thread: 2007-01-10 : Some questions about worship
On 2007-01-11, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Brand: "don't I fear God? Just a little maybe? And might that not be justified when I, a fallible and sinning being, look into the blank face of eternity and perfection? Maybe I'm more afraid of my own faults than his majesty, but the emotions become reflexive, and one can lead invisibly to the other. Describing them poetically, I may well use the term 'God fearing.'"
Well put. One of my great moments of spiritual terror occured in my years as a self-proclaimed agnostic, at all of 13, when I read C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity for the first time and was confronted with the idea of a Being that genuinely desired me to be good—and that would never stop.
Christian: "...for me, it turned into a way to pay respect to the dead animal. To announce, silently and mostly to myself, that its death was meaningful, that it was an occasion worthy of noticing and acknowledging. I cut my hair to 1/4 inch these days, but I place my hand on the back of my neck whenever I see a dead animal.
Ritual: Yes.. Meguey can talk about the importance of ritual—even (looking at you, Ralph) when it gets solidified into liturgy.
As a reporter I'm on the Pentagon's email list, so I get a press release every time a servicemember dies in Afghanistan or Iraq. Name, age, rank, unit, usually some detail about the circumstances (if I read "...when an improvised explosive device detonated near his HMMWV" much more I'm going to start screaming). When I have a second, and the stomach, I always try to read these and say the name aloud.
