The Reluctant Roman: or Why I Converted to the Catholic Church, Part II: Worship and the Physical Man

In the first part of this series I discussed the role of history and Tradition in my conversion to Catholicism.

As I have previously mentioned in the first part, I plan to outline three major ideas that finally convinced me to convert to Catholicism. None of these was the single deciding factor in my conversion, and these three reasons are by no means the only things that influenced me in my decision. But these big three insights that God led me to changed the way I viewed Christianity and by extension, Catholicism.

And now for the second reason:

Worship and the Physical Man

To make this particular subject easier to tackle, I would like to break it down into three main questions, as each of them is extremely important and a necessary starting point. Each of them also leads logically into the next:

• What is the point of Man’s existence?
• What is worship?
• What is the nature of Man?

The possible answers to these questions are clearly endless, but I will answer them from my own Christian viewpoint. In doing so, it should become clear why, in the end, I had to be Catholic.

The first question is possibly the most difficult, especially if you are searching through all the religions and philosophies of the world in an attempt to find an answer. Luckily for me, that was not necessary. I had no need to look anywhere but in Christianity. I was already fully convinced of the Truth of Christianity, and thus my search for an answer to this question was considerably narrowed.

So what is the point of Man’s existence?

Why was Man created by God? Why was Man put on Earth in the Garden of Eden? What was our original intended purpose?

The answer in short is: To Worship God.

This is our purpose, our reason for existing, the only reason why we were created in the first place. We are here to worship, to glorify the One True God. In everything that we do, in everything that we are, in everything that we can ever hope to be, we are to worship the Lord. For proof, let us turn to Scripture:

When asked which is the greatest commandment in Mark 12, Jesus answers, “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.”

We are to love and to worship God with everything we have.

We exist for nothing else.

Thus the first question proposed, “What is the point of Man’s existence?” is easily answered. God did not have to create us. He lacked for nothing. There was no necessity in our creation. The Lord would have been All without ever speaking Man into existence. Creation’s sole purpose in existing is to glorify, to magnify, to worship the Lord. This is why Man was created. It is why the angels were created before us. It is why the Universe itself was spoken into being, why light was created, why the sun and the stars, why the animals, why the mountains and the rocks were created; everything was made to worship God.

If the idea of created, inanimate things worshiping God sounds strange, then consider Luke 19:40, “And [Jesus] answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.”

Everything in existence, yes even the very rocks of the earth, even the insects in the dirt, EVERYTHING exists to cry out in worship to God.

This, of course, leads us to our next question: what is worship?

What is this thing for which we were created? What is this that we are purposed for before all else, this “first of all commandments” for which we exist?

The simple answer, the dictionary definition, is “reverence or adoration to a deity.” But what does this mean? How do we show this reverence? What are we, as Man, actually supposed to do, or say, or not do, or not say, to constitute worship?

Clearly this question has been answered in countless different ways throughout the history of Mankind and throughout the history of the Christian church. I cannot begin to investigate every concept of worship that has existed in various denominations over the years. Instead, I will focus on two forms of worship with which I am intimately familiar.

In my years as a Christian, I have attended many different worship services, and these have taken many different forms. But the worship services that I am most familiar with now are seen in Baptist churches and in Catholic churches.

I grew up in the First Baptist Church in my hometown. For just about the first eighteen years of my life, I was in attendance, with the rest of my family, at Sunday service. We may have missed a week or two, but for many years, we attended with regularity. I was baptized when I was about ten years old, and I never doubted that the First Baptist Church helped me to make that decision. As children, my brothers and I participated in all the activities of the church. We went to Sunday School regularly, we were in RAs as adolescents, we attended church camps, we were active in the Youth Group in high school, we volunteered for fund raisers and to work at Vacation Bible School. We were active Christians.

And I loved it. I would not trade my childhood in the First Baptist Church for anything in the world. I made friends there that I will never forget, friends that are more like family than anything else. I have countless happy memories of growing up in and around that church and its great community of believers. These are memories that I will cherish forever. There is no doubt in my mind that the First Baptist Church there is full of strong Christians and wonderful individuals. And there is equally no doubt that I received a truly invaluable Christian foundation for my life as a result of the time I spent there. It was there that I became a Christian, and it was there that I learned the fundamentals of Christian belief. Again, I cannot emphasize enough my fondness and my appreciation for that church.

It is because of my time there that I am intimately familiar with the Baptist conception of worship. For Baptists are no different from other Christians, in that they believe as the Lord stated, that our first purpose is to worship God.

With that said, their style of worship is vastly different than that seen in the Catholic Church. I am not going to speak on every single difference in the two methods (that would take books) but I am going to point out a few because they are important for this discussion.

In Baptist worship services (or at least in all the ones I remember going to) the service is treated as a kind of meeting and discussion. I will explain this further, but the broad point is to Baptists, and to many non-sacramental Protestants, worship is a thought process. In other words, worship is something that takes place on the inside, in the mind. It is not an outward thing.

You may have noticed this if you have ever sat in on a Baptist worship service. The stoic-faced believers sit silently in their pews, they stand slowly and stolidly to their feet to sing a few praise songs, they pass the offering plates, the preacher gives a sermon, there is an invitational to call new believers to the front to profess their new faith, and then the service is dismissed with a prayer.

Now clearly I have simplified and generalized, but of the countless Baptist services that I attended over the years, this was the basic itinerary. Again and again and again.

The only outward sign that might be considered an act of worship in the Baptist service would be the singing of praise songs and hymns. This is the only time where Baptist worship “gets physical,” so to speak. During the singing, many worshippers will join in excitedly, rapturously praising the Lord, and during a revival, this might even include clapping and waving hands, jumping up and down, shouting to the Lord. And that is wonderful! But this, the singing, still remains the only physical act of the average worship service.

I am not meaning to run down Baptist services here. I am simply stating what I experienced in them. Most of the focus in a Baptist service, and in many Protestant services, is placed on the pastor. The pastor is the head of the church and the leader of the Sunday services, just as the priest leads the Mass in the Catholic Church. Thus, it would be natural that the focus turns to him occasionally. Yet in Baptist services, there seems to be an inordinate amount of focus on the preacher and on his sermons.

How many times have I heard while leaving a service at the Baptist Church a believer say, “Oh, I didn’t get anything out of that service,” or “Oh, that sermon just wasn’t for me,” or perhaps even, “Oh, Brother So-and-so seemed to have an off day preaching today, didn’t he?” I have even said some of these things myself during my time in the Baptist Church.

The point is, the focus of the service is on the preacher and his sermon. A good sermon = a good worship service. As Baptists, we are equating our worship with the lecture we heard, or with the mental side of the service (what we learned, what we thought about, etc.). The service becomes then a kind of seminar; what can we learn, or what can we “get” out of the service this Sunday.

This is also a very individualistic way of viewing Sunday services. Besides the preacher, the focus is also on me. What do I get? What did I think of the service? Abandoning this form of egotism and selfishness was my first step on the road to a better understanding of what worship is.

To summarize and to try to avoid writing too much on this: Baptist worship services are mostly non-physical, placing focus on the minds of the believers and on the preacher’s sermon.

Now let me turn to the Catholic worship services and point out a few key differences that influenced me in my conversion.

First of all, and most striking, is that Catholic services are physical. They are very physical. There is a lot of standing and kneeling and bowing and crossing yourself and genuflecting and gesticulating and etcetera, etcetera. Catholics clearly believe that worship involves physical action, a stark difference from what was seen in Baptist worship.

I will come back to this idea, but it is very important to remember that this key difference stood out to me. Catholics worship with their whole body; Baptists mostly worship with their mind.

I will not discuss all the aspects of a Catholic Mass, but will only briefly touch on a few points that I noticed. Broadly speaking, the Catholic Mass is divided into two sections, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. All of this is presided over by the celebrant, usually the parish priest.

During the Liturgy of the Word, selected readings from the Bible are read aloud from the altar. These include a reading from the Old Testament, a reading from the Epistles of Paul, and finally in a place of honor, a reading of the Gospel. During the reading of the Gospel, we once again see a clear indicator of the difference of the Catholic conception of worship. As a physical act, the Catholic crosses himself three times, on the forehead, on the lips and on the heart, just before the Gospel is read. There are reasons for this that I will not explain, but the point is, there is a physical act that accompanies worship, even when that involves someone else reading.

But before I digress too much, the second part of the Mass involves the Liturgy of the Eucharist, in which the Catholic faithful take part in Communion (what Baptists would call the Lord’s Supper). I will not discuss the vast differences between Baptist communion and Catholic communion. I will only say that one is rooted in the physical, while the other is purely symbolic. It should be clear which is which. Baptist communion is symbolic; Catholic communion is physical. The physical nature, that Catholics physically take the actual Body and Blood of Christ, was enormously influential in my conversion. (So important was the Catholic conception of The Eucharist that it will be discussed more in Part III. I will leave this idea for now.)

It also bears pointing out here that there is little focus on the priest in the Catholic Mass. While he may appear to be the focal point, in actuality he and especially his personality matters little. As long as there is a priest to sanctify the Eucharist and to perform the other rites, it can be any priest. The personality of the minister, unlike in a Baptist service, does not matter. I have been to Catholic Masses with African priests, with Indian priests, with Spanish-speaking priests; they are all essentially the same.

Now to summarize this whole point, the major difference between the two conceptions of worship is that one (Baptist) is spiritual, mental or symbolic, while the other (Catholic) is spiritual and physical.

So now we must move on to the third and final question: What is the nature of Man?

If man’s first and most important purpose on Earth is to worship God, and if worship is the adoration and reverence of a diety, then how SHOULD we worship? What is the best way? Is a mental/spiritual form of worship, as the non-sacramental Baptists prefer, the best way? Or is a spiritual/physical form of worship, as the sacramental Catholics prefer, the best?

In order to answer this, we must consider the nature of Man. What is our nature? What are we? Are we simply beasts, like the animals? Or are we like the angels? What are we?

I think it is clear that we are not simply animals. We are above the animals. We have an immortal soul, something the animals lack. We are not simply physical beings. In addition to an immortal soul, we have minds capable of reasoning, minds created in the very image of God. To say that we are strictly like the animals is obviously dead wrong.

Then again, we are not exactly like the angels. We are a little below them. Angels have no physical bodies; they are not bound to the material world but appear to be able to move freely between Heaven and Earth. At least the archangel Gabriel can as he delivers the Lord’s messages, as can Satan who both roams Earth like a roaring lion and accuses us in the very courts of God. Angels seem to be entirely spiritual beings. We are clearly not; we have a physical body that contains our soul.

Thus, Man is a unique creature, partly spiritual and partly physical, a melding of two natures. We are imperfect creatures, of course, fallen and in need of saving. And it was through the Incarnation, through the Lord Himself taking on our physical nature, that we were saved. Through His Incarnation, His death and Resurrection, our dual natures were redeemed. Jesus Christ, both fully Man and fully God, redeemed us all by becoming a perfect combination of our natures.

How then should this unique creature, Man, worship God? If we have a nature that is both physical and spiritual, how should we worship the Lord?

It should be obvious that our worship should involve both our spiritual nature and our physical nature. In other words, it must incorporate our mental faculties and our physical faculties.

Anything less than this flies in the face of the Incarnation. How can we seek to eliminate our bodies, and remove them from worship, when Christ loved them so much that He was willing to become one? It becomes clear that our worship must thoroughly involve our bodies. We are physical creatures made for worship, and we must use our physical nature to worship God.

Thus the Catholic Mass is a much better way of worshiping the Lord than any that I have previously experienced. For in the Catholic Mass, the worship is inevitably intertwined in the dual natures of Man; we worship with both our minds and our bodies. We kneel before the Lord. We cross ourselves to remind us of the physical sacrifice that the Lord made for us. We do all of the physical acts of worship, because we are partly a physical being.

To deny the physical part of Humanity, to rid worship of our physical side, is to diminish one side of the Incarnation. If Christ loved us enough to take on our human body, is it not fitting then that we offer that body back to Him in worship?

There are many more examples and points that I could make, but I will sum them all up in this:

Man is created to worship God, and as both a physical and spiritual being, Man must worship God with both his spiritual and physical natures.

As Paul writes to the Corinthians, “What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

Catholicism incorporates this, body and spirit, in a way that no Protestant church does. The Sacraments, as defined by the Catholic Church, are outward “signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.” The Sacraments are essential to worshiping God fully, both spiritually and physically.

Thus, in order to worship God fully, I had to become Catholic.

(Part III will conclude with a further discussion of Communion and the Eucharist)