Virtual Worship
March 21, 2020 § 9 Comments
My meeting (Central Philadelphia) is experimenting with online worship starting tomorrow (Sunday, March 22, 2020) using Zoom. I plan to participate; in fact, I will be part of a “tech support” team to help Friends who are having trouble joining the meeting. I think the virtual meeting is a good idea. However, I wonder whether we should call it worship.
What is worship?
A virtual meeting like this raises an existential question of just what are we doing when we worship? Not what do we think we are doing, but what is our goal and what is actually happening?
For me, the goal is the gathered meeting, the direct collective experience of the presence of God among us. By God I mean the Mystery Reality behind our experience of being gathered in the Spirit, however we might name that as individuals.
If the collective communion with the transcendent Divine is our desire in worship, then the act of worship is personal and collective alignment toward, attention to, attunement with, the Holy Spirit, with that ineffable link between the Light within each of us and our collective capacity for transcendental communion as a worshipping body, what Paul called the body of Christ.
How are we to be gathered into communion via the internet? I doubt that it’s possible, for several reasons.
Obstacles to a virtual gathered meeting
First, just what is the medium through which the Spirit is corporately manifest? I think there are two such media, one physical, the other metaphysical. The physical medium is vocal ministry. A virtual meeting for worship will have vocal ministry, albeit distorted by the technology. But at least, everyone will probably be able to hear the speakers, and the same discipline of discernment will theoretically apply for each minister. Or will it? How much is that discipline dependent on the physical presence of the listeners? Will the remote aspect of the technology encourage relaxed discernment, as it notoriously does with email, texts, and social media?
The metaphysical medium can be defined only through speculation, though we know it’s real because we’ve experienced gathered meetings. Communion really does take place, sometimes—but how? I think the metaphysical medium for the Holy Spirit in meeting for worship is our human auras and, by extension, the “ether”, or whatever you want to call the medium in which psychic events take place between people.
My study of auras points to two kinds of auras, an etheric and an astral. The etheric aura is a shade of “white” that emanates from the body. The astral aura is a rainbow of colors that emanates from the mind and, if you will, the soul, the spiritual self that knows right from wrong, makes choices, feels emotions and has intentions—and that is capable of psychic experience. These subtle invisible vibrations (to most of us most of the time)—what we used to call “vibes”—manifest with apparent physical limits to those who can see them, but they exist in an apparently nonphysical “space” that has no such limits. I believe this “space” is what the ancients called “heaven”, that is, the dwelling-place of the gods, of spirits, of Spirit.
In theory, then, this apparently limitless region for psychic experience could work with the internet and we could have a gathered virtual meeting for worship. But in practice, in the reality of reasonable expectations, we need to sit together in the same space where our auras can intermingle, creating a “network” of individual psyches that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is one of the reasons why sitting close together seems to foster the gathered meeting.
There are other obstacles to a gathered virtual meeting.
Central Philadelphia is urging participants to mute their microphones unless and until they speak, then to mute their mics again. This prevents the ambient noises in each participant’s environment from cascading with everybody else’s and potentially overwhelming the technology and the collective experience. For each participant, muting will create an artificial silence that is nothing like the silence in a meeting room full of worshippers. You will hear your own environment, but not one shared by the other worshippers. Can this disparate, individual scattering of personal artificial silences feed the gathered meeting? I doubt it.
Can fussing with the technology—logging in, solving connection and device problems, muting and un-muting mics, watching the screen flip from one speaker to the other if you’re in Speaker View, and the sudden intrusion of someone speaking out of that artificial silence—can all this outward business draw us deeper into the depths? I doubt it. Though we will probably get better at it with practice.
Conclusion
It will be good to see each other’s faces in this time of crisis. It will be wonderful to be together in some fashion, rather than stuck in isolation in a time of fear. But I don’t think it will be worship.
On the other hand, much of our worship is increasingly not the worship I have been describing, anyway. It usually is more like worship sharing, and often not even that. It is disturbed by latecomers. It is rarely gathered in the Spirit. We have lowered the bar for what constitutes worship and we no longer have a collectively agreed-upon understanding of what worship is, what it’s for, or whom—or what—we worship, if that last idea works for us in the first place.
So my final concern is that calling virtual worship “worship” reinforces this trend toward embracing something that is not true worship, practicing something that is not alignment toward God, however we might define that, but rather group meditation and an in-person blogging platform. So virtual worship will really be what we have already—group meditation with worship sharing added. So why not “worship” virtually? What’s the difference? In fact, why go back to meeting in person, once this is all over? We could all just sit at home in our jammies and worship.
So I think we should call this something else. Maybe “Meeting for Virtual Community”. And be deliberate in our characterization, that this really is not worship, but worth doing anyway.
Christ-centered worship
A side note here: For Christ-centered Friends, the object of worship is much more discreet and “tangible” than it is for us who are not Christ-centered. That is, (though I generalize) Christ-centered Friends worship a divine Christ, and by extension, God the Father, a theistic being possessing absolute attributes like omnipresence and ultimate power. For God so defined, anything is possible. Theoretically. So maybe Christ would choose to gather a virtual meeting of his present-day followers, just because he can and he wants to. No media required, physical or metaphysical. (Though metaphysical dynamics are still involved—how does Christ gather gathered meetings?)
I look forward to hearing from these Friends if they begin experimenting with online meetings for worship. Do they still program their meetings (if they were programmed before)? Does singing with each other remotely carry the same feelings of joy and presence to one another as singing in the same room? And so on. And will the Conservative meetings try this, who are centered in Christ but do not program their meetings? Somehow, I doubt it. But if they do, I hope to hear how it goes.
Through the Flaming Sword 
Reach
Dear Friends, let us reach
Reach toward the stillness
Stillness that reveals the Light
Light discovered within
Within the perfect oneness
Oneness with the Eternal
The Eternal single moment
Moment …….of endless Grace.
Worship is a verb that generally requires an object of worship, God. Meeting for worship seeks an Experience. The Experience defies words and definitions, but we try; The Divine Presence or Divine Light. That Experience is outside space-time or physical reality. When I am in the moments of communion I am in the same moment as were Jesus or Fox, Siddhartha or all others through human history who come into the Presence. I become the Experience, if even for a moment.
We gather for meeting and a “gathered” meeting is a mutual experience. Is this possible virtually on screens? Yes. All of the concerns raised are right and frankly the “gathered” meeting is a rarity even “in-person.” Because the true gathering is outside of space-time it is no less possible in this E medium. Focus on communion and trust that some will also, and that those who do will be joined into the same moment, gathered by Love and Light. Highly recommended!
Don Badgley
Thank you for this post, Steve, and for your subsequent ones publicizing resources and opportunities for virtual meeting for worship. I have what I hope is a word of comfort for those who can’t zoom in or don’t feel at ease with the technology:
Whatever our theology, and whatever we may call Him/Her/It, we’re all members of One Holy Larger Organism which provides us with a light in our consciences that reproves us for doing evil, and, if we abide its reproofs and assent to its cauterizations, heals our propensities to sin: “you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27 NRSV). When we sit in waiting worship, we gather as members of that Larger Organism whether we subjectively “feel” gathered or not, so long as our will is not set on refusing to be gathered. It is not we who do the gathering; but that Larger Organism, which lives and “groans” (Rom 8:26) in each of us, does it (“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” Paul asks, 2 Cor 13:5 NRSV).
Because our Gatherer transcends space and time, I suggest that it does not matter if our etheric and astral bodies locally coalesce to form a force-field whose energy we can feel, delight in, and be warmed and energized by. It can be delicious when that happens, and a real downer when a grandstanding ego steals the attention and lowers the field-energy (may God forgive us all who’ve ever done that), but even when we’re too far scattered to generate that collective warmth, our Gatherer is at work among us. I hope that many of us may see a sign in the morning that confirms this.
Dear Steven, et al,
Multnomah Meeting tried a Zoom meeting this week, had 55 attendees by best count. It was surprisingly deep and really wonderful to see all those faces. Some tips for running the Meeting. It will distract from their experience, but the person serving as host can mute and unmute each person’s microphone. It is good to keep track of this and mute for those who forget, and unmute for those who are baffled by the technology. It is also a good idea to set the meeting in advance so that all mics are muted on entrance. Easy for the host to do. We put up a sharescreen image at the opening that had a lovely photo and text that read “Welcome to Multnomah Meeting, please gather in silence”. That seemed to help get a good start. We took that down and had a very brief technical introduction as meeting started. Part of that introduction was to encourage Friends to use “Gallery View” so they can see everybody’s face, or at least most of them. We had a good page and a half or more of gallery view. A good problem to have. This seems to be very helpful in keeping up community. Friends seem hungry for a sense of community. I will leave the theology of gathered meetings to others, but this limited experience suggests that it could really happen virtually.
Yours hopefully,
Joe
Thanks for the tips, Joe. It turns out we’ve anticipated all the things you mentioned. And 55 is quite a good number to have so positive an experience. Any sense how many people had trouble connecting or getting the technology to work for them?
Not really. There were too many who had video turned off or didn’t know how to activate it, but they stayed for the duration. I only had one person who contacted me after frustrated because they couldn’t make their audio work. By the way, we are actively discouraging connection by dial up only. It seems to detract from the sense of community.
where I worship we have consistent deep meetings but I doubt that they deserve to be called “gathered.” Fifteen years in Quaker meetings and I still do not get it. Being alive in the light as an individual is a frequent experience both in meeting and out.
I am choosing to sit alone instead of virtually.
Friend Marcelle speaks my mind. Scarsdale Friends worshipped by Zoom for the first time last week and I found it very strange, but very powerful. An unarguable sense of presence, calm, and comfort settled on and around me and would not let go. It was more powerful than anything I’ve felt recently in any worship in a meetinghouse.
One of the curiosities for me was seeing everyone face to face when I was in Gallery view on my screen. It was a comfort in these times. “But then we will see face to face” or words to that effect?
Barnesville Friends are worshipping virtually and have sent out some guidance. I will find that in my email and post it here.
I would not be surprised if you were surprised tomorrow, Steve.
Thanks, Carol and Marcelle. This is great news.
Thank you for reflecting on this. Swarthmore Meeting has also tried this, twice last week. I have experienced true worship and being gathered with others sometimes even while meeting “virtually.”