Worship, Ritual & Celebration

When I handed my life over to God just over a year ago, I could not have predicted where He would take me.

All of this came about from a plea; a Divine petition for something to change. And it did.

Coming from a paradigm where I was the sole character, change-maker and navigator of my life, or at least co-conspiring with an impersonal “Universe” to help guide me into some sort of depth and salvation, I was thrown into an entirely different world.

This is a world where I could no longer be the central character of this story called ‘my life’; a world where the impersonal “Universe” became intimately personal.

And I had no idea that it would go this way. I was wholly unprepared for its immensity.

I thought I had known what a life of worship, ritual and celebration - from a Christian perspective - was all about. I would picture sweet old ladies, knitting booties for charitable events, well-meaning but slightly ignorant people gathering on the weekend to worship something outside of themselves.

It all felt a little shallow and unsophisticated.

But I was unprepared for its unending depth, radical and unconditional love, and mysticism. I was unprepared for how it would feel to gather every weekend and celebrate, through ritual and worship, a God that turns out to be more personal and more intimate than our own breath.

It turns out that worship, ritual and celebration are in our collective DNA. We were created for all of this. And without it, we become disenchanted. In fact, society has become distinctly disenchanted. This is an inevitability for a secular society; a society that puts the individual and his or her ‘freedom’ and ever-shifting feelings at the centre, wiping out the enchantment that our bones, blood and heartbeat yearn for.

A society of ‘individuals’ will underwhelm and perhaps worse, devolve the very individuals that are seeking some sort of salvation. And we’re all seeking salvation.

We can’t celebrate anything by ourselves or in isolation. Celebration is a relational affair.

We can’t worship anything unto ourselves. Worship requires the Other.

We can’t participate in ritual by ourselves. In order for a ritual to ignite with intention, meaning and expression, there must be something higher than us. It must be witnessed and experienced through others.

Like singing in harmony with others, something mystical, ancient and profound can only emerge when voices join.

The entire self-help movement loses this argument, handily. Unto ourselves, we simply cannot experience the exhaltation that life offers. That requires another.

We know this to be true just from the evolutionary fact that we all search, in earnest, for a partner. In fact, all mammals on this planet will search for a partner. To go through life’s trials and celebrations, we want and even need each other.

To deepen this, we’re not just searching for anyone. We’re looking for that someone who can hold all of our complexity, see all of our faults, know our greatest potential and do all of this with unconditional love.

The closest we come to this in human form is the mother. The mother will lay down her life for her children and love them no matter what.

The commodification of romance has promised this kind of love as well. The problem is, this is a lot to ask of a partner. A wonderful partner will be able to hold and give a lot. But they won’t be able to do it all.

And yet, this is a fundamental need of human beings. In fact, our greatest traumas have been at the hands of a withdrawl of unconditional love. Either someone in our lives withdrew their unconditional love from us, or in response to something, we withdrew it from ourselves.

That’s when the trouble starts.

So at some point, we begin the search. Like a moth to a flame, we yearn to come back to this place of love; from the mundane cycle of self-service to the realm of the enchanted.

Here’s the thing about God that can be like no other, including the holiest parts of ourselves.

God is complete. God is not lacking or in need of anything. We can’t give Him anything that he doesn’t already possess. He requires nothing of us. Self-interest is non-existent in God.

He only knows giving.

You can’t do anything to please Him.

If one of the marks of modernity is Disenchantment, than a gathering of Souls in worship is the greatest antidote. It is a re-enchantment of our lives, our communities, our world.

The self-help and New Age movements miss this mark, entirely. Through the exhaltaton of “Self” we diminish our capacity for the very thing that we’re looking for: Unconditional Love. To try and gather that up through the Self is impossible. By definition, love requires another.

I have experienced this through worship, ritual and celebration. Where Souls gather to receive the gift that says: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are mine.” - Isaiah 43:1.

Read that again.

If this stirs something in you, you are being called. How? I’m not sure. But, you are being called.

While this call has come in soft whispers in more recent history, it’s not so quiet anymore.

We’ve come to the end of The Individual.

We’re witnessing the Re-enchantment of humanity. We’re living through revolutionary times.

Revolutionary times call for something bigger than us.

These times are asking us to step out of the story of ‘me’ and enter into the story of ‘we.’