Ideal worship
are you praying attention to the right things?
Lots of significant changes this year: Astrologically, I am thinking about our three outermost planets: Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus. All three are in the midst of big movements, all of them moving into higher energy, more frenetic spaces. Pluto and Uranus in their new homes of Aquarius and Gemini will emphasize the technological, the social, and the mental, while Neptune in Aries raises questions of the charismatic leader, the demagogue, the one who strikes the match whose flame grows to overcome the masses.
These are long cycles, not expected to play out over the course of this year or even necessarily this presidency (unless this presidency lasts longer than four years). But what we take action on now will bear out over the many years to come, as astrology always reminds us. We can measure things as quickly as the Moon changes phases or as slowly as the fixed stars proceed around the ecliptic. These measurements are nested, so, somehow, we will need to find ways to keep our eyes on the horizon and also on what is right in front of us.
Idol worship, idle worship, ideal worship.
Worship is an intentional use of your attention. It reflects a determination that your attention has some meaningful effect, whether in yourself or in the wider world. The priest worships the trinity, the sunflower worships the sun, and the newborn worships her nurturer.
Worship is, for some, active and outward and for others purely reflective. It might be performed through good works in the community, through acts of charity, or even painful acts of public penance. Consider the monks in Monty Python who walk single file through town and smack themselves with planks of wood. On the other hand is the hermit, she who lives the quiet life, the kind of worshipper who goes deep inside to a quiet place to worship. Julian of Norwich, reflecting in a cell with a small, high window through which she can hear the world but cannot interact with it.
Worship is always intimate. Whether led by a worship leader in front of a mass of thousands, in a dark room with a single confessor and god, or in the silence of your own spacious mind, the point of contact between you and the divine is all yours. You will always set the final terms privately, a closed negotiation between you and god.
Speaking of her own prayer practice, Etty Hillesum says: “When I write these things down, I still feel a little ashamed, as if I were writing about the most intimate of intimate matters. Much more bashful than if I had to write about my love life. But is there indeed anything as intimate as man’s relationship to God?” Bear in mind that this was a woman who wrote extensively about her love affairs with married men, her physical relationship with her spiritual advisor, and of her own internal sexual appetite. It’s only when discussing her evolving relationship god, with positioning herself supine on the “coconut skin mat” in her bathroom, that she gets sheepish.
I might be projecting, but I see in Etty’s demure attitude some kind of concern that she’s not worshipping correctly. I see a fear that if someone really saw what she was doing, saw her on that coconut skin mat, speaking quietly with god, they would point and laugh. Worse, they might be right to do so. Life is short, afterall, and how we decide to spend our time in any given moment eventually defines the substance of our whole life. What if your time is spent poorly? What makes for good worship?
Idol worship
Where your attention goes, there is god. So when you give a certain kind of attention, I think you can kind of make the subject (object?) of that attention into an idol.
The obvious example of this is how the political and cultural Right in the U.S. has turned Donald Trump into a god. Those who once were the rock solid core of religious tradition in this country are now reverently holding pictures of Donald and Jesus in the Oval Office tight against their chests. Guns have their own cult of devotion that surely rivals church attendance on Sundays. Oil and money have been worshiped by the elite since time immemorial. A large voting bloc is awfully close to melting down their white mothers’ wedding rings and using that gold to mold a gargantuan, shining calf, with the face of Elon Musk, the towering hulk of Trump himself, and the reek of whatever Axe body spray that I assume J.D. Vance wears.
Easy for me to rag on them, but many of us who’d love to see this regime topple have done our own version of this. Definitely there was a time when Hillary Clinton had her acolytes with their own religious artifacts (pantsuits and pink pussy hats). Bernie Sanders endears devotion from a more secular audience and certainly does better work with it, though at times his most fervent followers manage to strike an exclusive stance that rhymes with Calvinism. But even putting this apples to apples comparison aside, this suggestion that the Left and the Right each have their own gods, I think it’s worth considering if all of us now contribute to the deification of Trump and his pantheon. Anger and hate are kinds of attention and thus, I guess, kinds of worship.
Should we stop seeing them and what they do? Stop paying attention? No, definitely not. Democracy dies in darkness, as my Vanity Fair tote bag reminds me. We ought to pay attention, but we need to do our best to be aware of who we make into gods. Who do we give that attention to and in what form? Instead of baiting you with rhetorical questions, I should just say what I mean: turning these people, whether we love or hate them, into idols, is a quick way to make them untouchable. This is dangerous.
Idle worship
This leads me to idle worship. This is the kind of worship where you might be focusing on the “right” things (read: aligned with your values, which I think should be life affirming and centered in an ethic of love—corny, perhaps, but not untrue), but you aren’t doing so actively. You’re being idle. If idle hands are the devil’s playthings, then what about an idle soul?
We worship our phones. This is so far beyond obvious now that, as a call to action, it has jumped the shark. “Delete the apps!” I cry from inside my sandwich board, ringing my bell, “They use your creativity and attention to build wealth for the men and women who are leading our world to and over the precipice.”. If this hasn’t been enough to get you to make the leap out of the Meta-X sphere, why would it work now? Clearly it’s not compelling enough, because countless people I know who are very intelligent tell me they cannot leave the apps behind. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
And, of course, we know that in key moments these technologies have enabled important successes, exchanging information and knowledge when it was most essential to do so quickly. The fact that algorithmically driven content platforms have not died tells us that there is something we believe we cannot get elsewhere that is necessary or at least overwhelmingly enticing and not on its face harmful enough to outweigh the benefits. What is it?
The kind of mental work that’s done on social media is work. It is a labor of sorts. It wouldn’t create value for the tech shareholders otherwise. But it’s primarily mental and emotional work. It doesn’t build cohesion in the same way that feeding our communities does or educating ourselves through real-time conversation does or rallying, physically, to support the hostage students and faculty that this administration is disappearing from our streets does.
I think, especially for those of us with click-clack-email jobs, these feel like real, active, and engaged places to spend time. Afterall, our email jobs take place in the same pseudo landscape on which these apps are built and where our posts live. If our work can be on the Internet, why not our activism? Whether or not our email jobs are “real jobs” has been long contested, but I will grant that in the past month or so that I’ve finally peeled myself out of the last app I clung to (Instagram) I have probably missed some quirks in the news cycle.
I read my morning newsletters, but that necessarily involves at least a 24 hour delay. I’ve also missed, I imagine, many carefully designed educational infographics about Palestine and Houthis and the fall of higher education and loan forgiveness and tariffs. But I’ve gotta ask at least two questions to better understand this loss. First: have I missed anything I needed to know? And, implied in that question is the second: would that missing information have meaningfully helped me support the ICE detainees dying in American death camps?
So there is some kind of mental effort involved with the evil algorithm apps, with the news and the endless scroll, that can result in knowledge. It can be useful, overwhelming, soul sucking, misleading, fantastical, chilling, stirring, connecting, and a distraction. One word comes to mind: anxiety. An idle feeling that can suck you dry.
Ideal worship
Wow isn’t he clever. Ideal worship, the mix of paying attention to the things that matter with active engagement.
In the Catholicism, this idea is perhaps best captured by the Jesuits, whose founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, advocated for a mix of contemplation and action in order to give glory to god. In the words of the good folks over at www.ignatianspirituality.com:
Contemplation allows us to renew our active lives (work, play, relationships) so that all we do does not become mindless action but rather glorifies God. Then the cycle repeats. Your activity leads you again into a time of stopping, resting, reflecting, and then returning to activity with greater zeal and purpose. Being a contemplative in action means that your active life feeds your contemplative life and your contemplative life informs your active life.
Really what I’m trying to get at is the idea of contemplation and action working hand in hand in support of whatever it is you want to worship. For me and, I think, for many of you, whatever it is that’s worshipped has in common the desire to see minimal suffering and maximal thriving in this world. You might also just call this “justice”. When our mental faculties and our bodies in the world are moving in the same direction, toward justice, that’s a good kind of worship.
So many of us now are stuck in a warped version of contemplation. We are anxious, obsessed, caught in the “thinking” space of whatever is happening online. We need a push to go into the world and do something. We need to stop worrying and start doing. Importantly, action can easily give rise to better contemplation in its own way.
On December 4, 2024, Luigi Mangione allegedly performed an action that reminded everyone in the United States that wealth does not always protect you from consequences. Whether or not you agree with or approve of his actions is beside the point. Simply by witnessing the consequence, our ideas are expanded. The same kind of value can be understood when Palestinian children throw mud and rocks at Israeli tanks. Do they cause harm? Do they wound Goliath? No, but they remind us all that our hands can take hold of whatever is within reach and use it to act in protest against injustice.
I’m not calling for us all to go out and shoot the nearest billionaire or millionaire we can find. I’ll leave that decision up to you. But what else can you do? What is the thing that you can do that shows someone, maybe just you, that you have more capacity and power to influence the state of things than you thought? Get offline. Get into the world. Need an idea? Start with dropping off some food at the nearest community fridge you can find. Next you can look to see if there are any protests against the extrajudicial arrests that are taking place against people who are speaking out against this administration. I’ve heard, but can’t verify, that slashing three of the four tires on a Tesla will leave them unable to use insurance to replace them. The ideas are endless when it comes to throwing mud at Goliath, really.
In Letters to Cristina, renowned educational theorist Paulo Freire recounts an experience he had as a boy when he witnessed the humbling of a viciously disciplinarian teacher. In an act of rebellion, a skinny little pupil of the imposing adult fled out of school from a beating. The teacher chased him, tripped, and skinned his knee, tearing his pants. From then on, the children understood he was not God. They teased him from the bushes and from behind fences. They were less afraid and, Paulo believes, they opened themselves to the potential that there might be a future beyond their oppression.
Did I lose the thread of “what is good worship”? I don’t really think so. I think this question of being visible in the fight against injustice is more pressing for those with spiritual interests than ever before, whatever creed or non-creedal path you might be drawn to. Unless your spirituality is anti-life (and what’s the point of that?), you need to grapple with these questions of good worship as much as I do. You need to be conscious of who you’re giving power to, where you are devoting yourself, and what forces, political or otherwise, you are choosing to make holy.
If you’re curious about where I’m coming from, I can say that I might just end up calling myself a pantheist. I like this as a way out of some traps along the way to a religious identification (such as identifying with a religious organization over a spiritual experience). My inheritance is Catholicism and pantheism doesn’t prevent my accepting and working with this. It’s a truth seeking by addition rather than by subtraction. While I’m stirred by the Neo-Pagan and Pagan movements, it isn’t authentic to me to claim these outright. It would be a kind of dressing up in playclothes that, while harmless I think, isn’t true. Pantheism, permeable and generously defined, feels like a way into these ideological spaces that maintains a respect for their hard fought definitions and outlines and where I do or don’t align with those.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that I have tended to leave out the “Eastern” religious traditions in my religious exploration. My dancing around Catholicism and Paganism and whatnot has largely ignored Asia and Africa and South America—the entire global South, really. The reason for this is to avoid encouraging whatever colonial tendency I carry, but it does so with the unfortunate outcome of ignoring at least half the world. The word pantheist makes me feel like I’m making a better effort of acknowledgment and respectful engagement with these paths, I think.
What has been interesting as I’ve taken the pressure off to put some kind of definition or title on my beliefs is that the most important pieces have only gotten clearer. It’s about justice. It’s about acting in accordance with whatever I can that will amplify dignity on this not always so dignified rock flying through the universe. In one clenched fist is my tradition of origin. It’s a given, a tether that I wouldn’t be able to release even if I really wanted to. But I try to keep my other hand open, flat-palmed. Whatever passing mystery or wisdom that might drop in can do so and rest there for as long as it wishes.
Some things to read:
The only must read this week comes by recommendation of my friend Kyle, this piece by my favorite modern poet Kaveh Akbar. Who deserves to live in your community? What will you do when they come for your neighbor? What is the line you will not cross?
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.