Aspects of Worship (2): our duty and our joy
The duty and joy of loving the lord
In the Eucharistic prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, the beginning of the preface that the priest says runs: "It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord... This was adapted in Prayer A of Common Worship “It is indeed right, it is our duty and our joy, at all times and in all places to give you thanks and praise. To worship is our duty and our joy.
I touched last week on idolatry – the substitutes that the world offers in place of the living God, which can never satisfy. One way to understand an idol is that it mistakes a part for a whole – for idols are always good things, just good things that are taken too far. A due proportion is lost, and as a result chaos is generated, rather as when a sailing boat doesn't reduce that amount of sail when the wind gets stronger, and if left unchecked control of the boat is lost and the boat itself can capsize. Idolatry is when a good thing is made more important than it deserves.
One of the idols of the modern world is love, so if we want to know what it means to love the lord we have to pay attention to that modern idolatry and be careful not to think that the object of our worship is to be loved in the way that we seek to love and be loved with one another. It is true to say that God is love; it is not true to say that love is God, and it is especially damaging to our worship if we believe that our felt experience, our emotion of love, is taken as our guide for how to worship. How we understand our emotions of love has changed greatly over the last thousand years – roughly speaking, a progression from the invention of courtly love in the medieval period, through the transformations of the Romantic movement and up to the modern pastiche of TV programmes like Love Island! That language of love is a long way from the Christian understanding of love.
As CS Lewis made familiar to many, there are different sorts of love. The love that we are to offer to God is agape love, charity, which is a conscious decision to will the benefit of another, and that is the love we are to offer to God – to give to God what God deserves. When Jesus says 'love God' he uses the word agape. In doing this he is drawing on the understanding framed in the Old Testament where rejecting idolatry and prioritizing divine authority above all else is at the heart of the relationship with God. Unlike modern emotional associations, the OT emphasizes practical devotion: obedience to God’s commandments (Deut 10:12–13) and service “with all your heart, soul, and strength”. So our love for God is more like signing up to a binding contract, more like pledge of allegiance than to feel affection; faithfulness and duty not the nurturing of fine sentiments.
In simple terms, our duty and our joy is not about cultivating right emotions leading to a decision, but rather a decision leading to emotion; our emotions need to be trained and disciplined by the framework of our faith. This is what liturgy achieves (not only liturgy) – one of the church fathers describe the psalms as a spiritual gymnasium, within which our souls can learn virtue. The centre of gravity for our worship, then, is not our feelings or emotions – they come, and they are wonderful when they come, but they are not the true centre, they are like the ocean when God is the strong rock. Rather the centre of gravity is agape love, the conscious choice for duty and joy.
To go back to where I started: idolatry mistaking a part for the whole, it is not that the felt emotion of love, and joy in that loving, has no place in worship, on the contrary, it belongs there and that is where we find our truest guide to what real love is – but it is a part of the picture, it is not the whole, and we have to understand the element of duty – in other words, to take part in worship, to exercise our agape love of God, even when we don't feel like it, even when the emotion isn't there. If we are to come back to the heart of worship then we have to focus on Jesus, we have to look outside of ourselves. What it means to look outside of ourselves I will explore next week, when I begin to talk about the psychology of worship.