Worship

Worship. The offering of devotion, praise, and adoration to that which is deemed worthy of such offering, usually God. Worship of that which is less than God as though it is equivalent to God, especially if it is addressed to particular images, is idolatry. In non-theistic religious, worship is more usually expressed as gratitude to the enlightened guide or guides, as with Buddhists and Jains.

More often, however, worship is associated with the adoration of the supreme Being, the unproduced Producer of all that is, from whom all things and all events ultimately come, and to whom all things return. This sense of the transcendence of God necessarily evokes worship. From this sense of the absolute majesty, holiness, and supremacy of God derives Israel's life of worship, of the constant recognition of God in Temple, sacrifice, Psalms, pilgrimage, and eventually synagogue, liturgy, and Prayer Book—epitomized in kiddush ha-Shem. By wearing the tefillin, an observant Jew bears on his body a constant worship of God.

Christians inherited this sense of God's independence from, and yet concern for, the universe which he has created—and in particular they inherited the Psalms, which from the start informed their religious intelligence and became the backbone of prayer and devotion. But Christianity recognizes in Jesus the incarnate presence of God, through whom praise and worship is offered to the Father—in other (less contingent) words, transcendence and immanence are held together in the reality of Jesus’ own prayer.

Islam shares the Jewish sense of the absolute uniqueness and oneness (tawhīd) of God. Since this and its consequences (not least in belief and behaviour) are made known in the Qurʾān, the very chanting of the Qurʾān (even without a knowledge of what it means) becomes an act of worship. But the acknowledgement of God is so fundamental that it becomes a daily obligation in ṣalāt, and an annual obligation in ṣawm, the month-long fast in Ramaḍān—both of these being among the Five Pillars of Islam. But Muslim devotion goes far beyond obligation, spectacularly so in the case of the Sūfīs.

An attitude of worship and devotion is equally characteristic of Hindus and it defies brief description. Worship (pūjā) is held and sustained in the home (where there is likely to be a small shrine devoted to a particular deity), but it readily flows out into temples and shrines, and into many practices of particular devotion. Since Hindus in general believe that Brahman becomes manifest in many different ways, there are many different forms of the deity. More formal communal worship may be expressed through dance and drama, or through the singing in groups of kīrtana and bhajana (‘songs of praise’). These are usually associated with bhakti, a particularly powerful tradition of devotion and praise. But for the Hindu, the human relation to the divine is possible at all times: every circumstance can be an occasion of the divine. It is this which underlies the importance in worship of mantra, maṇḍala, and yantra. For the Hindu, worship is as natural as birth and death: it is the bridge which connects the one to the other.

See also YASNA.