THE TRUE WORSHIP, WHEN IT IS THE INNER ECSTASY OF ONENESS WITH THE ALL. THE TRUE MYSTICAL AND SPIRITUAL AWAKENING OF OUR SPIRITS AND SOULS THAT IS THE TRUE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF OUR LIVES FOCUSED IN WORSHIP
I would not ordinarily call the inner ecstasy worship; but when I was meditating this morning I was caught up in the ecstasy. I was so aware of an ultimate goodness, and I found myself using similar prayers that I might have used in church. As I ‘came down’ I was aware of a friend’s use of the word worship and also struck by what I was experiencing: the profound similarity. For me this makes sense of worship and understood in this way it is a very good word. When understood in the traditional way, I think we have problems. Another friend spoke some time ago of how she felt when seeing a snowdrop. We have all experienced that. Many of us have been tempted to use it as a reason to believe in God. I would merely say this, that when we feel that SOMETHING when we see the snowdrop (is the SOMETHING an aspect of the OTHER?) then I believe we are touching on what one can feel when one goes deep into contemplative prayer or meditation. Many in the past have used nature as a key to that higher consciousness. In the east mandalas (Sanskrit for disc) are used. Look at the rose window of Chartres cathedral and you have a beautiful mandala. Nature does it for me, mandalas tend not to. Ordinarily my key is music, and I usually meditate with music playing in the background. It is perhaps unfortunate that the idea of worship has sort of been hijacked so that so many do not appreciate the true significance of their inner feelings because matters spiritual have been ‘captured’ by orthodoxy and bound up in a mindset and theological construction that most modern minds recoil from and even find repulsive, ie ‘worship’ in the sense of ‘obedience’ towards a sovereign Lord.
Surely our spiritual destiny is to be ONE with the higher realms, with the ALL of the ONE.