Going Through Samaria

143:7.1At the evening con­fer­ences on Mount Ger­izim, Je­sus taught many great truths, and in par­tic­u­lar he laid em­pha­sis on the fol­low­ing:

143:7.2True re­li­gion is the act of an in­di­vid­ual soul in its self-con­scious re­la­tions with the Cre­ator; or­ga­nized re­li­gion is man’s at­tempt to so­cial­ize the wor­ship of in­di­vid­ual re­li­gion­ists.

143:7.3Wor­ship—con­tem­pla­tion of the spir­i­tual—must al­ter­nate with ser­vice, con­tact with ma­te­rial re­al­ity. Work should al­ter­nate with play; re­li­gion should be bal­anced by hu­mor. Pro­found phi­los­o­phy should be re­lieved by rhyth­mic po­etry. The strain of liv­ing—the time ten­sion of per­son­al­ity—should be re­laxed by the rest­ful­ness of wor­ship. The feel­ings of in­se­cu­rity aris­ing from the fear of per­son­al­ity iso­la­tion in the uni­verse should be an­ti­doted by the faith con­tem­pla­tion of the Fa­ther and by the at­tempted re­al­iza­tion of the Su­preme.

143:7.4Prayer is de­signed to make man less think­ing but more re­al­iz­ing; it is not de­signed to in­crease knowl­edge but rather to ex­pand in­sight.

143:7.5Wor­ship is in­tended to an­tic­i­pate the bet­ter life ahead and then to re­flect these new spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cances back onto the life which now is. Prayer is spir­i­tu­ally sus­tain­ing, but wor­ship is di­vinely cre­ative.

143:7.6Wor­ship is the tech­nique of look­ing to the One for the in­spi­ra­tion of ser­vice to the many. Wor­ship is the yard­stick which mea­sures the ex­tent of the soul’s de­tach­ment from the ma­te­rial uni­verse and its si­mul­ta­ne­ous and se­cure at­tach­ment to the spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties of all cre­ation.

143:7.7Prayer is self-re­mind­ing—sub­lime think­ing; wor­ship is self-for­get­ting—super­think­ing. Wor­ship is ef­fort­less at­ten­tion, true and ideal soul rest, a form of rest­ful spir­i­tual ex­er­tion.

143:7.8Wor­ship is the act of a part iden­ti­fy­ing it­self with the Whole; the fi­nite with the In­fi­nite; the son with the Fa­ther; time in the act of strik­ing step with eter­nity. Wor­ship is the act of the son’s per­sonal com­mu­nion with the di­vine Fa­ther, the as­sump­tion of re­fresh­ing, cre­ative, fra­ter­nal, and ro­man­tic at­ti­tudes by the hu­man soul-spirit.

143:7.9Al­though the apos­tles grasped only a few of his teach­ings at the camp, other worlds did, and other gen­er­a­tions on earth will.