We are all worshippers
The only choice is what we worship. So how can we find a source of ultimate meaning that is life-giving rather than soul-destroying?
This week I want to share a reflection on ‘worship’ - where do we find ultimate meaning and value? What do we look up to, admire and seek to become like? Also, if you’ve seen Thor: Love and Thunder you’ll know that it raises questions about whether gods are worthy of worship? If so, what makes them worthy? This is my attempt to engage with that!
Image credit: atmtx via flickr cc
What do you worship?
“One more thing...” says the executive. A new gadget is revealed. The press go wild. The internet buzzes. “Take my money!” scream the fans.
A convention hall thronged with people in a thousand costumes: Iron Man, Daenerys, Princess Leia, the TARDIS, gathered to share their passion; queuing to meet their heroes.
The football stadium. The shopping centre. The board room.
Different gods, different temples.
But we are all worshippers.
In David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement speech, he put it this way:
There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship…
If you worship money and things, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. 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. 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.
How then can we find something worth worshipping? How can we find something big enough to bear the weight of our meaning-making, our identity-forming?
So many things demanding our time, money, energy and attention. But I don’t think these are actually our gods. These are only our offerings to our true god.
Our one true god is Self, and Happiness is its prophet
In today’s contemporary Western culture, we make our sacred images not out of wood or gold but out of pixels and reputation.
Most of us don’t directly worship, say, our iPhone or technology more generally. Instead, it aids in building a shiner image of ourselves that we then worship. Or perhaps you define your self-image by not being an Apple sheep. Either way, whether following the crowd or being a maverick, we define ourselves by our consumer choices.
Social media feeds our self-addiction, allowing us to manipulate our image and keep score. I count my followers (not far off two thousand!) whilst compulsively checking for likes and retweets.
Advertising is our indoctrination into this creed. The real significance of adverts is not whether they get you to buy any particular product, but the subtle lie that runs through them all: it’s all about your choices; you are what you consume; you are what other people think of you.
We build our self-image around many different things, because no one thing is big enough to give us ultimate meaning. The shows we watch, the team we follow, the gadgets we use, the friends we have, even the church we go to or ways we serve.
To deny oneself, to go against self-expression, is the great blasphemy in our society. Idols are images of what we worship – it’s no wonder we take so many selfies.
The trouble is, as Foster Wallace identified, we get eaten alive by what we worship. And when what we really worship is self, we end up exhausted by the weight of self-expression and self-creation. We collapse into narcissism or despair or both.
How can we escape the black hole of self? How do we transcend the event horizon of ego?
Finding something worth worshipping
David Foster Wallace again:
An outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
Even spiritual ideals can be subverted to be another consumer accessory, of course. We can treat God or the cosmos or morality as a means to the end of our happiness. A while back Victoria Osteen (wife of prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen) told people: “Just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy.”
But genuine spirituality takes us beyond ourselves. By contrast, Jesus said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Spot the difference. Jesus’ words cut my conscience. I’m as prone to the worship of self-image as much as anyone. And it’s exhausting – always watching my words and actions, wondering how other people will see me. It’s unending work.
And Jesus says stop. He offers another way.
Dying to self, being reborn as self-givers
Forget everything and follow him. Die to image, reputation and self-exaltation. Be free from the slavery of self. Be so taken up with Jesus that you count everything else a loss compared to him.
It seems an impossible call. But Jesus isn’t asking us to do anything he hasn’t done himself. He himself took up his cross, denying himself, giving up his life out of love for others.
Worship is only life-giving if we are worshipping someone who is a life-giver.
We can only become other-centred by worshipping one who gave himself for others. He promises us not just an example, but his own life by the Holy Spirit to be changed from the inside out, to give us the power to escape the event horizon of our own egos.
If the Bible is to be believed, Jesus uniquely brings together two things: transcendence and humility.
Jesus is not only God made flesh, the transcendent creator of heaven and earth, king of kings and lord of lords, the eternal one. We need to worship something or someone transcendent for it to be weighty enough to give meaning that can bear up in the face of the whole range of human experience: life and death, joy and suffering, injustice and reconciliation.
Jesus also reveals to us that he is the God who is humble. He stoops to meet us on our own terms as a human being, who bears the cost of our reconciliation with God by his own death, who rises to new life to share that with us. We need to worship someone who gives himself, to receive the fulness of being that enables us to be self-giving ourselves.
Because Jesus died for us, we must die to self. When we abandon self, we find new life in him on the other side.
It sounds scary. And it is. But only worshipping Jesus can free us from the worship of self. Only Jesus is worth our worship.
Adapted from an article originally written for Threads UK.
What I’ve been enjoying recently…
Hi everyone, thanks for reading! I’ve picked up a few new subscribers recently post-Hutchmoot, so a particular thanks to you for giving me a slot in your email inbox.
Keswick Unconventional
This week I was away at the Keswick Convention, and I especially enjoyed the Keswick Unconventional arts stream - Ruth Naomi Floyd’s performances were a particular highlight for me, and I enjoyed chance to chat with lots of people including comedy writer James Cary, YouTuber and podcast Rachel Redeemed, artist Ally Gordon and folks from the Moot UK community!
The Sandman on Netflix
I’ve also started watching The Sandman on Netflix, adapted from Neil Gaiman’s comic series. I stumbled upon the graphic novels in my local library as a teenager and was both baffled and fascinated by their exploration of myth and storytelling, and I ended up getting the complete run in the Absolute editions.
So I’m excited to see it brought to the screen - though I have to admit, I’m not so keen on the earlier issues, which have more of a horror focus than the later broader mythological sweep that the story develops. The first episode was promising but with some slightly clunky dialogue - it seems to be erring on the side of over-explaining things. Here’s hoping the TV show makes it to season 2 and beyond!
