Worship? What is it?

When we think of worship we usually think: Church! But worship is a lot more than attending a religious service in Church. Worship, in fact, is how we live our lives to the best. Everything we do, when done in the right spirit and in the right way, is a continuous act of worship.

There is a story told of Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy. One day during a church service, Dante was lost in meditation and forgot to kneel at the accustomed time. His detractors, eager to accuse him, demanded that the Bishop punish Dante for this act of sacrilege. Dante defended himself by saying, “If those who accuse me had their minds on God, as I had, they would most certainly not be concerned by my posture during prayer.” Dante was right. True worship of God is not simply a matter of performing certain religious acts to be seen, as Jesus was quick to point out in Matthew, chapter 6 : 5. True worship is a thing of the heart. Dante understood the true meaning of worship.

Worship is first and foremost a matter of the spirit, and it can be conducted anywhere; in the privacy of your room, in Church, or in the midst of God’s awesome creation. Prayer is worship of the heart, and doesn’t even need words. Jesus tells us when we pray we should go to our room, shut the door and pray to your Father in secret (Matthew 6:6).

The wonderful conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well centers on the meaning of worship (John 4:7–42). The woman perceived worship as something that should take place on Mount Tabor as opposed to the Jews who held that the Temple “is the place where we should worship God” (John 6:20). In this beautiful encounter, Jesus freed worship from the restrictions of time and place, saying that the time is “already here when people will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23).

St Paul faced a similar dilemma about worship in the early church, and argued that the gentile Christians, who did not share in the temple sacrifice of Jewish Christians, worshiped authentically because what mattered was how they worshiped. They worshiped in the truest sense of the word by offering themselves “as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to His service and pleasing to Him. This is the true worship” St. Paul says in Romans 12:1.

The woman at the well recognized Jesus’s new kind of worship. It was a living worship, all wrapped up in the presence of God who is everywhere, and manifested by the power of example. Not only did the woman respond wholeheartedly to Jesus, she rushed back to her village to tell the rest of the inhabitants.

When you realize what worship is, and live your lives as one successive act of worship, then you begin to understand that worship is not divorced from life, but is part of it. Nobel Laureate, Seamus Heaney, in his beatific poem, ‘When all the others were away at mass,’ captures the beauty of the simple ritual of peeling potatoes for the family dinner. The Mother’s noble act of peeling potatoes with her son provides him with a deep spiritual experience. He compares it later to the parish priest at her bedside who “went hammers and tongs at the prayers for the dying” to his own simple, but precious experience with his Mother peeling potatoes: “I remember her head bent towards my head, her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives never closer for the whole rest of our lives.”

Just as you engage in public worship in church, so too you should always worship God the rest of the time by the way you live, and by the way you treat one another at work, at home, in school, in the gym, on the playground and during meals.

Now, is a good time to appreciate worship in spirit and in truth when Churches all over the world are still, largely closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a time to engage in the living worship that never ceases. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), and your worship has its roots within you and extends to everything you do in thought, word, and deed.

This is the worship that is wholly acceptable to God.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy