Why Worship?

My questioning falls on the purpose of worship.  Before I begin, though, I will admit that I have not taken but one class on theology, that I have not read much Quaker theology either and that my focus rests still primarily on the social science of Quakerism and of religion.  This said, there are some important insights to be had within the disciplines of the social sciences.  And of those, some fraction is represented below this short essay (see after the ellipses).

What are we really doing when we worship?  What actually happens during it?  Is worship actually necessary?  These are questions that run through my brain almost every time I sit down in a meeting room with the intention of being quiet alongside others who are also sitting quietly.  Apparently, sitting quietly must be fun if so many people do it!  (Not that many people do it).  But, as a student in Divinity School, even though I will have spent two short years (and at some point I'd like to write a diatribe on how useless this degree was for my real education except in whatever utility having a degree from Harvard will mean), I have encountered quite a lot of reflections on religious experience.  Most importantly, religious experience tends to be operationalized as: 1) a feeling of satisfaction and deep connection with others and an extreme degree of intimacy and vulnerability, 2) an extreme degree of emotional expression, and/or 3) an existential re-orientation that involves some kind of clear view of purpose and meaning (rarely achieved in every-day life).  Such reflections often lead to the phrase I posted in my FB status a few months back.  A friend once said, "Most of my religious experiences have not actually been in Church."  Thankfully, for Quakers, the Church was never meant to be the meeting house.  The Church is the religious and spiritual community.  So all our religious experiences have the potential to occur inside the Church, in so far as they occur within community.  If we think of "religious experience" in the way that I am doing (and I am open to others' views on this), and if we think of Church in the way that I am thinking, then there is really no need for meeting for worship per se.  

Now, here is where my lack of theological knowledge shows most beautifully.  I am not at all certain about where the idea that, "God is still speaking," comes from.  So I will cite two people who do know: Ben Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins.  They, social scientist scholars of Quakerism and Quaker theology, write that liberal Quakerism comes with the following basic premises: 1) the primacy of experience, 2) the necessity for faith to be relevant to contemporary situations, 3) the requirement that Quakers be open to new forms of truth or, “new light,” 4) that new revelation has an automatic authority over older truth claims, and 5) that God’s truth is revealed gradually (Dandelion and Collins 2008:23).  Apparently, the ritual of meeting for worship helps to facilitate the life of these premises within Quaker community.  Yet as much as I like meeting for worship, I wonder sometimes whether we might find a better use of our time.  The basic three functions of meeting for worship are:  to affirm community by opening a space for vulnerability, to be in community such that these values can come to life, and to wait on God to show us new lights.  I'll work backwards.  

Focusing on the later function first, we are essentially inviting God to speak during meeting for worship.  We sit down, and then we wait on some deep wisdom to bubble up from our inner-most life-forces.  But, God is always speaking, is she not?  So, then, inviting God to speak would be much akin to inviting the mail man to please remember to bring the mail.  This is to say, if all we are doing when we worship is getting together to wait on God to speak, aren't we doing something unnecessary?  It seems like it would be more useful to get together and tell each other what God has already said to us.  Our new slogan would be: "What has God said to you in the past week?"  In this sense, we would still be meeting as a community, to affirm our aforementioned values, to connect and to love each other (getting back to the second function of meeting for worship I listed).  We would also have a more practical view of religion and spirituality—that it is unnecessary to create a space in which God can speak to us, because she is already speaking to us.  Much in the same way that we rejected the notion that God only speaks to us inside a certain building, it is also to be rejected that God only speaks to us inside the confines of a particular time-period.

Relating to the first function now, the idea that, in worship, there is space for vulnerability and intimacy is a fun idea!  But, community is not well served in this regard by meeting for worship.  Mostly, we sit quietly when we worship.  Community building, intimacy, requires relating in a way that is usually not prevalent in worship.  Nowadays, we have to create other spaces for community building.  We have to develop worship sharing groups, active committee-life, and other such small-group sessions.  In some cases, we develop whole bureaucracies just so we can have time to be in community.  This requires a lot of time and money.  We busy ourselves unnecessarily.  We have fallen prey to post-modern life—which is understandable sense (as I have suggested elsewhere) liberal Quakerism is the epitome of post-modern religion. 

Think back to my three operationalizations of religious experience.  Can you imagine any of those happening without closely knit community?  I suggest finally that religious experience itself requires as a necessary condition, close-knit, vulnerable, intimate community.  This fits well with the Quaker notion that religious experience happens always within the Church because the Church is just another word for the community.  I am merely “shepharding” this premise to its logical end.

Monthly Meetings can create worship-practice spaces, surely.  We all need practice being open to God’s messages in everyday life.  But Quaker community might need to be centered on spaces in which we share with each other what God has already given us.  This would allow us to get vulnerable and close.  It would also allow us to affirm our values, and to really dig deep into the idea that God is still speaking.  It would probably lead to more beauty, and many more said religious experiences.  It’s also cheaper.  Meetings for worship for business, then, can be a form of the "worship-practice session" in which we open ourselves intentionally to the life of the divine.  Are we not to be worshiping all the time?  Are we not to be praying all the time?  Are we not to be looking for God within every creak in the wood where we step?  As for me, I think I'll go to the gym on Sunday mornings.  I look forward to hearing God’s breath in the squeak of the treadmills.  

...

The following is an introduction for a literature review on which I premise my research into liberal Quakerism.

People are choosing their religions rather than remaining connected to their religions of origin (Chaves 1994:768; Hammond 1988; Cadge and Davidman 2006).  Differently from the past, “[people] can choose how and whether to be religious, including choosing how central religion will be in their lives…” writes Nancy T. Ammerman, “If religious identity ever was a given, it certainly is no longer,” (2003:207).   Likewise, persons are more progressively defining who they are by the many collectivities in which they belong—or think of themselves as belonging—rather than by membership in one collectivity alone (Jenkins 2004:114).  “I am American,” someone might say, but she might also say: “I am white,” or, “I am a singer,” or, “I am a Quaker.”  It is quite likely that each of these statements are associated to particular communities, respectively: one’s family of origin, one’s a cappella group, one’s community of Quakers or one’s Quaker youth group from High School, etc.  The ground upon which communities cohere is becoming more about the formation of “self” or of “subjectivity.”  The ground upon which religious communities cohere thereby yields no exception.  This is not to say that all communities everywhere, in every period in history, cohere and remain coherent due to common identity formation (if histories can even be said to have periods and communities can be said to have particular locations).  My argument applies only to the Western world, and only to this post-modern era in which we seem ambivalently to be fixed. 

Furseth and Repstad reference James Beckford (1992) in an attempt to define postmodernity (2006:78).  They characterize it, in part, as a refusal to allow instrumental-rational or positivist-utilitarian criteria to be the sole standards for worthwhile knowledge; they define postmodernity as a celebration of spontaneity, irony, playfulness, and fragmentation; and as a willingness, “to abandon the search for overarching or triumphalist myths, narratives or frameworks of knowledge,” (2006:78).  One could supplant some words and be able succinctly to describe the character of the liberal Quaker tradition with this same definition.  Collins and Dandelion’s articulation of Quakerism is strikingly similar to Beckford’s definition of postmodernity—in that both place primacy on experience, the currency of present discernment, and the availability of knowledge through many different sources (Dandelion and Collins 2008:23).  In its emphasis on a perpetual search for truth, Quakerism certainly retains vestiges of modernity merely in its seeming presumption that the ultimate truth is discoverable, as long as we keep looking.  Even so, Quakerism does not proclaim triumphalist truths, nor does it aim to discover one someday.  For Quakers, searching for truth should be very messily grounded in experience—in all its possible facets.  Hence, an emphasis on nonrational experience becomes necessarily clear.  Truth comes not merely through logic—not merely within the boundaries of reason (Kant 1999).  Truth comes through spiritual, mystical and emotional means as well. 

Because religious activity takes place in the body, involving emotions, as Meredith McGuire argues, it cannot be analyzed simply in terms of cognition and belief (2006:198).  I therefore approach the study of the liberal Quaker tradition in this way.  I argue that religious experience recounted as narrative is the primary mechanism through which liberal Quakers constitute their ephemeral truth claims.  In what may be a controversial analytical angle for other religious spheres, the religious sphere of liberal Quakerism actually calls for the sociology of narrative in which fragmented contemporary, Western identity is always experientially negotiated in process.  

Bibliography

Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. “Religious Identities and Religious Institutions.” Pp. 207-224 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Dillon Michele. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Beckford, James. 1992. “Religion, modernity and post-modernity.” Pp. 11-27 in Religion: Contemporary Issues, edited by Bryan R. Wilson. London: Bellew.

Cadge, Wendy, and Lynn Davidman. 2006. “Ascription, Choice, and the Construction of Religious Identities in the Contemporary United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45(1):23-38.

Chaves, Mark. 1994. “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.” Social Forces 72(3):749-774.

Dandelion, Benjamin Pink, and Peter Collins, eds. 2008. The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion. Newcastle [England]: Cambridge Scholars.

Furseth, Inger, and Pal Repstad. 2006. An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical And Contemporary Perspectives. Ashgate Pub Co.

Hammond, Phillip H. 1988. “Religion and the Persistence of Identity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27(1):1-11.

Jenkins, Timothy. 2004. “Congregational Cultures and the Boundaries of Identity.” Pp. 113-123 in Congregational Studies in the UK. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.

Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.

McGuire, Meredith. 2006. “Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance.” Pp. 187-200 in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, edited by Nancy T. Ammerman. Oxford University Press, USA.