An interesting alternative question might be, why don’t we worship God already? Our faith, in essence, is telling us that the right and natural order for things is for all creation to bow before the beauty, superiority, and majesty of God. And not because He’s some ego-maniac, but rather because He really is that awesome, and because humankind really does possess it’s integrity when this relationship is in balance. And we learn that pride is really the culprit that blinds us to this fact, preferring to remain ignorant of anything greater than itself.
If we think about it, wouldn’t all sin cease if we were so focused on the “One Thing” that could finally truly captivate and hold our attention because that very vision is the inexhaustible totality of goodness and love and happiness itself? What we do now in terms of worship and our relationship to God in general, under the guidance of the Church, will always be a compromise, somewhere between the ideal that we strive for and the realization of that ideal within ourselves, the ultimate goal being to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. In the next life come the full and complete realization of that ideal.
Good one, fhansen. Sign me up for your fandom.
"Simone Weil urges a Christian poetic that insists on educating the reader into paying attention to people and to language and to things, because the cultivation of attention directed to the other (the suffering neighbor; the created order as God intended it, or shalom; the created order as it is, broken; and God) is fundamental to the ethics of Christianity.
One cannot love or help a person one refuses to listen to; one cannot redeem a world one doesn’t look at; one cannot serve a God one doesn’t engage with, ask questions of, listen to, study. And, as Weil points out, one cannot space out and pray, prayer demands attention. Perhaps a Christian poetic might insist on nourishing a broken faculty of the modern mind – attention."
It is all about Paying Attention, or as Flannery O’Connor saw it:
His second night in Talkingham, Hazel Motes walked along down town close to the store fronts but not looking in them. The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all of time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.”
From *Wise Blood *by Flannery O’Connor
And why these questions don’t really matter in a way:
Increasingly, I learned that the great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live in the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level.
Studying and teaching brought me to confront the reality of God in the lives of those I met. An intuition of God’s presence can come to us in closeness to another whose spirit touches our own.
I cherish the memory of a remarkable teacher, filled with learning and gentleness, precious to me despite the ridiculous conditions under which we met.
I was a new rabbinical student and in my reading had come across the phrase “noch einmal.” I approached Dr. Slomovic, knowing he spoke several languages, and introducing myself, asked him what “noch einmal” meant. “Once again,” he answered.
Well, he was old, and probably hard of hearing. So I repeated, a little louder, “What does ‘noch einmal’ mean?” He said, a bit more emphatically, “Once again.”
Poor man, I thought, must be difficult on him to make people repeat themselves all the time. “WHAT DOES ‘NOCH EINMAL’ MEAN?” I screamed. He looked at me with compassion, and placing his hand on my cheek, said, “‘Noch einmal’ means once again.” -
Sitting in his class, day after day, listening to him weave together stories of his life in the Eastern European home in which he grew up, listening to legends of the tradition and faith that survived the shocks of the twentieth century, was more powerful than any line of reasoning. Before me was faith as it is lived.
An argument looks different when it vibrates through a living person. Repeatedly in religious circles I came face to face with the force of faith, a faith that is not self-satisfied or closed-minded, but is a strength grounded in humility. Meeting such people reinforced the truth that faith is not an idea but a way to live, not a logical proposition but an outcome of encountering a noble soul. Bertrand Russell made belief a question of logic; I was learning that it was a question of life.
Increasingly I was less concerned with what God might be than with what faith in God might make of me.
Rabbi David Wolpe,
Why Faith Matters (A thin book you should all read)
the more humble we are, the more we worship. Worship is also a way of life. It’s doing God’s will rather than our own, again out of love for Him. In addition, worship is the Mass, offering the Eucharist to the Father, - as the original Sacrifice on the Cross.
but in order to get there, we need to consider His attributes… and as we consider His attributes (ie: His mercy, etc) - we begin to remember how He has worked in our lives in these attributes… so then we are thankful for the ways He has shown us love and mercy, for example. As long as we are focused on God here, it is not selfish.