On Worship

This is brilliant, well done, and way too close for comfort: "How to Worship" (via).

If you find that video irreverent, that's because it is. But — and here's the important thing — it's irreverent toward ourselves, which is no sin. Probably the opposite, actually.

Watching that reminds me of the time I was invited to attend a "Generation X Worship Service" at a new Vineyard church not far from my old apartment. This was back when people my age were still young enough that we were the focus of lots of earnest articles with titles like "Reaching Generation X" or "Generation X and the Future of _______," so a long time ago.

The service was billed as the ultimate Gen-X "worship experience." In practice, this meant that the preacher wore ripped jeans and a T-shirt and the worship band didn't have the standard-issue Yamaha keyboard that all church worship bands seemed to use. The band turned out to be pretty good — much better than the songs they were playing. The friends who invited me were really into it. Eyes closed, hands raised, swaying to music that did not, in any way, make me feel inclined to close my eyes, raise my hands or sway. I tried closing my eyes, but I kept peeking at my friends and the others present who all seemed earnestly committed to the ultimate Gen-X worship experience. I began inspecting myself, looking for some sign of a similar earnestness or some reason why I couldn't seem to be as swept away by it all.

And that's when it hit me. Unlike everyone else in that room, I really was having the ultimate Gen-X worship experience. I had become a detached observer — standing apart from the others, from the music, even from myself. What could be more of a Gen-X experience than being self-conciously aware of your self-consciousness about your self-consciousness?

Anyway, since we're on the subject, here is one of my favorite things on the question of worship and prayer. It's from David Foster Wallace's astonishing novel Infinite Jest:

He had nothing in the way of a like God-concept, and at that point maybe even less than nothing in terms of interest in the whole thing; he treated prayer like setting an oven-temp according to a box's direction. Thinking of it as talking to the ceiling was somehow preferable to imagining talking to Nothing. And he found it embarrassing to get down on his knees in his underwear, and like the other guys in the room he always pretended his sneakers were like way under the bed and he had to stay down there a while to find them and get them out, when he prayed, but he did it, and beseeched the ceiling and thanked the ceiling, and after maybe five months Gately was riding the Greenie at 0430 to go clean human turds out of the Shattuck shower and all of a sudden realized that quite a few days had gone by since he'd even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed. Not just merely getting through those last few days — Substances hadn't even occurred to him. I.e., the Desire and Compulsion had been Removed. More weeks went by, a blur of Commitments and meetings and gasper-smoke and clichés, and he still didn't feel anything like his old need to get high. He was, in a way, Free. It was the first time he'd been out of this kind of mental cage since he was maybe ten. He couldn't believe it. He wasn't Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal. How could some kind of Higher Power he didn't even believe in magically let him out of the cage when Gately had been a total hypocrite in even asking something he didn't believe in to let him out of a cage he had like zero hope of ever being let out of? When he could only get himself on his knees for the prayers in the first place by pretending to look for his shoes? He couldn't for the goddamn life of him understand how this thing worked, this thing that was working. It drove him bats. At about seven months, at the little Sunday Beginners' Mtg., he actually cracked one of the Provident's fake-wood tabletops beating his big square head against it.

White Flagger ('Ferocious') Francis Gehaney, one of the most ancient and gnarled of the Crocodiles, had a white crew cut and skallycap and suspenders over the flannel shirt that encased his gut, and an enormous cucumber-shaped red schnoz you could actually see whole arteries in the skin of, and brown stumpy teeth and emphysema and a portable little oxygen-tank thing whose blue tube was held under the schnoz with white tape, and the very clear bright eye-whites that went along with the extremely low resting pulse-rate of a guy with geologic amounts of sober AA time. Ferocious Francis G., whose mouth was never without a toothpick and who had on his right forearm a faded martini-glass-and-naked-lady tattoo of Korean-War-vintage, who'd gotten sober under the Nixon administration and who communicated in the obscene but antiquated epigrams the Crocs all used — F.F. had taken Gately out for eye-rattling amounts of coffee, after the incident with the table and the head. He'd listened with the slight boredom of detached Identification to Gately's complaint that there was no way something he didn't understand enough to even start to believe in was seriously going to be interested in helping save his ass, even if He/She/It did in some sense exist. Gately still doesn't know why it helped, but somehow it helped when Ferocious Francis suggested that maybe anything minor-league enough for Don Gately to understand probably wasn't going to be major-league enough to save Gately's addled ass from the well-dressed Sergeant at Arms, now, was it?

That was months ago. Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help.