This post is the first in a series on covenanting with God through worship.
Part of covenanting with anyone is spending time with them. Neglect will end any relationship we have. Why should our relationship with God be an exception? God will, of course, wait patiently for our attention, and we can always regain a lapsed closeness. But why let such closeness lapse in the first place?
We covenant with God through prayer and worship. Everybody worships. Years ago I participated in a graduation ceremony at Kenyon College, where I was the chaplain. The writer David Foster Wallace was the graduation speaker, and gave one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard. It was so good that it was later published as a small book, This is Water. He said a lot of very good things, but I want to focus on one passage of the speech:
In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and display. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
As I sat on that stage, I found myself in deep agreement with Foster Wallace. I was also very charmed by him as a person. After his speech, when the president was handing out diplomas, each student crossed the stage as their name was called. At first, everyone on stage clapped. But as the ceremony went on, and the number of graduates stretched to two hundred, then three hundred, then four hundred, the applause of the professors and deans fell away. I kept clapping even though my hands were hurting. Glancing around the stage, I saw that Foster Wallace was the only other person who was clapping, too. Clapping for total strangers, while the rest of us took little rests and waited for some beloved student’s name to be called before clapping again. He was exercising the freedom that he had talked about, celebrating the students in the petty and unsexy way of slapping two raw and aching hands together.
