Delight as Worship

Why is worship equated with a church service?

Plate 14: Common Brimstone, Painted Lady, and Clouded Yellow Butterflies; c.1575/1590s; Flemish; Joris Hoefnagel; Source: National Gallery of Art

CEFR Level C1-C2

“Oo, look, a pinxter!”

“Ooo!”

“Oh!”

“Wow!”

The group wasn’t quite oohing and ahhing, but we were certainly oohing with an enthusiasm that would be comical in a movie. 

“Solomon’s seal!”

“Tiger swallowtail!”

“Warbler!”

You would think this group of adults had never been outside before, but the opposite was true. We’re master naturalists, although most of us are more generalists than masters. 

What’s so much fun about this group is the open enthusiasm. On a nature walk, someone is always calling out what they’ve seen or asking for ID help. I suspect it’s a great environment for people who thrive when their attention is called to something new every 30 seconds. At the same time, there’s no pressure. If you want to spend five minutes looking at the same plant and debating the precise ID (it’s not just a mint, it’s a narrow-leafed mountain mint, which turns out to be the same as a slender-leaved mountain mint), then that’s fine, too. This isn’t a class museum trip with the chaperones hurrying you along. You’re an adult and can spend as much or as little time on each “exhibit” as you want. If you miss something someone else saw, no problem. You did the thing that satisfied you. 

Even though I’m not a scientist and I know far less about the natural world than many of the others in the group, I love being with them because of the open delight. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done where adults unapologetically give themselves over to joy.

But What About In Church?

When I was in Pentecostal-stream churches, there was much talk about being free and physically expressing your sense of awe, joy, grief, and worshipful feelings. In the churches I attended, there were unspoken expectations creating some constraints (e.g. dance at your seat; no going up and down the aisles), but within those boundaries, you were encouraged to kneel, clap, cry, raise your hands, and come forward to kneel at the stage (AKA altar). If you didn’t do those things, there was no direct questioning, but there was a clear sense of “in-crowd” behavior created by the frequent comments from up front about how we need to follow the Spirit (by performing physical actions) without worrying about anyone looking at us. Despite the frequent statements that we were in a place of freedom and worship, full of the joy of the Lord, I rarely experienced those emotions. What I typically felt is a topic for another day.

In nature, as I learn the names of plants and animals and fungi and lichens, my delight grows. When I find myself inside, but thinking about one of those things, I feel joy and curiosity and delight. When I am outside and see a species I recognize, my response is somewhere between a pleased smile and a direct greeting. Even in times when I don’t feel overcome with joy, there is an underlying appreciation that may be simmering delight, which might be a description of love. I have never felt anything like this in church. Or if I have, it was fleeting enough that I don’t remember it. I certainly remember the delight of seeing roundleaf ragwort and cinnamon fern and towhee and fruticose lichen. 

In my previous church experience, this is where someone would interrupt to suggest I examine myself to see why I’m delighted more by nature than by God. Actually, I would know better than to admit that something brought me more delight than “God.” But go back and read what I wrote. I never said I didn’t feel delight in God. I said I never felt delight in the worship rituals at church. (Yes, all churches have rituals, even if they go by another name.)

That’s when someone might comment that church isn’t about feelings (Pentecostal practice that requires responding to feelings notwithstanding). The intimation is that I should be delighted by church, even if I don’t feel delighted. 

Don’t protest that it’s impossible to have a feeling when you don’t have the emotion. Don’t you know that once you rely on logic, you’ve stopped relying on the Spirit? (That question was sarcasm. Please don’t use it as a quote to represent my beliefs.)

I believe that God created the world and called it good. There are a variety of beliefs about how the world and all that is in it came to be. Christians can believe many of these and still acknowledge God as the ultimate Creator. The following doesn’t rely on a specific creation belief. 

One Way to Worship God

How better to honor a creator than to delight in their creation? Why can’t joy in what God called good be an act of worship? Does God really care if our worship is [insert the components of a church’s order of service] or a walk through the woods with joy in our mouths and thanksgiving in our hearts? 

I may change my mind on this in the future. At the moment, I don’t see anything in scripture that indicates God needs humans to worship God in specific ways (or even that God needs human worship). What I see is God acknowledging that humans will perform rituals to connect with The Divine, so God gave instructions for how to do that when worshipping God. A discussion for another day is on the question of if humans have a need to perform rituals, does that mean God created that need, which would suggest that God needs those rituals.

For today, let’s leave aside the convoluted theological discussion and consider how the US church worships God differently from the practices recorded in the Old and New Testaments and use that as a basis for claiming that God is flexible in the precise rituals humans use (with some boundaries (see Leviticus 18:21 and Deuteronomy 23:17-18 for examples). If God is flexible in the worship God accepts, then how do humans decide which acts are worthy of the designation “worship”? 

The more I think about the joy and gratitude (to God) and praise (of God) that naturally result from delight in nature, both individually and communally, the more I wonder why this, too, can’t be classified as a worshipful experience as sacred as any a church attempts to create.