Words: Worship

Harvey Gillman introduces a new series in which he offers personal reflections on key words in Quakerism

I love words just as I love silence. In fact, each takes value from the other. A self-declared nontheist Friend at Meeting tells me that if I need to know what a word means, I should simply look in the dictionary. Usually the literal meaning of the word is given first. Sometimes, however, she fails to see the phrase ‘by extension’. The meaning of words often depends on their cultural context and changes as the culture changes. The question underlying these reflections is: can we still use religious vocabulary creatively and imaginatively in a world caught between religious literalism and secular indifference? How far can words be extended before they break?

Liberal theologians, like poets and mystics, tend to work in metaphor (language by extension). At best, they are creative artists exploring new ways of perceiving the world around us. There is nothing new in this. The conflict between literalists and weavers of metaphor goes right back to Greek philosophy. The value of the metaphor in helping us re-see the world, or see it more deeply, goes back at least to Aristotle in his Poetics (330 BC). In the seventeenth century, Puritans wished to return to a pure form of language, which they believed was that spoken by Adam and Eve in Eden. This influenced early Friends with their slogan ‘Let your words be few’ and yet metaphor abounds in early Quaker writing, as in the splendid line of George Fox himself:

…feel the seed of God in you all, which inherits the promise from God; which seed is atop of the serpent’s head.

Metaphors were acceptable if they were biblical. They were not to be ornaments; they were to be revelations. Nevertheless, a bias against metaphor persists among Friends in the name of plain speech. When I called my book A Light that is Shining the title was criticised as ‘unQuakerly’, in spite of the subtitle: an introduction to the Quakers. And what could be more biblical, and at the same time more universal, than light?

The metaphor and the simile point to a new relationship – unless they become a cliché or a slogan. The first person to compare love to a rose, it is said, was a genius; the second was a fool who could think of nothing better. Do religious metaphors, then, act as openings onto reality or are they unthinking slogans to close our eyes? Are they opaque or transparent? Do they give a sense of a deeper dimension, a more profound way of attending to the world, than a purely secular way of speaking?

When we do undertake a revision of our Quaker faith & practice, we shall need to reflect what we feel the function of the book to be, and that itself will reflect the sort of Society we are.

How can we use words creatively knowing, as we do, that words are inadequate? How can we use them in order to explore, both with ourselves and others new to us, the nature and the discoveries of our collective spiritual journeys? How, with these inadequate tools, can we offer hospitality to a whole range of human experience and longing that is emotional and intuitive as well as rational and intellectual?

Worship

The word ‘worship’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon. It is the recognition of the worth of something, to which honour and esteem is then given. As God was seen to be the most worthy, he (sic) was given the greatest worship. But involved in this paying honour to the other is often an abasement of the self – you are all, we are nothing.

In a number of Latin-based languages ‘worship’ is translated by words related to the English ‘adore’ – the root being ad-orare – ‘to open one’s mouth in prayer to’. German has anbeten ‘to pray to’ or verehren ‘to give honour’. In Old Testament Hebrew, the act of worship avodah also means ‘work or service’ (the other word used in Hebrew means ‘to bow down before’). The idea here is of a transcendental monarch to whom honour is paid, duty must be paid and obedience must be given. But by extension, that is, metaphorically, ‘to worship’ comes to mean to ‘give value to anything one holds dear’: another human being, a system of values, money or whatever idol is popular at the time. In these examples the verb is used transitively, that is it has an object. In English, the word is also used intransitively from the very beginning of the eighteenth century, where it means to take part in an act of worship as in ‘I worship in Brighton Meeting’.

In Epistle 262, George Fox, quoting from the gospel of John 4:24, writes: God, who is a spirit, and the God of truth, seeks that men should worship him in the truth; and so every man and woman must come to truth in the inward parts, and to the spirit of God within themselves.

Here it is the form of paying honour and giving worth which is emphasised (the original Greek word for worship in this passage from John’s gospel derives from two words meaning ‘kiss the hands towards’). For Fox it was the manner of worship that differentiated Friends from other false forms and apostasies, as he would describe them. God outside in the world was recognised by the light of God within, for it was the same light that shone overall.

What worship required was an act of reverential quiet listening to the voice within, an attentiveness to the light of God (or Christ). Today, among some British and other Friends of the quiet tradition, there has been a shift away from the outwardness of divinity, especially expressed in traditional Christian terms, towards that of God within, or even that of good, or conscience (which, by the way, are not synonymous!). In this case, can we still use the word worship with integrity and authenticity? Do we worship the good? Do we worship conscience? Perhaps that is why many Friends of our tradition tend to use the word intransitively, without an object. I am worshipping, but do not ask me what!

But when we meet for Meeting for Worship, are we not involved at all in an act of finding worth and attending to it? Can our worship lead not to self-abasement, but to an encounter in depth, an affirmation of the journey within, which we each undertake, leading to a sense of the interconnectedness of self and other, an awareness of the sacredness of reality itself, an inward journey that leads to a particular form of attentive living in the world? If we reject the heightened use of all spiritual references, do we not become yet another secular organisation with a worldly agenda and genteel ways of doing business and serving tea: tourists and not pilgrims? Why a Religious Society of Friends at all?

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