[1976]

1. WHAT DOES WORSHIP MEAN?

WORTH, CONNECTION, ORDER.  “Worship” is sometimes narrowly understood as bowing down to some supposed deity. The etymology of the word, however, leads us to a far more significant activity. The root of “worship” is worthship, considering things of worth. “Religion” (religare) means to bind up, to reconnect, to get it all together. Worship is thus the central activity of religion because through worship we reconnect with worth. Worship is a compelling vision of life in its fullness. Its scope, diversity, coherence and power engender the fundamental meanings, values and relations for our lives. Worship centers us. It gives us a perspective that orders the Void, the chaos of unconnected fragments of experience. Through worship we find our connections and take our place in society and the cosmos. Here beholding and becoming are the same.

THE CREATION AND CELEBRATION OF HUMAN VALUES AND MEANINGS.  It is fashionable nowadays as “the celebration of life.” This too easily becomes a party or a vague sentiment. Worship is the celebration of life in its depths—intimate, intense, and ultimate. Through worship we discover, enliven, enrich, create, order, enhance, and empower what gives life worth. We experience awe, wonder, flow, fitness, appreciation, refreshment, and commitment.

THE WHOLE.  This does not mean there is an ontological Whole or Absolute Worth. It does not mean that all things actually fit together. On the other hand, worship is not illusory or simply “subjective.” It does mean that worship is the activity that fits things together, that reaches toward a whole as we create ourselves and our world.

SPONTANEOUS WORSHIP.  One can worship alone, “communing with nature,” in the ritual of a sport or other play, in work and in social action. Worship is not necessarily an orderly, regular calculated process, though it always creates order. Worship is more like falling in love, like being struck with the majesty of Mont Blanc, or like the surprise and gratitude we feel when someone touches us deeply in an unexpected way. For the creation and celebration of values, meanings and relations appears accidental perhaps as often as devised: if directed, then often outside ordinary awareness. The spirit of God, before creation, brooded on the waters before there were even any words. So our spirits hover in the Void, until we discover meanings emerging. Thus Schweitzer came upon “reverence for life,” Einstein formed the Relativity theories, and Mu Ch’i painted his “six Persimmons.” After considerable brooding, each integrated values into a larger whole in a moment of high awareness, of spontaneity and freedom. Such a consideration of worth occurs when the horizontal and the vertical—the mundane and the transcendent—suddenly intersect for us. There we gain awareness; we create a new or renewed order through which the entire universe plays.

2. PUBLIC WORSHIP

DELIBERATE WORSHIP.  Thus we rejoice when we unexpectedly find ourselves worshipping.  But there is also place for the deliberate, labored consideration of values, whether they be themes Beethoven nurtured into the Fifth Symphony or the relation of First Amendment freedom of the press with Six Amendment guarantees of jury impartiality. Conscious and intended worship seeks to name our gods—to identify our values—even if they be such only for the never-ending moment. Hidden and unacknowledged gods can rule our behavior without our knowing it. Naming our gods and taking responsibility for assessing their worth enlarges our freedom. When we find we hold conflicting values, we may be alienated—unconnected—from ourselves and each other. Worship is the healing of such splits.

IDOLATRY.  Regular worship, a continuing reconsideration of values, as our lives and society change, prevents ossification and idolatry by guarding us from confounding the proximate with the transcendent. The discipline of deliberate worship thus is a source of expansion and freedom. Giving thanks even for the unknown, we can in high awareness choose the ways of growth, proportion, and flow.

“WORK OF THE PEOPLE.”  The church offers the discipline of deliberate worship. A community of faith, the church adds the dimension of human life to worship in nature. Private and public worship enhance each other. The presence of others who challenge and enrich our lives with competing and supporting agendas and priorities gives us additional eyes through which to see the universe—to reconnect us to ourselves, one another and the cosmos. Public worship then is not a presentation; it is involvement. It is not a lecture, concert or program. Liturgy means “the work of the people.”

EXPERIENCE, NOT EXPLANATION.  Liturgy is an immediate yet eternal experience which demands the participation of everyone in the religious community. It is not a simulation of some other experience, like theater. It is not merely an explanation of the way things are or ought to be. Liturgy transcends various styles or levels of interpretation since it is a prior unity of experience. For example, two persons taking part in mass may have different explanations of if of the world. One may understand things quite literally; the other may give a mythical or metaphorical interpretation. The important fact is that they are both taking part in the same event, a sign of their human bondedness to one another and all life. Liturgy thus permits greater freedom than do rhetorical injunctions. While exegesis often divides, liturgy encourages “unity in diversity.” This does not mean intellectual precision is unimportant. Theological homework is required. A “worship arts” committee, more dance and drama, a new organ or a poetical sermon without transcendent reference will fail to meet the deepest human needs. Nevertheless openness to the experience of transcendence is more important than a precise analysis of what is not.

PLAY. Worship, like sex is a supreme form of play. Play liberates us from the work mentality that seeks (at least functional) absolutes by which to judge our activities. In play, in worship, we need no reason outside life to give life meaning. Some attend church as an obligation, to justify or earn their existence. Such an attitude profanes life’s character as a gift, unearned and unearnable. In worship we celebrate with wonder and gratitude the meaning of that gift. The consequent responses we seek to make are not to earn life, but to revere it in centered faithfulness.

3.  WORSHIP IN THE AGE

A VISION OF WHOLENESS.  Our secular age gives us little access to a vision of wholeness. Our fragmentation masks from us the import of the human story. In our time it is difficult to find genuine open community. There are few tribes of people who trust one another enough to deal openly with the question of what is important in life. (New communities are appearing now, but often they are not open. Rigidly defined by narrow allegiances, they themselves participate in and perpetuate division in the world.) Our secular age has abandoned, demeaned or trivialized human rituals through which one once gained access to the whole. This situation also makes the development of new worship forms awkward and vexing. We have been parted from ourselves by rejecting ancient and humane customs and institutions. We have blasphemed the process which created new forms of Ordering. Simply because an institution—the presidency, the church, communion—has been abused, used hypocritically, deeply stained in many cases—is no reason to abandon it. The fact that love and friendship have been betrayed (which is very much the Passion story) does not require us to renounce these values (a discovery named Easter). Nor are past failures any excuse for refusing to fashion new rites and institutions.

RITUAL.  Nevertheless, we are beginning to appreciate ritual. Ritual is done by custom, rote or habit. Much of our lives depends on ritual: tying our shoes, brushing our teeth. If we had to lean how to drive a car each time we got behind the wheel, life would be intolerable. Some ritual is needed in much of what we do. Ritual frees us to use the vehicle to go somewhere. But ritual alone is a blank book. Liturgy (the work of the people) fills the book with meaning. A prayer that appears a superstitious ritual to an observer may be to the participant a profound act of spiritual awakening.

AN ABRAXAN IRONY.  If worship is the reconnection, the integration of experience, then it is possible only if there are real fragments needing unification. The very alienation of our age gives us the opportunity for empowering liturgy. Our corporate worship seeks to embrace and connect individual resources and priorities. So “evil” and “alienation” cannot be excluded as we move toward the whole. It is the tension between the actual and the ideal which not only wants resolution through worship but which inspires it in the first place.

THE SIZE OF THE LITURGY.  Because our lives are varied and few of us are at identical places in our cognitive and emotional development, public worship must be large enough to address different ages, classes, conditions, and concerns. The liturgy must embody all organs of the human adventure, with all its directions and contrasts. Such liturgy reorders our differences in the large view and makes them whole. Liturgy appealing only to the "traditionalists," or the iconoclasts, or the, successful or the visitors, is a liturgy without the dimension and integrity which stretches, restores and renews our lives. Only a very large liturgy can speak to all of us. If we are to grow religiously, we need worlds of vision beyond those we know now. If parts of the liturgy fail to speak to us at one point in our lives, it may mean there are worthy things yet to behold. Only a very large liturgy can speak to us for a lifetime.

HOW THE EXPERIENCE IS FORMED. While spontaneity is possible and desirable, public worship enables rich and durable forms of worship to emerge, just as a symphony is developed. Many liturgical forms epitomize the history and possibilities of human interaction. Some of these forms are no longer suitable but many have been unnecessarily neglected and deserve renewal. The smells, vestments, motions, phrases, sounds and houses of worship themselves can convey and further the ordering of awareness, the design of fitness and fullness, the reconnections of genuine faith. The liturgy, with its psychological order and theological sequence, is the central means through which individual participants discover their parts in the human enterprise, and by which the church itself finds and expresses its corporate identity.

LITURGY AND THE WORLD.  But liturgy is more than an instrument of the individual and the church. The self and the world, spirit and politics, intersect in liturgy. Through liturgy we change the world by changing ourselves. Worship brings it all together. Through liturgy we involve ourselves in the larger society with greater vision and effect. In worship we freely touch the changing world with access to the experiences of the past and the present with the imagination and invention of a people honestly sharing their personal religious pilgrimages together in tribal celebration, in centering, in ordering.

WORSHIP AND SEX.  If worship involves the intimate, the intense and the ultimate, then worship is to the church as sex is to marriage. Like the sexuality of marriage, worship cannot be its only activity or its exclusive basis, or it has no real life in the world. Yet the worship of the church, again like sexuality in marriage, is the essential sacrament defining and enlivening other personal, social, economic and political sides of the institution's life. Further, like sexuality in prostitution, dead forms of worship are detached rather than intimate, shallow rather than intense, and trivial rather than ultimate. Moreover, a church without worship is like a platonic marriage, meeting special needs of a few but for most failing to command the interest, energy, imagination and commitment of a rich relationship. The obvious alternative to regular worship with a community of faith is to remain single (unchurched).

4. THE UNITARIAN UNIVERALIST EMBRACE

THE WHOLE PERSON. Just as worship is an act of the entire community of faith, so it is an act of the whole person—intellect, esthetic sense, body, emotion. Literal truth is too confining: We would lose Beethoven, Rembrandt, Shakespeare and maybe even Emerson with a creedal test. Many important decisions—such as choosing one’s spouse—are not made simply by intellectual calculation. Pure emotional appeals are too transitory to reorder one's vision with clarity. The liturgy demands our presence as whole persons involved with one another, and thus reconnects us.

This sometimes means singing or saying something we may not literally believe but which, from another perspective, informs our experience. Many of us left Christian churches that required literal acceptance of creedal statements, and offered few alternative modes of expression. What is important is not so much the words but rather the experiencing of legitimate religious moods and modes, no one of which can be taken as final and completely comprehensive.

OUR GENIUS.  We find it easy to enjoy different kinds of people and viewpoints. We can rejoice in many languages. We can love Dante even if we cannot accept his cosmology; we can sing the Beethoven Credo even if we cannot subscribe to it; we can feel and revere the 1905 Symphony of Shostakovitch though we abhor communism; we can participate in a Hindu chant without compromising our own mythologies; we can enjoy Christian communion without patching it up to fit our own prejudices; we can teach "Silent Night" to our children though we disbelieve the Virgin Birth; we can be moved by Hamlet while we deny the existence of ghosts. We can sing, we can dance, we can rejoice without censoring any honest hallelujah or plea for help. Our genius is being able to see God, the Void or Whatever, working in every person and place.

5. THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST OPPORTUNITY

UU CONTEXT.  Our churches, especially where liturgy is not automatic or routine, have an unparalleled opportunity today for the renewal of liturgy. Where clear-thinking people celebrate their companionship with one another and with human struggles through out the ages, separations can be healed through the revival of the art of worship. However, just as it is difficult for someone who has never heard baroque music to understand the musical language of Bach, so we must overcome the prejudice against liturgical forms to develop and communicate with a rich religious language. Such a language appeals to the entire person. Without it Unitarian Universalism will continue to be for many a revolving door into the secular world. Without it our children will find our intellectual emphasis inadequate to sustain their commitment to our movement, as they will also find the cute "smelling the flower is worship" too weak to inform their decisions with wisdom. With a rich liturgical tradition we can build temples of meaning and societies of justice.

DISCIPLINE. To develop an empowering liturgy, the professional UU leadership must turn from the charismatic model. The churches must turn from narcissism. No longer may we pride ourselves as mavericks. We must become virtuosi in the art of worship. Instead of inventing the wheel each week in each church in our individual ways, we must develop disciplines for sharing the technical as well as "spiritual" aspect of worship as we use it and live it in our churches and lives. While each congregation must retain control over its own worship, such disciplined sharings—tested through wide rather than idiosyncratic usage—offers a hope for moving beyond pulpit exchanges and shuttling programs towards a body of powerful common liturgy adaptable to specific situations. Such disciplines would refine, enrich and enlarge our practices into a genuine living and growing liturgical tradition.

6. OUR WORK

This is the work of the Congregation of Abraxas: liturgical renewal. We believe the human enterprise and the health of our churches requires above all else the capacity and vehicles for genuine private and public worship. We want to renew liturgy in our lives so it will renew us and our society. We hope the suggestions of this essay are part of an open Renewal process.

This essay, originally a pamphlet (1976), appears on pages 22-26 in the 207-page 1980/81 volume, The Congregation of Abraxas Worship Reader and Supplement: Essays in Worship Theory from Von Ogden Vogt (1921) to the UUA Commission on Common Worship (1980) -- copies of which should be at the theological schools.

 
The Congregation of Abraxas was founded by Duke the Dumb  (Gray), Fred the Full (Gillis), Stephan the Spare (Papa) , Harry the Holy (Thor), and yours truly, Vern the Void (Barnet) after the 1975 Buck Hill Falls UUMA Convocation.  Later joining the order were such as Mark Belletini and Dick Boeke.  The first public witness of the group was at the 1976 UUA General Assembly. The history could be reconstructed from a 20-page single-space Chronicles of the "missionary and liturgical order" and from a number of newsletters it published. At its height, I think there were over a dozen members of the order and a number of postulants.
    We were especially proud of Fred serving on the 1980 UUA Commission on Common Worship and Mark for chairing the Hymnbook Commission.
    As I reflect on those days, these points seem to me most important:
   a. The group was committed to a discipline of collegiality. Although the group distributed materials written by its members and others, nothing could be published in its name unless all members of the Order agreed to it. Since the group ranged from born-again UU to Buddhist/atheist, the writing of liturgy was often painful but joyfully endured because of the
breath of understanding gained by discovering was of being inclusive. I remember a conference call that cost us over a hundred bucks as we argued over whether to include the word
"seeming" as a modifier of the word "evil."
    Especially significant publications were the basic "Essay on  Worship," the "Matins," the "Compline," and the "Eucharist."  The liturgical materials were always published in "draft" form to give the invitation for growth.
    b. The Congregation had a  great sense of humor, as the "shadow vows" to the three vows required of Ordering (not poverty [economic], chastity [focus of purpose], and obedience [authority] but equity, utility, and collegiality -- and my vows prevent me from revealing their shadows).
    c. I remain perplexed these many years later that the group found more receptive ground among lay people than the clergy. I remember the challenge the Congregation faced in doing the Eucharist in the then rabid Santa Rosa Fellowship -- with amazing success because of the virtuoso rather than charismatic execution of the liturgy we had developed.
    d. Especially surprising was the number of lay people who wanted to come to our retreats, the length of which varied from 3 or 8 days at a time, from Berkeley to Boston, several each year. We did not anticipate the popularity of the retreats which were originally designed as consultation meetings to work on the liturgical writing. But we developed an "ordered day" with matins, eucharist, vespers, and compline, and a wonderful schedule which included Abraxas volleyball and eating with specific disciplines. The discipline most popular was the rule of no conversation between compline and matins.
    e. The development not only of daily and seasonal cycles of worship and devotion but also of a 4-part structure for the liturgy itself (outlined in the 1980 Commission's work and detailed in the Congregation of Abraxas Worship Reader (see below), has continued to ring true and may be the most important work the Congregation did. That's why (below), I lament it being reduced to stoles.

aspects of the Congregation's work:

1. stoles: window-dressing, alas!

The 1980 October newsletter (710.15 in the Abraxas agenda) tersely explained the alb, the stole, the cincture, and other items of dress the Congregation adopted. I will see if the Chronicles of Abraxas also contains materials about this. The newsletter was produced a month or so before I purchased the first computer for my church, so I don't have the text in electronic form. I have made a gif file of it, however, which can be accessed at  http://www.cres.org/tem8.htm or go to http://www.cres.org and click on the 8-button on the bottom of the page.  The approved exclamation at the Abraxas retreats was not "Bless my soul," but "Bless my stole" as participants came out of the closet and into the sauna. Ha.
    The purpose of vestments was not to further distance between congregation and the clergy -- but that is another discussion.
    My impression is that when Abraxas presented President Gene Picket a stole at General Assembly (he had hinted that he would like one) AND HE WORE IT, the clergy brothers and sisters began to imitate the practice which has become increasingly popular.
    Which brings me to my lament. I recall modernist architects discussing the impact of their work. I think it was Mies van der Rohe who said, "Yes, but what do we have to show for it but the picture window?" The central work of Abraxas, liturgical renewal, has been pretty much reduced to the stole and maybe a few worship features, but the overall conception of worship still seems to be primarily a set up for the sermon. In my opinion,  the ground-breaking 1976 Abraxan essay "Worship" has yet to receive the serious and widespread consideration it merits. Am I wrong?
 
 
 

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