Our Need to Kneel

OUR NEED TO KNEEL

Few things are as debilitating for true worship today as is the mistaken notion, popular in many circles, that somehow we belittle ourselves, are regressive, insult human dignity and put-down oppressed peoples, if we kneel, if we bow in obedience and if we genuflect so as to acknowledge that we are below and something else is above.

In the name of religious progress, we are teaching ourselves not to genuflect, not to kneel and not to think of ourselves (and feel ourselves) as living under God.

We mean this sincerely and there are some understandable reasons for why we feel this way, not the least of which is a religious upbringing that many of us are still reacting against. But this is not progress—religiously or otherwise. We are poorer because of this.

Genuflection is the ultimate moral act—and it lies at the basis of all morality. We become moral on that day when we first genuflect and know what we are doing.

Perhaps we need a new language which no longer uses phrases like "under" or ''below" (though, like Rohr, I doubt this) and perhaps we do need gestures other than genuflection and kneeling (though my imagination runs out of gas here). Whatever language and whatever the gesture, we need again to "kneel" and to "genuflect" and put ourselves "under" someone.

To kneel does not belittle or demean us. It does not make us smaller. It makes us larger. No person, female or male, is taller in terms of dignity and genuine adultness, than when she or he kneels in prayer, in adoration and in obedience.

There are few gestures singularly powerful as is that of bending the knee before the God who made us.

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