Worship and the Senses

Don: What is the relationship between the senses and worship? A look at worship across time and cultures reveals great variability in the employment of the senses in worship. Some churches today display no pictures, flags, banners, flowers, posters, musical instruments; just a pulpit facing rows of sterile pews. Their colors are muted. There is, in short, nothing to stimulate the senses. But other churches have all of the above, plus stained glass windows, burning candles, fragrant incense, priests bedecked in colorful vestments, altars bearing wine and wafers.

The senses have long been viewed as a portal allowing evil, in the form of one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins (pride, anger, covetousness, lust, envy, greed, and sloth), to penetrate the soul. Intellect, on the other hand, appears to be purer, less subject to contamination by evil. For many Protestants, especially the more conservative ones such as our own Seventh Day Adventist Church, worship is primarily an intellectual experience.

The comprehensive study of Adventism, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), by British sociologists Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart, is useful for anyone seeking a fuller context for this discussion and in highlighting the experience of the senses in worship. Both authors had close personal connections with Adventism: One was raised as an Adventist but had left the church; the other was raised in an Adventist home but never became an Adventist himself.

They wrote that the primary mode of expression was shouting, therefore the primary sense employed was that of hearing. The senses of sight and touch are resorted to sparingly if at all.

The question is: Can the senses be trusted in worship? Are they more dangerous to divine life, the religious experience, or to worship than the intellect?

When visiting a rural hospital during a trip to India I was involved in an intensely sensual worship experience. I was there to receive a humanitarian award for my service to the people of India. I was met upon arrival by a huge banner with my picture and a note of thanks on it, strung between two trees; a ramshackle but enthusiastic band; and a huge, bright-blue statue of Ganesha, the Indian god with the head of an elephant and the body of a man. As Wikipedia puts it: “Ganesha is widely revered as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honoured at the start of rites and ceremonies.” He is popular with business people. Ganesha was flanked by two priests clad only in loincloths and covered in a white chalky substance with red stripes painted on their cheeks, singing at the top of their lungs. They hung garlands of geraniums around my neck, and I was daubed on the face with paint. Oil lamps were lit and incense sticks were burning. The impact on my senses was overwhelming.

After a few minutes of this, I was handed two coconuts and told I was to smash them on the floor. I failed to break them open on the first blow, and was told to do it again. In the process, I was splattered with coconut water, but enough remained that I was able to drink some, as instructed.

At the conclusion of the welcoming ceremony, which probably lasted only 10-15 minutes but which seemed an eternity to me, a rich magenta- or plum-colored cloth with elaborate gold stitching was wrapped around me. My heightened senses were brought back to earth by their next action, which was to present me with a pair of blue jeans.

The experience left me feeling both exhausted and somewhat of a heretic. Its intensity was the very opposite of the relative calmness of Adventist worship.

Yet scripture calls upon the use of all human senses:

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

The psalms are replete with instructions to sing and to make music for God:

Praise the Lord!
Praise God in His sanctuary;
Praise Him in His mighty expanse.

Praise Him for His mighty deeds;
Praise Him according to His excellent greatness.

Praise Him with trumpet sound;
Praise Him with harp and lyre.

Praise Him with timbrel and dancing;
Praise Him with stringed instruments and pipe.

Praise Him with loud cymbals;
Praise Him with resounding cymbals.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord! Psalms 150 (Psalms 34:8)

This sounds more like the Ganesha experience than the Adventist worship I am used to. The psalmist even suggests that the physical sensory expression—seeing, feeling, hearing, touching—is not enough; that there needs to be some internalization of them:

O taste and see that the Lord is good;
How blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him! (Psalms 34:8)

The detailed instructions for the construction, appearance, and services of the sanctuary, recorded in the Old Testament, almost induce sensory overload. The shrouds and curtains covering the sanctuary, the vestments of the priest, the laver for washing, the table for incense, the table of showbread all appeal to the senses, In those days, the ultimate sensory experience was when the sins of an entire family were transferred to an animal, which was then slaughtered, bled, and burned. Today, one can only imagine the sight, sounds, and smells of that event.

Is there a difference between an encounter with God and experience of God? Intellectual worship stems from the mind or the brain. It involves ideas and beliefs—the paramount aspects of intellectual worship. Sensory worship stems from the body, the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the hands, the nose. Art might produce powerful emotive images, sounds, and other artifacts that could lead to a worship experience. Can, and if so should, the senses enhance and enrich our worship experience? If we limit or deny the senses, do we limit or deny our experience with and exposure to God?

Donald: Adventists are not very good at large events such as wedding receptions. We don’t dance or drink or do things that allow us to celebrate a festive, important moment. In church, we tend to distrust anything that ventures beyond the sterile. Our senses are a form of communication. They were created. By shutting them down, we are cutting off major components of our capacity to understand what God has blessed us with or enabled us to value. Adventists are skeptical of art unless it is very literal. I have had a wonderful worship experience at Notre Dame. It gave one a feeling of being exposed to what God might be about, in a way the intellectual study known as a sermon does not.

Jay: It is true that our worship is primarily sound-driven. To me, that raises the issue of exclusion. I see so many children at school wearing earphones and headphones. They are in their own place, isolated from the world around them. That has both positive and negative implications, but in any case, sound has the ability to drown out the other senses. When all the senses are firing (as happened to Don in India) it is a corporate experience, bigger than the individual. The second part of the Great Commission to the disciples was to go out and teach the world what Jesus had taught them, to spread the word. That cannot be achieved without all the senses fully attuned to the world ad other people. Perhaps a church could stimulate “Big W Worship” through a more sensory form of service.

Robin: I can’t help but remark that Heaven probably does not much resemble a Seventh Day Adventist church! There are some Adventist churches that dare to differ. At one in Saginaw, someone has painted a beautiful floor-to-ceiling pastoral mural behind the baptistry. Small windows on both sides of the sanctuary are a modern form of stained “glass” (actually an acrylic) also displaying pastoral scenes.

Mikiko: Worship is a matter of truth and spirit. The truth is that Jesus was crucified on a stake, not on the cross so prominently displayed in many churches.

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4: 19-24)

Anonymous: I may understand what it means to worship through the senses, but once I visited an old ruined castle on a beautiful warm day just before sunset. In this vast expanse, all the senses were alive to induce in me a sense of the presence of God. The same feeling can arise when I focus in meditation on the details of something small but beautiful, such as a flower; or when I eat something so simple and natural—a peach, for instance—that it gives a sense of having been prepared by God; or when I hear the murmur of falling water. Some people see God in the behavior of animals towards their babies. The small is more easily overlooked by the senses than the large, but God can be found there, too.

Jay: The senses invoke emotion. Without them, it is impossible to connect with other people. The loss of any one—through blindness or deafness, for instance—is a serious impediment to our developing and maintaining relationships.

Michael: The emotional is separate from the intellectual. A symphony is not a sermon. A spiritual experience seems easier through the senses than through the mind. I feel more spiritual in the forest than in the church. It’s hard to say what causes it, but one can say that for a sermon to have the same effect as the forest, it would have to hit me exactly on the spot where I need it and in a precise way that works for me. That doesn’t happen often in church, but it happens often in the forest.

Don: Part of the problem with the senses is that they seem to be contextual—to be different for different people and in different circumstances. For instance, if someone puts an arm around one’s shoulder, one’s response to the sense of physical touch depends on who the someone is—a loved one, a stranger, a boss at work, or an enemy. Perhaps this makes us wary of relying on the senses alone.

Donald: We rely so much on trust when it comes to our senses. Little if any touching takes place until a relationship has been established. The song “We are standing on holy ground” is emotional. The sanctuary of the church can be very distracting. It is not conducive to evoking the feelings that come from meditating on beauty of the flower or the solemnity of the forest. Can we attain such feelings in corporate worship, or is it strictly a personal matter? Church strives to provide a corporate way to establish a relationship with God. In our church, the younger generation is migrating to worship in the auditorium instead of in the regular sanctuary. Young people today seem increasingly to prefer to be married in a barn rather than in church. If finding the Deity is a personal matter, why try to impose it in a corporate way?

Mikiko: Daniel and the prophets were able to worship in jail. We can worship in any space, because true worship takes place in the heart.

David: Our dear departed Harry and I shared a shameless feeling of uplifted spirituality in the great cathedral, feasting our eyes on the grandeur and our ears on the Gregorian chant. These induced an almost visceral sense of God’s presence. But what happens when we leave this self-proclaimed “house of God”? Do we then leave God behind? No. As Mikiko implied, we take him home, to dwell quietly in our hearts.

Jesus was met by no great banner nor a raucous band to welcome his arrival on Earth. He came quietly, inconspicuously, in humble circumstances. Big W Worship is to live our lives as he lived his. The Truth and beauty of his Way of life were expressed in a handful of phrases never before nor since matched in their sublime and beautiful power. “Turn the other cheek!” is a phrase no mere mortal could have made up. It is neither an intellectual nor an emotional statement. It is a spiritual statement. If we allow our human intellect to examine it, it falls apart—we can’t possibly live that way, can we? And yet, whether we hear it spoken from the pulpit of a grand cathedral to a background of angelic choristers intoning Gregorian chant, or read it in Gideon’s bible in the solitary confines of a dingy motel room, it resonates with each and every one of us. We should not confuse the intellect or the emotions with spirituality or seek to apply them in developing our relationship with God.

Robin:

So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and *said to them, “Peace be with you.” … But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples were saying to him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

After eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus *came, the doors having been shut, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then He *said to Thomas, “Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.” Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus *said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.” (John 20:19, 24-29)

Don: The implication of that passage is that although sensory experience is not necessary to experience God, such is our fallen condition. Our senses are our only conduit to a relationship with our fellow man and with God. To reject this may leave us more bereft.

Donald: To describe someone as emotional is not always complimentary. There used to be testimonies at the end of services, in which people would often get very emotional. We tend to marginalize such people, while applauding people who are more driven by their intellect.

Chris: Senses are personal. Some people have to smell everything before they eat it. Some respond to the same sound differently depending on its volume. Our experience with God, and therefore our worship, is also personal and thus bound to be different from the experience of others. We get into trouble when we try to impose a one-size-fits -all experience on individuals, unless we find people like ourselves to worship with.

Jay: But does God want us to find a common way to worship him? One that is not bound by time, culture, or anything else? I hope there is. In our fallen state, we value knowing we are right, as opposed to feeling that we are right.

Don: There was a time when Adventists were loud holy-rollers. What will Adventist worship look like a hundred years from now?

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