©Khrysso 2000, 2001
Unitarian Universalism is perhaps unique among liberal religions in the extent to which we are willing to ponder the concept of "worship" as an intransitive verb. It’s not an unheard-of idea; you can find it in the dictionary (so we know that it exists in the language), but there it is not a terribly vital verb, meaning “to attend worship services.” Of course, attending worship services can in and of itself be a vital act, but it seems to me to lack the sparkle inherent in what happens in said worship service: that, too, UUs maintain, can be worship-without-an-object. The fact that UUs are willing even to "go there" is a sign of hope that we can continue to be religious trailblazers as our forebears were.
I took a course at Starr King School for the Ministry entitled “Re-Imagining Worship.” It was part of an ongoing program of inquiry at the school culminating in a conference on the subject. During the course, we were asked to answer the question, "what is worship?" I answered,
Worship is letting off the pressure when the abundance has built up.
Worship is closely connected with music.
Worship is something other than service or liturgy: "Sunday worship" is really just the vessel we provide for worship to happen in.
Worship is an individual response, enhanced for me by community experience, the "Yes!" of joined voices who have discovered, "you, too!"
Worship is too private to be shared with those who are not also worshiping.
Worship is a place at which I meet a something that I have recently agreed to call God.
Worship is where and when I acknowledge my connection with that which is wonderful.
Worship is ecstasy--explosiveness--implosiveness--quietude in the wake of the discovery of the Holy.
Obviously, this is the response of a mystic--a way of being not terribly popular in UU, or at least Unitarian, history. I want to highlight two particular things that I said in the above reflection. I said, "worship is closely connected with music" and "worship is a place at which I meet something that I recently agreed to call God." The intersection of these statements had happened to me scant weeks before I wrote the above exercise when I was journaling for this class and was able to articulate for myself that while I don't really know much about God and am not willing to ascribe to God many of the characteristics ascribed to God as foregone conclusions, I can know this: I don't know who created the world or me, let alone how; I haven't yet bought the seemingly foundational premise that God is Creator . . . but God is whom I sing to. I don't know why there is sadness in the world or how the world will end or who's responsible for it all . . . but God is whom I dance with.
I don't know much about God, but I know that God is the one with whom my deepest soul plays and yearns and makes love. Wordsworth called God "our home." "God" is what I call this cosmic lover; I'm not willing to say much more about God, because this lover of mine is, above all, mysterious.
"How can I keep from singing?," asks the song, and in fact this very song has been my signature song for the last 22 year, I reckon. Music is my response to the mystery.
I had forgotten until I sat down to write this essay and looked over my old class notes that I had said, "Worship is too private to be shared with those who are not also worshiping." but it's true--for me, at least--and that means that when singing is happening in the congregation, some will be worshiping and some will just be singing. Music is only worship when it's worship. Or so it seems to me.
But what about those who don't have mystical experience? Can they ever worship, direct object or no? The dictionary tells us that "worship" derives from "worth," and one doesn't need to have mystical experience to acknowledge worth, or even sing one's acknowledgment of worth. Speech-writers and ghost-writers write acknowledgments and commendations and kudos all the time to persons with whom they have no emotional or spiritual connection and may not even like, but who are worthy of recognition all the same. So it seems to me that it's good to sing, whether or not one is experiencing the ebullience that I described earlier. Some people will simply never have that gut reaction to life that I have known forever; that doesn't mean that they are not able to be appreciative and to express it.
Expressing it, poets know, often takes the form of singing. "I sing the mighty power of God, who made the mountains rise," wrote hymnist Isaac Watts; "I sing the body electric," wrote the exquisitely mundane Whitman. "What's so big about music in worship?," asks my friend UU church musician Ed Milham, who essentially commissioned this essay. I submit that worship can't exist apart from music.
As a Pagan (which means, for me, that my most important religious symbols come from the body of the Universe and the Earth in particular rather than from scriptures or prophets), I am familiar with the concept of magic, or "magick," as we often like to spell it in order to distinguish it from stage magic. Aleister Crowley, to whom the Neo-Pagan community owes its current use of the word "magick," said, "Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" and "Every intentional act is a Magickal act." Accordingly, I call myself, at least when I am pitching myself to the Pagan community, a "music-magickian" because I intentionally use music to change consciousness.
There is, in the Christian world, another word for what Crowley called "magick": prayer. Which naturally leads us back to "worship."
Others have explained more succinctly than I can how singing, in particular, works vibrationally in our bodies, some using language of science and some language of embodiment, to change our consciousness. It is the most important science and art for worship; rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is not for worship, though it is for changing consciousness intentionally and is thus a magickal art and science. But it leads us to a different place and consciousness than worship does. Communion in its many forms--for UUs it often means Water communion or Candles of Community--is not for worship, as I see it; it is for creating that sense of "you, too," of shared preparation for worship, but it is not the worship itself. So I'm back to what I said before: worship is the explosion or (for those more introverted than I, which is practically everybody) the implosion, the fountaining of the wonder and awe and celebration, and it must be expressed lest we languish. Music, and singing in particular, isn't a vehicle for that; it's *the* vehicle.
Which is why I have written elsewhere that it is the birthright of all not to have their voices silenced with messages of "you can't sing, therefore you shouldn't sing." Voicing worship, I maintain, is a basic human need, whether it is worship of or to an object or not. Even the deaf who have not learned speech give voice to their emotions: they laugh, groan, wince, cry . . . and with much more effect than from the rest of us, because it is such a surprise to hear sound from those who are usually so silent.
What's so big about music in worship? Maybe it's the wrong question: maybe we should say, with apologies to Keats, "music is worship, worship, music." Ultimately, what is there to worship other than music?
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