Interesting Form of Worship
The last couple of days, the Cauldron forum has had an interesting thread going on "What Does ‘Worship’ Mean" (link is to Msg. #1; my musings were started by #7). The whole thing is good reading, but the sentence that caught my attention was from Heartshadow: "Since it’s something the Divine wants me to do, it’s an act of worship to actually do it." (In reference to her religion blog.)
I spent several hours chewing over that statement, since I’m one of those who has a very bad reaction to the term "worship" as I was raised to understand it. You may have similar memories: no choice about going, boring services, hard pews, constant drumming on the theme of human lack of worth, whether spoken or just implied — that sort of thing. Yuck!
The idea of doing something your deity wants you to as a form of worship had never occurred to me, but the more I thought about Shadow’s comment, the better I liked it. After all, if I’m doing something Lord Ganesha wants me to, that I probably wouldn’t be doing otherwise … well, "worship" is as good a term as any, and actually better than any alternative I’ve been able to come up with. Considering I still have no idea why He wants me to do this particular major project (my best guess is mental exercise), thinking of it as a form of worship is a real help.
Thanks, Shadow!
