To find a home in one's own Spirits.

Let’s start with a quote from the last piece I wrote:

I think it’s apt for what I have to share today.

“As many people there are in the world, there is an equal or greater number of religions, because everyone has their own interpretation of the teachings they come across.”

In basic, non-Christian terms, a liturgy is like a script for a religious service, the official set of rules for performing a religious ceremony, order of worship, and all processes that make up that infrastructure.

Technically, the word comes from Greek, originally Leitourgia, and according to Nicholas Wolterstorff it can also mean: “In classical Greek the word was used to refer to a service performed by an individual for the benefit of the public, usually at his own expense.[—] Etymologically the word leitourgia comes from two Greek words, leitos and ergon, meaning, respectively, “of the people” and “action.” It meant action for the benefit of the people. A liturgy was a type of public service. [—] In the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, the word leitourgia was regularly borrowed from its Greek civic use and applied, by metaphorical extension, to the kind of service rendered by the priests in the temple.”1

And when I speak of a ‘personal liturgy’ I mean just that: A personal set of organized rules for which one governs spiritual or religious services for one’s own spirits, prescribed by them, for them, for mutual benefit of the steward and the congregation of spirits that walk with them.

Today I saw a note from Jay Versace here on Substack, and a quote from that piece that struck me is as follows: “constantly thinking about how being a black african American may sometimes feel like ur spiritually homeless w no spiritual identity. religion is nothing more than the deification and glorification of a group of peoples history. meaning deities that represent a specific region or group. [—] the idea of having to fly out to visit the “holy land” makes me never feel grounded in the soil im in.”

For many people descended from forced displacement, diaspora, or mixed heritage, the question of “what tradition do I belong to?” rarely has a simple answer. The threads have often been intentionally cut, tangled, or colonized beyond recognition. Some find themselves with fragments; an ancestor’s plight remembered in a grandmother’s song, a dream that shows symbols no one around them can name. Others collect many threads, each from a different origin, none of which feel whole on their own.

In these cases, one cannot simply return to a singular tradition. Instead, one must build a home within the spirits in their line. This creates a spiritual architecture designed in cooperation with the spirits who walk with them. This is what I mean by a “personal liturgy”: not simply an eclectic collage of inherited rites, (I call that nonsense crazy quilting) but a deliberate, living framework of worship and responsibility, formed through direct relationship with one’s ancestral intelligences directly.