Canter Bridge

Worship is a crystallized form of proximity to YHWH. The joy and completion we feel in worship do not demean similar experience elsewhere, for ‘liturgy’ is expansive without hegemony, inclusive with no eradicating instincts. Worship’s embrace shelters those it gathers in but none is lost there, none negated.

Though worship is an intensified version of wider life lived before YHWH, there is nothing like it.

Worship is paradoxical to the bone, for though YHWH ‘fills both heaven and earth’, as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, it is worth the trek to his house to encounter him as he can be known nowhere else.

Some are fortunate enough to linger in that dwelling place.

Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself
in which to set her young,
near Your altar, O LORD of hosts,
my king and my God.
Happy are those who dwell in Your house;
they forever praise You. (Psalm 84:4-5 JPS)

We come in, we go out. We make pilgrimage, we return home. We weep, shout, lift our hands, stomp our feet, spin our bodies like a top without the embarrassment we would feel in doing so anywhere else, because to stand before YHWH’s altar is like nothing else we know.

Yet it is like everything, for all life lived purposefully culminates in this, in doxology.

We may admire the fortunate sparrow and the swallow, who bears and nurtures her young in the rafters of YHWH’s house, so close that her babies might topple onto his altar were they to stray too early from the confines she has lovingly built for them. Yet we cannot stay, as she does. We can only depart when the hour for homeward things is due, worship so sewn into our hearts that we live longing for our next visit to this place, so like the rest of our lives, so unlike anything, so near to YHWH whose invitation shall one day no longer speak of adjournment.