Ican’t talk to you about worship unless I first give you some idea of my own religious point of view. I want to be quite frank with you so that there shall be no misunderstanding. I do not belong to any standard brand religion. I don’t have any religious label because in this day and age, when we know so much about the various religious points of view of the whole world, I consider it to be unintelligent to commit oneself to a particular label. This is prejudice. This is saying I commit myself to a certain point of view in advance of any new discovery, any new knowledge that may turn up. To me the essence of faith is being open-minded. I would say that there is a fundamental contrast between belief on the one hand and faith on the other. Belief comes from an Anglo-Saxon root, lief, which means to wish. In my definition, a believer is one who fervently hopes that the nature of the universe is thus and so. He is therefore committed. He is using religion as something to hang on to. And when you use religion as something to hang on to, you are in an attitude that is the exact opposite of faith.
For example, when you are thrown in the water and it is necessary to learn how to swim, the very last thing you must do is to grab hold of the water and try to stay afloat in the water in the same way that you try to support yourself on the dry land. The commitment of faith is very much like being thrown into the water because you suddenly realize that you don’t know. You are afloat in a vast universe and you honestly don’t know what the nature of life is. Therefore, you have to act as the swimmer, to let go. Take another example. When a cat falls out of a tree, the cat lands safely because it makes an act of faith. If, when the cat let go, it suddenly stuck out its limbs like this and said, “e-e-a-h,” the cat would hit the ground and be a bag of broken bones. But all cats have learned from their mothers to relax when they fall, to let go so they land with a soft thud. And that is the act of faith.
Faith I would say is having one’s mind open to the facts or the truths, whatever they may turn out to be. Therefore, from my point of view, religion is not a doctrine to be believed in; it is an experience. That is to say, it is an experience in just the same sense that being alive is something that you experience, that falling in love is something that you experience, that being afraid or being happy or whatever is an experience. So for me, religious faith or religious knowledge is that alteration that occurs to one’s consciousness, to one’s whole being, indeed, as soon as you take an attitude toward life that is fundamentally one of letting go. In Buddhism, for example, the highest state of consciousness is called Nirvana, and a lot of people think that that means nothing at all, annihilation. The word in Sanskrit means “blow out.” While the breath is life, if you hold onto your breath you begin to lose it. So, you see, he that would save his life, his breath, shall lose it, but he that loses his life shall find it. Let go. Let the breath go. Let go of God.
In a certain sense—and I don’t want you to think I am an irreligious person—there are two kinds of irreligion, the higher and the lower. The lower irreligion we all know about—when one simply doesn’t care about these things. The higher irreligion could be called atheism in the name of God. There was once upon a time, though everybody’s forgotten it, a technical Christian theological term for this. It was called apophatic theology or the via negativa, and its great proponent was a certain saint who goes by the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. The idea was this: that the most dangerous of all idols are not the idols made of wood and stone, but the idols made of imagination and thought. Therefore, all ideas of God, all conceptions of God that are fixed and positive and formal are idols. The truly religious man of faith must be one who smashes his own idols, or if I may put it another way, he scrapes from the window the paintings of the sun and the blue sky that have been put on the glass. He looks as if he were destroying something but actually he’s letting the real light in. So, in my philosophy, all conceptions of God to which people cling for spiritual security are their major obstructions to faith and to religious knowledge, and the best thing to do is to get rid of them.
Now this applies particularly to ideas, to concepts, that might very well be mistaken for the reality that they represent. The ideas of God as the “necessary being,” or as the “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” or as the “infinite absolute mind,” are far more dangerous idols than say De Lawd of Green Pastures. De Lawd of Green Pastures wears a top hat and smokes a cigar, and this is not a dangerous idol because nobody would dream of taking it seriously. In the same way, the good old-fashioned God who has a beard and sits on a golden throne is not in danger of being taken seriously by any intelligent person. But at the same time, there is something marvelous about these images just because they will not be taken seriously, and because they are also very expressive.
It is very difficult to conceive a being in higher terms than in human terms. Once you have tried to conceive God as something like “necessary being” or “pure spirit,” you get a conception of God that is rather more like an infinite sea of tapioca pudding than anything else. Whereas to think of Him in the form of men is to think of Him in the highest form that we know, provided you have this little thought in the back of your mind, what the Germans call hintergedanke—a little thought, a little reservation—that this isn’t really the way it is. (This is the essence of mythological symbolism. Mythological symbolism is very powerful and very necessary.) So when I speak of God in anthropomorphic human terms I do so with a twinkle in the eye so that you won’t take me quite seriously. Nevertheless there is something to be said, there is something to be conveyed by this message.
Now, having abandoned all religious believing, I want to tell you from my own experience what happens. In order that you can understand it, I have to express what happens to you in some sort of mythological terms. They are better, they are clearer than attempting to be aridly philosophical. (I could put it to you in that way too, but I’m not going to tonight.) Now what I come to is this: the fundamental nature of the universe is based on the game of hide-and-seek, or lost-and-found, or peek-a-boo; the universe as we know it physically consists of a sort of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sort of thing, something like the positive and negative aspects of electricity, the up and down of the wave, the here-we-are and the here-we-aren’t of a discontinuous vibration. We know things exist because they just don’t stay put; they keep coming and going. For example, if I put my hand on your knee and leave it there, you will soon cease to notice it, but if I keep patting you on the knee you will keep knowing that I am there. In the same way, here in front of me is a hard object, a microphone. The reason it’s hard is that it keeps going out of existence and coming back into existence so that my fingers won’t go through it just as I can’t put my finger through the rapidly evolving blades of an electric fan. This microphone is going much faster than any electric fan. My finger is going pretty fast, too. All of those electrons or whatever they are, waves or wavicles, go b-r-r-r the whole time; and b-r-r-r is here-we-are and here-we-aren’t. You can also test this out by playing with a baby. The game that all babies like is when you hide your face and the baby starts to giggle. That’s because the baby in its unspoiled state is profoundly in touch with the metaphysical core of the universe. So, that’s the fundamental game.
Now, suppose I were God, what would I do? Let me put it to you in a simpler way. Suppose that every night you could dream any dream you wanted to dream, what would you do? I am sure we would all spend many nights having wonderful wish-fulfillment dreams. When we had got through with enormous meals and dancing girls and concerts and great gambols, we would then go into adventures and thrills. But when we had gone through that for several months, we would decide we wanted a surprise dream where we didn’t know what we were going to dream. First of all a pleasant surprise, several months of pleasant surprises. Then we’d have the adventure of an unpleasant dream, knowing that we would wake up in the end. In reality, we do that all the time, because when we go to plays, when we read books, we like to know the fundamental plot. Everything starts out O.K.—status quo. Then a villain has to come in and upset everything and, although we know it’s a play, we still sit a little bit on the edges of our chairs, especially if the play is well acted. We go through the thrill of seeing everything go to pieces and then everything is restored again. So, if you were the Lord God, what would you do?
Well, of course, you would have imaginary things going on. You would imagine a creation, and you would imagine after a while that you weren’t in charge of the creation anymore, that you were mixed up in it. That would be like having a surprise dream, or like the perfect technological push-button universe in which everything we desire can be had immediately by pushing a button. Five minutes of that would be enough. We’d have to have a button labeled “surprise.” So you might say the Lord is the supreme dramatist who forgets that he is the Lord: he goes through the game of pretending that he’s all of us; he becomes involved like a great actor in myriads of parts; and he gets absorbed in them because he’s such a good actor that he takes himself in. He has himself sitting on the edge of his throne absolutely spellbound. Is it going to come out all right?
You see, there really are only four great philosophical questions. Oh, I think there may be five. The first one, “Who started it?” The second, “Are we going to make it?” The third, “Where are we going to put it?” The fourth, “Who’s going to clean up?” and the fifth one, which I just thought of, “Is it serious?”
Now from the ordinary religious point of view, from what I call the point of view of standard brand religion, it is serious. The Lord is a very serious person as we shall see shortly. But in the view that I have come to the Lord is not serious, because the Lord’s fundamental function is play. Just as Shakespeare says, “The play is the thing.” The whole universe is in this sense dramatic. (I am not trying to preach to you; I’m just telling you what I think.) The whole universe is dramatic. It’s a drama that’s so good that it takes itself in and looks as if it isn’t play. It looks as if it’s serious, but it isn’t. And the reason it isn’t serious is that basically every one of you—although you may not know it, and most of you probably don’t—every one of you is really the Lord in disguise, and you are therefore fundamentally “what there is.” You’re it. See the game of hide-and-seek. You’re it. So there’s really no need to worry; that’s the fundamental attitude of faith. You don’t need to hang on to God or to cling to God, because the moment you do so you deny the fact that you’re it. By trying to have faith you don’t have faith. By trying to believe, you aren’t really religious because the fundamental thing in religion is to realize oneness with or union with God.
Now I don’t attempt to say what I mean by God, I’ll just give you the idea of the old gentleman on the throne, because the real thing you couldn’t think of any more than you can bite your own teeth or look straight into your own eyes without a mirror. In this sense, you see, none of us knows who he is because each one of us is the absolutely fundamental root and ground of being. Now some people will object to this idea. They’ll say it’s pantheistic. That’s a dirty word in theological circles, because it’s supposed to disrupt all morals. After all, if I’m God, and you’re God and everybody’s God it really doesn’t matter what happens. And when we say it doesn’t matter, that’s a way of saying that matter is no matter. It really doesn’t amount to anything because it’s a game, a good game, a wonderful game. In that sense it matters—a glorious game—but it is only a game.
Here I find a difficulty. The moment you try to root ethics and morals in the nature of God you get into trouble. The Chinese have a proverb: “Don’t swat a fly on a friends head with a hatchet.” In the same way, if you make good and bad and moral behavior depend on God, it’s too much. It overwhelms things. It’s saying that the distinctions between good and evil are so eternal that the good people will be happy forever and ever, but the evil people will have to scream in hell forever and ever. And that’s really very immoral. There’s nothing more immoral than making morality absolute. We know what good grammar is, and we all agree fairly well to speak proper English. But we don’t have to say that English is the one, authoritative, true, absolute language. So we get much better agreement on speaking English than about moral behavior just because we don’t put such heavy sanctions on it. We don’t swat the fly on the friend’s head with a hatchet.
I feel that a schizophrenic universe in which there is an infinite gulf between the creator and the creature is an unthinkable and absurd system. It’s as if—and many people feel this—it’s as if the universe were primarily a whole lot of things, a sort of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that happened to gather together from nowhere. Whereas I like to think of the world the other way around. For example, I like to think of it as a star that radiates from a center, where all the differences in the world are linked in a fundamental unity. Just as petals come out of a flower, as rays from a star, as legs from a spider, as tentacles from an octopus, as spines of a sea-urchin, all of us are the many, many functions and doings of one center. Then I feel I have an integrated universe, a whole universe, and thus a holy universe.
Now, then, if we take this point of view as fundamental, what is the place of worship? You might say in this kind of religious philosophy there is no place for worship because worship as most of us understand it is kowtowing. Historically, most forms of worship in the West—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic—are based on the idea of the behavior of a subject in the courtroom of a monarch. Here the monarch sits on his throne, and everybody who comes in bows or prostrates himself. Why do people prostrate themselves? A monarch is a person who is fundamentally afraid. For if you take the world in hand to govern it by force, you must be frightened since everybody will be trying to take the power from you. So when you come into the presence of an absolute monarch he has his back and his throne against the wall, his guards on either side, and everybody prostrates himself because in that position they can’t attack. And so it is with worship in Christianity, as we have known it in the past, whether Catholic or Protestant.
This form of worship is exactly what goes on in the court of a king. Indeed, the great cathedrals are sometimes called basilica because that is the place of the king. There is the throne, very often behind the high altar where the representative of the monarch, the representative of the Lord of Heaven, the bishop, archbishop, or pope or whoever he may be, sits, and the ceremonial is based on the court ceremonials of Roman and Byzantine emperors. In the Protestant churches, the scene is not very different. It’s republican rather than monarchical since the protestant church is modeled after a court of justice. The presiding person doesn’t wear royal vestments. He wears the black gown of a judge. There are boxes and stall and a pulpit. You get behind a stall to protect you from the people, just in the same way as the judge. But still it’s based on a court scene. Both of these forms of worship presuppose that God is something not in us but above us. Even if in some sense he is within us, he is above us. And, although he may be within us, we have to worship him externally. Actually, we’re turning things around to worship that which is in us but not us—not fundamentally us—but always infinitely other.
This is an attitude suitable to human beings who have been bamboozled into being afraid. Thus, when they hear the thunder they cower a little; they think about their guilty conscience and wonder if the lightning is going to hit them. But this is an attitude suitable to childhood, and perhaps it may not even be very suitable to childhood. But it is a childlike attitude, or rather, a childish attitude, bowing down to authority not realizing that you yourself are the source of that authority. If you say, “I believe in the Bible or the Church because I’m told to do so,” your belief is an act of obedience. Don’t kid yourself. But it was your choice to obey, wasn’t it? You give to whatever you believe such authority as it has for you. So you may say that Protestants interpret the Bible in their own way. Catholics interpret the Bible as they’re told to. And therefore they’re more obedient. But that’s not true because they consented to it in the first place. It was their choice to accept the authority of the Church, which interprets the Bible. So it is fundamentally on your authority that you assent to any kind of religious doctrine and belief.
Now if there could be some form of worship that is relating oneself communally—all worship is fundamentally something we do together—relating ourselves communally to the heart of the universe, something that is concentric with the real heart in every one of us, what would the pattern of such worship be? We’re thinking in symbolism. The old pattern of worship was the courtroom, and the thing we all look at is down at the end, whether it is the altar or the preacher. But a worship that represents God in everybody would be radial. I recently went to France and visited many of the great French cathedrals. In almost every one of them they have moved the altar to the middle of the cathedral. Instead of being far up at the East end, it’s right at the crossing. And when the mass is celebrated, the congregation now stands the whole way around the altar, and the priest is in the middle. What does this mean? What’s happening? Maybe the dear old church is waking up. Perhaps it is.
Now I offer a rather daring proposal that in some places is not accepted. It is the idea that the act of Christian worship, the mass, the Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or whatever you want to call it, is not something you go to see like you go to see a movie. It’s something in which you participate. It’s not something you hear or witness; it’s something you do. For example, in the Eastern Church, the church of Greece and Russia, they don’t say, “to say mass”; they say, “to make the liturgy.” To make it. Poiein in Greek means not only to make, to do, but also is the root word for poetry, the act of creation.
For a moment may we consider the meaning of this fundamental act of worship in Christianity? Its possibilities for an altogether new feeling of worship are very important. I want to consider it from two points of view. First of all, the original action of Jesus in being with his intimate disciples before he was crucified and instituting what was for those people in that time an absolutely outrageous ceremony. He took the bread and broke it and said “This is my body.” Then he took the cup and said “This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins. Drink it.” Now you couldn’t say anything more startling to a Jew because the one supreme taboo for the Jew was that you mustn’t drink blood, for blood is life and the blood belongs to God alone. When an animal is killed, the blood is poured upon the ground as an offering to the Lord. Jesus was saying, so to speak, from now on drinking the blood signifies for each one of you your oneness with God.
From the second point of view, all life is maintained by eating and drinking. Bread is ground wheat. Wine is crushed grapes, fermented. Upon the sacrifice of the wheat and the grapes depends our life. We are killing something, whether it be vegetables, cows, chickens, turkeys or what not. We are all killing something in order to live. Each one of us, deep down in his heart, has probably a profound sense of guilt for living only at the expense of other life. So when Jesus said “This is my blood which is shed for you for the remission (the putting away) of sins,” it means this: Don’t feel guilty anymore that you have to drink the grapes and eat the crushed wheat, because all that you eat is me, and I’m offering myself to you and it is my pleasure. I am the one you kill when you kill the cow, and I give myself to you because I am before Abraham was. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am, therefore, that disguised godhead in all beings whose sacrifice is the act of playing that I am not God, but that I am all creatures. I dismember myself in the beginning of the creation, and after a time I remember myself. Hence, do this in remembrance of me. In other words, as the scattered grain is brought together in one loaf, we are made to realize that we are all one body. “I am the vine and you are branches,” and the “I am” is the central “I” in every one of us.
Now let’s look at that analogy further. First of all, it is no longer the analogy of the creator above and the miserable little creatures like subjects of the king below. Instead, it is the vine, the tree, the central stem and all the branches coming out from it. Secondly, the basic idea of traditional Christian worship is not that it is man talking to God, addressing petitions, and so on, as if one were to present himself in the court of the king and say, “Your majesty, your humble subjects request that you do so-and-so for us.” The very idea of the liturgy of the mass of the Holy Communion as being the central act of worship shows something quite different. Actually, Christian worship is based on the notion of God as Trinity, as a cycle of love. In worship, that aspect of God, which is called the Father loves the Son through the Holy Spirit, so that there is a cycle of love going on. Christian worship was originally intended to be man getting caught up in the cycle like you might catch something in a vortex of a whirlpool. So the worship of God is not what man does to God, but what God does to himself through man. Thus, for example, when Benedictine monks recite the psalms in what they call the Divine Office, they have the idea that the words of the song are the words of the Holy Spirit, not their own personal words. When they sing the songs, the Holy Spirit is talking through their mouths. All worship thus originates in God and returns to God.
In the Christian philosophy, therefore, worship would be defined as God’s love for himself through man in which man is like the flute, the reed that is played upon by the wind of the spirit. So you can see that already there is, in germ, the idea that worship is radial. It is not something done to something over there out there. It is not the confrontation of I, man, with Thou, God, because where do these things that confront each other come from? Where do these opposites originate? From somewhere way off? No. The secret is that all opposites, all poles are two ends of the same thing. You can’t even arrange a meeting between things that are really opposite; you can’t even get them together. But in the poles lies the secret of opposites. We don’t know black without white; we don’t know light without darkness; we don’t know long without short; we don’t know infinite without finite; we don’t know being without nonbeing. That means that there is a secret conspiracy between them—to look different, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Before all diversity there is unity. Before all differences there is agreement. We must agree in order to differ. There can’t be a battle between the tiger and the shark. They have no common ground, no common field.
What should be the kind of worship that truly expresses the radial view of the cosmos as distinct from the confrontational view? To be frank with you, I was once a clergyman. I gave it up because it didn’t suit my temperament. I was a little bit too much of a bohemian, and also I just couldn’t preach at people. It went against the grain. But when I was a clergyman, an Episcopalian chaplain at Northwestern University, I used to say to the students: “Now look here, nobody is allowed to come to church here out of a sense of duty. We don’t want skeletons at the banquet. If you feel that you ought to come to church, stay in bed on Sunday morning. But if you’d like to come, please come. For I announce that there will be a celebration of the Holy Communion, and I mean a celebration.”
What are we doing here fundamentally, despite all the agony that the crucifixion represents on the surface, what is deep down here is the joy of the celebration. For it is written in the book of Proverbs that God with divine wisdom creates the universe by playing. Wisdom speaks and says, “I was playing before him, playing in the world, and my delight was with the sons of men.” Of course, the King James version, which is rather a pompous translation, says “Rejoice.” But the correct Hebrew is “play.” So the whole notion here is that worship is making celestial whoopee.
In the Christian mythology—and I don’t use the word “myth” disrespectfully, but simply as any idea expressed in images rather than abstract terms—in the Christian mythology, what are the angels doing in heaven? What is the end of man? They say it is the Beatific Vision. To behold God. Well, what’s the good of that? But, if God is “the Which than which there is no whicher,” then when you are there, you’re there. There’s nothing else to do, so all the angels call out, “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” Alleluia doesn’t mean anything. It’s just as if you were so crazy with happiness that you went wh-e-e-e-e-e. All you could do was just shout for joy.
So from this point of view, God is that which is perfectly useless. Not good for anything at all because he is perfection, and there is nothing else that it serves, no greater ends to which it leads, absolutely of no consequence whatsoever. No consequence. That’s what a Buddhist means when he says that the highest state is freedom from karma. It is of no effect anymore. It isn’t a cause-effect scene. It isn’t leading to something because it’s already there. You’ve arrived. And so in this way, all profound worship is a celebration of having arrived. It’s where we join hands and dance.
For dancing is very profound. When you dance, you are not going anywhere. You are not aiming at a certain spot on the floor. When you play music, you’re not trying to reach the final bar, for if that were the point of music, the best musician would be one who played the fastest, gets there first. There would thus be pianists who would specialize in playing only final chords.
If life is anything like music, it has no aim to get anywhere. But we are all hypnotized, especially in western civilization, into the idea that life is supposed to get somewhere. The result is that when we do get where we think we’re going, we don’t enjoy it, because we are then thinking about getting somewhere else. A person who lives for the future is never living in the present, so he never gets anywhere. It’s of no use for him to plan for the future because when he gets there he can’t enjoy it.
The idea of centrality, this whole radial idea I’m talking about, is to know how to be “all here.” It’s a definition of sanity. Nobody can be sane, really sane, unless he preserves a central area in his life for craziness, that is, for perfect uselessness, for “whoopee,”—for absolutely nothing except blub-blub-blub-blub. That’s the touchstone of sanity. The difficulty with most people, especially when they make a religious scene, is that they’re too rigid.
You know what happens to an absolutely rigid bridge. When the wind blows it breaks. A strong bridge has to have a little bit of give in it. It’s like the movement of the hips in dancing—a little bit of swing. And if you don’t have that, you’re nutty as a fruitcake. You’re insane and you’ll fall apart; you’ll break down. You have no faith; you have no give. So that worship that corresponds to the Sabbath—remember, that’s the day on which the Lord didn’t do any work, and said, “Holiday!” Holy day—which is a day for laying on the law, for rationality, for listening to sermons, and that’s just terrible. Instead, a church should be a place where people go out of their minds for a while and have a great celebration. The idea of the bread and wine is that this is the most friendly thing imaginable. Get a little bit drunk—not too much—and have good bread. It’s very difficult to get good bread nowadays, because it’s all made out of ticky tacky. That’s a combination of paper maché, plaster of Paris, and plastic glue; it comes in any flavor. That’s a sign of how remote our culture is from fundamental Christian ideals. For in Christianity, material is very important. “God so loved the world. …” And that means honest bread and things like that. Good wine had body to it. But we are trying to get everything disembodied. Eventually, we’ll just take some pills and that will be that; it’s almost that way now.
In this fundamental idea of worship, the spirit and the flesh are together, and the flesh is seen as the rays, the doings, the activity of the spirit. It is a coming-together in a spirit of celebrating the fact that we are all branches of one vine; that the real deep-down inmost self in us all is the dancer of the worlds, as the Hindus think of the Lord as the great juggler with many arms. Imagine the God with ten arms, each hand juggling ten balls and each ball a galaxy. “Is he going to make it”? We watch with terror this act of juggling. Then suddenly he drops one, and everybody covers his eyes and says “Oh-oh.” There’s an immense explosion. We think it’s the end, but we look again, and suddenly we see all the fragments of that broken ball have turned into ten more gods with ten arms juggling ten balls each. “Good old Shiva,” we say, “he did it again.” This alternation of terror and suspense, suddenly bursting into joy, is the systole and the diastole of being.
Presented at the Third Symposium on Human Values, Central Washington State College, 1964. Reprinted from A College Looks at American Values (Vol. 1), edited by E. H. Odell, 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Central Washington State College. Used by permission of Central Washington University.