thread: 2007-01-10 : Some questions about worship
On 2007-01-11, Shreyas wrote:
Thanks for asking this question. It brought me back here. I've been lapsed in religion for some time now, so these thoughts are hard to dredge up...
To me, prayer is how we salute the spiritual importance of things, so yes, I think your song is prayer.
Worship, I am not so sure about. From your description, it seems that you are acknowledging/celebrating a relationship between entities, one that already exists. That's not really aligned with my feelings about worship - I was raised among Hindu rituals, and talked with my mom a lot about abstract Hindu theology, rather than the folk theology that seems to be what's informing the practices of temples - so I ended up thinking of worship as "that stuff that happens in a temple" and analysing it as action that creates spiritual relationships between oneself and abstract beings. That's palpably different from the blessing you recite when someone is setting off on a journey, signifying that you wish him good fortune in his travels. In any case it can't be idolatry if it isn't worship.
I don't really know what blasphemy is in a useful way. Intuitively I suppose blasphemy generally describes spiritually or socially damaging practices, which isn't what you're up to.
Incidentally, I find it really interesting to see the definitions of worship that come out of the religions of the west - in my family, spirituality has never been a supplicant thing, but a relationship between equals; the same infinity resides in me as does in Krishna (sorry brand, no classical spelling if I can't use underdots) or Laxmi or that tree. We light candles to help gods find us, we feed them when they are hungry. Through their stories they are icons of wisdom and inner strength. That kind of thinking has made supplicant religion really hard for me to understand. To this day, I shudder when I hear the phrase "God-fearing."
