Liturgy in Postcolonial Perspectives: Only One is Holy

Choosing a Heritage 147 20. Sandro Mezzadra and Federico Rahola, “La condición postcolonial,” Estudios postcoloniales: Ensayos fundamentales, comp. Sandro Mezzadra (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2008), 271. 21. Mario Aguilar, “Postcolonial African Theology in Kabasele Lumbala,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 303. 22. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–94, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 355. 23. Russell, “God, Gold,” 41. 24. Emmanuel Lartey, “Postcolonial African Pastoral Theology: Rituals of Remembrance, Cleansing, Healing, and Re-Connection,” Journal of Pastoral Theology 21.2 (2011):11–12. 25. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. 26. Ibid., 4. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. Voolstra, Menno, 46.

11 Liturgy with Your Feet: The ROMARIA D A TERRA Pilgrimage in Paraná , Brazil : Reappr opriating Liturgical Rites in the Quest for Life Spaces and Their Liberation* Júlio Cézar Adam An Uncommon Liturgical Praxis: The ROMARIA DA TERRA This chapter is based on field research1 analyzing a special form of pilgrimage in Brazil: the Romaria da Terra and the social and political function of this liturgical praxis in the struggle for land in Brazil. From this analysis, we try to obtain contributions for reflections on liturgy in the Latin American context. Romaria da Terra was conceived and became reality during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) in southern Brazil,2 with a direct relation to liberation theology, which also was coming up at that time; the aim of the Romaria was to question social injustice in the rural areas, to support the so-called Miserables of the Earth, 3 that is, indigenous people, squatters, small farmers, landless people, farm employees, and people disowned by new dams being built for hydroelectric power. This new form of liturgical praxis was from the beginning made up of a mixture of elements from traditional pilgrimage, protest marches, and new forms of spirituality around the base communities. In all cases, two aspects came together: faith and politics. This article deals specifically with the Romaria da Terra in the State of Paraná.4

150 Júlio Cézar Adam The phenomenon of Romaria da Terra and its liturgical nature can only be understood against the backdrop of land conflict (that has been) going on for 500 years of Brazilian history. Concentrating land in the hands of a few5 brings social tragedy to thousands of families (indigenous people, former slaves, squatters, landholders disowned by new, and small farmers), which involves a sort of exclusion that affects rural and urban areas all over the country. During those five hundred years, physical space has been expropriated, which means property accumulation (for some), on the one hand. On the other hand, people try to resist and hold the space to which they belong.6 Space as an abstract category here means concrete places where people live, their culture, traditions, and their own bodies. This quest for space to which you belong7 has to do with what we call resistance. For the miserables of the Earth, it is a very concrete place: your home turf, the land you live on, where you plant, get your livelihood, have a relationship with nature, with God, with other people; this is where you create culture. From the beginning, this resistance and struggle for land has been marked by mystical and religious features. Space, place, and land have symbolic and religious dimensions.8 Hundreds of conflicts all over Latin America have been defined by rural, indigenous, and black cultures, based on symbolical, mystical, and religious motifs.9 The liturgical structure of the pilgrimage is quite similar all over Brazil. Generally, three larger sections of the phenomenon can be distinguished: (1) initial gathering and a marked moment in which the march is started; (2) the procession or march as such; (3) closing feast. The details and liturgical variations of the pilgrimage depend on the specific Regional Pastoral Land Commission (CPT). If the local CPT works closely together with the local diocese or with some sanctuary, elements of traditional pilgrimages or at least traditions of local popular Catholicism are used in the pilgrimage. If the local CPT has some independence in relation to the diocese, the liturgical structure is rather loose and offers more opportunities for ecumenical and interreligious elements. This (latter situation) is the case in the Romaria da Terra in the State of Paraná. In effect, most of the liturgical effort is in the hands of people whose profession is neither theological nor liturgical. This means liturgy is conceived, molded, prepared, conducted, and evaluated in teams made up of pastoral agents (some of them theologians) and of other interested participants. These Romarias da Terra, just as traditional pilgrimages do, gather together a great number of people. They are motivated by the activities of CPT: they involve groups of landless people,10 organizations of small farmers (squatters, migrant farm workers, peasants, and other organizations in the rural area); indigenous people; rural base communities;

Liturgy with Your Feet 151 organizations of black people and women; or simply people identified with the “church of the poor,” like the churches in the urban base communities.11 Other people involved are those workers and young people engaged in pastoral work; and political parties and NGOs, among others. A Romaria can involve between 5,000 and 70,000 people. Participants organize in groups or communities. Many prepare several months before the pilgrimage, using materials dealing with the chosen subject, distributed by CPT. Many are activists who often get involved in protest marches; some have felt government repression personally, clashing with police, getting beaten up, and/or jailed; some have lost partners in confrontations and ambushes. This experience of frequent social-political confrontation has to some degree become part of the movements’ culture around Romaria da Terra. The duration of a Romaria differs from place to place. They usually last an entire day, but in some places they have lasted three to seven days or even three full weeks. To this day, 25 Romarias da Terra have been celebrated in the State of Paraná under the guidance of CPT-Paraná. They happen once a year and last one day (a Sunday in July or August). With approximately 15,000 participants, Romaria da Terra is the biggest concentration of “popular organizations” in that state, and is perhaps the biggest gathering linked to the church, although the media and the official church avoid mentioning numbers. The vast majority of people come from Catholic congregations; a significant number come from Lutheran communities, along with a few from other Protestant or Pentecostal denominations. ROMARIA DA TERRA, Liturgical Praxis, and the Quest for Space Romaria da Terra has been a liturgical celebration even though in its essence it is neither part of nor the result of a liturgical movement; it also does not have the intention of being a starting point for liturgical renewal. The fact that social organizations receive guidance from a church activity called a pastoral, in this case the CPT, is not new in Brazil. The fact, however, that these organizations have decided to celebrate together shows the Romaria is something special in liturgy. The relation between political struggle and liturgy in the Romarias is perhaps no great discovery. But the relations and the mechanisms at work in this collaboration between liturgy and struggles for land in the context of Romarias da Terra surely involve and/or constitute something new in liturgical research. What is the effect of liturgy in Romaria da Terra on the people involved? What is liturgy’s role in getting this pilgrimage underway? How far does this liturgical praxis reflect the cultural context of the miserables of the Earth, how far does Romaria da Terra reinforce resistance, identity, and the struggle

152 Júlio Cézar Adam for land in everyday life? How does the quest for space in everyday life relate to spaces in this pilgrimage? Why do participants engage in a pilgrimage, a procession, instead of some other kind of liturgical celebration? Finally, why do the land activists stage a liturgical celebration, not a protest march? What are the limits between liturgical celebration and instrumental, doctrinal means within a Romaria? All of these issues, as well as the question about the function of worship and liturgy, become crucial when doing liturgical science in the Latin American context, at a time of recurrent abuses in worship and liturgy.12 Liturgy and Political Resistance This research does not aim primarily and directly to assess theological possibilities and criteria for the relationship between liturgy and political resistance,13 but to analyze why and how this relation happens in the context of Romaria da Terra. The focus here is on understanding what the liturgical actions do to people on the one hand; and on the other hand, to understand the way in which it affects people in the case of Romaria da Terra and in the specific context of struggle for land. Liturgical anthropology shows that in a society structured on class inequality, liturgy defines clear positions in the conflict between unequal powers. In these societies, liturgical rituals have political relevance and can be instrumentalized by one of the parties. Liturgical actions can be abused as an instrument of dominance, attending to the interests of the big fish; and they can also be a symbol and reinforcement of resistance by subcultures. In a society characterized by domination of one social class over others, the power struggle will also be felt in the symbolic practices whose function is to legitimate, communicate and reinforce the social and political system. Each class will do its utmost in order to, consciously or unconsciously, legitimate and communicate its vision and so overcome the other classes and reinforce its own power. Willy-nilly liturgy has an ideological role and will reinforce one or other side of classes and conflict. It will either reinforce classes in power which have a vested interest in keeping the status quo, or it will strengthen classes desiring social change. [ . . . ] If liturgy reflects a tranquil and positive image of social and political reality, it will make citizens accept the situation pacifically and become integrated into society. If it shows criticism of reality, it will arouse indignation, protest, fighting, hope, expressing desire and need for social and political change. This ideological function is not visible to the naked eye; it is not explicit in words; it subtly pervades all of celebration, for instance in the relationship between ministers and people, which can be one of power or of service; it may be present in the tone of voice, which may or not suggest sacred/profane dualism, may induce passivity; in musical language, in the language of ecological texts, in Bible readings chosen, in the social context in which liturgy is carried out.14

Liturgy with Your Feet 153 Celebration becomes a laboratory for counterculture. The gospel’s imprisonment or liberty also find expression in liturgical signs. Worship can be celebrated in such a way that Christ becomes prisoner of a given culture, sometimes even of a cultural layer or of a specific group culture. On the other hand, when it gives room to Christ’s free word and action and to his protest, it can be experienced as a possible different (counter)culture. The function of liturgical anthropology as criticism of culture and society then achieves a new theological quality: while describing and interpreting worship also as a (counter)cultural happening, it stimulates congregations to formulate in their worship those (counter)signs, without which eschatological protest cannot become culturally efficient.15 Behind every Romaria da Terra, these decisive social conflicts can be perceived: on the one hand, there are political and economic models which for their own reasons do not see, or don’t want to see, the exclusion of certain groups, thus perpetuating a relationship of power. On the other hand, there are the impoverished peasants who are not able, or do not want, to be part of that development model of the market championed by the ruling power. Through their organization within CPT, the miserables of the earth have a grasp of the social conflict in which they are living. Using liturgical symbols and procedures of a countercultural feast, of which Romaria da Terra is one instance, these organized groups are enabled to step beyond the intricate mechanism of power and exclusion in which they find themselves. Protest and politics are part of Romaria da Terra, but one can detect at least two features of politics: one is the politics of confrontation, related to party politics or the organization of the landless people. The other is a mystical politics directly related to what I call the quest for space. It has a symbolic nature, having to do with working on the land, with nature, with faith in the God of Earth and Life, a politics of everyday life. Both features can be detected at Romaria da Terra, the second being clearly predominant, mainly in recent years. There is a margin of indetermination at Romaria da Terra, establishing a field of dispute and negotiation between the religious and political discourses. Social problems and confrontations taking place in the countryside, their victories and defeats are ritualized in worship, translated into biblical religious discourse of liberation and martyrdom. This allows us to talk of a reinvention of pilgrimage by militant Catholicism which, while being political, also sacralizes politics.16 The liturgy of Romaria da Terra has an important role in the process of resistance and liberation of the miserables of the Earth, not primarily because of their “confrontation policy,” although it is subtly or explicitly

154 Júlio Cézar Adam present in celebration; but because liturgy as such is a symbolic and collective experience of liberation and feasting, it connects people to something greater, which encompasses everyday life and transcends it. Mysticism is present, brought by the pilgrims themselves, because the practice of pilgrimage is intrinsic to them. For them, this pilgrimage is a religious and festive happening beyond suspicion. Thus liturgy makes the exhausting toil of daily life into a meaningful activity, into a social and political struggle, even though with festive and playful ingredients, but always facing what everyday life entails.17 Liturgical action conveys to the struggle of the people the dimensions of spirituality and festivity, as well as of faith’s playful, symbolic, and physical operations. It enriches and complements the effort of resistance with mysticism, with the mística of the Earth, of nature, of the memory of places and times. Liturgy and the Quest for Space In the case of Romaria da Terra, this force of resistance comes from an intimate relationship between the daily struggle for land and the celebration of liturgical rites. In one day, Romaria da Terra ritualizes and symbolizes what its participants experience the whole year long. The quest for space in everyday life becomes, in this pilgrimage, a quest for space by means of a liturgical festival. This exchange has five intimately related aspects: discovering a place; the reconstruction of memory; moving and walking; a subversive festival; and a way to participate. 1. Discovering places: villages, small towns, plazas and roads, fields and plantations, occupied land, local cooperatives, and marginalized groups unknown to the general public are discovered throughout the day by thousands of involved people. People living in a given place are visited and become the focus of everybody’s attention, even of the media. Their culture and their mores are shown in artistic presentations. You can taste their food. Pilgrims act in solidarity with local people because they come to know their reality, they pray and celebrate with them. God is brought into that place by means of that big happening of pilgrimage, or God is simply rediscovered in places of misery and conquest. It is the discovery of a Deus Absconditus being revealed, not in the glory of official liturgy, but in the Kyrie of very real places belonging to people. That place becomes transparent, it becomes the platform for visualizing a new society. The place to meet God is the naked life of local people. 2. Reconstruction of memory: the place you are is the place of memory. This happens by means of communications and denunciations, stage acts and rites calling to memory those forgotten stories, which are

Liturgy with Your Feet 155 narrated and reinvented. Injustice in the backcountry is dramatized, people who died in the struggle are invoked to make themselves “present.” A model of working on the land as it used to be done in generations past is maintained by memory as an alternative model for today. Memory in this case is not a plain mental exercise of remembering, but has to do with integral life—the body, mind, and spirit of people in a given place. Therefore this memory is reconstructed by using symbols, metaphors, colors, posters and banners, dancing, and singing. Pilgrims and local people go onstage (grab the scene) and tell the others and themselves who they are. Every Romaria in the past, every theme and place in its history, must be mentioned and shown once again. Biblical memory encompasses all other forms of memory: liberation in the Exodus, prophetic protest against social injustice, the good news of Jesus Christ, sharing in the life of the first congregations, as well as the apocalyptic hope of John in Patmos, are of great importance for the feast of the little ones. 3. Moving and walking: visiting a place means getting underway, moving, going, pulling up roots. This movement belongs to the nature of pilgrimage. Four kinds of movement are part of it: (a) Leaving home, the group, the community, and parting, traveling to the place of pilgrimage. (b) Walking during the pilgrimage, when you leave the meeting point to go toward a second special place, the place of festival. (c) Ritual walking during the whole pilgrimage amid the public, walking toward the stage (or stage-truck) and back again into the public. 4. Going back home after the pilgrimage: through ritualized walking in the pilgrimage, the “quest for space” in the organizations’ life is reenacted, one goes through that quest again. Freeways and roads— places of the provisional, of passage, or non-places,18 but also the premises of protesting and marching, or the place of survival, where the Indigenous live in provisional tents together with expropriated peasants—are dealt with in the pilgrimage as a symbol of quest, search, and resistance. For many pilgrims, roads belong to everyday life, are part of their non-situation, of their condition as dispossessed of their place. 5. Subversive festival: Romaria da Terra is often defined as the festival of the little ones19 or as the Authentic Feast, because in it the poor can celebrate their misery and their hope. Feast and play pervade and connect all dimensions of this pilgrimage and free it from possible manipulations. Festival occasions enlarge enormously the scope and intensity of man’s relationship with the past. They elevate his sense of personal worth by making him a part of an epic. Fantasy offers an endless range of future

156 Júlio Cézar Adam permutations. It inevitably escalates people’s sense of powers and possibilities. Therefore, the cultivation of celebration and imagination is crucial to religion and to man himself, if the biblical appreciation of his status (“a little lower than the angels”) has any validity. Perhaps this is why the observance and revelry, rituals, and myth have nearly always been so central to religion, and why they seem to be making a comeback today.20 For people in search of space, pilgrimage as a festival finds and opens vision for possible places. Dancing, laughing, drinking and eating together, balloons and fireworks, shows and theater, are part of the Romaria festival. It is a subversive festival, because through its festive and recreational dimensions, a space is created in which participants can laugh and joke about their own situation, where they can lampoon and relativize political and ecclesiastical power, the status quo.21 The form of participation: the way a Romaria is prepared and celebrated is democratic. Just as in the everyday life of the organizations, the people involved are called to be protagonists in their own history and fate, and celebration is put into the hands of those celebrating. Liturgy is handed over to the community, to people, thus enhancing what already is being practiced in the church base communities, opening up one more space for the exercise of autonomy. The peasants build up the Romaria da Terra even when there is some kind of assistance from pastoral agents or clergy. For all these reasons, the liturgical practice of Romaria da Terra engenders the vision of possibility in its participants, like the Feast of Fools. By means of concrete occupation and appropriation of places, through the repeated experience of memory, symbolic walking, festive spirits, and the feeling of belonging to this festival, participants ready to change the world return home, to their communities, organizations, or movements.22 “When our inner light is almost extinguishing, we go to the Romaria and come back recharged.”23 Consequences for Liturgy and Worship Romarias da Terra in Brazil are one of many examples all over the world of liturgical practice being intrinsically related to social and political conflicts of different social groups. Analyzing this relationship is the focus of this research, which intends to understand the consequences such a relationship has for the church’s liturgy. Some of those consequences are: 1. With or without the support and consent of the church as an institution, people celebrate in a different manner. Mainly popular cultures appropriate liturgical elements and celebrate in their own way and with their own aims, which go beyond the institution’s liturgical standard, with all

Liturgy with Your Feet 157 possible losses and gains for the kind of liturgical science that considers what is correct or proper, the ordo. Romaria da Terra is a good example of how particular people, the miserables of the earth, have reinvented worship, pilgrimage, and procession. Beyond that, Romaria da Terra creates a space that is free from institutional tutelage and from liturgical tradition, choosing what seems indispensable to its participants for liturgy. The people create a free space for the relationship between politics and celebration to occur; for the integration of forms and elements from indigenous and Afro religiosity and from popular culture; for inculturation of local mores, of characteristic chanting, celebrating, praying, and interpreting of the Bible. 2. Liturgy and daily life are intertwined: J. J. von Allmen compares worship to the “heart of the community, where the community acquires new strength for life during the week beginning, and where the community returns tired from the world, the next Sunday.”24 It is a beautiful metaphor that illustrates the essential relationship between daily life and worship. Context is decisive: all worship both celebrates and denounces the world it is in and sends its community back to the world’s context. Worship reflects—in form and content—the world it is in. When life is hectic, the liturgy is also shaped in a hectic, sometimes even aggressive and provocative, fashion. If life is provisional, looking for something, then liturgy will be a peregrination, a Romaria. The world that comes up in worship is not at all abstract, but presents its members’ life and struggle in all its crudeness. The Pilgrimage of the Earth would not be a celebration of resistance and liberation if the context of its members offered no resistance and offered resistance. In the case of the Romaria, there is no liberation in celebration as such. No worship will change the world if during the week its members do not take anything experienced in worship into everyday life, and if they don’t bring anything of that life back to worship. 3. Worship is attached to places: first of all, churches belong to their locality. Studies by Lutheran World Federation (LWF)25 about worship and culture have extensively dealt with the importance of culture and location for the worship of the Church. For displaced people, much like the thousands of peasants and indigenous peoples in Brazil, local culture and a particular way of life are perhaps their only solid ground, the only place in which God is still revealed. It is the assurance that God is there. The struggle for land is not just a particular struggle for social change, not just a strategy within a historical project (the achievement of a socialist society or the Kingdom, and so on). Its aim is to release space in the form of places where you belong. This liberation of space is more than a means; it is already an end. This is the meaning of the slogan, “Land is Life.” The goal of this struggle, the land, the space, the places occupied, the camps,

158 Júlio Cézar Adam must have theological density; the space where the struggle takes place must somehow be qualified by the holy.27 In the case of Romaria, the visited and celebrated place is more than a mere geographical location. The place has to do with a way of life in the countryside, with the mystical relationship with the land, and with the liberation of the spaces that guarantee life. Where people have been displaced or their space has been taken, rites of the Romaria da Terra create a basis from which it is possible to visualize the missing place. Liturgy constructs the place. 4. Related to the dimension of place is the dimension of memory. Wherever people were deprived of their grounds and are seeking to recover these places these places and spaces, memory becomes an “agency for survival.”28 The dimension of anamnesis in worship helps us say who we were, who we are, and who we will be. Memory helps us identify and celebrate not only the incarnation of God in Christ centuries ago, but also this same incarnation that happens every day and in different places, even in the midst of struggle for land and within utopian hope. Memory in Romaria da Terra means a real update of the past and future through liturgical celebrations. Worship reflects a community of memory and storytelling and creates a space for understanding how those who came before us experienced life and faith. These experiences are voiced when we sing hymns, when we use their prayers and connect to them when we praise God. They are with us and are celebrated when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. The history of salvation includes the people when we remember them while telling the history . . . The story of salvation also includes those who are to come after us. As memory—and only as memory—the future grows, hope grows. Worship as a community of memory and storytelling thus also forestalls forgetting the future, the reckless abuse of resources on behalf of deceitful interests. Worship lends a voice to the unborn, takes them into account in its prayers, keeps them as still vacant spaces in the community of the Body of Christ.29 Conclusion Understanding the sociopolitical purpose and function of worship from a case like Romaria da Terra in Paraná, and the concrete struggle for land underlying it, is very productive for liturgical studies. On the other hand, it is not immediately obvious how we are to make a straightforward application of these findings to the church’s Sunday worship and liturgy.

Liturgy with Your Feet 159 The biggest lesson of the pilgrimage is the fact that the pilgrims have engendered a way of celebrating that which meets their needs and speaks to their day-to-day life, their everyday struggle and hope for another possible world. Once a year, they experience a dynamic change between daily life and celebration, between the real and the symbolic, between struggle and feast, letting both influence, strengthen, and purify each other. After peregrination, pilgrims return to a context that is no longer the same one they left. The celebration of pilgrimage has now “contaminated” the context with its liturgical and mystical dimension. The title of this research intends to express precisely this feat in a liturgy of the feet. It is not only about Romaria being a walking liturgy. The mention of feet here is intended to indicate the fact that the starting point is inverted, that is, that liturgy is not something you do solely with your head, with ideas, with liturgical calendars, with musical notes, with tradition. Liturgy is done with all of these things, but its first impulse is to find out what moves people in their daily life, in their quest for what is missing, in the feet also dancing for the victory in things God has done and that God continues to do in the midst of poor people, among the least and the last ones. In the case of the Church’s worship, it seems that an alliance of rich liturgical tradition and the congregation’s feet, that is, those things that move people, what they seek day-to-day as a group as well as individuals, that which makes each congregation a unique community, will provide a fruitful exchange between the tradition and people and create a huge party every Sunday. Notes * Translated from Portuguese by Walter O. Schlupp, [email protected]. 1. This is a summary of the main research elements of the author’s doctoral thesis finished in 2004 at Hamburg University, Germany, under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Peter Cornehl. 2. The first Romaria da Terra, then called Missão da Terra, was held in 1978 in the State of Rio Grande do Sul as a homage to cultural resistance by the indigenous people of that region. 3. Term from Roy May, Los pobres de la tierra: Hacia una pastoral de la tierra (San José: DEI, 1986). 4. Paraná is one of the three states making up Brazil’s Southern region. 5. 3.8 million units out of 4.6 million total rural properties are smaller than 100 hectares. Half of the landowners own less than 10 hectares. This means land concentration in Brazil is one of the most extreme worldwide. A. Jacobs, Es ist dunkel aber ich singe (Erlangen: Bkv, 1992), 26. 6. V. Westhelle, “Os sinais dos lugares: As dimensões esquecidas,” in Peregrinação, ed. M. Dreher (São Leopoldo, 1990), p. 256. 7. Ibid., 255.

160 Júlio Cézar Adam 8. “That the object of this struggle, land, space, occupied places, campgrounds have theological relevance; that the space where struggle is going on be somehow quantified by the holy.” Ibid., 255. 9. See Marcelo Barros de Souza and J. L. Caravias, Theologie der Erde (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1990), 62. It is only since 1950 that political elements have been consciously used in movements of rural resistance. Cf. J. de Souza Martins, Os camponeses e a política no Brasil (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1995), 10. 10. The Movement of Landless People (MST) is a sociopolitical movement that gathers thousands of families across the country. The policy of the MST is characterized by concrete actions and confrontations, mainly in the form of occupation of large properties. This movement has strong ties to the Pilgrimages of the Earth. 11. A 1995 survey by the PR-CPT showed that 51 percent of the pilgrims were identified as urban, which shows how the land issue also involves city dwellers. 12. See Ione Buyst, “Teologia e liturgia na perspectiva da América Latina,” in Eu sou o que sou, ed. C. Favreto and Ivanir A. Rampon (Passo Fundo: Berthier, 2008), 38–76. 13. Balbinot deals exhaustively with this aspect. Egídio Balbinot, Liturgia e política: A dimensão política da liturgia nas romarias da Terra de Santa Catarina (Chapecó: Grifos, 1998). See also Michael Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Sheffield/Oakville: Equinox, 2011). 14. Ione Buyst, Como estudar liturgia: Princípios de ciência litúrgica (São Paulo: Paulinas, 1990), 53. 15. K.-H. Bieritz, “Fundamentos antropológicos,” in Manual de ciência litúrgica, vol. 1, ed. Hans-Christoph Schmidt-Lauber, Michael Meyer-Blanck, and Kar-Heinrich Bieritz (São Leopoldo: EST/Sinodal, 2011), 152–153. See also studies of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) on worship and culture; particularly the articles by Gordon W. Lathrop and J. Anskar Chupungo, who have richly discussed the countercultural impetus of worship and liturgy. Anita Staufer, ed., Christlicher Gottesdienst: Einheit in kultureller Vielfalt (Genf/Hannover, LWB/VELKD, 1996). (Also translated into Spanish). 16. C. A. Steil, O sertão das romarias: Estudo antropológico sobre o santuário de Bom Jesus da Lapa (Petrópolis : Vozes, 1996), 285. 17. G. M. Martin, Fest und Alltag: Bausteine zu einer Theorie des Festes (Stuttgart/ Berlin/Köln/Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1973). 18. M. Augé, Los no lugares: Espacios del anonimato (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2000). 19. Marcelo Barros and Artur Peregrino, A Festa dos pequenos: Romarias da Terra no Brasil (São Paulo: Paulus, 1996). 20. Cox, Harvey, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Berlin: Harper and Row, 1972), 21. On liturgy and play (Spiel), see also Ernst Lange, Predigen als Beruf: Aufsätze zu Homiletik, Liturgie und Pfarramt (München: Kaiser, 1987), 83–95. 21. J. Moltmann, Die ersten Freigelassenen der Schöpfung: Versuche über die Freude an der Freiheit und das Wohlgefallen am Spiel (München: Kaiser, 1971). 22. Through this intense dialogue and play with day-to-day life, the romaria creates space for guidance, expression, assurance, and integration. Peter Cornehl has been investigating these four elements that are visible in this exchange

Liturgy with Your Feet 161 between everyday life and the celebration of romaria, which in his theory is about the function of worship. 23. Metaphor used by a woman during a meeting observed by the author. 24. J. J. von Allmen, O culto cristão: Teologia e prática (São Paulo: Aste, 1968), 60. 25. Anita Staufer (ed.), Christlicher Gottesdienst: Einheit in kultureller Vielfalt (Genf/Hannover: LWB/VELKD, 1996). 26. Displacement as such has nothing to do specifically with Third World poverty. Displacement and local identity loss nowadays are present in diverse cultures worldwide. A further study by LWF has focused precisely on this local dimension, the loss of places and its theological dimension: The theological significance of the question of land or territory can be framed precisely in the conjunction between the place that provides for the sustenance of life and the animated space in which the spiritual dimensions of existence, the space of the sacred, the space of feast, can flourish. V. Westhelle, “Re(li)gion: The lord of History and the Illusory Space,” in Region & Religion: Land, Territory and Nation from a Theological Perspective, ed. V. Mortensen (Geneva: LWF, 1994), 85. 27. Westhelle, “Os sinais dos lugares,” 255. 28. James F. White, “Introduction to Christian worship: 3rd Edition: Revised and Enlarged,” (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2001), 142–143. 29. K.-H. Bieritz, “Heimat Gottesdienst?” inTheologisches geschenkt: Festschrift für M. Josuttis, ed. C. Bizer, J. Cornelius-Bundschuh, and H.-M. Gutmann (Bovenden: Foedus, 1996), 265–266.

Part IV O ceanian, Asian, and Asian American Perspectives

12 A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK = HE KARAKIA MIHINARE O AOTEAROA: A Study in Postcolonial Liturgy Storm Swain “Liturgy describes the People of God. Liturgy expresses who we believe we are in the presence of God. Liturgy reveals the God whom we worship. Liturgy reflects our mission.”1 So reads a part of the introductory section, “A Multitude of Voices,” in A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare O Aotearoa. If one makes one’s way into almost any Anglican Church in New Zealand, one may pick up this prayer book and prepare to participate in the liturgical expression of “the People of God” in that place.2 Like most parts of the global Anglican Communion, the expression of the church in New Zealand is unified by the use of a book of common prayer. However, one need not even open the cover to notice that this prayer book is a unique expression of the voice of at least two distinctive peoples who worship in a common way. Its title proclaims the biculturality that is reflected both in the text and the practice of the liturgy. The latter, He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa, is not a subtitle for A New Zealand Prayer Book, but is part of the full title that expresses a complex cultural identity where the ‘land of the long white cloud,’ is named in two ways, together. As such, it is an expression of what it is to be a people of God in relationship within a complex space that both privileges the contextuality of the first peoples and socially marginalizes them within the colonial legacy of the Anglo-centrism of the later settler peoples. This cultural dialogue of privilege and marginalization, however, has led to a creative and life-giving space where A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare O Aotearoa (NZPB = HKMOA) can be seen as an excellent example of postcolonial liturgy. It reflects how colonialism has “in-scribed” liturgy and practice since the first missionaries, how cultural

166 Storm Swain engagement has “de-scribed”3 liturgy in the desire for both liturgy that more accurately reflects a country with a treaty between the ‘people of the land’ and those who have come after, and how the people of God in this place have “re-scribed” a prayer book that is a life-giving “third way” that is more than a product of the former but an attestation to the spirit of both the peoples who now reside in the land and the God they worship. Here, to use Luke Strongman’s words, “post-colonialism is perhaps better conceived of as an articulation of a plurality of ‘centres’, as a re-inscription of a multiplicity of emergent identities. Thus we are not so much engaged on a project of de-scribing empire, as re-inscribing its hybridized offspring.”4 The “multiciplicity of voices” within this arguably “hybridized offspring” of the prayer book, emerging out of the bicultural commitment of the church, gives a textuality of liturgical expression and practice that both expresses and critiques what it is to be a postcolonial people of God, which can be instructive for those seeking to engage in similar ventures in their own contexts. NZPB = HKMOA states, “It is our hope that the use of these services will enable us to worship God in our own authentic voice, and to affirm our identity as the people of God in Aotearoa New Zealand.”5 Jenny Plane Te Paa, former head of Te Rau Kahikatea, the Maori “strand” of the only Anglican theological college in New Zealand, affirms this model thus: “As the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia continues to come of age as a post-colonial church committed to honoring ethnic diversity, A New Zealand Prayer Book offers in its deep structure a globally unique and influential template.”6 A postcolonial reading of the New Zealand context has to take into account the complexities of a bicultural country. It is not simply a product of what Paul Meredith describes as “cultural politics in Aotearoa/ New Zealand concentrated and contested around the bi-nary of Maori (the colonized) or Pakeha (the coloniser), oversimplified and essentialized” around “dichotomous categories of ‘us/them’, ‘either/or’,” but a “far more critical perspective of bicultural politics in New Zealand that rethinks our assumptions about culture and identity from an ‘us-them’ dualism to a mutual sense of ‘both/and’” that “must acknowledge and negotiate not only difference but affinity.”7 New Zealand has the blessing of being, in a sense, colonized by two peoples. The prayer book notes, “The Lord’s song has been sung in this twice-discovered land since before Samuel Marsden first preached the Gospel on that Christmas Day in 1814 in Oihi Bay.”8 Although historical dating is difficult, anthropological research and the oral traditions of the Maori peoples indicate that Aotearoa was first discovered sometime in the thirteenth century by peoples from East Polynesia.9 One version of the oral tradition of the Maori legend of Kupe tells of him and his wife, Hine-te-Aparangi, and family chasing a giant octopus for weeks across

A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK 167 fishing grounds to kill it, and discovering a beautiful new land, whose snowcapped mountains looked like a long white cloud when seen from a great distance by an oceangoing canoe on the water. Like similar colonial histories that often name the first sailing ships, the Maori oral tradition of several tribes traces back the patterns of immigration to seven large seagoing canoes (waka) that brought the first peoples to the new land from the unknown Hawaiiki. The colonial history of Europeans settlers has less poetic origins, some six hundred years later. The first colonial settlers came from the newly colonized Sydney, Australia, and were soon augmented by sealers and whalers. A steady trade was kept up between the Australian city and the islands of New Zealand, which by the 1820s included muskets, which would be used in intertribal warfare, and diseases that would be equally devastating to the indigenous Maori population. Less than 20 years after the Ngapuhi chief Ruatara invited Samuel Marsden to sail from Sydney as a missionary, the secretary to the Church Missionary Society would be sending an appeal from 13 Maori chiefs to the Crown to become the “friend and guardian of these islands,” to forestall continued armed aggression by other Maori tribes, landgrabs by settlers, possible annexation by France, and to promote general law and order in a country with active trade.10 British colonization in New Zealand was carried out in a different fashion than it was in Australia, America, and many of the African nations, taking the shape of a treaty signed between the Crown and many (but not all) of the Maori tribes. This affirmation of tribal authority, and the desire to protect land (perhaps for the benefit of the Crown itself), left a legacy that would be returned to at the time of the writing of A New Zealand Prayer Book; a legacy that would bring to fruition an authentic partnership that was not always apparent in the years immediately following the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, when the crown interpreted the treaty in terms of sovereignty, not partnership. The late Rt. Rev. Sir Paul Reeves described the partnership set up by the Treaty as a partnership between the “people of the land,” the tangata whenua, the Maori, and the Crown representing the manuhiri, visitors/ guests, all those who came afterward, which affirmed “full chieftanship of lands, settlements and properties.” For Reeves, this included not only land and fisheries, but also a way of life that included education, governance, health care, and so on. Despite the land wars and systematic oppression that followed, through legislation that would deny the Maori way of life (language, tribal healers, education) and legal rulings such as that in 1877, which declared the treaty a “simple nullity” signed by “primitive barbarians,” the Treaty would lay a foundation of biculturalism that is the root of New Zealand’s self-understanding today. Here, postcolonialism has the context of an ethical commitment to the Treaty which

168 Storm Swain sees New Zealand not simply as a great melting pot of indigenous people, Anglo and European settlers, and later immigrants from Asian, European, and Polynesian countries, but a bicultural commitment to the Maori as the first people, and all those who follow afterward as manuhiri (guests). In this context, we see postcolonialism isn’t simply the age that comes after the age of colonial imperialism marked by the expansionism of the British Empire, but a new way of being in relationship. Paul Meredith notes, “Here postcolonial doesn’t mean ‘they’ have gone home. They are here to stay, indeed some of ‘us’ are them, and therefore the consequential imperative of relationship negotiation.”11 Thus, in New Zealand, all voices are not equal, and there is at least a tacit understanding of the privileged position of the first people of the land, unlike the marginalized position of indigenous peoples in United States of America and Australia. Having said this, the legacy of racism in New Zealand is replicated in similar statistics of poverty and social ills, as beset other countries where indigenous people have been legally and socially marginalized without later recourse to a document such as the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). The year following the signing of the Treaty, on the day after Christmas, newly consecrated English bishop George Augustus Selwyn set sail from Plymouth for his new see. On May 30 of the following year, he arrived, having stepped off the brig able to preach, and possibly celebrate the liturgy, in Maori, the language of the people of the land. Although Davidson and Lineham appropriately argue that colonial Christianity in New Zealand was in many ways a “transplanted Christianity,”12 this commitment of Selwyn, and that of the missionaries before him, to learn the language of the people, would foreshadow the commitment to the postcolonial liturgy that we see embodied in NZPB = HKMOA, almost 150 years later. Despite colonial legislation that systemically deprived Maori people of much of that which was foundational to Maori cultural identity and way of life, including prohibition of the use of Maori language in educational settings (Native Schools Act 1867), this Reformation commitment to liturgy in the vernacular is still an authoritative commitment to the identity not just of a people but of a Church that values such identity. “Liturgy reflects our mission.”13 A cursory look at NZPB = HKMOA will give a picture of a liturgy that is languaged in a number of different ways. With the overshadowing of the dominance of the English language of the colonial settlers in the text for a multiplicity of liturgies, the observer will also notice the interweaving of the Maori language of the “indigenous” people throughout the Baptismal and Eucharistic liturgies, diglot versions of a Eucharistic service, “Prayers in a House after Death,” “The Unveiling of a Memorial,” and a Eucharistic liturgy in Maori alone. In addition, Eucharistic prayers are in Fijian and Tongan. These latter two are simply translations of the

A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK 169 English liturgies. However, it is of note that the Maori is not a diglot translation of the English text. It is this fact of both content and process that speaks to the postcolonial nature of the prayer book as much as anything else. Jenny Plane Te Paa puts it well: In some instances the parallel diglot sections are close approximations to one another, but in most cases they are not. To some non-Maori speakers who incorrectly apply a literal one-way translation to individual Maori words the Maori text is regarded as theologically questionable or actually subversive. To Maori-speakers who delight in the richness of allusion, the profoundly organic nature of the theology being expressed, and the sheer beauty of the language form, the Maori text is most definitively regarded as delightfully subversive!14 It is this commitment not just to the language of the “people of the land,” but to the unique thought-forms and culturally rich expressions of spirituality, grounded in an intimate relationship between God, the earth, and the peoples, that speaks to a process that affirms a biculturality that is not simply a counter-imperialistic lip service to an indigenous minority, but a “re-inscription” of emergent identities in relationship that have their own authentic center. Whether the prayer book commission was fully cognizant of the “delightful subversiveness” of the Maori textuality, it was significant that there were Maori members of the commission from the outset,15 who contributed not just to the formation and production of the Maori text, but worked in consort as full members of the commission, shaping the prayer book as a whole.16 In that light, the compilers of the prayer book could say, “A New Zealand Prayer Book has been created in our own Pacific cultural setting, and shaped by our own scholarship. It belongs to our environment and our people.”17 The formation of NZPB = HKMOA spanned 25 years. In that time, the issue of race relations was not the only consideration that shaped the prayer book, but the decisions made about liturgy and language evolved during that time in a way that often paralleled other cultural shifts taking place which impacted theological, ecclesial, and liturgical understandings. The authors of the prayer book cite societal shifts, including “an increasing awareness of the delicate ecological balance within our country” and New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. They also note that “the re-emergence of a sense of identity within the Maori people has seen the Maori language approved as an official language of the nation.” The authors also noted the impact of local ecclesial changes, such as the ordination of women as priests beginning in 1977, a continuing dialogue about equality, “an increasing need to choose language which is inclusive in nature and which affirms the place of each gender under God,” and a recognition of the ministry of all the baptized.18 “Through the decisions of General Synod the Province is committed to affirming the partnership

170 Storm Swain between Maori and Pakeha, and has maintained that the life and governance of the Church stand upon our Constitution, and the fundamental principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. . . . Through all these insights we have come to new understandings of who God is, and how God acts, among us in our world.”19 Initial considerations after the production of a new Eucharistic liturgy in English as a precursor to the prayer book had the Commission questioning “whether the liturgical goal for Maori Anglicans should be to have available a translation in te reo [Maori] of what was a clearly European shaped service, unmistakeably tikanga Pakeha (reflecting the culture and customs of Pakeha), or a new service in their own language and style, informed by tikanga Maori.”20 Initially, the choice was made for a translation, and then later, the addition of a Eucharist that was a stand-alone service in Maori. Following these developments were liturgies that originated in Maori, following cultural practices regarding death that were then translated into English. The diglot version of the liturgy, however, was seen as a ministry both to Maori and non-Maori alike. Given that Maori both had a need for liturgy in their own language and were dealing with the colonial reality that many had been alienated from their own language (te reo), a diglot version of the liturgy would dually benefit Maori. However, it would also be a contribution to pakeha (non-Maori of European origins). Bishop Manu Bennett argued that “it would demonstrate that the mission of the Church was to both Maori and Pakeha; a bilingual service would help overcome some Pakeha sensitivities; and Maori had a need to be ministered to in their own language in worship.”21 “Our people,” as a bicultural people, is further shown in the interweaving in several places, of Maori address in the English language liturgy, and English in the Maori, once again expressing that the liturgy was not simply about two peoples occupying the same space, but being in relationship. The relationality of two peoples, with different worldviews, thoughtforms, and cultural expressions, is what gives NZPB = HKMOA its radical postcolonial flavor, and its subversive witness to other postcolonial contexts. When training pakeha priests, Rev. Wi Tamarapa would encourage them to live into the Maori text, so that they would not simply be parroting the language but stepping into the worldview, saying that a creedal statement like, “You O God are Supreme and Holy, you create our world and give us life” cannot be easily equated with statements like “You O God, are the tip of the fern frond of all creation.”22 Likewise, in the diglot version of the Eucharist Liturgy of Thanksgiving and Praise, one can only compare the version that says in English, “We shall all be one in Christ, one in our life together” and that in Maori, which can be roughly translated, “Christ is the ridgepole of our meeting house to which we tie our waka (oceangoing canoe).”23 Jenny Te Paa also offers

A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK 171 a comparison of another section of the Eucharistic liturgy with her own more poetic translation. Such a translation highlights the presence of the creation spirituality of the Maori people, which includes allusion to the Earth-mother—Papa-tuanuku, and Sky-Father—Rangi-nui, of Maori legend. The English text reads, So now we offer our thanks for the beauty of these islands; for the wild places and the bush, for the mountains, the coast and the sea.24 The parallel diglot version in Maori can be translated, Therefore we give you thanks, For Rangi-nui above and for Papa-tuanuku reclining here below For the prayer mountains, for the hills which bespeak our histories For the tides ever whispering their salutations to humankind and the oceans stretching forth.25 Te Paa sees such translation as “delightfully subversive,” However, one must see such subversiveness in the context of the Liturgical Commission that trusted the Maori translation committee to produce the form of liturgy that was true not only to language but also to the worldview of Maori spirituality into which colonial Christianity had been transplanted. This contrasted with the translations of English into Tongan and Fijian. As NZPB = HKMOA itself states, “It is important to understand that the Maori liturgy expresses the theology and understanding of Maori people. In the parallel service the Maori is not the precise equivalent of the English.”26 One could argue, therefore, in the production of NZPB = HKMOA, that the subversiveness was not simply on the part of the Maori members of the commission and translation committee, but was maintained by the commission as a whole, who are represented in the words of one member, Brian Carrell, as he recognizes, “The Liturgy itself is universal, not European, not Western cultural.”27 A few short years after the production of NZPB = HKMOA, the Anglican Church in New Zealand was to take an even more subversive stance in its ecclesiastical re-formation. In many ways, the prayer book can be seen as the precursor to this ecclesiastical ordering. The General Synod in 1992 produced a new constitution, having “agreed to certain amendments and revisions of the Constitution to implement and entrench the principles of partnership between Māori and Pākēha and bicultural development and to incorporate and extend the principal provisions of the Church of England Empowering Act, 1928”28 by reforming itself as a church with three distinct cultural strands—tikanga Maori, tikanga Pakeha, and tikanga Pasifika—to give each cultural strand the same rights and authority, to order their way of being church. For Tikanga Maori this

172 Storm Swain meant the ability to ordain bishops who would not be a minority representation within the whole church, but to ordain for the needs of a Maori church, to order mission districts with boundaries more reflective of tribal areas rather than the European designations of the dioceses, and to order the education of Maori clergy in culturally appropriate ways. The reordering of the life of the church, however, was seen by some as “ecclesiastical apartheid,” and the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia, as it now self-identifies, risked censure by the Anglican Consultative Council. The New Zealand church sought to educate the wider Communion as to why this was a postcolonial expression of Church life, rather than an implicitly racist expression of ecclesiastical segregation more reflective of the church in the former South Africa against which so many New Zealanders had protested. Membership of each cultural stream was by voluntary association, for “those who wished to be ministered to”29 within a cultural stream, not racial designation. One could be Maori and be a member of tikanga pakeha, and vice versa. Tikanga Pacifica was, however, more of a geographical designation, a fact that complicated the understanding of the biculturality in the New Zealand church. Additionally, Maori and pakeha were to be formed as priests of the whole church, able to celebrate the liturgy in both languages. How far this was a reality in different dioceses was debatable, but the intentionality was of a bicultural church in mutual relation. Brian Carrell, a member of the Commission on the Prayer Book that served the whole of the 25-year period of formation, states, “Fortunately the Commission, even though unaware of the substantial legislative change to our Constitution that later would occur in 1992, had done its work well in the formation of its Prayer Book. When the Constitutional change came, the new Prayer Book presented no problems in serving as the vehicle for worship of all three tikanga.”30 Notably, the cross that serves as the identifying feature of the title page reflects the interwoven strands of each of the three cultural ways of being, again attesting to the symbolic reality of the complexity of a bicultural church in a multicultural geographic location, existing as one entity while communicating complex postcolonial interrelationalities. As such, NZPB = HKMOA gives a window into the complexity of a postcolonial country that is not simply living with the legacy of the past, of “De-constructing Empire,” as Tiffin notes,31 but a unique reconstruction of what is it to be peoples-in-community, each with their own worldview and ways of expression, yet with a mutuality that shifts the boundaries of what it is to be truly church. Yet, part of this continual reconstruction involves living with the legacy of a colonialism that does not die easily. While the Prayer Book reflects the mutual empowerment of centers with their own integrity and authenticity, in practice, the resource-sharing that should have followed the ecclesiastical reorganization did not manifest

A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK 173 itself in such equal reality. Although shared decision-making through consensus was manifest at General Synod, and the Theological College reformed with the distinct cultural streams, in many local dioceses, there failed to be a resource-sharing that enabled tikanga Maori the funds or buildings to enable a ministry comparative to the resources of tikanga pakeha. In this situation, we can see how liturgy can both be a radical foretaste of the kin-dom of the divine in our midst and comment on how far we are from manifesting the Gospel in all its radical challenge. NZPB = HKMOA has inscribed itself on the hearts, minds, and souls of the peoples of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia for over 20 years. In that time, it has borne witness to a complex negotiation of what it is to be a postcolonial church. It has served as a template of what is possible, and a critique of what is yet still so unrealized. Like the Gospel in this “twice-discovered country,” the Prayer Book is a taonga, a gift to the Church that has sought to recognize, empower, and express what it is to be a church in a bicultural country with a multicultural population. These cultural ways of being, however, although expressed often so beautifully in the liturgy, can only be fully realized in the ways they are lived out beyond the liturgical dismissal, as a verb rather than a noun that, as Te Paa would challenge us, “compels us to act together against injustice as God’s faithful people theologically bound in all our wondrous differences.”32 Part of being a postcolonial people is to recognize how colonialism still binds us, as what is inscribed upon our lips liturgically needs to be continually reinscribed on our ways of being together consciously and purposefully. As such, the liturgy helps us celebrate “the now and the not yet,” of what it is to be a people of God where not only “our liturgy” but our life together “reflects our mission.” Blessed are you, God of the universe. You have created us, and given us life. Blessed are you, God of the planet earth. You have set our world like a radiant jewel in the heavens, and filled it with action, beauty, suffering, struggle and hope. Blessed are you, God of Aotearoa New Zealand in all the peoples who live here, in all the lessons we have learned, in all that remains for us to do.33 Notes 1. Church of the Province of New Zealand = Te Haahi o te Porowini o Niu Tireni, A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare O Aotearoa, Collins Publications, Auckland, NZ, 1989, xiii. 2. I write with conscious humility as pakeha, formed as a priest by a multitude of voices, which include the Revs. Wi Tamarapa, Lemuel Pearce, Wiremu

174 Storm Swain Quedley, the late Rt. Rev. Sir Paul Reeves, and the communities of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Auckland. 3. This echoes Strongman’s critique of Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson’s De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (Routledge, London, 1994). 4. L. Strongman, “Post-colonialism or Post-imperialism,” Deep South 2.3 (Spring 1996). 5. NZPB = HKMOA, p. xiii. 6. Jenny Te Paa, “From Te Rawhiri to the New Zealand Prayer Book,” in The Oxford guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, ed. C. Hefling and C. L. Shattuck (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 346. 7. P. Meredith, “Hybridity in the Third Space: Rethinking Bi-cultural Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” 1, accessed March 23, 2014, http://lianz.waikato .ac.nz/PAPERS/paul/hybridity.pdf. 8. NZPB = HKMOA, xiv. 9. “Māori arrival and settlement,” Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, accessed March 23, 2014, http://bit.ly/postcol4-9. N.B. Some sources argue for Maori discovery of Aotearoa as early as the tenth century. 10. “The Treaty of Waitangi,” accessed March 16, 2014, http://bit.ly/postcol4-11. 11. Meredith, “Hybridity in the Third Space.” 12. See A. Davidson and P. J. Lineham, Transplanted Christianity: Documents Illustrating Aspects of New Zealand Church History (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1989). 13. A New Zealand Prayer Book = He Karakia Mihinare O Aotearoa (Christchurch: Genesis, 2002), xiii. 14. Jenny Te Paa, “From Te Rawhiri to the New Zealand Prayer Book,” 345. 15. Maori members of the Commission and the translation committee included Canons Manga Cameron and J. T. Tamahori, the Rt. Rev. M. A. Bennett, the then Revs. Rev. P. A. Reeves, Whakahuihui Vercoe and Brown Turei, the Revs. N. Te Hau, A. R. Broughton, W. R. Te Haara, the Ven. K. M. Ihaka, Sonny Melbourne, and Mrs. A. Blank. Source: Carrell. B. Creating a New Zealand Prayer Book, Kindle locations 1639–1660. 16. K. Booth, “The Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia,” in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, 339. 17. NZPB = HKMOA, ix 18. Ibid., x–xi 19. Ibid. 20. Brian Carrell, Creating a New Zealand Prayer Book (Kindle Location, 507). 21. Ibid. 22. Please note these two statements are comparative, and are not translations. Personal conversation—the Rev. Wi Tamarapa. 23. The English version is from NZPB = HKMOA, 479. The Maori is the author’s own poor translation, “Ko te Karaiti te pou herenga waka,” from the Maori language liturgy, NZPB = HKMOA, ibid. Thanks to the Rev. Dr. Eleanor Sanderson for the reference. 24. NZPB = HKMOA, 477. 25. Te Paa, “From Te Rawhiri to the New Zealand Prayer Book,” 345. 26. NZPB = HKMOA, 403.

A NE W ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK 175 27. Carrell, B., Creating a New Zealand Prayer Book_6 (Kindle Location 804). Thanks to Theology House in Christchurch, New Zealand, for providing me with a copy. 28. Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, Constitution, http://bit.ly/postcol4-28. 29. Ibid., Clause 1, Parts D, E, F. 30. Carrell, Creating a New Zealand Prayer Book_6. 31. C. Tiffin C. and A. Lawson, De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994). 32. J. Te Paa Daniel, “‘To say my fate is not tied to your fate is like saying, your end of the boat is sinking’”: A Heartfelt Critique of the Three Tikanga Church, accessed March 23, 2014. http://progressivespirituality.co.nz /wp-content/uploads/2014/03/JennytePaa-Daniel-Tikanga.pdf. 33. “A Thanksgiving for Our Country” in Prayers for Various Occasions, NZPB = HKMOA, 142.

13 Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh Gerald C. Liu In the book of Acts we read: So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”1 Acts provides more than a shift from the life of Jesus to the ministry of the earliest Christian churches.2 It articulates a loss that redefines life within time. The disciples are promised Holy Spirit power to radiate without boundary in the world. Yet Jesus has left. Christianity has evolved without Jesus of Nazareth ever since. The Christianizing of time as evidenced by the liturgical calendar and the Christian Era or Common Era (a worldwide chronological standard) is arguably the most ubiquitous adaptation of Christian faith following the departure of Jesus. Yet ironically, Christianized time reiterates the loss of Jesus in celebrations such as Ascenscion Day. Christianized time also emblemizes Western hegemony and colonial boundary-making of extraordinary scale. In order to rethink Jesus being gone and to indicate alternative and postcolonial approaches to time, retracing the roots of liturgical and Common Era time becomes necessary. The argument below revisits the history of Christianized time and offers Michel de Certeau’s

178 Gerald C. Liu description of Christian divergence in “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” and Tehching Hsieh’s artistic interpretations of time in his One Year Performances as resources for imagining new futures that follow a Jesus lifted to heaven. Assigning a Day for the Ascension Scholars have determined that it took approximately four centuries for Christian churches to craft an appropriate ritual response to the ascension of Jesus. Even purported “first evidence” like Gregory of Nyssa’s In ascensionem Christi (388 CE) makes no reference to the Acts account.3 Rather, as Elias Moutsoulas critically points out, “the entire homily consists of a brief commentary on Psalms 22 and 23, the content of which can be placed in direct relationship with the event of the ascension inasmuch as they refer to the return of Christ to the Father.”4 Not until after the end of the fourth century do most Latin Christian congregations reach a kind of consensus in deciding when to observe ascension. The fortieth day after Easter day would become commonly known as “Ascension Thursday.”5 In the liturgical calendar, the Easter season does not, however, come to fullness until Pentecost. Pentecost, derived from ancient Greek for “fiftieth,” magnifies the promise of the Spirit from Jesus to his disciples and became set in liturgical practice as a feast ten days after Ascension. The fifty-day span from Easter forward that Ascension and Pentecost punctuate grew out of a Jewish precedent to celebrate the giving of the Law from God to Moses and the Israelites at Mt. Sinai on the fiftieth day after the Passover. The greek term “Pentecost” was derived from Shavuot, or the feast of “weeks,” referring to the seven weeks that follow Passover.6 Taken together, Ascension Day and Pentecost sealed a historical fifty-day Easter season. By the end of the second century, Easter itself began to take shape as a three-day series of rejoicing for Alexandrian churches (Egypt). The triduum compelled Christians to remember and to live into the significance of the Passion narrative—the crucifixion on Good Friday (the death of Jesus), the tomb on Holy Saturday (the burial of Jesus and descent into hell), and the resurrection on Easter Sunday (the life of Jesus after death). Celebrating Easter within the triduum sequence became a standard practice but shifted in later centuries to unfold from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Accompanying the recalibration in observing the triduum was an expansion backward as Holy Week, or the Great Week as it was known in Eastern Churches, came to introduce the triduum. Holy Week began with Palm Sunday, a day that recalled the triumphal entry of Christ into Jerusalem. Forty days prior to the Easter week, Christians began to observe Lent, a period of fasting and self-sacrifice to help the faithful grasp the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’s life.

Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 179 Far more detail surrounds how the days and seasons revolving around the pasch, the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus formed liturgical celebrations. The historical lines of development are not as neat as they have been sketched here.7 For example, although the current argument suggests that liturgical time is a colonial imposition, one could present a historical objection by pointing toward the North African roots of Christian feasts as they have been detailed above. North Africa certainly initiates many of the earliest Christian practices. Yet the standardization of those rites results from the directives of Roman empire.8 Critical here is to recognize that as liturgical practices evolved and became formalized, both the approach toward Easter and the liturgical celebrations following that day expanded in their ceremony and in public observation. Those expansions eventually synchronized with Common Era time which gradually came to designate and standardize the years around the world. Calculating the Common Era Like the liturgical celebrations that mark particular events in the life of Jesus, the Common Era, historically known as the “Christian era” or by its latin reference, Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, is itself a manmade innovation based upon computations derived from theological speculation. A monk, Dionysius Exiguus (Denys the Little, AD 470–544), born in Scythia, what is now Dobruja, a territory shared by Romania and Bulgaria, worked in Rome from approximately 500–540 of what we now call Common Era time. He possessed a deep knowledge of Latin, Greek, and the Christian sciptures and, most notably, introduced time tables with calculations based upon unverifiable dates for the birth of Jesus and Easter that would eventuate in Common Era time. Dionysius never conceived that his way of enumerating years from the Incarnation forward would have a use beyond developing tables to determine occurrences of Easter.9 Yet his innovation has provided chronological uniformity for organizing history and the present as we now understand them. Before the innovation of Dionysius’s standardized numbering of years, ancient cultures like the Romans and Athenians used the names of chief magistrates to mark time.10 For example, in the Latin-speaking world of 455, Prosper of Aquitania wrote the closest analogue to a Christian era, an Easter time table that counted time forward from the Passion. In Prosper’s timetable, the consuls Fufius Geminus and Rubellius Geminus provided the title for year one.11 Based upon the calculations of Prosper and his followers like Victoranius of Aquitania, March 25 in the consulship of the two Gemini AD 29 served as the traditional date in the Roman church for the crucifixion of Jesus.12 Dionysius completed his Easter table in the sixth century AD. Using calculations from Alexandria of Egypt, Dionysius generated a list of Easter

180 Gerald C. Liu dates for five 19-year cycles totaling 95 years.13 In Egypt, the years had been numbered according to the reign of Roman Emperor Diocletian from year 153 until year 247. With a note in the preface to his Easter table, Dionysius explains that six years still remained within the Alexandrian regnal years, and Dionysius decided not to begin his table from 248. Rather, he deduced a date for the Incarnation of Christ based upon calculations that still remain a mystery and for which Dionysius himself provides no hints.14 He chose to begin at 532, and historians like Alden A. Mosshammer believe that he completed his work in 525, given the six years that still remained on the Diocletian calendar.15 The Easter timetable of Dionysius emerged as the preferred chronological system in both popular and official uses. It rose to popularity over options like the Easter table begun by Prosper and later extended by Victorius. It outshone older methods in the Latin-speaking world. The late seventh- and early eighth-century monk, St. Bede, gave the Dionysian timetable significant durability, too, as he lengthened the Dionysian table for a span of 532 years from 532–1063. In some writings (HE [Ecclesiastical History of the English People], 1.2–3), Bede also counted years backward using the Dionysian Easter table. For example, he dated the year that Julius Caesar was consul with Bibulus as the sixtieth year before the Incarnation.16 Julius Caesar, in his office as Pontifex Maximus, regulated the calendar as it fell out of synch with the seasons by his time. Caesar reformed the Roman calendar to match a solar year of 365.25 days. He added an extra 67 days between November and December of 46 BC in order to correct any asynchronization beginning with January 45 BC. No one knows how Caeser determined the correct number of days to add, or intercalate. After Caesar’s intercalation, synchronizing the Dionysian calendar with the seasons required only the addition of an extra day every four years. Today’s Western calendar corresponds precisely with the Roman calendar, and its adjustments, except for the fact that the months Quinctilis and Sextilis have subsequently been renamed for Julius Caesar and Augustus.17 Fast forwarding out of antiquity to show the effect of the Dionysian timetable upon later historiography and current understandings of time, even where the designation is omitted, every year is inscribed by Common Era time or with reference to Anno Domini Nostri Jesu Christi. 18 The Common Era birthed by the Dionysian Easter Table and established through Roman Empire has made counting annual time an innate allusion to the heart and soul of Christianity—the Pasch and the Incarnation. Therefore, the wide acceptance of Common Era time could be seen as a surrendering to colonial chronology of high sophistication and subtle but pervasive institutionalization by a dominating Christianized establishment. Allowing particular liturgical feasts such as Ascension Day, Lent

Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 181 or Holy Week, Easter, and more publicly familiar days like Christmas to recede from view for the moment and admitting the moveability and variance of liturgical celebrations across traditions as seen in Western and Eastern ecclesial practices, the broader scope of Christian Era time still suggests a liturgically based colonial move of universal scale. Imagining Other Observances of Christianized Time In his lecture, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” delivered on May 16, 1971, at St. Louis University, critical theorist Michel de Certeau reflects upon the absence of Jesus and its relationship to developing Christian thoughts and actions within an epoch of Common Era time, what he describes as an epistemological situation and what I refer to as late modernity or the current era. For Certeau, Christian thoughts and experiences always refer to a single event, “Jesus Christ.”19 According to Certeau, the event of Jesus Christ encompasses all of the biblical accounts that communicate narratives about Jesus, and therefore by extension, specific understandings about Jesus like the Incarnation, earthly ministry, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, ascension, and eschaton, or second coming. But the event of Jesus Christ also comprises the presence and absence of Jesus outside of sacred texts, and within and outside Christian communities. For Certeau, those who risk Christian thoughts and actions do so in a paradoxical relationship to the event of Jesus Christ: their practices of faith move from the event of Jesus Christ and toward it with a God-given permission. The permission consists in a ubiquitous allowance for innumerable communities and individuals to think about and practice Christianity with divergence from an origin (like the Incarnation) and toward a telos (like the kingdom of God brought to fullness in our world). In perpetual and plural modes of diverging and approaching, private and public narratives, rituals, proclamations, and embodiments of the Jesus event come to expression with reference to the vanishing points of beginning and end that indicate and frame the mystery that Jesus is who he said he was. Certeau’s argumentation provides a theoretical outlook for reassessing the ways in which congregations and the world have become bound by liturgical time and the Christian era. Within Certeau’s line of thought, the error of the Dionysian timetable is not that we have no precise evidence for how Dionysius tabulated a date for the Incarnation that then made it possible to calculate regular occurrences of the Pasch. Rather, innovators like Dionysius exemplify the kinds of divergence and approach associated with Christian faith. The problem is that his form of divergence and approach has become normalized for the entire world.

182 Gerald C. Liu Innovators of time still exist today. One striking postcolonial example that has connection to and extends the kind of variant thought and practice that Certeau articulates is the artwork of Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh. ONE YEAR PERFORMANCES Born into Common Era time on December 31, 1950, in Nan-Chou (南洲), Taiwan (台湾), Hsieh was a 1967 high school dropout who began his artistic forays with painting. He served three years of conscripted service in the Taiwanese military and used training as a seaman to enter Philadelphia on July 1974 as an illegal immigrant. His father, an atheist “and like an emperor,” died from cancer two years after Hsieh moved to New York. His mother, Su-Chiung Hung, a devoted Christian, made only one request of her son: “Don’t be a criminal.” In a retrospective interview, Hsieh stated that her influence foundationalized his entire artistic oevre and way of being—“I use her power to live and do art.”20 Between September 1978 and July 1986, Hsieh completed five yearlong performance artworks as an illegal immigrant in New York. From September 30, 1978, to September 29, 1979, he lived continuously in a cell constructed out of dowel rods and two-by-fours inside his apartment. A friend brought food and water and removed his waste. From April 11, 1980, to April 11, 1981, Hsieh punched a time clock every hour on the hour inside his studio. From September 26, 1981, to September 26, 1982, he committed to living outside on the streets of New York for an entire year. (He succeeded with the exception of being forced into jail for disorderly conduct for 15 hours.)21 From July 4, 1983, to July 4, 1984, he made a pact with fellow artist Linda Montano that the two would be tied together with rope for one calendar year without touching. And finally, from July 1, 1985,to July 1, 1986, Hsieh vowed not to do art and instead to “just go in life.” He then finished his oevre by comitting to make art but not show it publicly for 13 years, from December 31, 1986, to December 31, 1999.22 The last piece started with his birthday in the eighties and ended with his birthday at the turn of the new millenium. Hsieh explained that he “was using thirteen years to reach the time frame of a century.”23 Disentangling his work from any need for an audience to view his art, the final piece infused deep paradox and transience into understanding exactly what being an artist is and what making art entails. In the One Year Performances, Hsieh fills the timing of a year with daring synchronizations of art and life that become unequivocally palpable. All this despite the fact that we only know about the pieces through documentary evidence and the relevant archives that make his art legible to publics today. His One Year Performances occurred without the

Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 183 support of any gallery, benefactor, foundation, or significant community of fellow artists. Simply put, they were unsanctioned and unsupported. Hsieh accomplished his artistic feats with a Nietzschean resoluteness and without much fanfare. Today, even a casual glance at the documentation of Hsieh’s works can stun a viewer.24 The mix of self-discipline, self-containment, self-abandon, and utter reliance upon others and his environment galvanized in the conception and implementation of his performance art pieces is extraordinary and staggering in scale. In every piece, time becomes a canvas of finitude upon which isolation, regimen, exile, partnership, effacement, and farewell receive magnification through imaginatively contained actions and exponentional artistic exploration from within remarkably difficult strictures. Somehow, despite his status as a foreigner (he was literally an “illegal alien”), and the absurd parameters for his performances, his pieces connect with the ordinary experiences of everyday folks living in Common Era time. When liturgically examined, Hsieh’s portfolio raises generative questions about how repetition, self-erasure, and revelation can reconstitute what it means to live according to liturgical cycles and the seemingly inescapable developments from them such as Common Era time. Take, for example, the dedication to repetition that Hsieh undertakes in Time Clock. Time Clock happens in a particular place: Hsieh’s apartment in New York City—111 Hudson St. 2FL, 10013, during a specific apportionment of time from 7:00 pm, April 11, 1980, to 6:00 pm, April 11, 1981. The content of the work, like good liturgical practice, fortifies its communication of meaning through repetition. In a letter commencing his “one year performance,” Hsieh writes, “I shall punch a Time Clock in my studio every hour on the hour for one year.”25 How do we know Hsieh made good on his promise? Besides the copious 366 punch cards that still exist, there is also the attorney-verified statement of witness, the sheet of tabulation that records 8,760 card punches, and the mercilessly matching frame-by-frame series of photographs from a 16mm movie camera documenting each instance of marking time, scrupulously assembled in the retrospective Out of Now by Adrian Heathfield and Hsieh in order to provide a testament to monumental twentieth-century art as well as ample, jaw-dropping evidence that Hsieh did what he set out to do.26 Time Clock provides an interpretive frame for thinking about the liturgical cycle not because liturgy shares affinities with performance art. Rather, liturgical time itself constitutes a banality within life. Whereas “higher times” once re-ordered the world’s time, that reordering has begun to lose its radiance.27 Recurring feasts feel tired or have become dimmed by late capitalism and humanistic allergies to Christianity. Could modifying the frequency and the manner by which dates of the Christian year are observed regularize faithfulness in a way that breaks through the secular erosion that has undone designated dates of liturgical time and

184 Gerald C. Liu made more enticing the easier path of inattention to deeper liturgical meaning? Yes, Christmas and Easter every day might make it easier to live like people of radical charity and the resurrection (or lead to more stress and anxiety). But what about daily observance of the event to which Ascension Day refers? What might it mean for congregations and other communities of faith to embrace as a daily practice the acknowledgment that Jesus is gone, not the regularization of Ascension Day per se, but rather the incomprehensible event to which it refers? How could a constant reference to something so obvious and mundane as the physical absence of Jesus become miraculous again for ordering time within or at least with respect to Christian faith? Works like Keeping God’s Silence, by Rachel Muers, and How (Not) to Speak of God, by Peter Rollins, have explored what it might mean to develop taciturn ethical and ecclesial practices in order to elevate reverence and faithfulness toward God.28 But is there a place for articulating the absence of God? Instead of remaining silent about who God is, how might people of faith express the absence of God as an exercise of faith? Are there models that maneuver outside but also within the Western theological framework to help us think about how the articulation of God’s absence might take shape? The “Atheism for Lent” project, where participants undertake 40 days of reflection upon the deepest critiques of Christianity, approaches what is being described here. Except the “Atheism for Lent” project still upholds the structure of the liturgical calendar, proceeds with an apologetic undercurrent, and uses theological jargon that a Hsiehinspired acknowledgment of a physically absent Jesus would resist.29 One way toward ritualizing emptiness of infinite magnitude with reference to Hsieh is to begin with experimentation in self-erasure. While erasing the self ritualistically might seem futile and disempowering, Hsieh exemplifies how making a ceremony out of nothingness can in fact lead to a reinvention of how one lives within a given time. For the contract of self-imposed rules that regulated his final One Year Performance, Hsieh typed, “I, TEHCHING HSIEH, PLAN TO DO A ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE. I ..... [BLACK SQUARE] NOT DO ART, NOT TALK ART, NOT SEE ART, NOT READ ART, NOT GO TO ART GALLERY AND ART MUSEUM FOR ONE YEAR. I ..... JUST GO IN LIFE. THE PERFORMANCE ..... BEGIN ON JULY 1, 1985 AND CONTINUE UNTIL JULY 1, 1986.”30 Just after his yearlong “No Art” piece, he composes the following rules for his last artwork to date: “I, Tehching Hsieh, have a 13 years’ plan I will make ART during this time. I will not show it PUBLICLY. This plan will begin on my 36th birthday December 31, 1986 continue until my 49th birthday December 31, 1999.”31 Like the other One Year Performances, Hsieh keeps his word and lives with abandon into artistic invisibility. Hsieh seeks invisibility in order to display “lack of creativity.”32 But perhaps his self-imposed schedule of disappearance actually creates spaces

Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 185 for other interpreters and other artists even though his works were (only) esoterically known at the time. By parallel, how could liturgical display incorporate intentional moves of self-erasure in order to make room for others and perhaps even for the Jesus who is physically absent and who is coming back someday and somehow, as many Christians believe? Recurring to Lent, the season of self-sacrifice marks a time of self-resignation. Yet are there other possibilities that challenge the banality and constraints of the liturgical cycle and of Common Era time in order to experience once again theological verve? Ironically, even though Hsieh strictly adheres to the rules of his No Art pieces, his plan to completely disappear ends up thwarted. The art market eventually absorbs Hsieh’s outsider status and exalts his portfolio out of obscurity and into critical acclaim. His disappearance within the Common Era impregnates his artwork with lasting significance. Though Hsieh still remains somewhat of a cult figure, his pieces have reached an authoritative status, not as ones that define any particular method or Taiwanese aesthetic to contemporary art. Rather, his works participate in what Certeau calls authority in the plural. The work of Hsieh subverts Common Era time by producing fictional situations that redefine through disciplined chronological documentation unexpected realizations about living. In Hsieh’s own words, the pieces each have “a truth in essence.”33 Whatever that truth is specifically, it makes life “open and uncertain once again” to use Hsieh’s phrasing again.34 According to Acts, the future also remains open and unknowable, but it is also filled with an indescribable promise as the disciples, on the one hand, cannot “know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority”; on the other hand, they have been entrusted to proceed anyway as witnesses empowered by the Spirit of God. Perhaps a similar power flickers in Hsieh’s artwork, which might not seem so far-fetched, given his own admission that his mother’s power enabled him to live and to do art. Whatever the case may be, Hsieh models a different way of living within the bounds of Common Era time, but he also shows much more, even if only by analogy. Hsieh vivifies ordinary life by giving banal behaviors within it an aesthetic velocity that moves our understandings of time to a place of critical thinking. He compels his viewers to ask questions, even if only inwardly and inchoately, about what it means to live as one who is incarcerated, bound to another, enslaved to tracking the hours, not only on the outside but at the bottom of society as well, and in the process, relinquishing the self. The kind of questioning that his artwork provokes has a reach further than the radiance of his will, the realm of aesthetics, and the confines of Christianized time. How do we live within the time whose measurement coincides with a seemingly ubiquitous colonial advance? What does it mean to live beyond the temporal borders we have accepted for now and into a time where Jesus

186 Gerald C. Liu is long gone? Hsieh’s artwork answers the first question, even if ineffably, and shows us enough material to develop a response to the second one. Notes 1. The Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Acts 1:6–11. 2. Most Biblical scholars agree that Acts serves as a companion volume to the gospel account of Luke. 3. For “first evidence,” see Patrick Regan, O.S.B., “The Fifty Days and the Fiftieth Day” in Maxwell E. Johnson, ed. Between Memory and Hope: Readings on the Liturgical Year (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2000), 237. 4. Elias Moutsoulas, “ASCENS: In ascensionem Christi oratio” in The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. Lucas Francisco Mateo Seco and Giulio Maspero (Leiden: Brill 2010), 86. 5. Martin Connell, Eternity Today: On the Liturgical Year, vol. 2: Sunday, Lent, the Three Days, The Easter Season, Ordinary Time (New York: Continuum), 167. Connell succinctly notes elsewhere that although ascension was traditionally celebrated during the fifty days of the Easter season, “it was at first variously positioned there in different geographical regions: at the mid-point of the span (on the twenty-fifth day, Mid-Pentecost), at the end (on the fiftieth day, Pentecost) and, increasingly in the late fourth century, on the fortieth day. See Martin Connell, “Ascension Day,” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy & Worship, ed. Paul Bradshaw (Louisville, KY: WJK 2002), 29–30. 6. The summary here of how Ascension Day and Pentecost developed as liturgical feasts is very short. For more historical detail, such as firsthand sources from figures from early Christian church history, and discussion of whether Pentecost historically referred to a span of days or a particular day, see Connell, Eternity Today, 166–178. See also Patrick Reagan, O.S.B. “The Fifty Days and the Fiftieth Day” in Between Memory and Hope, ed. Johnson, 223–246. 7. For an argument that challenges the claim that Lent grew backwards from Holy Week, and that it in fact arrived in Byzantine ecclesial practice as a singular observance with its own form of closure, see Thomas J. Talley, “The Origins of Lent at Alexandria” in Between Memory and Hope, ed. Johnson, 183–206. 8. See, for example, Paul Bradshaw, “The Origins of Easter” in Between Memory and Hope, 123, and in the same volume in an essay titled, “The Origin of Lent at Alexandria,” Talley discusses the forgotten but palimpsest-like influence of Alexandrian liturgical celebrations in the Byzantine celebration of the Saturday of Lazarus, emphasizing, “So liturgical tradition harbors our history, even when we have lost sight of it” (205–206). 9. Alden A. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus and the Origins of the Christian Era (New York: Oxford, 2008), 8. 10. For a fuller explanation of regnal year counting, see “The Eponymous Year” in ibid., 11–14. 11. Consuls, the highest publically elected officials in Roman culture, were elected in pairs.

Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh 187 12. Mosshammer, The Easter Computus, 29–30. 13. Mosshammer provides more detail. “It is rather the case that Dionysius adopted his era of the Incarnation from the Alexandrians with their 19-year Paschal cycle. It was the Christian era of Julius Africanus, adopted by Anatolius of Laodicea, and transmitted along with the 19-year cycle to Athanasius, Andreas, Theophilus, Panodorus, and the Armenian church, as well as to Dionysius Exiguus.” See ibid., 437. 14. For a theory about how Dionysius Exiguus generated a date for the Nativity, see Ibid., 421 Mosshammer writes, “As a bilingual scholar and the translator of several works of Greek patristic literature, Dionysius Exiguus might have found a date for the Nativity corresponding to the turn of the year 1 BC/AD 1 directly in the works either of Julius Africanus or of Panodorus.” 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Mosshammer notes that Bede’s calculation is incorrect. The year was 59 BC. 17. The numbering of days differs between the calendar currently in use in the West and the Roman calendar. For an explanation, see ibid., 35. 18. For a discussion related to the standardization of hours across the world, that eventuated in time zones and furthered solidarity in the counting of years, see Clark Blaise, Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000). 19. Michel de Certeau, “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?” in Graham Ward, The Postmodern God (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997), 142. 20. Adrian Heathfield and Tehching Hsieh, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Boston, MA: MIT, 2009), 380. 21. Ibid., 328. 22. Ibid., 66–315. 23. Ibid., 336. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 102. 26. Ibid., 102–158. 27. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 55. 28. Rachel Muers, Keeping God’s Silence: Towards a Theological Ethics of Communication (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) and Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006). 29. See http://bit.ly/postcol4-62 and http://bit.ly/postcol4-62b, both sites accessed April 7, 2014. 30. Heathfield and Hsieh, Out of Now, 296 [capitalization Hsieh’s.] 31. Ibid., 300. [The omission of a period at the end of the last sentence, Hsieh’s.] 32. Ibid., 332. 33. Ibid., 327. 34. Ibid., 338.

14 A Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India during the Colonial/Post colonial Period as a Mode of Resistance C. I. David Joy Introduction It is an intricate assignment to characterize unmistakably the origin and development of liturgy in India, as the two were linked up with ancient Orthodox traditions and St. Thomas’s legacy in India. However, this article deals with the missionary epoch, specifically, with colonial and postcolonial developments of liturgy in India. Since the Church of England and Methodist traditions were the pioneers in sending missionaries and supporting the colonial mission in India, it is very likely that their traditions and liturgies made an impression on the united churches in the country. Songs were one of the features that were present from the beginning of the developments that took place within liturgical traditions. In order to specifically appraise a postcolonial liturgical stream, I would like to present a number of innovative initiatives in postcolonial India seeking to shape a liturgy. Converging Trends in Liturgy during the Colonial Period Even though there had been no unambiguous endeavors to systematize liturgy exclusively for India, there were attempts to organize tracts for spreading the Gospel among the Indians. Many tracts adapted and adopted Hindu scriptures uncritically, neglecting the sentiments of the native people. For instance, the tract titled “Ram Pariksha,” written by Sternburg in the 1870s, was attractive to many people. However, it

190 C. I. David Joy was not written to build up mutual reverence (between Christians and Hindus). Indian Evangelical Review (1877) stated: Written in the simplest style of the vernacular, and illustrating every point by apt quotations from Ramayan of Tulsi Das, the favorite classic of that part of India, it is not only calculated to be popular, but to be effective in breaking down the idolatrous reverences for Ram, so common among the masses.1 The hymns and lyrics composed by MosaWalsalam Sastriar in Malayalam, Narayan Vaman Tilak in Marathi, and K. K. Krishna Pillai in Tamil, were appropriate contributions in terms of stimulating indigenous Christian literature’s development of a genre of resistance. While assessing Mosa Walsalam Sastriar’s hymns and their theological subject matter for a better understanding of the theological position of the natives, it becomes obvious that the message of liberation from bondage, of equality, and of hope for a better environment are part of the lyrics and hymns, and the natives considered them to be a language and channel of self-expression and liberation: The hymn book of the Christian church reveals its secret and lifts, wherever there are burdened hearts, the burden from these hearts. If that be so, we must seek diligently that every vernacular in India shall have such a storehouse of comfort, such a guide to peace.2 In the same way, A. J. Appasamy’s endeavors to present Indian Christian spirituality in the form and mode of bhakti undeniably challenged many liturgists in India who wanted to cultivate an indigenous form of liturgy. The Theology of Hindu Bhakti, published in 1970 by the United Theological College and the Senate of Serampore College, was the result of long and thorough research by A. J. Appasamy, who also published many articles and papers on inculturation of theology and liturgy. He published an investigation of bhakti in the Upanishads and in the works of the Tamil Vaishnava poets, the Tamil Saiva poets, and Ramanuja, and wrote as well on the characteristics of the bhakti saints. He evaluated the validity of the bhakti experience and presented the weakness of Hindu Bhakti. Appasamy claimed: As long as the Church and the Bible were our main authorities we simply ignored all that was not connected with the Church and the Bible. The other religions of the world were of no importance. They were outside the sphere of God’s revelation. But with one stress on religious experience we can no longer do this. The other religions of the world lay claim to the possession of religious experience.3

Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India 191 This assertion obviously provides the groundwork for accepting bhakti as a language and mode of developing a religious framework for liturgy. Since “much of the Bhakti piety was lavished on idols,”4 the question of the use of images in worship would emerge as a valid one. Appasamy argued, “I think we should recognize that there is a great deal in Indian culture which is quite unconnected with Hinduism and which the Indian Christian can use without any hesitation.”5 He also compiled readings from Hindu religious literature in a volume titled Temple Bells: Readings from Hindu Religious Literature in 1930, which motivated native indigenous liturgical movements. He felt that “ideas which are already present in the Christian Scripture will attain a new significance, and have a new power, when they are thus viewed in relation to their Eastern environment.”6 The religious experience should be the focus of any discussion on meditation and liturgy for native Christians. As Appasamy urged, “We must take full account of the experiences of those in India in the past who have sought and found God.”7 It is also said, “Indians have a natural genius for religions.”8 Such claims could compose a constitution for an indigenous Christian Church and liturgy. Samson Prabhakar, who introduced a number of radical and ecclesial-centered shifts in liturgy, explained: In India, where multifarious cultures, languages and traditions exist, indigenization often means the amalgamation of all these. Therefore the worship services in this book are more of inter-cultural in nature than indigenous.9 However, D. S. Amalorpavadass, who pioneered a number of attempts in presenting an indigenous liturgy, argues: In a vast country like India which is a mosaic of races and religions, languages and cultures, and which consists of different religions each having its own background of history, missionary enterprise and evangelization, and degree of development, it is almost next to impossible to paint an exact picture of things, whatever be the subject we want to treat of. This holds good for liturgy as well.10 The configuration of liturgy depends on a number of fundamental factors related to the nature and purpose of religion. Morris Jastrow Jr.’s The Study of Religion clearly revealed that “the twofold classification of religions into true and false” was not only the contribution of “Christian Theologians of the Middle Ages,” but also asserted that “the position of Jewish and Islamic theology is practically the same.”11 This declaration probably influenced the formation of liturgy even in the colonial Indian context. In the Indian context, the concern for culture has been

192 C. I. David Joy a prominent aspect in shaping the arrangement of the liturgy. Samson Prabhakar expresses: The relationship between the liturgy and the culture within which it is celebrated is an issue that has bearing not only on the question of the worshippers’ cultural identity and rootedness, but also on the question of unity of human family.12 The Use of the Bible in Liturgy for Resistance J. Paul’s article “Why do not More Indian Graduates Enter the Christian Ministry?” legitimately analyzed the fundamental issues that the Indian Church leadership faced at that time. According to him, there was a comprehensible discrimination between the missionary and Indian clergy in terms of sharing of power and responsibilities. He divided his concerns into five sections: namely, the selection for ordination, theological training, holidays, salary, and placements.13 Paul’s article made evident the fact that a concern for training missionaries was emerging within the Indian Church. All of these debates emerged particularly out of a context influence by Swami Vivekananda, a great reformer of Hinduism. Some local societies formed among the Christians inspired the process of Indianization. Though those societies demonstrated that the instructions of the missionary Church should be reinterpreted in order to make Christianity clear to the native people, most of the articulations were listed within the missionary alphabet. Missionaries used liturgy and music during the colonial regime for defining the identity and ideology of Christianity within ecclesial and cultural frameworks. In 1948, the first synod of the Church of South India affirmed Biblical authority as the foundation of the church. Thus, the prayers, songs, and other liturgical elements would be based on the Bible. J. S. M. Hooper, in his address, rightly declared: My mind has turned to the record of the first council of the Christian church, the Jerusalem council of which we read in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, and in particular to the terms in which it put out its decisions; with the decision themselves we need not concern ourselves today. But in issuing them, the words used are, “It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us” (Acts 15:28).14 The same ideological and theological framework was representative of the initial stages of the united and uniting churches in India. Therefore, determining how the liturgy was most effective in promoting the idea of resistance is of significant concern, and must guide our interpretation of the history of the Indian Church. The memorandum says:

Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India 193 The Indian situation in general has become tense with new passions and forces; and the Indian Christian Church placed in their midst is being naturally affected by them. Nationalism has now passed from the purely sentimental stage; and it has now resolved itself under the revered leadership of probably the greatest figure of the age.15 In view of the innovative developments, such as retreats, new patterns of worship services, hymns, the Indian Church began to verbalize the Christian experience in vernacular languages and native cultures. This was known as Indianization of the Church. How to proceed with the activities of Indianization was a central question that emerged in the context of new cultural life due to Victorian style of life, that began to develop during the colonial period. Even though it was not a very powerful mass movement, it was a broad and diverse movement, and heralded the birth of a more historical viewpoint in Indian Christian theological articulation. The memorandum states in this regard: The remedy lies in training the Indian Christian to live more and more in vital touch with the religious past of his people, so much he can recover the medium through which he can transmit his message. The recognition of this simple truth would involve radical changes in the constitution and curriculum of your religious seminaries and would require a different system of religious preparations for the missionary.16 It is unreasonable to assume that liturgy and prayer in a colonial context emerged without any conflicts or encounters, given the many difficulties and hurdles during that period. As this study deals with the inter-linkage between liturgy and the British Empire, it should expose a number of relationships such as those between liturgy and power, liturgy and culture, and liturgy and linguistics. Ram Chandra Bose in his article, “Work among Educated Natives,” described the atmosphere that was prevalent during the colonial period: We have to wrestle with intellectual pride, little knowledge which frequently proves a dangerous thing, bitter feelings generated by varieties of untoward circumstances, tempers roused by disappointments as well as minds elated by success, political animosities not all unreasonable and immodest hopes, a recoil from the most glorious ideas of the age and reaction in favour of good old ways, and other forms of opposition too numerous to be enumerated; but as we are backed by the Word of God and animated by the Spirit of God, we need not give up any branch of our own work in despair!17 It is legitimate to presume that in such a divergence, the attempt for an indigenous liturgy was launched. Many historians, especially mission historians, were driven by personal assumptions and deductive

194 C. I. David Joy argumentations. Such assumptions and deductive argumentations certainly created an impression of segregation and alienation in the recording of history. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concept of indigenization was the currency of the encounter between natives and missionaries. Of course, it is necessary to rely on all available resources regarding the topic, but a few representative texts suffice for our purposes. In 1922, the Christo Samaj, Madras, prepared “a memorandum on certain problems of missionary effort and Christianity in India.”18 This document seems to be the first of its kind, offering a historiographical perspective for reading historical events fruitfully. In terms of theology, culture, language, power, and so on, this document is unique. This memorandum was prepared after a serious study and a series of consultations and preparations, and represented the voice of “the younger generation of all denominations.”19 The Indianization of Liturgy This endeavor is not only an act of understanding the Christian faith in a contextual sense, but also serves “to respond to all the dichotomies of life as a whole in India today”.20 Such an undertaking is possible if we take our culture seriously. In a postcolonial context, this desire has been active. Eric J. Lott states: In such cultural fluidity we need to respond liturgically with as inclusive, though necessarily integrated, an inter-cultural style as possible. Clearly there must be an integration of these various cultural streams within our own consciousness and thus in our modes of expression if our worship is to be an authentic response to our context today.21 There has been a controversy whether “OM” and “AMEN” could be used as synonyms. The debate was not the product of a postcolonial quest for indigenous liturgy, but was active even during the height of the missionary era. For instance, K. S. MacDonald’s 1888 study on “The Natural History of ‘OM’ and ‘AMEN’ exposed some of the broad historical foundations of the debate. He began by defining the liturgical process by looking at Om: There is a tendency in human nature to worship sound or speech, independent altogether of the meaning it conveys or the idea it expresses, founded largely on its mysteriousness. . . . The sacredness of the word is by the modern Hindus traced to its history as thus formed. . . . Om is specially a word of power. He who meditates on it or mutters it, arrives at Brahmā or becomes Brahmā. 22

Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India 195 Though MacDonald did not tender any concluding pronouncement at the end of the argument, it is clear from the first page of his study that “OM” is a consecrated word for Hindus. Etymologically speaking, scholars such as Max Müller and Mitra argued that both “Om” and “Amen” keep “the same original meaning, also the same root.”23 What are the implications of such a conclusion? Without revealing the legitimizing purpose of the link between “Om” and “Amen,” MacDonald quoted George Bowen, who explicitly stated “Christ is the Amen with reference to the Mosaic Law. . . . Christ is the Amen with regard to the moral law broken by all mankind.”24 Since there was no genuine desire to link both words in order to prepare an atmosphere of dialogue, the matter was not studied further. Of course, there were a number of legitimate attempts to arrange indigenous liturgies during the colonial period, both by the natives and missionaries. The Anglican character of the liturgy was very explicit, though there had been attempts to cover that character systematically and to understate it subtly. Prayer life and the Eucharist were central to religious life in the missionary period, as many documents regarding these topics could be found in the mission archives. The mission work should be carried out “firstly, by the Eucharist, Prayer and Fasting; secondly, by study and work amongst them.”25 A significant breakthrough took place in the field of indigenization in the first half of the twentieth century, when theologians across the globe began to think seriously about the place of native cultures. Angus Stewart Woodburne stated: In spite of an overwhelming desire to do full justice to the Gospel which he bears, in his hands invariably presents some aspects of a foreign religion. It is for this reason, that the missionary enterprise is increasingly being realized as the task of building up strong Churches with intelligent leaders, native in the soil and the culture, so that the religion of Jesus may assume a more indigenous character everywhere.26 Consequently, the application of missionary terms and ideas encouraged the native Church to demonstrate its strength via language and art. The worship environment was complex, as many native movements emerged during the colonial period, including “another expression of Christianity in an Indian garb . . . the Christian Sadhu movement.”27 In accordance with the instructions of the mission bodies, missionaries implemented their style of worship and liturgy and the natives utilized those resources. However, there was a clear desire for an indigenous liturgy and music that prevailed among the native people. Angus Stewart Woodburne further clarified: At the same time, it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Sadhu movements in India might have solid contributions to the debate

196 C. I. David Joy regarding the stages of indigenisation and development of a liturgy with native insights and inputs. Some of those enterprises were mentioned in national journals of that period namely, The Christian Patriot, The Harvest Field, The Indian Evangelical Review and The Guardian.28 Between January 1 and 6, 1866, a number of Christians from all denominations assembled for joint worship in the London Mission Chapel in Bangalore. This was perhaps an occasion where they could experiment with some native prayers and lyrics. Moreover, initiatives were taken to start Canarese and Tamil services in Bangalore in 1816. In the same way, there had been enterprises to teach vernacular languages as well as English in schools and colleges, which ultimately equipped the natives to communicate their thinking on their own terms. Undoubtedly, such pioneering attempts motivated the natives to think using a postcolonial lens during the colonial period. The Christian Festivals and Liturgy Festivals played an important role in the origin and growth of the liturgy in the missionary period. E. A. Douglas remarked: It is marvelous how these festivals call out the people’s liberality. There is a marked difference between the joyous spontaneous way with which the people offer at these occasions and the too often grudging way in which some give at their usual yearly sangams, . . . A baptismal service is generally included in the festival programmes . . . I may add here that these festivals have helped to call out new efforts in musical composition, as in addition to two kummis written for the occasion.29 During the ministry of preaching, some imageries and metaphors were adapted and adopted from Hinduism by the Christian preachers, and those new words and phrases eventually became a part of the liturgy of the Indian Christian Community. W. Robinson’s 1901 article, “The Use and Abuse of Hindu Mythology in Preaching to Hindus,” revealed a number of mysteries hidden in the use of metaphors in preaching: There are parallels between Hindu Mythology and Christian thought other than those which I just hinted at . . . Latent Christian ideas in Hinduism is an ambitious subject that should be handled only by men who know and it is with this reservation that I would point the striking lessons we, missionaries, may learn from stories like Nala and Damayanthi . . . Some of the homely proverbial touches in the story have a rare charm and point the lesson of everlasting charity.30 The Christians were willing to participate in the local festivals, though they wanted to use the space for Gospel work. Nevertheless, their very

Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India 197 presence and participation initiated some level of religious dialogue and mutual acceptance without any hindrance. For instance, the participation of Christians at the Madurai Festival was a leading example of such dialogue.31 A search for a mystical experience by the natives also challenged missionaries in terms of forming a new religious framework out of which to develop indigenous liturgy and hymns. L. P. Larsen explained: And the descriptions given by mystical Christian writers of the soul’s experiences in that life of union with God have again perfect parallels in Hindu devotional literature. It is described as a life raised to such a state of intense emotions that the soul has no consciousness of anything else than God, nothing else can be distinguished.32 This attempt to address mystical experiences enabled the native leaders of the Church to express Christian liturgy at various levels: 1. Invitation is the only way of knowing God. 2. Self-renunciation is the way of attaining God. 3. Symbolism is the only mode of expressing what we have known of God. 4. Silence is the best way of worshipping God. 5. Ecstasy is the perfect mode of union with God. 6. Apocatastasis or universal restoration is the right hope to cherish.33 All of these assertions were adopted from native cultures and religions. As mentioned earlier, some scholars produced a very solid research on the link between Christology and the theology of other religions, linking them in particular with Hinduism and Buddhism. J. P. Jones’s 1906 article, “The Christ and the Buddha,” opened a new horizon of knowledge in terms of preparing a new path for an indigenous theology and liturgy. He cited the following similarities between Christ and the Buddha:34 1. Both were of royal lineage. 2. Both were oppressed by the prevalence and the tyranny of ceremonialism. 3. Both did not leave any writings behind. 4. Both were surrounded by an oriental environment. At the same time, many Indian stories and poems influenced the formation of an indigenous Christology and liturgy. E. S. Oakley stated: The example of this powerful influence exerted by a poetical work on the Indian mind suggests to us a rather surprising lack in the Christian life of the land. So far, it cannot be said that Christian faith in India has to any

198 C. I. David Joy great extent touched those springs from which any great popular stream of literature arises . . . For anything like popular literature we must go to Christian hymnology, and there we do find some indigenous growth.35 Later in 1973, A. P. Nirmal justified the inclusion of native festivals in the Christian liturgy by saying, “feasts and festivals are an important aspect of any religion.”36 Conclusion The challenge facing the vernacular practitioners of liturgy was the preservation of native vocabulary in their religious thinking and artistic cultures. Such preservation has been a major concern over the decades, though the theological schools in India have consistently addressed the issue at various levels. Scholars have frequently maintained that the portrayal of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ should be done with the help of vernacular words and phrases in order to make the message of the Gospel legitimate to all. Notes 1. Indian Evangelical Review IV (1877): 172. 2. Nicol Macnicol, “Christian Literature: Its Aim and Opportunity,” in John Mackenzie, Ministries of the Indian Church (Culcutta: R. N. Bhattacharya, 2002), p. 115. 3. A. J. Appasamy, The Theology of Hindu Bhakti (Bangalore: United Theological College, 1970), 114. 4. Ibid., 125. 5. A. J. Appasamy, The Christian Task in Independent India (London: SPCK, 1951), 96. 6. A. J. Appasamy, Temple Bells: Readings from Hindu Religious Literature (Calcutta: Association Press, ix). 7. T. Dayanandan Francis, ed., The Christian Bhakti of A. J. Appasamy (Madras: CLS, 1992), 180. 8. A. J. Appasamy, What Shall We Believe? (Madras: CLS, 1971), 73. 9. Samson Prabhakar, “Editor’s note,” (Nagpur: NCCI, 1991), 1. 10. D. S. Amalorpavadass, Towards Indegenization in the Liturgy (Bangalore: BSCLC, 1982), 9. 11. Morris Jastrow Jr., The Study of Religion (AAR: Scholars Press, 1981), 61–62. 12. Samson Prabhakar, “Authenticity and Relevance of the Liturgy of the Eucharist: A Case Study,” Masihi Sevak (December 1998): 37. 13. J. Paul, “Christian Growth,” Harvest Field, 4 (1892): 406–409. 14. J. S. M. Hooper, “Fellow-workers with God,” The South India Church Man (April 1948):123. 15. “The Christo Samaj, Madras,” in Harvest Field, XLII.1 (1922): 7–14. 16. Ibid., 10.

Post colonial Reading of Liturgy in India 199 17. Ram Chandra Bose, “Work among Educated Natives,” The Indian Evangelical Review, 16 (1888–89): 182. 18. “Christo Samaj.” 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Samson Prabhakar, Towards an Indian-Christian Religious Education (Bern: Universitat Bern, 1989), 39. 21. Eric J. Lott, Worship in an Indian Context (Bangalore: UTC, 1986), 6. 22. K. S. MacDonald, “The Natural History of ‘Om’ and ‘Amen,’” Indian Evangelical Review, XVI (1888–89): 15–18. 23. Ibid., 16. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Mother Edith, “Missionary Principles: The Place of Prayer,” IRM 7 (1918): 59. 26. Angus Stewart Woodburne, “The Indianization of Christianity,” Journal of Religion 7 (1921): 67–68. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. E. A. Douglas, “Christian Festivals,” Harvest Field, 3 (1896), 285. 30. W. Robinson, “The Use and Abuse of Hindu Mythology in Preaching to Hindus,” Harvest Field 12 (1901): 15. 31. J. P. Jones, “Christian Work at the Madurai Festival,” Harvest Field 10 (1899): 2. 32. L. P. Larsen, “The Interest of Mystical Christianity to the Missionaries,” Harvest Field 16 (1905): 7. 33. Ibid., 14–17. 34. J. P. Jones, “The Church and the Buddha,” Harvest Field 16 (1906): 98–99. 35. E. S. Oakley, “The Gospel in Songand Lay,” Harvest Field 16 (1906): 208–209. 36. A. P. Nirmal, “A Theological Approach to the Question of Celebrations of Some Indian Festivals by Christians in India,” BTF 5 (1973): 37.

15 Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? HyeRan Kim-Cragg In exploring a theology of baptism as crossing, this chapter proposes that the rite be understood as one of crossing, an understanding that may better reflect the post-colonial context of migration and respond to local ecclesial contexts where people of different faiths join Christian congregations in worship. This exploration makes a necessary investigation of the dominant theology of baptism as unity, and as the traditional understanding of the rite that leads to incorporation into the Christian Church, and is a condition of full membership in that body. I examine how these views on unity and membership may lead to religious insensitivity and power imbalances. I propose instead a theology of baptism as crossing that may better embrace multiple religious and denominational identities without denying a person’s previous affiliations in order to be a part (member) of a particular Christian worshipping community. Postcolonial insights on displacement, hybridity, and liminal-third space will be deployed to investigate this issue. The chapter also takes a closer look at Galatians 3:26–28 as foundational to early Church baptismal practices and the way in which it has come to be used as a baptismal formula, in order to make a case for how this biblical text can affirm the theology of baptism as crossing beyond belonging. Naming Situations Theology exists in relation to and in light of the situated reality from which events occur and issues emerge. Situations serve as a primary point of reference for theology, contesting the normative approach to theology (or systematic theologizing) that has often been developed outside of and independently of those situations. Such a situation is also evident

202 HyeRan Kim-Cragg within the particular area of liturgical theology and the various schools within practical theology. Approaching theology in this way illuminates an insight that the world precedes knowledge, a situation that enables us to focus on the raw reality of what happens in people’s lives.1 In a similar vein, practical theology aims to “describe the critical reflection that is done about the meaning of faith and action in the world.”2 One of the critical roles of practical theology includes “full attention to the structure of situation, its shape and demand, in such a way that the complex of racialized, normalized, and otherwise enculturated bodies and desire are as much a part of the analysis as the presence of biblical and doctrinal elements.”3 It is key for practical and sacramental theology to invest its efforts in shaping a production of knowledge based upon the description of reality and the observation of people’s lives in critical and reflective manners. Let us, then, take concrete congregational cases in order to describe and observe what happens in people’s lives when they come to worship. We will do so by fully attending to the situations in the United Church of Canada today: In a Northern Ontario congregation, a same-sex couple, one a Christian and the other Jewish, decided to join the church because this congregation welcomes LGBTQ individuals. While the Jewish partner fully worships, serves the congregation, regularly does the offering, and participates in various activities, she does not intend to be baptized. Here is another situation in a congregation: A young woman from Thailand knocks on the door of the congregation in Saskatoon one Sunday. She migrated to Canada to find a job, and she works for a family as a nanny (giving evidence of the global migration of labor). She told the congregation that she decided to come to a Christian church because she is in Canada. Here is a similar but different story from the same church: Another young woman from Malaysia joined the same congregation. She came to study at the University of Saskatchewan. She is a Buddhist, and has never heard of Jesus, but she enjoys worshipping and listening to the story of Jesus. Every week, she helps the Sunday school teachers and kids, and she has even invited other (non-Christian) friends to the church to worship. Should we insist these folks go through baptismal preparation, catechesis? Should we tell them that they should die to their old selves (their Jewish, Buddhist selves) and be clothed with a new garb of Christ in order to become real members of the church? Since they are not baptized, should