"...in worship we cease being predators who by stealth approach everyone as prey that we can pull into our center; we respond to the center. We are privileged listeners and respondents who offer ourselves to God, who creates and redeems... Many a congregation when it assembles in church must look to the angels like a muddy puddly shore at low tide; littered with every kind of rubbish and odds and ends -- a distressing sort of spectacle. And then the tide of worship comes in, and it's all gone: the dead sea urchins and jellyfish, the paper and the empty cans and the nameless bits of rubbish. The cleansing sea flows over the whole lot. So we are released from a narrow selfish outlook on the universe by a common act of worship."

- Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder