on worship

the word ‘worship’ by itself is simply a standard quaker word for that period of time on sunday mornings & committee meetings in which we settle down in our heads & hearts & bodies, getting quiet, maybe opening our selves to revelations from inside & outside of us. 

but like all common quaker terms, ‘worship’ & all our conventional english ‘friendly’ words come from a foreign place 4,000 miles away, soaked in 400 years of imperial english whiteness, that was imposed forcibly on the people of this land, Turtle Island.  ‘worship’ is a statement & act of servitude.  tribes, religions, languages were & still are being pushed aside & intentionally killed off to make room for english words like ‘worship’ to ascend into being THE imperial religious word of religious domination.   as mixedblood lakota, i am good with sitting in peace & quiet with all people, & call all people ‘friends’.  but i am not good with the requirement that we use one imperial anglo-kristian word, modeled in the language of the angloamerican King James Bible, every time we supposed friends of all cultures gather in peace & quiet, a word that serves us today as a creed that we say don’t have. as friends who sit in socially horizontal equality, we should not have to declare or practice servitude to that anglokristian word. 

for the largest part, we here are affilates of some kind to that sect of the Religious Society of Friends that is egalitarian & horizontal in practice, that sits in peace & quiet, that calls itself ‘unprogrammed’, that associates with what we call ‘Friends General Conference’.  seeing the overwhelming imperial whiteness in modern quakerdom, FGC itself saw the need to become actively anti-racist in 2018, and wrote specifically that we quakers need to “Develop a means to examine and change Quaker traditions, language and process developed by European ancestors, to be inclusive of other cultures.“

here it is 7 years later & we nontheists & black & brown & indigenous friends of color have examined the racist purposes of the word ‘light’ among Friends. it is time we also deconstruct & decolonize the word ‘worship’ from its euro-wite judeo-kristian origins. 

we need to examine the word ‘worship’ in relation to its use in imperial english as compared & contrasted with indigenous words in lenape & mohawk & lakota & anishinaabe & diné & & african practices in swahili, arabic, luo, khoisan. monoculturalism among Friends, be it english or kristianity, is racism. 

• worship is the purpose of classism,  classism is the purpose of worship 

we need to examine the word worship in relation to its implicit hierarchy of Other over us, of us being responsible to submit ourselves to the Other in narcissitic practice, aknowledging our unworthiness & Its supreme worthiness. this is not our principle of equality & egalitarianism in all relationships. if we do not doff our hats or tip our heads or call each other reverend or doctor, if we are one with the universe, if we see the good in all things, then we should not be using words that invoke religious classism, of hierarchy of beings of worthiness, of whiteness. 

today we are examining a quaker tradition of english imperial language developed by european ancestors, imposed on this foreign land & peoples of Turtle Island. it is time we as friends change that racist & classist tradition & language to be inclusive of other cultures. 

i think the word ‘worship’ is a nice word, a comforting word, for many people who are groomed to act & speak imperial english, who are groomed to act & be kristian, and who enjoy the privilege of being  insider to imperial white kristianity, and enjoy this friendly echo chamber of traditional anglokristian affirmation. 

but for those of us with older, deeper roots in Turtle Island, and for those descendants of colonizers & settlers who are becoming anti-racist & anti-classist, and for those of us who are deconstructing & decolonizing our friendly religious vocabulary, it is time we  • change quaker traditional language to • be inclusive of other cultures, including nontheism. … let us just say something as simple as ‘sit happens’. 

‘worship’ is racist & classist. as a master’s tool, it has got to go. 

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