As with most of my posts, wherever you think this is going to go, it probably won’t, so take that for what you will.

I have been on a binge of watching Babymetal and Sakura Gakuin lately.  No idea why, it’s just what popped up on YouTube and I get bored.  So I was churning through, and found this one thing called “Moabanger”.  It’s a version of “Headbanger” where Moa takes the microphone from Su on her birthday, and she stands there holding it while literally the whole concert venue is genuflecting to the microphone, and to her.  I mean literally genuflecting.  On their knees and literally moving their arms up and down, almost cartoonishly.

Moa is standing there with a very self-satisfied smirk on her face.  She’s become very beautiful, by the way, which only makes the effect more jarring.  A beautiful woman standing there, holding up a microphone on an ornate stand, while the entire hall of who knows how many people (maybe fifty thousand?) are genuflecting to her.

That makes me uncomfortable on one level.  I wouldn’t do it.  What you do with your body becomes truth, and no person deserves to be worshipped in that manner.  I know it’s not meant to be taken seriously, but these things take on a life of their own no matter what your intentions.  But it made me think about worship and what it really is.

I think the thing that struck me the most about that imagery is that everyone in that room was one hundred percent focused on Moa and that microphone.  As far as I know, every last person except for the musicians.  Everyone in that room had a single-minded focus, and that was Moa and her microphone.  There was no dissension (as far as I know), there was no deviation, there was only focus on that one thing in that room.

But that’s how it is with everything, isn’t it?  People are often the most at peace when they’re unified in a purpose.  That’s why peace tends to come from one of two things:  Unifying against a common enemy in war, or unifying in a common purpose.  You must have one of these two conditions in order to have peace.

And I think, as with almost everything, we completely misunderstand what worship is.

It is turning your face to something, and focusing entirely on it, to the absolute exclusion of everything else.

This is also why worshipping people is such a terrible idea.  Because a person’s purpose is not to be worshipped, a person’s purpose is to worship.  By which I mean, if everyone in the world worships someone, who do they worship?  I think that’s why kings tend to be avaricious and unstable.  Everyone else gets the focus but them.

I think this is one reason figures such as Jesus exist.  They provide a focus for worship that can actually handle said worship.  It’s not that they’re perfect so much as they’re complete.  God is the only thing that is complete.

So, one could say to worship God is to turn your face to him, to focus completely on him to the exclusion of everything else, and as everyone does that, from there comes peace.  Not in a religious sense – from there comes war, because people who focus on God in a religious sense aren’t – they’re still side-eyeing their fellow man.  That’s not worship.  But instead in a spiritual sense, which is something else entirely.

And this is said as someone who is terrible at religion and stuffs.  It just seems to be the only concept to make sense.