Just what does it mean to “worship”? To “adore”, to “glorify”?
We immediately think we know. “It’s what we do in church. We offer our prayers to God. We are “down here” and God is “up there” so we “send up” our prayers, songs and praises hoping that He hears us and somehow this makes Him happy.
That’s part of what worship is all about; but unless we go deeper, we miss the amazing gift worship becomes for us. You see, we were made to worship and adore. It is our highest activity as a creature. It’s our equivalent to a bird’s ability to fly. Our purpose as human beings is to praise and worship God.
There can be some disconnect at this point. We can too soon associate this worship with the feeling that God somehow needs our praise to feel better about Himself, or to love us more, because of our sweet words to Him. Think of a big balloon that needs our breath to stay inflat-ed. That’s NOT what’s happening when we worship.
Why is our ability to worship and adore so wonderful? Because it touches and activates our deepest potential as His creature.
Our reverent submission to the infinite knowledge of God opens the mystery of the created world. The countless galaxies, the sub atomic universe, the human gnome, the planet earth in the vacuum of space . . reveal God’s effort-less brilliance and our privilege to share in a small part of that knowledge.
Our surrender to God’s moral law awakens within us our deepest beauty as participants in a life of love that is God’s very nature. We become lovers as God Himself loves and thereby we are united to the Divine.
Worship and adoration open us to the intentional beauty God has placed all around us: the wonder of nature, the vision of beauty that is the human being, the overwhelm-ing power of a child’s smile, the glimpse of eternity that music can bring all have ultimate meaning because of God who is the source of all that is.
I think it was St. Ireneus who said the “The Glory of God is Man fully alive.” In other words, when humans are living in a way that God has made us for (loving, surren-dering to God’s way). We are giving Glory to God. This too is worship.
But the Ireneus saying has a second part, “and Man is ful-ly alive when he sees God.” This tells us of our final goal as human beings . . . to look on the face of God, to be filled with the Joy that is in the heart of Christ, and to see that joy in the faces of all who have loved in the course of their lives on earth.
In the end, nothing satisfies the human heart but the Love of God. Till then we are restless until we rest in that un-speakable beauty.
Let’s go straight ahead.
Fr. Tim
