On apparent paralysis in worship

You might think that I am thinking about some sort of spiritual, or metaphysical paralysis the we might encounter in our worship of God, but no, it is the simple physical kind. This is what got me thinking:

"O come let us worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our Maker." (from the Venite, or Psalm 95, Book of Common Prayer)

It struck me this morning that to fall down in worship is a foreign experience to us and that this, from the Psalms, is clearly an invitation to do just that: to fall down, to drop to the floor in adoration of God. And we are not taken to this extravagant behavior. Indeed, it might seem rather disturbing to us.

There is relatively little physical movement in many corporate worship services. We are accustomed, perhaps, to kneeling in prayer, but to fall down (it implies some level of spontaneity) in awe before God seems outside our physical worship vocabulary. We are apparently paralyzed in worship. We can sit and occasionally kneel. But there is none of this falling down before God business. It is simply not decent.

Some other faiths seems to have preserved this prostrate stance. Many have seen, in picture or in person, this stance in worship or prayer. Any liturgical practice of this is a sign or a picture of the awe that God's very real presence can and will produce in us, and in that sense it has got something right.

I am not sure that I am advocating that we do it, I just wonder why it is so foreign to us. Certainly the physical space in which we worship as Christians is not conducive us falling on our faces before God, so there is the practical constraint.

But I think another reason is that we are often too self-conscious (worried about ourselves and what others might think) to be truly abandoned in public worship. This is both bad and good. Bad because SELF-consciousness is exactly what worship isn't about. Charles Wesley describes this abandon in the hymn, Love Divine, all loves excelling, as being "lost in wonder, love and praise" (emphasis mine). Our attention is entirely Other-focused. Being self-conscious is just what we don't want in worship.

But that we are too self-conscious is good because, at least in corporate worship, behaviors or actions that distract other people from their focus on God, however edifying to the individual, is self-centered in another way. In the end it is uncharitable.

Were we all, suddenly overcome with the awe and majesty of God, to fall down before him that would be spontaneous, good and fitting.

And this is where it gets back to liturgical practice. Worship is not a spectator sport. It is participatory and makes the assumption that we are NOT paralyzed; that we might sit, kneel, stand or be on our faces (albeit this latter less commonly). This is why, in the Psalm it is an announced invitation:

"O come, let us (all of us together) worship and fall down and kneel before the Lord our Maker."

The individual, spontaneous response of prostrate worship is off-putting and perhaps counter-productive in corporate worship, as much as we might see it as desirable to be so moved in heart as to fall down in adoration. But it is better yet, in response to the liturgical invitation, with our wills and regardless of our being moved emotively, that we do exactly that, worship, fall down and kneel before the Lord our Maker. Not because we feel like it, but because, quoting the Psalmist, "he is the Lord our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand." It is meet and right so to do.