While proposing the series on Ingredients for Worship, it will be pretentious of me to propose something that goes against principles of that series. Not only so, I will come across as hypocritical. It is like giving with one hand, and stealing with the other.
There are fundamental differences between what I am talking about here – “what to do and think” (WTDT), and the series on Ingredients for Worship, and similar other blogs I have written that promote regarding our journey in worship as also a journey of faith – we continue to discover opportunities and challenges and be faithful to God in giving worship to him because he is worthy. One difference is that the subject domains are much wider in WDT, in any case, more than liturgy and biblical text. It is about psychological, even psychiatrical conditions, and some of behavioural sciences.
Here, a close look at the topic might be useful. To be more exact, the heading is “What I should be doing, and how I should be thinking” (shorterned as WDT). That, no problem at all. However, the way to read this is that I should know what I should be doing given a situation, and / or how I should be thinking.
An unusual instance perhaps, but bear me on this. I was once in a public transport venue, and approaching an escalator. For purpose of removing lack of confusion, an escalator is a moving staircase, either going upwards or downwards. In this case, I was at the bottom and joining it to go up. All ok there. What happened next was that a lady behind me alerted me by tapping arm or pulling my sleeve (I can’t remember which, but it caught my attention). I turned to look and she indicated to me that a lady immediately behind me, who looked much older to the three of us but definitely with some mobilily concern, was also about to get on the escalator. To which I reacted, but I cannot remember what I did, but to the effect that that lady got on to the escalator; I think, also, the other lady also got on, then followed on by me.
It is possible that I could have interjected the queue in such a way that I could be seen as “jumping the queue”. But I had no recollection about that; I was not in a hurry, and I don’t usually jump queue.
This is one occasion I thought to be, then, and to this day, I still do, whether I should know the thing I should do, and the way I should think about it. It would have to take me a lot more effort to constantly evaluating my presence to determine what I should do in the changing circumstances. But in any case, there appears there was a “need” to convey to me that I should know some action, and some way of thought, that frame my way of self that then gives way to people who are much more in need. And that leads to another topic which is how does one determine the physcially less mobile has greater need than a “psychological frail” person?
The focus on this writing is that I often feel that people are conveying to me that I should know what I should do given a situation, or the way I should think, or both. There are different ways of unpacking the “power relation”, and also physholocial / psychiatrical and social elements that come into play. A day might come that this is classified as a type of autism, but currently it (autistic study) is agnostic towards this kind of (behaviourdal) observation. The motive for putting this into words is that it is a form of healing for me; and it could help many others who share this kind of experience. It is a tremendous struggle to live through this.
and also to debate on how far and what we should do and think on that (worship) or on more general matters, it’s both pretentious and hypocritical. That, however, is my own recognition, and from such a basis I begin, or think can do so, with a high level of self-preservatin. By that, I mean I am at peace with my own and internal self, and not in constant danger to or anger with others, or both.
Even today, I often got the “message” in conversation, either in speech or writing, that in such a situation, the expected ways to think and do, is conveyed to me. There are multiple things happening here. First, we do convey some ways of “what one should or would do” embedded in our communication with others, in writing, speech, body language, and any combinations.
