Congregation of ABRAXAS!

In the 70/80’s I was a member of the Congregation of Abraxas–many worship items were produced in print form and many workshops were presented.  I have gathered a very few ideas from the Worship Reader and they are presented here for your  exploration.  This was one of the few Liturgical Revivals in the UU church; another was the work of the Humiliati (primarily a Universalist liturgical movement).  Below is a collection of CoAbraxas ideas.

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The texts below originally appeared in the Congregation of Abraxas Worship Reader, pp. 53-76.

May be printed for personal use only—authors retain their respective copyrights.

 

THE SIZE OF WORSHIP

Clarke Dewey Wells

 

A Church service, if it is to be adequate to the needs of a varied and intergenerational community, must be large, imaginative, evocative, utilizing myth, symbol and the arts.

 

Why is this so? Because few of us are at the same place in life in either our cognitive or emotional understandings. Each of us is in process. It would be easy to build a liturgy without the qualities desiderated above. And that liturgy would no doubt satisfy a few of us who happened to be at the same place in life, sharing the same age, sentiment, economic class, social status, theological viewpoint. I can put together a liturgy that in its clear‑cut rationality excludes everything beyond my present range of appreciation and understanding. I could exclude and exclude and exclude. I am clever enough to devise services that would exclude humanists or theists, traditionalists or modernists, Socialists or Republicans, and end up with a righteous remnant of two or three of us echoing away in the purity of our own perspectives.

 

But of course I am committed to a structure of experience on Sunday morning that goes beyond our differences in age, sex, politics, attitudes and life style, embracing the greatest compatible contrasts, contrasts that border on chaos . . . that we can manage. My commitment is based on my belief in the Church as a unique institution for intergenerational encounter and upon my belief that each of us needs constantly to be reminded of worlds of vision beyond our present ones.

 

A Church service serious about moving beyond narrowness and narcissism must have what Bernard Loomer calls S I Z E. It must be large enough to take in and integrate the diversity and rivalry of our small perspectives and reorder them in light of a larger community and wholeness.

A Church service appealing only to the young, or to the old, or to the  successful, or to iconoclasts, or to traditionalists, or to any other particular segment, is a service without size, without that larger integrity that stretches and restores and renews our own.

 

If you find parts of the Church service not speaking to your needs, say Halleluiah. It may mean your neighbor is being spoken to in the depths, and it may mean that there is more in store for you as your needs change in the unfolding years ahead.  Only a very large liturgy can speak to us for a lifetime.

 

 

 

 

THREE ELEMENTS OF WORSHIP

Joyce H Smith, River Road Unitarian Church

abridged and edited from a sermon 1979 Apr 29, Bethesda, MD

 

INTRODUCTION

Often the word worship brings to mind the concepts of bowing down to, sacrificing to, making submission before that which makes me feel unworthy, small or insignificant. The emotions of awe and wonder can be a part of worship, but for many of us the effect such awe or wonder seemed designed to create was that in comparison to God I am a lesser person. This unfortunate attitude is not the true meaning of worship.  While in relation to the cosmos or to God (however you define that word) we are small, still the aim of worship is not to make us feel insignificant, but rather to help us, through relationship to God or to all that is, to feel a sense of our own deep worth. Religions must emphasize the reason for worship forms which create this feeling of smallness. They should not point out that we are “miserable worms,” but that all of creation is of value as it relates us to the whole larger picture.

 

What do we worship? The process of worship is one of holding up that which is of primary worth. Unitarian minister Von Ogden Vogt in his book, The Primacy of Worship, says what we worship is the spirit of goodness, the spirit of beauty, and the spirit of truth. Note he says it is the spirit of goodness, beauty and truth not any concrete embodiment of any of these things, which would be idolatry. The ancient Jews did not allow an image to be made in the likeness of God because they feared that the image itself would be worshipped, not the spirit. No specific act is good in and of itself. Giving money to the poor may be an act of goodness, but the spirit of goodness is something else.  The purpose of ritual in religion is to perform an act that will create or generate this concern or identity with others. The act of giving money to the needy could in fact generate the concern for those people hurt by poverty and racism. The act or ritual itself should never be confused with the spirit which it may generate.

 

The spirit of beauty is revealed by the various forms in nature and in human art. The Eskimo carver believed that he released the animal trapped in the wood or stone, simply carving off that which hid the form of beauty inherent in the material. It was the spirit of beauty which was being revealed. 

 

The spirit of truth is in like danger of being made into an idol. The truth of one time and person may deeply reflect the spirit of truth, but to hold on to that truth as a permanent fixed expression for all times is a form of idolatry. Religions often express as their central form of worship a story of a quest for truth as an example of how the spirit of truth may be sought. To make that story or the truths found in that journey the final and complete expression of truth is to be worshipping idols. This is why we Unitarian Universalists find the limits of any one story and the answers of any one person or people to be idolatrous. The spirit of truth revealed in our various human stories‑‑Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, scientific, sociological or psychological‑‑this spirit is what we find of supreme worth, what we hold up as teachings of significance to us.

 

THREE ELEMENTS

Given that it is the spirit of beauty, truth and goodness which we are holding up as of primary worth in our worship, what happens when we worship? What is the process by which worship occurs? Why do we set aside a special time, a special setting?  Three things must happen for worship to have occurred, revelation, recognition, and acceptance. The forms of worship may vary widely, but unless all these elements occur, the act of worship has not been complete. We may have a highly structured religious ritual (like a Mass), a walk in the park, a program on TV, a concert or a sermon, any of which may be worship if the three elements are present.

 

First there must be some aspect of the spirit of truth, goodness or beauty revealed. It must be there for us to see, hear, feel, sense or experience. Often we are more aware when something has failed to reveal the spirit of beauty, truth, or goodness‑‑a concert which fails to show beauty or is badly played, a service whose meanings are so diverse or so obtuse or unorganized that we end up more confused than enlightened. An example:  the setting was lovely‑‑an area overlooking a New England lake, the air was cool, spring was coming fast, the birds were singing and the sun shining on the morning of the service. The worship leader had taped a series of popular songs and read selected poems between. The poems and the songs were in themselves good selections, but they were far too many, too long, and too confusingly diverse in expression. In spite of the lovely setting, the attention to each individual selection, there was no revelation of the spirit of truth, goodness or beauty because it was unclear what was being held up for us to experience. For us, the participants, revelation was closed.

 

Second, even when revelation is clear and the spirit of truth, goodness or beauty hovers in the air, unless the participants recognize the revelation as related to them in some significant way, the revelation will not result in worship. The tone deaf person cannot be moved by music and the observer of rites and rituals with which he does not identify may see that they have beauty and goodness about them, but still remains an observer only. I remember in my adolescence such an experience. I was raised a Methodist and wanted very much to experience the depth of emotion which I suspected the story of Jesus’ last days on earth could create in the heart of the Christian worshipper. I participated in church services for the week which were meant to create that very experience. But I was unable to recognize in that revelation the spirit which was significant to me. I did not grasp that here too was my story, something which was a part of me. I left that faith since it did not fulfill the worship needs in me.  I did not recognize myself to be involved in the revelation given.

 

The third part of worship is perhaps the most difficult part‑‑that of acceptance. Acceptance means taking the revealed truth, goodness or beauty, not only recognizing it as your own but making it a part of your life and acting on it or out of it. Much of the deep power of the civil rights marches and the anti‑war rallies of the 1960’s was that the people participating (and perhaps those watching) were actually changed by those rituals. They became different people in the areas of race relations and they became more dedicated to peaceful ways.

 

Several years ago when I preached on hunger, I had pointed out that one aspect of our complex civilization and the hunger of others was that we ate food like beef, at the top of the food chain, food which required more of the world’s energy to produce. One of the congregation so took that message to heart that he had cut down his consumption of meat and he had almost entirely cut out beef from his diet. That type of acceptance, which effects a permanent change in behavior, is an example of acceptance in worship.

 

THE ATTITUDE

Recognizing what we worship and the elements of worship, we must yet consider the attitude we bring to worship. We create special places and settings with the expectation that worship will occur because the attitude of worship is not easy to maintain. I call this a “tip‑toe” attitude. It is the feeling that I must take off my shoes, for this is holy ground. This kind of attitude allows us the necessary openness to see the revelation which is given, the openness by which we can recognize the revelation as ours and accept its meaning in our lives in such a way that it will influence our actions. This attitude of expectation is sometimes a part of every moment of life, for some rare persons, whom we call saints or gurus. For most of us open expectation and receptivity is not our everyday attitude. Joseph Campbell believes that worship is conscious playfulness. It is the sense of taking the ordinary, common parts of life and using them to reveal something extraordinary, breathtaking and uncommon which is akin to playfulness. The reason Jesus could say of children that “Of such is the kingdom of heaven,” was that children often see the common as extraordinary, every experience reveals meaning. This same sense of openness and expectancy is part of the attitude necessary for worship to occur. We create the special place, the ritual, the time, and the attitude to make this happen for us. We create the occasion for worship.  

 

 

 

 

THE PROBLEMATIC SITUATION IN LIBERAL WORSHIP

Don Vaughn

 

Worship is the act, performed individually or as a group, of honoring the intrinsic worth of a person, an idea, or a thing. By “honoring” I mean making a special effort to laud or emphasize or enjoy. This may also be called celebration and it may be characterized by acts of self confrontation and confrontation with reality, but standing in awe and wonder at both the clarity and mystery of that worthfulness, and by praise, penitence, and thankfulness. The occasion may be either grave or joyous or both. Worship has at least three central aspects. The first is reveling in the fact of that worthfulness and can draw on all phases of human activity (mind, emotions, physical movement) for its expression. The second is probing into the intrinsic meaning of that worthfulness and into its relation to other aspects of human existence. This while seeming to be only an operation of the mind, may require the full capacity of the person to experience, to know, and to understand”operat1ons that can be as affective and somatic as mental. The third is asserting the reality of that worthfulness and, again, may involve the full range of human powers especially since this is the realm of symbol which may be not only of a verbal nature but also use the full range of human senses and physical movement.

 

Liturgy is the ordering of the means of worship; it is worship’s form. As such it is not optional although it is greatly variable in as much as it may range from impulsive spontaneity to unvarying adherence to our present order. The content of worship is the ideas and acts which flesh out the liturgy.  Every element of the above attempt to define worship is problematic in our liberal religious movement. The problem derives not simply from a lack of consensus on the content of worship, the liturgy of worship, the proper relationship between worship’s three aspects, the varying emphases which worship may pursue, or the acceptability of the very notion of worship itself, although there is disagreement and confusion over each of these.  The greatest difficulty arises from a lack of having a common object of worship. Since the whole act of worship receives its coherence and integrity from being well ordered and directed at, and a celebration of, an object, confusion (if not chaos) must result when the object is obscure.

 

Because of the general difficulty in our movement with the concept of God as the focus of worship we have been casting about (in a largely unconscious way) for something to take its place. The effort has been, for the most part, to substitute some notion of ideal humanity, or of human values, or of the democratic process for God but perceptions in these areas have been so individualized and inchoate that groups seldom meet with a common aim in worship and, therefore, seldom can coordinate their energies in a common sharing that can be built on. When this does occur it is hard to understand what really made it happen. And some people go away with a fear that they have been psychologically manipulated or invaded and, therefore, maintain a suspicious attitude toward such experiences. Until we can tell people what we worship when we come together, we will continue to experiment and test with highly uneven results and worship will continue to be a fundamental need which we cannot adequately fulfill.

 

 

 

 

RITUAL

Alice Blair Wesley

adapted and excerpted from OM Worship Workshop 10/78

 

A woman came up to me [after the service] to say, “I felt today for the first time in two years like I was at church.” I later learned that at the First Church in Dallas, where she had been a member for several years, the congregation begins every service by reading those words as an affirmation.

 

Similarly, the Emerson Church choir in Houston ends every service with the traditional “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” and a seven-fold amen. A college student once told the minister with a lump of gratitude in the throat, “When the choir started to sing that amen, I knew I was home.”  In both these cases people knew where they were because of the ritual.

 

That is to say, memories of meaningful experience of a particular type and a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy of more meaningful experience of the same sort were triggered by the explicitly repeated ritual. Those memories and expectations are important. The richness or paucity of our lives largely results from their influence or absence.  Much more importantly, however, the potential for creativity is not present without ritual, more broadly conceived now as flexible forms of expression. By way of example think of Greece of the fifth century BC.  Surely a more creative people never lived. They produced great architecture, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture. But they wrote no novels, because no one had invented that art form. The form of an art is a product of the entire culture; it belongs to everyone. Once the form is discovered, individual artists can be infinitely creative within it. Formlessness is a vacuum. The purely spontaneous service is a non-event.

 

Without the form nothing creative can be done at all. Liberal forms of worship must have autonomy. That is, the generative imagination and the content are ours and no one else’s. But liberal forms of worship cannot be isolated from religious practice in the rest of the society. We will simply kill ourselves as a religious institution if we abstain from the forms in use throughout the culture, because there are and can be no others available to us. The alternative to their adaptation and use is spiritual and artistic sterility.  The ritual art forms of worship serve as vehicles for expression of the truth of our experience in a way which allows for intimacy without intrusion of privacy. The form is there; the degree of intensity to be expressed or experienced within the form is left up to the individual. For example, the  handshake of greeting or the reading of a confession may be “merely” a ritual more often than not, the commonly polite or usual thing to do, with little to recommend it except that it makes us feel comfortable in the sense spoken above. However, there are times, which we may not care to spell out with soul-baring publicity, when the handshake of greeting needs to and does communicate profound feelings. There are times when we can deal honestly with our shortcomings and guilt by reading them out loud in symbolic language and so start the work of healing that only honesty can bring to a burdened soul. The availability of the form will

 

 

 

 

WORSHIP AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Arthur Foote

Excerpts from a paper prepared for the Prairie Group, 1967 Nov 6

 

Worship is a human activity—something done by an individual or a group–that concerns man’s relationship to the divine, however conceived. For the theist, it is an act of adoration, a humbling yet uplifting invocation of the sense of God’s presence. In her well-known study, Evelyn Underhill maintained that worship is essentially   disinterested. It is something we freely offer to God. While it is God “from whom all blessings flow,” the object of worship is properly not to receive but to give—to give praise, to express thanks. Thus, worship is not synonymous with prayer, since prayer may or may not be disinterested. The words of the seraphic hymn, in Isaiah’s vision and call, state its essence:

 

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

          (Isaiah VI)

 

To recognize that glory, to love it, to serve it, to be possessed and transformed by it: this is worship.

 

There is, then, a valid distinction to be made between worship and religious experience. Religious experience—as the very phrase implies—is something that happens to us. We may invite it, prepare for it; but we cannot command it. It may happen to us anywhere, anytime, while star-gazing or washing the dishes, standing before a Rembrandt or waiting beside a deathbed. It is the sudden apprehension, or the gradual awareness, of what Sir Julian Huxley calls “sacred reality.” To me, religious experience is most naturally described as a meeting with the divine, a sense of communion with a power “vast as life and love,” but I would not wish to limit such experience to my language, or to the traditional language of theistic religion. Its occurrence is clearly not limited to those who believe in a personal God. James Bissett Pratt and others have demonstrated the universality of religious experience, however varied the verbal descriptions employed by persons who have had it.

 

Worship may be considered the other side of this enterprise. It is the human act, the conscious effort to induce religious experience (in so far as we are able); the discipline through which we seek to strengthen our commitment to ideals, to examine our motives. But even more basically, it is the act of praise, the celebration of the goodness of life. In Sir Julian’s phrase, it is evoking a “consciousness of sanctity in existence.”

 

Religion is sometimes defined as a man’s love affair with life; worship thereby becomes his disinterested endeavor to express that love.  It is important that we do express that love. For as Harry Emerson Fosdick says, Nothing else matters much—not wealth, nor learning, nor even health—without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all man’s important faiths: that he should be able to believe in life.

*         *        *

We Unitarian Universalists, spiritual descendents of the New England Puritans, have evidently never shaken off their intense suspicion of institution worship, their fear of formalism, and (as Evelyn Underhill said of the Quakers) we tend to demand a personal religious sincerity so drastic that no word may be said or sung which is not true for such individual worshiper.  Hence, we make what is basically an artistic enterprise especially difficult. For the artist is not primarily concerned with facts, or literal truths. Picasso only overstates when he asserts:

 

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

 

The artist’s search is for meaning; his effort is to communicate that meaning, to illumine experience, and by imaginative vision to add insight to sight.

 

If worship is an art—Von Ogden Vogt called it “the all comprehending art” and “the mother of all arts”—then he who conducts worship needs to be an artist. And this leads to the unavoidable conclusion that to conduct worship effectively, the minister himself must be a worshiping man. He needs to worship with his congregation, even though he cannot worship for them.  And this, in turn, means he must cultivate his own private devotional life.  In this area I fear our performance is sadly lacking. Our kind of religion encourages action far more effectively and persistently than it does contemplation, or the practice of “quiet sitting,” as the Chinese called it.  … It is my serious contention that whatever decline we have noted in public worship stems in no small part from our failure as religious liberals to value and faithfully adhere to some systematic plan for the cultivation of our inner life.

 

 

 

 

HOW CAN THE DISCOURAGED WORSHIP?

sermon excerpts from the UUA’S The Edge of Worship, 25-6

John F Hayward

 

[How] shall we think of worship in our times of defeat? If I come to church heavy laden with real sorrow or a vague anxiety, if I have steadily felt myself losing my identity and my way—or if I wonder if I ever had true identity and way—how can I rejoice in the gifts of man or God or enter into the mood of celebration? In spite of our confidence and our optimism, we liberals must take seriously man’s constant tendency to deny and depreciate himself through discouragement, neurosis, and hostility. If the inner world is unlovely, it wilt project its dark shapes upon the outer world. Then all our attempts to celebrate run the risk of inducing only deeper discouragement in the already discouraged person. He will say, others can be excellent, I cannot. Others can enjoy communion with goodness, but I am cut off.

 

The person who is cut off from worship because there is [in the design and conduct of the service] no excellence to be savored or the person who is cut off from worship because he is too depressed to respond to what excellence there is must be reminded that we call our worship services. The role of spectator is important but not primary. The role of server, offerer, giver is at the heart of the matter.