Worship

I was laying in bed this morning, petting my dog, and it occurred to me that true worship consists in offering love and connection to the universe, or perhaps in receiving what was already there.  When you are participating in love and laughter and useful labor, when your consciousness is entirely filled with the focus needed to accomplish some worthy task, that is worship.

I was listening to Gibbon talk about the Emperor Julian, how he had many altars and that he made animal sacrifices on them every morning and evening.  Picture yourself doing that. Picture someone handing you a live chicken, you ritually offering it to that God–let us say Jupiter–then ritually slitting its throat, or cutting its head off.  Then you offer the dead animal again.  And you do this twice a day.

It seems to me it would pacify the violence and bloodlust which always exist as possibilities for all of us. It seems to me much of the violence on television, and in movies and in video games exists to feed this primitive, primal part of us, which never gets to break peoples jaws, or shoot anyone, scream at the top of its lungs, or even OFFEND anyone.  My god, can you imagine anything more productive of rage, of Donald Trump, than making everyone keep their mouth shut about nearly everything?  Those emotions, that need to assert self, and to be heard, do not disappear.

But this blood also becomes something you NEED, something you feed on.  The spirit is that of a vampire.

No, wherever Goodness is, that is true worship.  That is what I feel.

And I will repeat the point I made in my Grand Inquisitor piece, that Christ did not intend to be taken literally, to have ritual cannibalism enacted in his honor.  Wherever wine is, love is, and there he is.  Wherever bread is, where communion is, there he is.