"All You Need is Love"

According to Russian Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann, man is first and foremost homo adorans, worshiping man, a personal entity innately directed towards the worship of God.  This is primordial in us, preexisting all other needs, desires, guiding impulses, or defining characteristics.  Humanity is humanity first and most especially when it worships God.

And what is worship, exactly?  According to the Christian understanding, which is guided by the familial implications of the Trinity, to worship God is to love God.  To love demands knowledge, demands a revelation by God to humanity.  The initiative in the relationship is always on the side of the divine--God creates us; God reveals himself to us; God loves us first.  Indeed, in a certain sense, God loved us into existence, and holds us in existence by the power and perpetual presence of his love.

In God, as Father Spitzer explains, there is absolute simplicity.  We experience him in different ways at different times, but God is one.  So the God who Is, the God whose name is I AM, is also the God who is Love, the God who is Truth, the God who is the Way, the God who is Trinity.  We exist by participating in the divine being, as Cardinal George discusses, and we are born into eternal life by participating in the divine nature--that is, by entering into a familial relationship with the living God.

We enter into this familial relationship by means of the covenant between God and man, most perfectly and eternally by the new and everlasting covenant of Christ's blood, by which we are granted a participation in the divine nature.  Just as sons and daughters are human by reason of the love between their parents which loves the children into existence and grants the new people a participation in human nature, so then are Christians sons and daughters of Our Father in Heaven by reason of the Love between the Father God and Mother Mary, that Love who is the Holy Spirit coming from the Father, overshadowing the Mother who is the handmaid of the Lord and so perfectly consents that God's will be done to her according to the angel's word.  We are loved into eternal life by the fruitful love of the Father and Mother of God the Son, of the Father and Mother of Jesus Christ, because we are members of his one body, and so share in the life of the head of the body, which is the Holy Spirit.

We are able to receive the coming of God within us by our obedience, since those who follow Christ's commands are the ones who love him.

[Jesus said,]"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.  In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him...

Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; yet the word you hear is not mine but that of the Father who sent me. I have told you this while I am with you. The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name--he will teach you everything and remind you of all that (I) told you."

So then, love and obedience draw down the fire of divinity.

...we who are receiving the unshakable kingdom should have gratitude, with which we should offer worship pleasing to God in reverence and awe. For our God is a consuming fire...

And this fire takes up its dwelling place in our hearts, in our lives, as the fire from heaven came down upon the water-sodden offerings of Elijah, as the fire from heaven came down and remained upon the water-sodden Lamb of God, who came to take away the sins of the world, when he who bore the spirit of Elijah baptized Jesus in the Jordan.  We are children of the living God, for his spirit, his life has been breathed into us, and remains with us if we love him in return, if we obey his commandments and remain in communion with his Body.  We take our place in the eternal dance of relation at the heart of the life-giving love of the Trinitarian exchange, all because a Woman and a Man said yes to God, all because the New Adam did not sin in the Garden of Gethsemane, because he did not turn back from the fight with the serpent, because he died rather than permit the New Eve and her children to be devoured by the serpent, because the redeemer of Israel came, the eldest son, the firstborn of the living, he went down into Egypt, into the land of captivity, into the realms of the dead, of Hell, to set free the captive, to ransom our forebears in the faith, to reunite the family, to heal the breach between heaven and earth.

His is the perfection of obedience, his the perfection of worship, his the membership in the priesthood of Melchizedek, whose sacrifice was bread and wine.  Jesus, then, and the worship which he established, the worship in spirit and in truth, entailing the offering of the perfect sacrifice of God to God, Light to Light, True God to True God, that humanity might become one in being with the Father, is the fulfillment of homo adorans, of the longing written into every human heart.  Our worship is our response of obedience and love, our gift to God in return to his gift to us.  The greatest gift God can give us is himself. The only appropriate response from us is the gift of ourself.  And thereby, the marriage of heaven and earth takes place, and is consummated at the marriage supper of the lamb, the wedding feast where time and eternity meet, mingle, marry.

The longing for worship endures, even past belief, even past understanding.  As Dorothy Day says:

One of the great German Protestant theologians said after the end of the last war that what the world needed was community and liturgy.

The desire for liturgy, and I suppose he meant sacrifice, worship, a sense of reverence, is being awakened in great masses of people throughout the world by the new revolutionary leaders. A sense of individual worth and dignity is the first result of the call made on them to enlist their physical and spiritual capacities in the struggle for a life more in keeping with the dignity of man. One might almost say that the need to worship grows in them with the sense of reverence, so that the sad result is giant-sized posters of Lenin and Stalin, Tito and Mao. The dictator becomes divine.

We had a mad friend once, a Jewish worker from the East Side, who wore a rosary around his neck and came to us reciting the Psalms in Hebrew. He stayed with us for weeks at a time, for although mad, he had the gentleness of St. Francis...

He sat at the table with us once and held up a piece of dark rye bread which he was eating. "It is the black bread of the poor. It is Russian Jewish bread. It is the flesh of Lenin. Lenin held bread up for the people and he said, 'This is my body, broken for you.' So they worship Lenin. He brought them bread."

There is nothing lukewarm about such worship, nothing tepid. It is the crying out of a great hunger. One thinks of the words of Ezekiel, condemning the shepherds who did not feed their sheep. I know that my college friend Rayna never heard the word of God preached and she never met a Christian. The failure is ours, and that of the shepherds.--The Long Loneliness, pg. 223.

And apparently that longing to worship established civilization.  Excerpts:

Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages—think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis). They are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by. Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself...