Real Worship...The ordinary and extraordinary aspects in the movement of God's grace

"Mass had already begun, and the priest was reading the epistle. Then a brother in a brown robe came out, and you could see he was going to lead the children in singing a hymn. High up behind the altar St. Francis raised his arms up to God, showing the stigmata in his hands; the children began to sing. Their voices were very clear, they sang loud, their song soared straight up into the roof with a strong and direct flight and filled the whole church with its clarity. Then when the song was done, and the warning bell for consecration chimed in with the last notes of the hymn and the church filled with the vast rumour of people going down on their knees everywhere in it: and then the priest seemed to be standing in the exact center of the universe. Then the bell rang again, three times.

Before any head was raised again the clear cry of the brother in the brown robe cut through the silence with the words: 'Yo creo...' 'I believe' which immediately all the children took up after him with such loud and strong and clear voices, and such unanimity and such meaning and such fervor that something went off inside of me like a thunderclap and without seeing anything or apprehending anything extraordinary through any of my senses (my eyes were open on precisely what was there, the church), I knew with the most absolute and unquestionable certainty that before me, between me and the altar, somewhere in the center of the church, up in the air (or any other place because in no place), but directly before my eyes, or directly present in some apprehension or other of mine which was above that of the senses, was at the same time God in all His essence, all His power, all His glory, and God in Himself and God surrounded by the radiant faces of the uncountable thousands upon thousands of saints contemplating His glory and praising His Holy Name. And so the unshakable certainty, the clear and immediate knowledge that heaven was right in front of me, struck me like a thunderbolt and went through me like a flash of lightning and seemed to lift me clean up off the earth."

Thomas Merton quoted on pg. 151 of The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, by Michael Mott

I love my church, Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas and I am grateful to have had moments like Merton describes in the serious work of worship that goes on each Sunday there.