Acts Of Worship

Worship is an integral part of spirituality. Yet people often seem to think that it consists largely of talking and praying and singing. In worse cases people believe it consists mainly of groveling!

Worship is an act of faith -- a "payback" to that which we revere -- a fulfillment of our pledge to the Divine. Worship is how we do our duty to the Divine -- trying to live the way our God wants us to. Do we really believe that God wants us to sing and grovel and sermonize? Perhaps we should instead concentrate on those "little things" of the Spirit which give meaning to life.

We should worship by lying in the grass; by helping the lady to her car with her groceries; by helping someone who's hurting; by simply listening to someone who needs to talk. We should worship from our hearts, and not from our mouths. We should worship through the acts of the Spirit, not the expectations of the mind!

Doing good things is an act of worship. Do good things not because you think you should, but because you feel you should. Worship should be a spontaneous act, not rehearsed -- it should flow freely from the heart. How we live our lives should be a Holy Sacrament. And everything we do should reflect the Sacredness within us!

A Pantheist Song...

We were treated to this at the Unitarian Universalist Church this past Sunday morning. Every so often I find a song which is directly on target for my beliefs. Here it is!

Inner And Outer Paths

We travel our spiritual paths in inward and outward focused directions. We must first find the sacred within ourselves before we bring it out of ourselves into the world. We work on ourselves first and the world later.
Two of our greatest tools for spiritual development are meditation and ritual:
Meditation (or prayer) is an inner process. We look within ourselves for answers. We learn, we grow. We find the holy within us. Meditation and prayer are ways of connecting on the personal level with the Sacred.
Ritual (or worship) is an outer process. We put our faith into action. We practice compassion. We celebrate the chorus of life. We may gather for a formal worship service or we may simply "practice what we preach".
And these processes should be balanced in our lives. We take as we give, we give as we take. We breathe in, we breathe out -- since the moment of birth, every breath in is mirrored by a breath out. Balance is important. Balance creates the harmony of the world.