You’ve probably heard someone say, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” They might apply the saying to music, cars, or cooking. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself. 

            Lately, I’ve been saying it about worship. 

            I’ve probably had more experience of worship than most lay people. Since I was a child, I’ve attended worship services pretty much every week.

            As a journalist writing about religion, I’ve attended worship in Africa, India, and South America – places where I understood not a single word said or sung. I’ve worshipped in big churches and small churches, in affluent churches and struggling churches, in churches with long-term clergy and in churches with no professional leadership at all. 

            I’ve shared the Eucharist with 5,000 at a World Council of Churches Assembly. And I’ve sat with six strangers on wooden benches in a converted garage where a lay preacher harangued me about hell and the woman next to me sounded as if she might be having an orgasm.

            I’ve heard a lot of sermons. Some were brilliant. Others — to quote my friend Ralph Milton — “barely dribbled over the edge of the pulpit before expiring on the floor.”

            But worship is more than a sermon. 

I stepped out the front door of the theatre last Saturday night just as the first drops of rain fell. The drops felt as big as marbles.

            I ran for my car.

            Then the rain came pounding down. Too much, too fast, for windshield wipers to keep up.

            Driving home, I counted the gaps between flashes of lightning. Three to five seconds. Once, I got to ten seconds before the next flash.

            Water coursed down the gutters. Tree branches, bent under the weight of water running off their leaves, thrashed in gusts of wind.

            And I was not in the Bahamas. Where Hurricane Dorian had wreaked utter havoc earlier that week.

There have been more mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year than days in the year. CBS News predicts the U.S. will end 2019 having averaged at least one mass shooting every single day.

            It makes reporting fairly easy. Reporters can simply fill in the blanks: “Today in (name of city) a gunman opened fire in (name of church, store, mosque, or synagogue) with a (make or model of gun) killing (number dead), and injuring (number hospitalized) before being shot and killed by police.”

            In the wake of the latest mass shooting -- Which one? Does it matter? -- the TV program  Fox and Friends called in a pastor to explain what was going wrong with the nation.

            Former police officer Tony Perkins, a Southern Baptist minister who heads an organization called the Family Research Council, blamed the rash of mass murders on the teaching of science --  particularly evolution -- in American schools.

            He said, “We've taught our kids that they come about by chance through primordial slime and then we're surprised that they treat their fellow Americans like dirt."

“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” So said the inscription at the entry to hell, in Dante’s Inferno.

            Dante was an optimist. He saw hell as some other place, from which he could return safely to his everyday world. 

            I’m afraid that our world — this world, the one we live in, the one our grandchildren will live in — is becoming its own hell. 

            I am optimistic about individual relationships. I have yet to meet anyone who would refuse to help another individual in need. Race, education, and wealth don’t seem to matter IF – and it’s a big “if” -- there’s genuine contact, person to person, soul to soul.  

            At the same time, I am profoundly pessimistic about humanity as a whole. Collectively, we humans persist in seeking short-term solutions. Our corporate mindset is incorrigibly greedy, seeking our own benefit even if it harms others. Yes, even if it will harm us, farther down the line. 

            Hong Kong is a thriving hub of international business. Kashmir is a backwater, even by Indian standards.

            Hong Kong has world-class communications. Kashmir has frequent power failures. Internet communication, iffy at any time, has been shut down completely by Indian forces. So have telephones. And the post office -- you can’t even send out a scenic postcard!

            In Hong Kong, almost everyone speaks English, the result of 156 years of British rule. In Kashmir, only the educated class speaks English.

            And Hong Kong is home to about 300,000 Canadians -- many sent as children to Canadian high schools in the 1980s to provide an escape plan for their parents in case the handover to China went badly. According to Global Affairs Canada, Kashmir has just 12 Canadian residents.

            Therefore it’s natural, even inevitable, that our media would concentrate on Hong Kong and ignore Kashmir.