Equus / Worship

From Equus by Peter Shaffer, Act II, Scene 25:

HESTER: Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
DYSART: I don't.

As of this writing, I'm halfway through a two-weekend run of Equus at the University of Houston-Downtown (where I currently work). I play the father of the young man who is central to the story.

The young man in question, Alan, has taken a religious impulse and focused it on horses, building a rather complex theology around his "god-slave," Equus. In the end, the theology results in a violent attempt to destroy the god. Still, the psychiatrist treating Alan, Martin Dysart, recognizes that what's at the center of Alan's religious impulse is a need to worship. Something.

The above exchange smacks me against my head every performance. "Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that."

"I don't."

As someone who has had a lifelong impulse toward worship---one that I've embraced and fought at different times in my life.---I'm left to ponder how destructive it may or may not be. In the context of the play, we have Dysart dreaming of being a priest in ancient Greece, sacrificing children. The dream doubles as an expression of question his own profession as a child psychiatrist and as a yearning to have some powerful way to respond to something larger than himself, something that he feels but doesn't allow himself to express.

In my own tradition of Christianity, we have remnants of this bent towards destructive worship. Rooted in the Hebrew tradition of slaughtering lambs, goats, or doves in worship of God, we have references to the Lamb of God, Jesus, who we celebrate as having died for our sake. We even have a ritual meal that, no matter how you deconstruct it, has the surface appearance of ritual cannibalism.

Of course, the Eucharist is hardly a wild ceremony, nothing compared to Alan's midnight rides on his horse-god. People do not approach the communion rail with anything like the abandon of Alan howling in the mist, riding naked on the back of Equus.

I don't even know what to say about that. I mostly just lift it up as something to consider. It may be that worship can be destructive and it may be that taming it down to our slow line toward the communion rail is a reasonable maturing of the sacrificial language of ancient religion. Or not.

Again, the context of the play: Alan, the son of a very religious mother and an atheist father, finds no way to please either. He gravitates toward the bloodier aspects of Christianity, and when his father rips a particularly gruesome picture of Christ's approach to Calvary off Alan's bedroom wall, Alan replaces it with a photo of a horse his father brings home from his printing business. And so Alan's religious focus shifts, or rather the shift is completed, a shift that started years earlier with a childhood encounter with a horse. His mother gave him a religious impulse, his father gave him a new focus for it.

I've seen people describe Equus as a play about a boy who falls in love with a horse. Alan falls in love with a horse in the same way Teresa of Avila fell in love with Jesus---which is to say, horses became the medium for Alan's mystical experience. The "love" is sensual only in the sense that ecstatic experience is sensual---which it is and it certainly can feel sexual. Teresa didn't shy away from that and neither does Alan.

So is what Dysart calls "worship" really mystical experience? And is it destructive? Hester knows it isn't. Dysart doesn't.

I don't know that I could clear it up for them.

Later in the same scene, Dysart says, " . . . Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that . . . I shrank my own life." This also smacks me against my head. Worship . . . Awe . . . Wonder . . . Fear . . . Reverence . . . These are the words that come to mind, and if I'm reading Shaffer something like right, these are the things that make our lives expansive. One might even say, abundant. I think I can say that when I've tried to stay away from worship, something was missing. I might not have said I shrunk from the absence, but perhaps absence is a kind of shrinking.

I'm devolving into word play.

Devolved as I am, I am left with these words and they worry me like a pebble in my shoe, even as my big toe worries the pebble. What is worship? Is it destructive or expansive? Are those words mutually exclusive?

If we can choose, how do we care for our worship life, nurture it, so that it is a vital and compelling as Alan's wild midnight rides and as expansive and fulfilling as Dysart hopes it is?

A Thought on Worship

A book that I'm likely to reference frequently here is Mirror to the Church: Resurrecting Faith after Genocide in Rwanda. It is by a Ugandan Roman Catholic priest and scholar, Emmanuel Katongole, who teaches at the Duke Divinity School. It is a book that fell into my hands somewhat accidentally, not something I would have normally sought out, but seems to have animated my imagination in ways that few books on religion have. His main hypothesis is that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is reflective of how the church in many societies, in the West as well as in Africa, operates. That is, the church as it currently exists simply doesn't matter. It didn't matter that Rwanda has been considered one of the most successfully evangelized African nations. Christians killed Christians and often in direct, hand-to-hand combat (which, for some reason, strikes me as even more atrocious than if the genocide had been accomplished by long-range missiles or even simply pulling a trigger on a gun---hacking people to death with a machete is much more . . . personal).

Katongole asks, what difference does being a Christian make? If we call ourselves Christian but then can kill our fellow church members simply because the government says they're the enemy, what good is saying we follow Christ?

As I say, there is much in this relatively short book (it's under 200 pages) that I will likely bring up in weeks and maybe months to come, but I want to put out there one short quote from him (in part because I was at a worship and music committee meeting today):

"I do not think it is any accident that the civil rights movement in the United States grew out of black churches where people were used to worshiping Jesus for two, three, even four hours at a time. Christians who cannot imagine worshiping God that long may want to reconsider their cost/benefit analysis of discipleship."

This strikes me as terribly indicting of the church when I hear complaints that a worship service goes more than 10 minutes over an hour or that a hymn was too long or there simply were too many hymns.

I'm not sure I'm advocating 3 hour worship services, but I am pondering the cost of being a church member. That is, I'm wondering if we even think there is a cost to being a church member. What are we willing to "pay" for the right to call ourselves disciples?

(Obviously, this is a question applicable to countless other areas of a Christian life, not just worship. Spin it where the Spirit leads.)