Part Thirty Three

From Preacher Haywood’s Internet Message #27:

When EVERYTHING you do is an act of worship, the concept of crowding into a church one day a week to worship seems kind of… pointless and redundant. There is much to be said for worship, and if it takes setting aside a particular hour of a particular day for you to do it, then by all means go to church or synagogue or mosque or whatever, but ask yourself: if you need a specific building and a worship-specialist standing at the front of the room to worship properly, aren’t you by extension excluding the Divine from the rest of your life?

If you need something specific to focus your mind on the real presence of God, might I suggest dinner?

The act of preparing a meal for yourself and others just gives you so many opportunities to caress the cheek of the Divine. First off, nothing recognizes the sacredness of others so much as feeding them – you are, in a sense, keeping them alive. Second, the ingredients themselves put you in communion with the Divine. You are handling all these formerly living things, fruits and vegetables and (if that’s your thing) animals who all lived and all carry the breath of the Divine in them, and you are transforming them, rearranging their molecules so that others can consume their essence and live themselves.

Surrounded, then, by life, doing Divine work of providing for life, how can you not feel the Divine around you? How can you avoid knowledge of the Oneness in such an activity?

Of course. It’s easy. We just have to willfully close our eyes and minds to it. But once you managed to force open just a little crack in that armor, nothing will make you feel closer to the Divine than standing in your kitchen with loved ones nearby, chopping vegetables and smelling bread rising in the oven.

(I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when the messenger is a washed-up waiter, the message is going to take a definite culinary slant.)

So Worshipers – some of them, at least – don’t go to church. Instead they have Circles, Worship-Circles, and that suffices to focus them on the tangible, inescapable Divine. Once a week – Thursdays, usually, just out of habit – they meet at someone’s house and fresh food is prepared and they eat and talk and laugh and they have at least three different chances to feel that piezoelectric spark of God being squeezed to life inside – first, from the food they eat; second, from the humans around them; third, from the nurturing act of preparing food for others.

If you have four couples in your Worship Circle, you’re having people over once a month. Much more than that and you start to lose a sense of community. It works fine if you only have one other person in, but we’ve found that much more than four families and things start to break down.

And bring your kids to the Circles. It will keep them from building up that God-proof armor that you’re working so hard to tear down. I mean, they’ll still acquire it – that’s what the world does – but hopefully you can make it be Whiffle-armor, Swiss-cheese armor, with lots of dinner-shaped holes for the Divine to penetrate.

Yes, cooking for and visiting with kids can be a pain in the ass, but keep in mind also that your kids are an embodiment, not just of the Divine, but of a moment when you and another person tried to touch the Divine in yourselves.

Great, now I’m going to get sued by the Whiffle people. Bad enough that Pat Robertson wants me whacked, now Wham-O’s lawyers are going to be after me.