Peterson-"Praying with Eyes Open"

Christians need to be as prepared to meet God in Church as explorers have been to go on expeditions to the North Pole or Mt. Everest. Failure to prepare properly meant certain death in numerous cases. It can as well in worship. In The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson, citing Annie Dillard, comments on the staggeringly pedestrian style of much of modern day worship: 

The blithe ignorance is frightening: "Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? . . . On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares: they should lash us to our pews." Explorers unmindful of "conditions" died. Why don't similarly unprepared worshipers perish on the spot?

It's not that Dillard doesn't go to church. She does. Says Peterson, 

She realizes that one can no more go to God alone than go to the pole alone. She further realizes that even though the goal is pure, the people are not pure, and if we want to go the Land we must go with the people, even when they are playing banjos, singing stupid songs, and giving vacuous sermons.

These words may seem harsh. And praise God they are not true everywhere. But evidence speaks for itself, and we mustn't turn away from that, but seek a higher view of God which pulls us away from the little box we have become so accustomed to, a box not invented by God, but man, and too small to allow for the God who is too mysterious to name. Let us not just be amazed, but live amazed, blown away by the wonder of God in nature, in economic recession, and, yes, even (especially) in church!