The Point of Worship

In his book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, neurologist Oliver Sacks tells about a man he calls Jimmie C. As they met for the first time, Jimmie talked about growing up in Connecticut and his life in the navy in the forties. But he spoke as if it was still 1943 and he was still nineteen. When Dr. Sacks left the room for a couple minutes and then returned. Jimmie C. again met him warmly, introducing himself as if they'd never met. Jimmie C. suffered from Korsakoff ’s Syndrome, a complete loss of recent memory. He had a perfect memory up to 1943; but everything else was gone. He had no short-term memory at all.

As conversations continued over the next months, Sacks kept hearing about Jimmie brother who was in accounting school and who was engaged to some girl from Oregon. Of course, his brother had been married and been an accountant for over thirty years. Jimmie had no memory of the last 30 minutes or the last thirty years. For all practical purposes, the clock of his life had stopped in 1943. And Dr. Sacks couldn't help wondering if this “lost mariner,” as he called him, was really a full person. “Is this man’s essence gone?” he asked. “Does he even have a soul?" Then one day Sacks saw Jimmie C. in chapel during a worship service… and came to see him in a whole new light.

I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before… Fully, intensely, quietly in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakoff’s then, nor did it seem possible or imaginable that there should be; for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism— that of mean¬ingless sequences and memory traces— but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, which carried feeling and meaning in an organic continuity and unity, a continuity and unity so seamless it could not permit any break. Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual atten¬tion and act.

Do we not share something in common with Jimmy C. here? We live in a world that distracts us and distorts our memory of what is really important. We live our lives at such breakneck speed that we lose sight of the pursuit of God. And then each week we come together for worship… and our memory is restored. In the act of worship we are reminded of what is truly true and really real. In worship, the secular gives way to the sacred, and the human makes connection with the divine once again. Worship focuses our lives and reorders our priorities. It is in our connection with God through worship that we remember what it is to truly be human.