5.21.2012

Everybody Worships?

I recently came across the below quote in inbox. Any thoughts on this approach to “worship”?
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in a myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

1 comment:

  1. If we understand "worship" as the acknowledgment of worth then he is right. We always worship something - and at the bottom you are always worshipping your self as if you are the center of the world. The great Christian mystics (like St. John of the Cross or St. Catherine of Siena) much like the mystics in other religions tried to push away all the things that they worshipped almost unconsciously. In the end, there was always the self. So the freedom that Wallace talks about in the last two sentences has to do with reaching out to the other, putting the focus on this relationship. Love, of course, is just this kind of relationship in which the good of the other is all that matters - love is desiring the good of the other as other, Thomas Aquinas says. The divine Rumi sums it up: "To Love is to reach God."

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