I previously wrote about music that blows chunks, but which endures due to the memories associated with it. If you take the same music, and spin it out in front of folks lacking any memory connection, the chances of them being impressed is about nil, and they may well think you are off your rocker should you sing its praises.

I’ve been pondering how this relates to worship. A friend of mine describes almost every Sunday service as sort of like seeing a arena rock concert for the first time. (Feel free to replace arena rock concert, with Opera, jazz, country, whatever…). I’ve heard the same from a number of folks over the years… the worship service rocks their world. Such views are not limited to full bore high church liturgy with a massive organ, they could be low church with a folk band, or even without any music or liturgy at all. Even more so, for some folks this is a near weekly occurrence.

Such is not my experience. There may be a profound sermon here or there, and I do have a real affinity towards weekday morning masses at a Catholic church… but worship rocking my world, um no.

In fact, when I look at Revelation and such… and things going on 24/7, its like hmmm. I get that we will be changed, I get that super holy stuff has to be rock my world awesome beyond belief, but its such an abstract thing, it just doesn’t connect.

On the other hand, as a pilot, the words of a tv copy editor wing walking for the first time rings very true. I get exactly what she is saying.

Thanks to Jane and Charlie, I now fully understand the poem “High Flight” by John Magee.  I paraphrase, but I truly felt I touched the hand of God.

Very few people will believe or understand this, and most of you will think I’m high (never did drugs, for the record) but strange as this sounds…at one point the wind stopped clawing at me. The motor roar stilled. I was suspended in a peculiar time and place where I felt the presence of, well, quite frankly, my grandparents and guardian angel slightly behind me on either side. And I felt their happiness and approval.  For just a moment, I felt the ethereal presence of those who at one time loved and protected me as if they were physically at my back. Call me nuts as my last name means in German, but there you go.

There in likely is just a tiny view of what the Revelation text talks about… I capture this in a plane should I be in “flow”. An old friend said similar things about being in the midst of storms in his boat on the great lakes. As a bass player, I’ve caught fleeting glimpses of this too if I’m literally rocking the stage with 5000+ Watts of power so to speak…

I came across the following this evening as yet another descriptor of encountering God’s hand so to speak.

…an intimate connection with the God who created us, an inner peace unlike any our five senses can provide?  It’s scientifically inexplicable. It’s mystery beyond any words.  Yet there is where we most clearly experience and encounter God.

I can try and attach memories and run with them, but unless in the cockpit half upside down, on the stage, or in the storm so to speak, merely attaching the memory doesn’t make the connection. It has to be authentic… a memory attachment alone won’t work.

This then brings me back to folks for whom worship rocks their world. If it makes such connections as above, it cannot be an attached memory thing, it has to be real, it has to be authentic.

It makes me ponder…