Personal and Group Worship

Fred J. Tritton

 

What is it that we seek in our devotions?—by prayer, by meditation, by contemplation? Truth, Reality, assurance of the Eternal, an experience of being grounded on a Rock, a sense of unity with the infinite life of God, a deep inward peace that the world—to which we owe so much—cannot give nor yet take away.

By quiet reflection on one of the great sayings, “Be still and know that I am God,” “Lo, I am with you always,” or by deliberate meditation on an incident in the life of the Lord (the Transfiguration, the healing of the blind men) we may be brought into that “serene and blessed mood” wherein we see into the life of things and are at rest. Sometimes we may like a pen in order to record what we have known, but often that is impossible and even the very fringe of it eludes expression. As for the core of the experience, we know and are transformed by it, but are unable to declare what it is. We may feel that the living Christ has arisen in our hearts but we are so Blended within Him that all we can do is to allow the Glory to shine through us. We cannot describe the ineffable. The experience is that of lover and beloved, the alone with the alone, my mystery for myself, in incommunicable secret, a transubstantiation by which our very inner self is transformed into God's, and we are made partakers of the divine nature.

But beware lest the intensity itself of the experience betray you into seeking it for its own sake. There is nothing more dangerous, especially if it leads you to forsake the assembling of yourself with others. For to this individual experience of God, group worship is the necessary complement. You may experience disappointment in your meetings for worship unless you realize that a different method of approach is needed, that your attitude of mind needs adjustment to the new conditions. For whereas in your solitary communion it is yourself alone with God, in the meeting you have those other silent forms to go out to and draw into your experience. And the process of integration with them takes time and often great struggle, but the reward is great.

In your private devotions you draw inwards and upwards, in the meeting there is also this reaching out to others on the inner plane of experience. If you kept only to one form of devotion you would become like a tree that was all height and no breadth, or vice versa. By practicing both, your growth is healthy and all around. For the time being you leave your soaring in order to feel down into your spiritual roots and out into the lives and experiences of your fellows. You meet together with them in order to “know one another in that which is eternal.” And for those who have only been used to their private devotions this is not easy. They may practice private meditation in the meeting, and for a time it seems that the atmosphere of quiet alongside of other worshipers is helpful. Some may even go on for years without knowing anything different. But sooner or later there comes a time when they are disappointed. They enter upon a dry period, and are unable to obtain refreshment in the meeting, though they may still do so alone.

Then, they begin to perceive that they have unknowingly been selfish in their devotions. They must now take account of their fellow worshipers, not merely as aids to private meditations, but as individuals whom they have to learn to know in the Eternal, whom they need to see as children of God, realizing for them their divine Sonship.

Out of that changed attitude will come—after much struggle to adjust themselves—a new a richer and vitalizing experience in which they will know themselves as linked up with, and part of those others, suffering and rejoicing with them, but able, because of this knowledge of the Eternal, to speak to their condition and to help them too to know the infinite life that is flowing through them and uniting them all into one with God.