It happened very spontaneously...
I was standing outside on my deck one chilly morning. Blue jays were making their usual boisterous calls as the surrounding 300 foot redwood trees cast their long shadows. It was another dark and cold forest morning.
I closed my eyes and allowed my head to fall back and lungs expand as I inhaled a long, deep breath of the crisp, dewey morning air. When I opened my eyes, my jaw dropped open. Oh wow. Suddenly my body flushed warm and my breath stopped as I tried to take in the glorious scene above me. Cascading beams of sunlight were just beginning to pierce through the forest canopy. The light, glistening off of the wet tree branches, was dancing with the shadows creating the most brilliant mosaic displaying every hue of green.
Tears filled my eyes. I was overcome with awe at the indescribable beauty I was witnessing. My arms floated up above my head. My hands came together. Gazing up through my fingers, tears spilled over and down my cheeks. My body bowed down, my hands, still in prayer position, came down through the midline of my body, my head dropping toward the ground. Once again my arms floated up, and my hands came together above my head. I gasped as my eyes were once again flooded with the most heart-exploding beauty. Again my body bowed in reverence without any thought or effort. This went on several more times until I eventually came to rest standing, every cell in my body vibrating and alive.
In that moment there was nothing more important. This was it.
For a brief time I experienced a profound connection to our world and suddenly awoke to life in a spiritually ecstatic way. My body was moved by the same force that danced the tree branches in the light.
I grew up going to an Episcopal church every Sunday, and church camp in the summer. I attended church youth groups and charismatic religious retreats, but never once in all those years did I feel a natural desire or call from within my own spirit to worship. Sure, I kneeled and bowed my head like I was told to do and prayed countless times to something I was told was the only thing worthy of worship. “Worship” had become an abstraction to me. It was something I had no real connection to, except that it felt heavy— an obligatory act intended to save my soul from damnation.
That unforgettable morning I understood for the first time what true worship is.
It’s a natural response to an overwhelming feeling of awe, reverence and deep resonance. It comes from within you and overtakes your body. It changes you. If I hadn’t been open to the experience, if I’d allowed those old voices in my mind to surface and tell me it was wrong to worship anything else, I would have tragically denied myself one of the most connected spiritual experiences of my life thus far.
I now understand that the key to having these kinds of experiences is simply being open to them. Unspeakable beauty is all around us all the time, but most of us are too busy accomplishing things or lost in our own mind’s chatter to notice. Or worse, we’re clinging to old beliefs that it’s wrong to appreciate something so deeply or be moved (quite literally) by something if it’s not in a specific religious context.
I don’t believe there is anything wrong with ritual worship, but there is just no forcing the kinds of experiences that awaken something deep inside us. It comes upon you gently and fleetingly, like a butterfly. Suddenly you find yourself swept up in the rapture of it, and then it’s gone. It wouldn’t be so precious any other way.