Inner Beats

Reading a little Augustine today. After attending Cafe Wycliffe last night I find a kindred thought in his notion of prior knowledge preceding memory. The Cafe evening started with a Sudanese group singing worship (mostly in Arabic). As us whiteys sat there trying desperately not to wiggle too much for fear of embarrassment it got me thinking about my approach to God in worship. My intellectual side is very pervasive in its disputatious redolence (if you can figure out what that means you know exactly which part of my anatomy it came from). I approach worship with my mind, needing to know and understand the words or postures I’m using. I think I use this as a guard so that I can approach the throne of my very Creator without having it affect me too much; all the benefit without any of the shiny-juices-on-the-face-of-Moses business.

The few times that God has broken through all my shit it has been devastating indeed. He leaves me devoid of my own strength, a speck of insignificance in a sea of pure Substance. Yesterday, despite my defenses, I felt, again, that piece of me that wants to cry, shout, laugh, dance for God. I think this is what Augustine means:

They have known it then, I know not how, and so have it by some sort of knowledge, what, I know not how, and am perplexed whether it be in the memory, which if it be, then we have been happy once; whether all severally, or in that man who first sinned, in whom also we all died, and from whom we are all born with misery, I now enquire not, but only, whether the happy life be in the memory? For neither should we love it, did we not know it. (Confessions)

It is the part of us that knows God as from memory. We have known Him, we have known real happiness in Him and we cry again for that which we once knew so well, perhaps as in a dream. It is this yearning that manifests in worship, not some convoluted sequence of words that describe what God has done or is.

Furthermore, we cannot express more than what we have come to know and even this is from God. Again Augustine:

For neither do I utter anything right unto men, which Thou hast not before heard from me; nor dost Thou hear any such thing from me, which Thou has not first said unto me. (Confessions)

All which God has given to us we return in worship; nothing more, and hopefully nothing less.