“In
the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as
atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The
only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing
some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it
Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some
infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you
worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where
you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you
have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure
and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die
a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this
stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides,
epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the
truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and
afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a
fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
Wallace’s
thoughts echo a point made by an Orthodox Christian priest, Alexander
Schmemann, in an intriguing essay titled “Worship in a Secular Age.”
In that essay, Schmemann wrote that man is fundamentally a homo adorans—a
“worshipping being”… “the one for whom worship is the essential act which both
‘posits’ his humanity and fulfills it.”
In making this point, Schmemann was writing
from the perspective of Christian revelation, which holds that God gifts man
with existence for the sake of sharing in his divine life, and man’s
fundamental act in response to this gift is thanksgiving in the form of
worship.
Wallace also makes the point that man is a
“worshipping being,” but from an experiential point of view. Experience shows,
he argues, that men and women inevitably end up worshipping something. If it’s
not God, then it’s things such as money, comfort, sex, sports, fame, power,
success, their bodies, their careers, or themselves.
As we know, to effectively pursue
excellence in any one of these things requires a significant commitment of
time, attention, and discipline; it requires an ongoing binding of oneself to
the activities required to achieve the desired goal.
And that’s literally what religion is—the
word itself comes from the Latin verb religare, which means “to bind.”
It refers, as Lactantius said in the third century, to the act of voluntarily
binding oneself to God.
In Wallace’s thinking then, all human
beings are ultimately “religious”; what differentiates them is merely the “god”
to which they happen to bind themselves.
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