Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 203 they be disqualified from election to church leadership? What does it mean to belong to the church through baptism in this context? Bringing a Theology of Baptism into Conversation with Postcolonial Wisdom While baptism is one of many rites of passage, it consists of many phases and stages, one of which is the “liminal” phase. Baptism is not just one thing, nor does it just start and finish at one time. It is rather a journey; once a person becomes a catechumenate (welcome to the catechesis process), s/he is a part of the community but s/he is not yet incorporated into the community. The catechumenate exists within a liminal space, neither here nor there but in “betwixt and between” spaces. What is communicated is that s/he is not quite a full member, though s/he is almost the same as the already baptized members. S/he is an “almost the same, but not quite”4 Christian as far as her/his status is concerned from the point of view of baptism. Her/his incorporation into the church is yet to be sealed as the time draws closer to partake of the Eucharist. This liminality entailed in multiple phases of the baptismal journey marks a precarious baptismal ordo. In fact, the baptismal ordo is often disorderly, and is reversed in some current ecclesial practices.5 The reality today is that many unbaptized individuals take a part in communion, and the first communion does not function to seal the baptismal process. Additionally, one may notice that the established pattern has been altered and that the ordo has been reversed from the way in which it was ordered even in the early Church.6 However, this disorderly ordo, this uneasy situation, in which baptism finds itself is remarkably noticeable, and is more prevalent than ever in today’s postcolonial7 world. Since 1947, when India gained independence from Britain, those countries in continents of Africa, Asia, and South America also gained their independence in processes involving internal conflict and political instability.8 Such hardship often led people to leave their homes. The result was a massive wave of migration from and within these colonized countries to European and European-settled countries. Many people and their countries exist in a liminal space, finding a home away from home, leaving conditions of colonialization, yet continuing to be dominated by (ex-)colonial powers. Some have become refugees and others have joined the transnational labor force (as has the nanny introduced in the second story above), encountering a new world, trying to make sense of life, joining two realities (before and after they left home). “Everything that happens in this raw, painful experience of disruption, dislocation, and dis-remembering paradoxically fuels the cruel but creative crucible of the postcolonial.” 9
204 HyeRan Kim-Cragg Could the liminal character of baptism be lifted up in this postcolonial world? In the world of migration, can baptism be creating “a threshold space” for contemplative learning, “attuned to be aware of moments where shifting and negotiating one’s social location happens . . . [and where we are encouraged to reflect on] our own subjective self as a situated partial self as we find ourselves dislocated and relocated?”10 Faith formation may be enhanced through the fluid baptismal identity, an “almost same but not quite” hybrid Christian identity. And this fluid Christian identity may truly reflect nuanced yet broadened and ambiguous meanings of baptism. “Initiation may be the wrong name,” as Gordon Lathrop once said, in arguing that baptism is never really over, and that we as baptized people are never finished with the lifelong learning process of becoming Christian. “With baptism we are,” he continues, “indeed, made members of the church . . . Yet, [t]his rite is finally not about distinguishing a few ‘passengers.’ . . . If anything, the rite marks the passage or journey of the entire world out of ‘the old age’ into ‘the new.’”11 The journey of the old into the new is never linear or orderly. It is bound to be chaotic, confusing, and even disruptive, whether it is a matter of reinforcing the business of baptism or on the other hand, loosening it. After all, this journey is typical of the experience of borderlines and border crossings. My modest but bold attempt here is to engage in both experiences, honoring both means of shaping baptism as belonging and crossing, certainly not forcing a choice between belonging and crossing. My attempt is to create a “third space” of Christian belonging, overcoming this dichotomy of being forced to choose one over the other.12 In order to succeed in this attempt, it is necessary to disturb and contest the notion of unity, a major metaphor that remained attached to the theology of baptism even with the emergence of ecumenical dialogue and interdenominational theological development. While there are still tremendous difficulties in achieving mutual recognition of the validity of different denomination’s celebration of the Eucharist,13 there have been many successful efforts in advancing unity through baptism.14 In the name of Christ, churches have worked hard to achieve one baptism. However, unity may pose some problem. While unity should never be identified as sameness or uniformity, it delineates a totalizing force, opting for homogenization. Christine Smith, arguing for honoring difference where preaching about racism is concerned, writes, “For much of white Christianity, the quest for unity . . . too often become[s] a religious naming for assimilation.”15 While it may not be intended that way, unity has often been presented, interpreted, and practiced in that way. This very noble (and even desirable to some extent) meaning of unity that baptism entails creates tensions in terms of preventing dissent and keeping disjunctive views of baptism from being “reconciled and recognized.”16 We live in a postcolonial world where many find their identity shaped
Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 205 by “disruption, dislocation, and dismember[ment]” due to their sexual orientation (as in case one) or their migration experience (as in cases two and three). Thus, a theology of baptism can and should both provide the language that makes sense (meaning-making) of their particular (dissident) experience and performs its practice so as to reflect critically the raw, heterogeneous situation. This juggling gesture is not meant to dismiss or underestimate the positive contributions baptism-as-unity has made on theological, liturgical, and ecclesial levels. Baptismal discourse on unity, or to put it differently, the theology of baptism viewed as “the foundation of our unity within the Body of Christ,” has resulted in theological maturity and liturgical depth.17 The other critical issue associated with the theology of baptism is a theology of initiation, that is, incorporation into the church as a member. The concerns surrounding the appropriate age for confirmation, as well as the whole debate for and against infant baptism, are not simply matters of the church’s policy, but of identity politics. It is a question of “who a Christian is and how [this person] gets to be that way,” as Aidan Kavanagh puts it. 18 The cliché or truism of Christians being “made and not born” presents a far more political and physical issue than is at first apparent. “Baptism may be used rather to reinforce than to question a regnant social view,” Gordon Lathrop warns. He further cautions that there is a political consequence with regard to baptismal boundaries. 19 The stronger a baptismal practice is required, the more rigid boundaries it creates. When it requires a strict rule, baptism creates a fixed norm rather than a fluid openness that allows the Spirit to be present. Kavanagh talks about the church as a carrier of baptism and not as a closed vessel of baptism. He writes, the Church itself begins to appear less as a static institution resistant to change, and more as an organic and power-laden mystery that is constantly coming into existence precisely through a change in people that is so radical it can only be described as a dying and a being born again. . . . Learning to live with rich ambiguity is not a fault but a virtue. It is the poverty of precision that is killing us.20 This is as good a place as any to examine a case of membership in light of baptism within the United Church of Canada. According to The Manual (2010), a full member is one who has been baptised, either as infant, child, youth or adult, and has made a public profession of faith before the congregation. Full membership is not required in order to worship at a United Church, and many, in some cases 10 times more, who regularly attend worship are adherents rather than full members.21 [However,] a pastoral charge’s board
206 HyeRan Kim-Cragg or council members including elders shall be the full members of United Church. In addition, only a full member can vote on spiritual matters at congregational meetings—usually whether to issue a “call” to a new minister to join the congregation.22 It is apparent from The Manual that baptism is a prerequisite for membership, and that membership is a condition for leadership. Does this mean the folks introduced earlier are not fully practicing Christianity because they are not full members? Does this also mean that their Christian practices of participation, stewardship, and discipleship, as evidence in the various gifts they offer, are disregarded and discounted, where palatable leadership is concerned? Would The Manual’s rule lead to the exclusion and discrimination of those who are full participants but not full members? Or can baptism be understood as “a significant step of discipleship and spiritual commitment emerging from that participation,” rather than as “the required entry point to membership and active participation in the life of a congregation?”23 The most critical issue raised here is whether our current baptismal practice and its theology adequately reflect a challenging and changing reality of the postcolonial world, chiefly in regard to contexts of migration, out of which emerge the various people joining in our gathered Christian communities who are not yet or will not be baptized. For those of us who are forced to or intentionally choose to live in interstitial inbetween liminal places, “predetermined rules cannot fully apply.”24 Such ability to live in liminal places is neither a negation of a reality nor a reality of despair. On the contrary, it is an ability that enables us to embrace both the negation and the despair to go beyond realms of baptism where “the boundary of the permeable self breaches the impossible possible.”25 What I propose is that baptism be regarded as a rite of crossing, as a recognition of one’s complex trajectories of life and faith. This faith journey may bring someone to the church via a same-sex marriage commitment or through the global migration of labor, or for some other reasons. Baptism as crossing would allow for a fluid ambiguity and openness to difference in belief and practice. Such a juggling act, between belonging to the church as a member and embracing the process of crossing, may incubate a new (or nuanced) theology of baptism, of the liturgy, and of the church. Rediscovering Biblical Wisdom In the book of Galatians 3:26–28, we read: For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There
Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 207 is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.26 This text has been in wide use as a baptismal formula from the days of the early church throughout today. Some scholars contend, however, that chapter 3 verse 28 was not originally composed by the apostle Paul but was cited by him in recognition of this particular community’s use of it.27 Borrowing from Wayne Meeks’ phrase, “performative utterance,” Sheila Briggs claims that the early Christians not only used this formula, but also enacted it. “For early Christians,” she continues, “it was a fact, not just a hope for the future.”28 This text “utters” God’s radical love regardless of gender, class, and race as much as it “performs” a reality of abolished borderlines as barriers here and now. Furthermore, the switch from “either-or” to “both-and” in 3:28 bears further study: “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female.” Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood offer an intriguing interpretation of this text as evidence of “cross-dressing” as a genderbinding performance in early churches among women leaders, including Thecla.29 While transvestites were not unknown to that world, and many independent (meaning unmarried) Christian women cross-dressed for safety on their missionary travels, Althaus-Reid and Isherwood argue that Thecla only cross-dresses after baptism. They write: Women who break out from the norm in any age face the threat of physical violence [yet] their way of remaining safe was to keep transgressing the norm. Women like Thecla both cut their hair and wear male clothing which is an extremely transgressive action in the world in which she is portrayed. These women were not all transsexual but they did push the gender boundaries very hard in order to create space in which to flourish.30 Thecla’s baptism not only enabled her to “belong” to a Christian identity, but also enabled her to “cross” into a new identity. This text, as a “performative utterance,” is actualized by her act of crossing. The text materialized as an incarnational message that proclaims radical inclusion and equality. These stories of gender bending/cross-dressing are visible and tactile signs of performance and enactments of boundary-crossing informed and advanced by baptism. Envisioning a New Theology of Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging Baptism is central to ecclesiology and foundational to Christian identity. The practice of baptism gave birth to the early church and served as a
208 HyeRan Kim-Cragg primary theology for the development of reasoning for and apprehensions about elements of the Christian faith. Baptism allows us to raise a host of complex theological issues that involve salvation, eschatology, sacrament, identity formation, catechesis, and rites of passage, just to name a few. Given my assertion of its importance and the arguments I have used, it should be evident that I am unwilling to abandon a theology of baptism as belonging. I am also not prepared to succumb to the notion of “believing without belonging.”31 In fact, I contest that latter notion in two ways: one, with the assertion that such claim is Euro/North-American-centric, grounded mainly in the secularization of post–Second World War Europe and North America, a fact which may result in disregarding the nonEuropean and non-Western world and making their realities irrelevant on the scene of rapidly changing globalized Christianity. The second mode of contestation is through the assertion that “believing without belonging” seems to endorse an easy pick-and-choose mentality of free-market consumer capitalism. Such a claim is not far from the statement, “I am spiritual but not religious,” another prime example of highly individualized treatment of religion as a customer-made package that can generate the danger of being merely self-serving. What I am prepared to affirm, on the contrary, is the engagement of those who come from non-European, non-Western, and even nonChristian places, and whose needs cannot be met with a narrowly focused baptismal rite that is associated with groups that feature a policy of regularized membership. These “nons” want to be accepted fully by the community without being formally (legalistically) recognized as full members. They intend to participate in the community fully, but such participation is not identical to formally belonging in a conventional sense. They are, after all, part of koinonia, as they “have part in” the sharing of the Lord’s Supper.32 Here, the meaning of invagination as “a participation without belonging—a taking part in without being a part” is worth considering.33 Are we open to theologies of baptism that can illuminate “other avenues of church membership that acknowledge much greater variety in what faith communities will look like today and certainly into the future?”34 A seemingly radical statement of baptism as crossing beyond belonging is certainly not original. “Radical,” true to its etymology after all, means going to the roots, going to the origins, the earlier traditions that convey the wisdom of the old, illuminating new insights for the current and next generations. A theology of baptism as crossing, both allowing the space for ambiguity and holding the paradoxical nature of a baptismal identity, is found in the second- (or third-)century Epistle to Diognetus: “In clothing and dwelling places and the rest of life, they demonstrate the amazing and confessedly paradoxical character of the makeup of their own citizenship. They are at home in their own countries, but as sojourners . . . Every country is their homeland and every homeland is a foreign
Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 209 country.”35 Strikingly but not so surprisingly, this ancient wisdom finds a kindred spirit in the contemporary postcolonial scholar who describes home as “unhomely” and today’s reality as “the-world-in-the-home, the-home-in-the-world” reflective of and resulting from border-crossing experiences.36 Indeed, being radical is not incompatible with tapping into the tradition, for tradition is not “a looking backward,” but “is a bearing of what has been into what is and what will be; it is the wisdom of memoria.”37 We, as liturgical theologians and practical theologians, are equipped to appreciate a collective memory of crossing, the memory that cannot be contained in a one-time gesture, but that requires a juggling act that demands “persistent muscular habits”38 that have been developed within and beyond time and space. What is argued here is an invitation to experience a mystery that is “constantly coming into existence precisely through a change in people that is so radical it can only be described as a dying and a being born again,” as Kavanagh so beautifully described. This mystery of dying and being born again in baptism can only be encountered if it is free from the human-made, self-serving entitlement of belonging through membership. This mystery can be approached in the experience that enables us to unlock the keys—institutionalized rules and procedures that fail to welcome groups inside and at the border. In the world of the “great disembedding” or “excarnation”39 due to migration, technology, and virtual social media, a need for a real belonging—belonging to a physical community with embodied and incarnational characters has become ever more urgent. Ironically, this urgent need can be met both by uttering a theology of baptism beyond belonging and by performing a theology of crossing. In order to truly belong, you must leave the familiar place of belonging. That departure can then lead you to find places where you feel accepted. It is not a performance of simply turning to an other, but a performance of “turning yourself out in order to understand both who you are and who the other person is.”40 It is a paradoxical juxtaposition between belonging (to an unfamiliar community) and crossing (from the familiar community) in order to form a new community where true belonging and true crossing dwell together. Notes 1. Robert L. Browning and Roy A. Reed, The Sacraments in Religious Education and Liturgy (Birmingham, AB: Religious Education Press, 1985), 4–11. 2. James Poling and Donald Miller, Foundations for a Practical Theology of Ministry (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1985), 7. 3. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. 4. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 86.
210 HyeRan Kim-Cragg 5. While this speaks of a historical reference to the relationship between baptism and first communion, acknowledging that many Christian communities still follow this practice, it should be noted that my denomination, the United Church of Canada, no longer follows this practice. There is no age- or membership-based restriction in the UCC upon receiving communion. According to the study guide for sacramental elders, it states: “At the communion table, we acknowledge that Jesus Christ is the host and all are guests. Guests don’t determine who comes to someone else’s dinner party. God’s love for us is so great and God’s hospitality is so wide that any who wish to come are warmly welcomed in our churches.” Sacraments Elders (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 2013), 26. 6. Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1993), 60. He talks about such reversal of the ordo that happened in the fourth and fifth centuries. 7. Please note that the term “postcolonial” is used hermeneutically, and the term “post-colonial” is used chronologically. 8. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 2. 9. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12–13. 10. HyeRan Kim-Cragg and Joanne Doi, “Intercultural Threads of Hybridity and Threshold Spaces of Learning,” Religious Education 107.3 (May–June 2012): 267. 11. Lathrop, Holy Things, 121,120. 12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 1–2, 37; Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 207–221. 13. The most recent document, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (2013), by Faith and Order of the World Council of Churches, takes this issue as one of “the most difficult issues facing the churches in overcoming any remaining obstacles to their living out the Lord’s gift of communion.” 14. “Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry” (BEM), A Faith and Order paper by World Council of Churches in 1982, “Ecclesiological and Ecumenical Implications of a Common Baptism”: A Joint Working Group Study between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches in 2005, One Baptism: Towards Mutual Recognition (2011) by the World Council of Churches are a few of many examples that reflect such efforts. 15. Christine Smith, Preaching as Weeping, Confession, and Resistance: Radical Responses to Radical Evil (Louisville, OH: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 134. 16. Michael Kinnamon, Signs of the Spirit: Official Report Seventh Assembly (Geneva: WCC, 1991), 173. 17. Thomas Best successfully demonstrates this aspect of baptism as unity in Baptism Today: Understanding, Practice, Ecumenical Implications, Faith and Order Paper No. 207 (Collegeville, MN: WCC, a Pueblo Book, 2008), ix. 18. Aidan Kavanagh, “Christian Initiation: Tactics and Strategy” in Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate, The
Baptism as Crossing beyond Belonging? 211 Murphy Center for Liturgical Research, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 2. 19. Lathrop, Holy Ground, 121,120. 20. Kavanagh, “Christian Initiation,” 4. 21. The United Church estimates the number of adherents within the church at almost three million, as compared to 300 thousand full members (http://bit .ly/postcol4-124, accessed April 8, 2014). 22. The United Church of Canada, The Manual 2010, http://bit.ly/postcol4-125, accessed April 8, 2014. 23. The United Church of Canada, General Council Workbook, 105, http://bit .ly/postcol4-126, accessed April 8, 2014. 24. Trinh Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 159. 25. Wonhee Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, OH: Westminster/John Knox, 2006), 64. 26. The Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Galatians 3:26–28. 27. Hans-Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1979); J. L. Martyn, “Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians,” New Testament Studies 31 (1985): 410–424. 28. Sheila Briggs, “Galatians,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 218–219. 29. Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, Controversies in Feminist Theology: Controversies in Contextual Theology Series (London: SCM press, 2007), 20. 30. Ibid., 21. 31. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 32. The Church: Towards a Common Vision, 10. 33. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Moving Devi,” Cultural Critique 47 (Winter 2001): 124. She borrowed this term from Jacques Derrida. 34. The United Church of Canada, General Council Workbook, 104. 35. Epistle to Diognetus 5:4–5. Greek text in Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1959), 360. 36. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial perspectives, ed. Anne McClinctock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 445. 37. Graham Ward, “Belonging to the Church,” in Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace, ed. Teresa Berger (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012), 15. 38. John D. Witvliet, “Teaching Worship as a Christian Practice,” in For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education and Christian Ministry, eds. Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 127. 39. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 146–159; 554. 40. Kwok Pui-lan, “What Has Love to do with it? Planetarity, Feminism, and Theology,” in Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 41. Italics added.
Part V European, European American, Native American, and United States Perspectives
16 A Flagging Peace? Siobhán Garrigan Introduction As the New Year of 2014 started, the former US diplomat Richard Haass concluded his service as broker in the negotiations between representatives of the five main political parties in Northern Ireland. Those negotiations had been designed to find agreement on aspects of civic cohabitation that had proved contentious since the end of the Peace Process and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998, and they focused especially on parading and protests, flags and emblems, and contending with the past.1 Perhaps the most pressing item requiring a negotiated settlement was the question of flag flying. At several points over the course of 2013, violence had broken out on the streets of Northern Ireland as people protested the “removal” of the Union Flag (the flag of the United Kingdom) from the flagpole atop City Hall in Belfast. That change had been mandated at the end of 2012, when Belfast’s Republican councillors agreed to a proposal made by the Alliance Party that the Union Flag could be flown over City Hall on 18 days of the year (just as it is permitted to be so flown in Great Britain).2 The Unionist parties would not agree to any such “compromise,” used as they were to the flag’s presence there on 365 days. The intensity of the conflict led to worries that the ensuing flag protest, far from being a localized and temporary demonstration, threatened to destabilize the peace agreement itself. Haass’s work was, therefore, both urgent and pressurized, and it was given an unusually high profile in the British and Irish media, presumably to remind the politicians involved that an agreement was widely desired.3 However, the talks ended without agreement, despite additional and extended sessions. In a liberal democracy, what has an argument between politicians about the use of flags on civic and private property got to do with the churches’ liturgies? (Beyond the broad sense in which the word “liturgical” might apply to the ritualizations that characterize the raising, lowering, burning, protesting, and rioting by which the flag enters public consciousness.)
216 Siobhán Garrigan First of all, while there may be a clear and firm boundary between church and state in the laws governing Northern Ireland, in neither that jurisdiction nor the Republic of Ireland to its south is there any such clarity in the symbolic languages of church-state relations. As a result, the associations between “religious” and “nationalist” are a tightly woven knot, resulting in profoundly “religious” overtones to supposedly “secular” national symbols, and vice versa. Secondly, flags are flown in Irish churches and function as a part of the liturgies performed therein. For example, the very same symbol that is contentious when raised over, or removed from, Belfast City Hall (the Union Flag) can also be seen in some churches during Sunday morning worship, sometimes as one of only two visible objects in the sanctuary, the other one being the Bible. (Needless to say, these are not Roman Catholic churches.) What is at stake in this discussion is twofold: first, Dr. Haass and political theorists are not going to broker the necessary agreements on these issues until they understand better how secular symbols can in fact be laden with specifically religious associations and valences. Second, churches need to alter their use of flags or else take responsibility for their part in feeding the sectarian attitudes and dispositions at the root of the British-Irish conflict. As I hope to show, a postcolonial perspective might advance our understanding of both projects. Flying a Flag of Freedom—the State The Union Flag is claimed as a flag of freedom, symbolizing the free democratic state that is Great Britain. It is also seen by many as the flag of the British Empire, and whether that has predominantly negative or positive associations varies enormously according to one’s perspective. Republicans in Northern Ireland see the Union Flag as a symbol of British rule over a territory they believe should never have been ruled by Britain; flown over them every day, the Union Flag is a symbol of un-freedom. Unionists see the Union Flag as marking the fact that they are part of the very Union symbolized in the flag’s overlapping crosses; their freedom within this contested territory on the island of Ireland (and their freedom from the perceived threat from Rome and its perceived prevalence in the state to the South) is dependent upon their being subject to and under the protection of the British Crown, symbolized by the Union Flag. Flag controversies are found throughout history, as flags have long been powerful rhetorical devices—in battle, in territory disputes, on letterheads. Climb a mountain or go to the moon, what do people take with them and hope to plant there? A flag. It is the banner under which you and yours (including your conquests) are gathered, and in modern times it is especially visible where “freedom” and “un-freedom” are being defined and contested. Flags are thus intrinsically bound up in both the
A Flagging Peace? 217 work of colonization and the various manifestations of postcolonial realities. Graham and Maley, in their examination of Ireland’s description as a postcolonial site, comment: “Postcolonial theory, like any theory, ought to change practices and confront prejudices. It ought to be used to shake up rather than solidify existing views or established critical tendencies,”4 and their illustration makes explicit how complicated this is when it comes to questions of flags-and-freedom. They illustrate their article with a picture of a flag taken from a 1930 book of “The Flags of Empire” in which the Tricolore, familiar as the flag of the Republic of Ireland since its independence in 1922, is presented with the title, “BRITISH EMPIRE IRISH FREE STATE.” It is a sharp example of the sort of solidified view postcolonial perspectives are invited to shake up. The GFA recognized what it called the “birthright” of Northern Irish people to be British or Irish or both. This gives rise to (at least) two problems. First, by grounding nationalism in ontology, it further advances the idea that Northern Ireland is home to “two cultures” rather than a common culture with distinctive and different contributors and participants. This combines with a church life that is now allowed to entrench into its Catholicism or Protestantism, further laminating them onto ideas of Britishness or Irishness. A study needs to be done on the use of national flags on church premises (inside and out), but anecdotal evidence would suggest that it is increasing . . . and without too much opposition. Indeed, to oppose the use of flags in churches could now be deemed to “not respect the cultural heritage” of the group in question. Second, the terms “Irish” and “British” were left undescribed by the GFA, and they are extremely complicated terms. Regarding flags, only in Britain’s colonies was it permitted to fly the British flag on a government building for most days of the year; “back home” in Britain, by contrast, its use has always been carefully prescribed, and nowadays, as far as flags are concerned, being British in Great Britain means not flying the Union Flag on government buildings except on 18 days of the year. This is the practice to which the Republican parties and the Alliance Party agreed for Northern Ireland; but the Unionist parties would not agree, arguing that it undermined their Britishness. On the streets amid those protesting these attempts to use the British flag according to the British rules, Susan McKay reported one man summing up the Unionist position like this: “The Republicans have got their foot under the table now and they are out to destroy everything that is British. Everything has turned full circle. Our culture is being destroyed.”5 While it is unknown whether the Unionist parties are aware of it at a theoretical level, it would seem at the level of praxis that they understand their birthright to be “British” as a different model of “being British” than they would have the right to in Great Britain. The Unionist insistence in Northern Ireland today that the Union Flag be flown most of
218 Siobhán Garrigan the time on City Hall can, then, be examined as a desire for colonial-style rules rather than those governing the ordinary citizens of Great Britain. At the same time, it would be a mistake to name the Republican position as a “post”-colonial one, because of course for them that can only be achieved via a unification of the six counties of Northern Ireland with the 26 in the Republic. New Start, New Flag? It has often been suggested that the solution to Northern Ireland’s flag controversy is to create a new flag specifically for Northern Ireland. There are popular social media sites devoted to possible designs,6 and the Haass Commission seriously considered the possibility of a new flag in its work on reconciliation. A new flag was created for South Africa, and its adoption and use has been very successful. However, the comparison between South Africa and Northern Ireland is a flawed one: as many commentators, such as Hill and White,7 have pointed out, whereas in South Africa the root problem was addressed and actually “solved,” permitting new forms of life, in Northern Ireland, a set of accommodations—literally, “settlements”—were made to prevent further violence, but the root problems remained; and unlike in South Africa, those root problems are theologically inflected. Like others, Hill and White therefore consider whether comparison with Palestine is the more insightful one. To make such an analogy is usually seen as symptomatic of sympathies with a Republican perspective, but Hill and White go beyond this, interrogating at length the appearance in Northern Ireland’s civic spaces of the Israeli flag in 2002, and the way its use has grown and developed since then. They begin by comparing the long-standing use of the Palestinian flag (by some Republican sympathizers) with this new use of the Israeli flag by some Unionists, and conclude that it is not the expression of mere “relational oppositionism” that the media usually understands it to be. (If you fly a black flag, I’ll fly a white one, etc.) Rather, it can “be conceived as stemming from the specific connotations this flag has come to possess for those who fly it, in regard to the contemporary political situation in Northern Ireland.”8 Those specific connotations include the following: 1. The Israeli army takes a proactive approach to fighting “terrorism.” [And so the flag, flown in Ireland, reminds people of the Unionist belief that their claims and actions are legitimate whereas Republican protests against oppression, calls for civil rights, or calls for a reunited Ireland are the work of “terrorism.”] 2. The Israeli government takes a very hard line in “dealing with” Palestinians, and don’t care about world opinion in doing so. [And wouldn’t it be good if the United Kingdom did what it should and
A Flagging Peace? 219 protect the NI population from these insurgents, no matter the unpopularity of such a move on a world stage.] 3. The Israeli state does not afford Arabs the same rights as Jews. [Just as Protestants had protected privileges (contra Catholics) from 1921– 1972 and, de facto, until 1998.] 4. The Israeli state is the product of divine gift and approval: it is the promised land, for the chosen people. [Unionism’s purpose is “For God and Ulster.”] Flagging the Problem—the Church While it is much easier to describe the Republic as a postcolonial situation (because, unlike in Northern Ireland, it is both an independent state, and an overwhelming majority of its population understands its own history in terms of hard-won liberation from long-term occupation and the belittling methods and campaigns of foreign rule), it should not be assumed that the use of flags there is either simple or blithe. Granted, there is no controversy about which flag should be flown above government buildings, or for how many days, but uses are made of flags in other contexts, such as churches, which ought to cause more concern than they do. For example, my local church in County Mayo has six flag poles outside it. Over the course of the past year, these have borne: the local County flag (usually around the time of the local men’s sporting competitions in the Gaelic Athletic Association); a flag that I presume to be some sort of Papal flag (due to its large keys and crown and gold on white colors); and the Irish national flag, the Tricolore. Then, inside the church, throughout the whole of last year, there were two huge banners flanking both sides of the west wall. They each said “I know whom I have believed,” under a red and black stylized depiction of a Celtic cross, with a small print sign on the wall explaining that the banners were advancing the cause of the Pope’s Year of Faith (2013–2014). It is such a confident statement, yet it does not tell us to whom it refers. Jesus? The Pope? The banners were— paradoxically—as ambiguous as they were sure of themselves. The combined impression conveyed by my local church’s flag-flying in 2013 was masculinist, closely related to Rome, nationalist, Irish, and defensive. But when I tried to have a conversation about this with other local residents, I received the following responses (in order of frequency): 1. “That’s your personal problem, your mis-perception, something you choose to read into it, probably because you’re too British.” 2. “Those flags are simply celebrating aspects of our identity, and that’s a good thing: they say ‘We’re in Mayo and we’re proud of our Mayo identity’; or ‘We’re Catholic and we’re happy to be Catholic’ or ‘We’re Irish and it’s important to celebrate it.’”
220 Siobhán Garrigan 3. Many people hadn’t noticed the flags at all. 4. I spoke to the sexton of the church, who explained that they very rarely would have a Tricolore inside the Church, so there was nothing nationalist going on. And yet, on Easter Sunday (and for the next two weeks) the three large flower arrangements in the sanctuary were entirely green, white, and orange. This was, of course, almost certainly entirely accidental; but the power of the livery to appear at a subconscious level cannot be overlooked. Some of these “denial” responses are typical of any conversation about sectarianly inflected attitudes and practices in the Republic. But whereas people can be persuaded that some aspects of church life are symbolizing a sectarianism that church people have otherwise rejected,9 there are levels of deniability about flags that make this conversation particularly difficult. Flags can serve as a seemingly benign way of making very pointed points. And, in addition to this, in an Irish context, church traditions, languages, and sensibilities make national flags particularly intense items. Nationhood, manhood, family (in hetero-patriarchal mode), and faith (in authoritative and Roman modes) all “go together” to pass as a normative notion of being “Irish,” even in these days of reduced church attendance and anger at the crimes of clerical sexual abuse. Moreover, few in the Republic are yet ready to admit that it may have escaped years of classic colonial oppression by Britain, but that did not, and does not, make it immune from further colonization. The extreme Unionist account of the Republic as some sort of theocracy run from Rome and which would not permit Protestants to practice their faith is, blatantly, mistaken. However, the ways in which the nascent state was historically enthralled to Rome are becoming increasingly apparent, just as are the ways it was, and remains, prone to a globalizing capitalist-consumerist ethic that recolonizes it constantly, affecting everything from personal body image to hyper-real town renovations for the cause of tourism. It is noteworthy that in a small town in the tourism belt (in Connemara), the Palestinian flag accompanied by the words “FREE PALESTINE” are currently to be found drawn on the wall not of an old factory, or house, or farm, but of the old (Catholic) school attached to the local (Catholic) church. At worst, such imagery can be code for “Up the IRA,” but not only is that slogan no longer legally tolerated, it is also rarely socially tolerated in the Republic. If that were indeed all that was meant, it is highly likely it would have been washed off, or painted over, given that it was on a public site on a main road. To follow Hill and White then, we can ask whether, far from being indicative of some sort of blunt binary positioning, it is more likely to be expressing deeper desires and political dispositions. One might wonder, given its position on church premises,
A Flagging Peace? 221 if it is, after all, cognizant of the co-implication of the church in insufficiently post-colonial living, expressing a desire for a better freedom in church affairs in this supposedly independent, liberal, democratic state in which a Catholic ethos is nevertheless still enshrined in and protected by the Constitution. Conclusion There is a “peace” in Northern Ireland, and thank goodness for it. But like many other places with a colonial legacy (or present reality), this peace is fragile, based on daily negotiations of unsatisfactory realities. There is a seeming orthodoxy that the GFA came about at the level of elites and that it failed to sufficiently engage the public. This is true in the respect that it was, indeed, manufactured at a specific and narrow level of managing civic institutions. But any implication that it could have been wrought at the level of the public requires further attention. For that to now happen, these issues such as flag usage are the ones that need to be attended to, and theological commentators have a potentially important role to play—not merely because of the churches’ involvement in the creation of meaning around our national flags, but also because, liturgically, it is no surprise that symbols work in ways political scientists cannot predict.10 Like all symbols, flags are simultaneously specific and open in their meanings, harboring and giving voice to what is known-so-far while at the same time being the grammar of what will be in the future. Notes 1. Northern Ireland Executive, An agreement among the parties of the Northern Ireland Executive on Parades, Select Commemorations, and Related Protests, Flags and Emblems, and Contending with the Past, December 31, 2013, http://bit.ly/postcol5-1. 2. Department for Culture, Media & Sport, United Kingdom. Designated days for Union Flag flying, http://bit.ly/postcol5-2. 3. For example, this piece from December 23, urging conclusion by Christmas: BBC News, Fourth Haass draft studied by NI political parties, http://bit.ly /postcol5-3. 4. Colin Graham and Willy Maley, “Introduction,” Irish Studies Review 7.2 (1999): 149–152. 5. Susan McKay, “At City Hall,” London Review of Books 35.3 (2013): 16. 6. For example, see https://www.facebook.com/newniflag?ref=br_tf. 7. Andrew Hill and Andrew White, “The Flying of Israeli Flags in Northern Ireland,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 15.1 (2008): 1–50. 8. Ibid., 35. 9. For example, see Steve Bruce’s response to my last book, in which he says that the case has now been persuasively made. Steve Bruce, “The Real Peace
222 Siobhán Garrigan Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism,” Journal of Theological Studies 63.1 (2012): 393–395. 10. For a full account of the liturgical use of symbols in sectarianism in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, see Siobhán Garrigan, The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism (London: Equinox, 2010).
17 Holy Crumbs, Table Habits, and (Dis)pl acing Conversations—Beyond “Only One Is Holy” Michael N. Jagessar “Take and Eat”—Conversation Starters In Christian Worship: Postcolonial Worship (2012), Stephen Burns and I initiated what we considered “challenging, unsettling, exciting and rewarding” “starters” on “numerous and ongoing conversations about the shape, style and future of Christian worship in postcolonial perspective.”1 We hoped that our thoughts and insights would “stir and fund the imagination”2 to open up spaces toward fresh reconfigurations around liturgical theology and practice, and this volume is one result of this direction. One of the areas that we did not cover in Christian Worship is the eucharist or holy communion. We did, however, briefly hint in “Fragments of a postcolonial perspective on Christian Worship”3 at images/symbols in worship, specifically the link between “colour and holiness in the visual dimensions of sacramental celebration.”4 This chapter, building on postcolonial pointers raised in Christian Worship, will engage with eucharist or holy communion. Besides its theological and ecclesial significance, eating, drinking and conversations have a central place in the shape of our life together. “Food matters so much so”, said Angel F. Méndez–Montoya, “that God becomes food, our daily bread.”5 However, some have bread, while many starve; some can drink and guzzle wine while many die of thirst or overindulge in wine resulting in abusive behavior and relational damage; and we theologize on bread and wine, while greedy “corp-o-crats” speculate on grains/water and buy up
224 Michael N. Jagessar land dispossessing millions, including those not yet born. Colonial habits have many avatars, are still alive today, and no table is beyond its reach! Worship that ignores these contradictions that legitimize systemic oppression and domination and create victims either explicitly or implicitly is not worship in spirit and truth. As Roberto S. Goizueta (2009) observes, the “connection between the struggle for justice and worship of a transcendent God” is nowhere more evident than in the eucharistic liturgy.6 For what shall it profit our eucharistic theologies if it does not dare to puncture the many checkpoints we put up that prevent us from “encountering the God who approaches us from the other side”?7 In the United Kingdom, mission statements are replete with “radical welcome” and “Christian hospitality.” Yet, many experience exclusion and marginalization, not the least around the meal table of churches. Often we articulate notions of radical welcome to the table when in fact larger concerns such as “who gets to define community,” how specific definitions of community serve different interests, and the theologies undergirding our table habits, remain untouched.8 When we invite “all to come to the table of the Lord and not the Church” we may actually mean “come sit at OUR table where the rules of eating, drinking and conversations will operate within proscribed theological boundaries, an unchangeable inherited ecclesiology and a particular reading of Scriptures.” The table is the Lord’s only to a certain extent! Tissa Balasuyiya’s observation that the eucharist has become “domesticated within the dominant social establishments of the day” as “its radical demands have been largely neutralised” and “its cutting edge has been blunted,” is still relevant.9 What kind of Christ and Church do our table habits, methods, and theologies project? Are we open to a conversation with different voices? The need for a “reconstructive moment” when crucial doctrines are “re-envisioned” could not be timelier.10 The eucharistic theology we articulate shapes the theologies informing the other dimensions of our life together.11 Here, I use the notion of “displace” influenced by the Caribbean displacement experience. Displace is about location(s), geographies, and spatiality, but not necessarily about fixed places. It also embodies colors, sounds, food, manners, legends, beliefs, rituals, dress, and festivals. Displace for minorities/border negotiators is about displacement, dislocation,12 and movement. Hence, displace theologizing highlights the complexity of location and multiplicity of identities that collide and/or are renegotiated. Liberating liturgical God–talk/practice ought to explore such locations/spaces to grasp the multilayered heritage of the worshipping community members, while accepting the multiplicity of inherited traditions. So displace here is both doing eucharistic theological conversations within our fluid and complex contexts, and is a signifying heuristic “check” of our every attempt at majoring in exactitudes and drawing doctrinal, ecclesial, and cultural boundaries on God and God’s actions.
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 225 The minor word “beyond” in this undertaking is not insignificant. Beyond, as Homi Bhabha deploys it, is that which “signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future,” mindful that “the very act of going beyond” takes us into the “unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the ‘present’, which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced.”13 Beyond also underscores “its hope to transcend its shortcomings.”14 Bhabha’s insight that beyond opens up both an “intervening space” and a “revisionary time”—ripe with transforming empowering possibilities for the present, is timely for our scrutiny of eucharistic theology and practice. Here is an invitation to explore liturgical God-talk and -walk, specifically, on eucharist that moves us beyond “minority theologizing,” and to engage in critical conversations on the ways our forms of God-talk intersect, complement, and challenge each other. Could this be what Emmanuel Lartey had in mind when he wrote, “We need respectful engagement across our myriad differences to even begin to approximate the manifold wisdom of God in the care of the world”?15 As Janet Wootton observed before, perhaps a significant part of our challenge “lies not in the invention of new ways, but in the discovery of what has always been there, and been hidden or perverted.”16 Bread and Wine—(Dis)placing “Main Course” Conversations From the Guyanese/Caribbean/British poet John Agard who loves to “mug the Queen’s English” and “mash up” the English grammar,”17 I have learnt that our words, grammar, and language are often tied to hegemonic control, and are forced to labor under the weight of our spatial imagination. I will not be following the colonial rule on capitalizing eucharist, holy communion, table, or tradition. I agree with Cláudio Carvalhaes: “Words are not detached linguistic signs.” They do “carry a load of different meanings according to its cultural usages.” As he notes, “it is the theological borders that institute the grammatical rules and limits of the vocabulary usage of the word Eucharist.”18 Kwok Pui-lan contends that any critical engagement with liturgy must include more than translation into local language. The cultural and linguistic world of “the deposit of faith” must be fully interrogated.19 Besides grammar and words, some of our inherited liturgical terminologies need to be exposed for their role in gatekeeping and “border controlling” the free and generous exchange of abundant grace! Janet Wootton notes how the language of liturgy erases women through its male dominance and telling inconsistencies. Borrowing from Latin, “the grammatical argument” is that women and men can be collectively represented by “using only a masculine noun or adjective.” At the same time, words such as “believers,” “sinners,” and “friends” “are not gender specific, though
226 Michael N. Jagessar they would be in Latin and other similar languages.” What is missed is how the language not only erased women but also “hid the innate sexism of the language itself.”20 The ways in which the deposit of faith has been and is presented relates to its initial representation and how it continues to be presented today. Re-presentation and presentation are not value-free.21 Interrogating the so-called deposit of faith to detect, question, and expose how the dominant represents the dominated, the link between power and knowledge and the locating of ideologies in plots and characterization in texts and their interpretations, is urgent. As Sugirtharajah notes, “colonial discourse is staunchly wedded to unvarying and exclusive truth and tolerates no dissent or debate.”22 What, for instance, if the arriving at and solidifying of this deposit of faith, happened to marginal and dissenting voices? What is the link between the deposit, empire, and liturgical theology? A postcolonial perspective “offers an invaluable vantage point” to help in scrutinizing “how religious and cultural productions are enmeshed in the economic and political domination of colonialism and empire building.” 23 Scrutiny of eucharist and liturgical theology/practice may be more than challenging what is received/inherited. Faithfulness to a free flow of grace and creating spaces for all may require us to even give up established texts and dump images and restrictive metaphors.24 Only One Is Holy? The title of the proposed volume for this essay caught my eye: “Only One Is Holy,”25 from the ancient communion invitation of eastern eucharistic liturgies, and often employed by Gordon Lathrop.26 I agree with Lathrop that “the point of all the juxtapositions, reversals and paradoxes of Christian liturgy is to draw us before the living God” and that “liturgy is not God.” For, “only one is holy”—God, who “in mercy and love intends the wholeness of all things, the one who gives holiness away.”27 However, how much of our understanding of One operates within the confines of an inherited theology that restricts the Divine? Is our understanding of One homogenous and unifying with little space for “multiple monotheism” or for a Divine embodied in diversity? It is reasonable to suggest that Christianity has been too preoccupied with a terrifying singularity—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God, etc. Our diverse landscape (faiths, peoples, cultures) is a plural reality. Oneness may not be the only tune and dance of the Divine. So, how does the notion of “One Is Holy” allow room for the pleroma of the Divine and the Divine’s work of grace throughout the whole of creation? Catherine Keller reminds us that much of our God-talk tries “to draw the line at God” and at “shallowing” the Divine, rather than apprehending the Divine as Manyone, “a countless divinity.”28
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 227 From a postcolonial perspective, Only One Is Holy—which has been and still can be premised on the “logic of oneness”—must be critically engaged with, given its imperializing and totalizing tendencies. As Laurel Schneider reminds us, “the logic of the One is powerful and it is not extricable from monarchical and supremacist entailments.”29 She goes on to note that “most of Christian theology has fallen into more or less of a Docetic groove, unwilling to grant to divinity the freedom to incarnate except in one ‘conclusive’ time and place in the person of Jesus.”30 Eucharist and Borders—A Decolonial Table Cláudio Carvalhaes makes a strong case for a borderless border sacrament, suggesting that eucharist can enable us to understand how “borders and the ways of Christian hospitality might be (un)framed.” For at eucharist there are “ecclesiastical borders” and theological, liturgical, socioeconomic, and political borders.31 While recent writings alerted us to these interrelated borders, the interrogation of these and the consequence of reconfiguring the theology and biblical underpinnings that ought to inform current eucharistic liturgies and practices seem largely untouched. There are evident changes, with newer and more expansive language and imageries, and some rethinking around theological notions such as sacrifice and presence. What remains largely un-interrogated, however, are some of the inherited biblical scholarship and deposits of faith from across our various ecclesial heritages. Recent biblical rereadings have yet to impact our theology and practice. The goal of a decolonial table is to both interrogate and release this space for what it is intended—one for all people where borders are named and transgressed, rather than being chained to various ecclesial glimpses of the mystery that often becomes a fenced-in space. The activities around a decolonial table must be counter-hegemonic and strategic (a subversive space), hybrid (interactive-intersubjective space), dynamic and creative, and ambiguous (in-between space).32 Eucharistic Prayers, Bible and Hermeneutics Paula Gooder and Michael Perham note that “there is hardly a sentence in the Eucharistic liturgy that does not echo the Scriptures.”33 They observe that nearly always the liturgists will also have before them some of the texts that have come down the centuries and gone through many revisions and changes to fit them for new purpose and changing culture . . . some of it they carry unconsciously. Sometimes they can believe they are being creative when all they are really doing is calling to mind something lodged deep inside them for years of prayer and worship.34
228 Michael N. Jagessar Gooder and Perham suggest that “the most common use of the Bible in these texts is through paraphrase or summary,” as writers attempt “to communicate the whole sweep of salvation history in two or three lines.”35 The authors note how “the movement towards constant harmonization of narrative and ideas runs counter to biblical scholarship” and how “interpretational decision” related to liturgical texts can result in original meaning and intent being altered.36 Concerned about the appropriate deploying of biblical texts, they delve into various scriptural allusions and references in the eucharistic liturgies, querying whether it matters “if the effect of the allusion ends up being the opposite of what was clearly intended in the biblical narratives.” They suggest two responses: seeing allusion as allusion and insisting that faithfulness of the text is not necessary, and that since the Bible is important to the “authority for liturgical writing,” then “prayerful attention to its original meaning is vital.”37 While sounding a warning about “the forming of a liturgical canon within a canon,” the authors give way to tradition. They note: “This technique has such a historic and honoured tradition that one wouldn’t want to say that it shouldn’t be done, but it is worth being aware of the issues and implications that arise when it is done.”38 But being aware of what one is doing is only part of the challenge. The substantive issue is how the interpretation shapes our table habits and life together. As David Joy reminds us, “liturgists in the postcolonial world should be urged to offer due importance to the Bible in preparing the liturgy,” given the ways the bible has been misused to subjugate.39 While a ministry of word may counterbalance this, my concern is the inability to question both the inherited tradition and especially the scriptural foundations of the eucharistic prayer and/or the communion service. For, “the very act of interpreting affects the narratives as well as the world.”40 One attempt to do such interpretative interrogation is evident in a eucharistic prayer I developed around the theme of seeking asylum, where I interrupted and juxtaposed the eucharist narrative with one of “every refugee and stranger in our midst.”41 This has led Susanna Snyder to ask whether “the presence of asylum seekers among us” can cause us “to grapple with some of the problematic aspects of the Bible” and to engage with passages “at the edges of scriptural respectability, to own them as part of our tradition and to struggle with them together as a community.”42 Gooder and Perham (2013) do not disclose their interpretative lens, nor any biases in the use of any of these scriptural allusions. I am not sure they intended to give any agency to asylum seekers enabling us to rediscover the radical nature of eucharist. One wonders whether the implications of rereading the scriptures from various perspectives received any consideration. What would some of these rereadings mean for both the use of scriptures in eucharistic prayers and the rethinking of our eucharistic
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 229 theology? Not surprisingly, the authors missed the colonial-empire context in which the liturgy evolved! The issue is more than “liturgical censoring” or of merely “overlooking those traditions which have provided theological underpinning for various forms of colonialism and which scandalize most people today.”43 The question is whether crafters of eucharistic prayers are conscious that their interpretative paraphrasing is not value-free, and that these prayers may be more a “word about God” rather than “of God.” To dislodge dominant and oppressive modes of representing will mean cultivating and nurturing safe, fluid ecclesial spaces for these critical questions. Faithfulness to tradition should mean more than protecting biblical texts from “wayward” misreadings. Biblical stories “must not become the dead husks of orthodoxy.” Husks must be cracked “open to reveal the seeds they contain.” It is from the seeds that new narratives “which resonate with our lived experience” will sprout forth.44 As John Barton notes, “good liturgy is the natural ally of a hermeneutic that is alive both to the original sense of texts and to the modern context in which they are being appropriated,”45 as well as an awareness of the many compromises with dominant groups along the way. It may also be that faithfulness will demand the courage to give up some of our received interpretations and even the texts themselves.46 Remembering with a Difference A significant element around the eucharistic table is “remembering” or “recalling.” How can the saving action of the one remembered be meaningful for a particular gathering in any age?47 What is it we are actually remembering, and is our remembering a liberating and releasing act? Especially in the context of “eucharist as rehearsing God’s reign,”48 what is it we are remembering or reenacting49? What is the relationship between remembering and signifying? How does remembering give agency to multiple identities, and what is the relationship between remembering and the shaping of identities? Louis-Marie Chauvet notes that what we remember or recall are presented as if they were actual happenings of what “Jesus did the night before he died.” What is actually being narrated “is the way the Church re-acts the last meal of the Lord.”50 As Dominic Crossan notes, the eucharist comes not from Jesus, “but from the liturgical creativity of early communities.”51 It was largely an oral tradition. This highlights how an “oral tradition” evolves into a written one, and how exported texts (eucharistic liturgies), with their literary constructions and representations, are already culturally and ideologically compromised.52 Hence Jione Havea, writing in a different context, makes a case for shifting “our attention from focusing on book and reading (the realm of hermeneutics) to story and telling,
230 Michael N. Jagessar subjects that vibrate in oral cultures.” Can such a shift free up the texts and its content-message from “the burden of translation”?53 And would “remembering” be then released from restrictive ecclesial boundaries? Carmel Pilcher contends that “it is only when we remember Christ faithfully—in word and deed—at Eucharist that we embody Christ in life.”54 Pilcher argues for authentic eucharistic remembering that will see the Christian community “transformed and empowered to speak Christ’s prophetic voice of justice and peace in our world.”55 There is, therefore, a deeper significance to remembering that is beyond recalling. The remembering demands mimicking Christ in a lived response as “it is not enough to praise God’s creation unless we are also stewards of the earth. It is not enough to come to the table of communion and unity unless we are prepared to work towards equality and justice for all peoples—even in the carrying out of the church’s liturgy.”56 This lived response starts at the table and with those who are around it. Mimicry, though, is more than mere imitation, but should rather be seen “as a means of shifting power relations” that employs “partially hidden public spaces” to practice politics of freedom “on a lower frequency.”57 It looks almost the same, but not quite the same.58 The liturgical habit of remembering plays a key role in shaping the identity of the community, as the event is made present through reenactment,59 converging past, present, and future. For William Spohn, the meal is “a place where Christian identity is enacted and rehearsed,”60 shaped, and reshaped, “pulling us beyond individualism and defensiveness by having us identify with others and acknowledge that God has graciously identified with us in Christ.”61 The matter of identity-shaping raises questions about our current practices and whether “our remembering and reenacting” allow for variety and multiple identities around the table. This is especially the case given that the eucharistic meal “gradually became a source of dis-identity from the Jewish community, and a source of self-identity.”62 Do our eucharistic liturgies lift up and remember diversity? Linking remembering with identity, food and its availability, eating and economic well-being, Méndez–Montoya notes that while the eucharist reminds us that we are called to feed others as we are fed, our table reenactment must work for a sustainable economy of food for all. The author sets God’s superabundance in stark contrast to capitalism’s idea of overabundance and the manipulation of desire. As a counter-habit, eucharist trains us in sharing and in a “complete act of feeding.” In the complete act, God becomes food, we become God,63 and all gathered at the table become one in the sense of “many-one-ness” and in taking our place in the divine economy.64 Around the table, belonging and identity for all is reconfigured. Méndez opens up possibilities of eucharistic remembering as a playful movement between God and humanity, neither one having
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 231 any claim on absolute ownership over the eucharist itself, as it moves back and forth between them, uniting. There is reciprocity and mutuality in giving and receiving in a divine economy. In giving, God also receives. This approach offers a more dynamic understanding of eucharistic theology, where no one group can stake any rigid claim, all are invited to be mutually inconvenienced, and where we work with the sacramental understanding of all food. Our daily bread, whether eucharist, mole, or chapattis, overflows with theological and political implications, shaping our identities and our faith and faithfulness.65 The act of remembering is also a liturgically enacted counter-politics to this world’s politics. By drawing the church back to Christ, the eucharist furnishes the church with resources to resist the injustice, deceitfulness, and violence that mark the world for which Christ died.66 So the eucharistic prayer importantly recalls who or what voices and stories are remembered in the recalling, which is crucial to what we espouse as Eucharistic theology. As Janet Wootton contends, “the eucharist itself ought to be a place for celebrating women’s stories. Women are the makers and providers of food. Women’s bodies and blood are the nourishers of new life.”67 So how do we incorporate in the thanksgiving prayer or the remembering Mary’s right as a woman and mother of Jesus to say “my body and my blood”? And where in current eucharistic prayers do we give agency to the silent history of minorities and veneration of “saints” from among our deposits of faith and which our written texts have buried? Body Politics, Identities, and Subversion For many, the Pauline notion of the body of Christ is “the basis for the ecclesial dimension of Eucharist.”68 But notions such as the “body of Christ” and “in Christ” are not without an agenda. Ricardo Garcia notes how this can become “a weapon for cultural imperialism” as unwittingly, members of the community in Christ are encouraged to maintain the same mind, as in a “melting pot theory of assimilation” without the acceptance of cultural or convictional differences.69 How do our theologies of the body of Christ shape our table habits and our understanding of “in Christ”? Do they allow differences within the body, or are identities subsumed in the liturgical rite as we become one eschatological community? What space do we allow for many-oneness when, as William Cavanaugh notes, it is the “remarkable collapsing of spatial barriers” (Gal 3:28) that make the local community truly catholic”?70 Cavanaugh may be referring to the fact that the eucharistic table is not about a globalized competition, though the way we practice eating around our various ecclesial tables may not be far from such. But the question still must be asked: what does such collapsing do to distinctive embodiment, and how is this reflected in our eucharistic theologies? In
232 Michael N. Jagessar contexts where race consciousness plays a central role in the theological constructions of racially marginalized and oppressed communities, how do we make sense of ethnic particularity within the church’s theological formulations? How do we reread the interpretive tendencies of Paul’s oneness theory that seems to subsume differences? Murphy O’Connor writes that “in a group which possesses ‘the mind of Christ’ (I Cor 2:16) the individual is distinguished only by different Spirit-given gifts of service.”71 What about cultural, ethnic, and sexual identities and embodiment? If as O’Connor contends, Paul worked the image of the Body “as a pastoral rebuke to a community who had lost the sense of the prophetic memory of Eucharist,”72 then these words should do more than “cause us to examine our contemporary situation where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow” and where the body of Christ sees exclusions of all sorts. We have to also query the constant preoccupation to “turn back” or “keep out” refugees and asylum seekers in a country where its citizens believe themselves to be “‘free’, ‘open,’ and ‘welcoming’ people,” and also ask whether Christ’s eucharistic hospitality can ever find a space with such preoccupation.73 Yung Suk Kim contends that “how one conceives of community determines the way one understands the ‘body of Christ’ in Paul.”74 He questions whether the yearning for a “pure community” downplays the interaction and Hybrid complexities of the early church. This yearning legitimizes “the hegemonic voice of unity in society with the church,” leaving little space “for differences and diversity,” placing more emphasis on “sameness of identity or pure unity.”75 Paul and his interpreters may seem liberative, while also diminishing and restricting the existence of others! The “one in Christ” call may look like equality in the body. However, it carries a threat to differences in the Christian economies of history.76 Kim rightly questions some interpretations of the body of Christ, especially “interpretations that leave no room for contemplating the marginalized and give no account of the value of diversity.”77 Much of our received interpretations of tradition offer restrictive views of the body of Christ, “serving ecclesial interests and legitimizing the powerful in society and the church.” These close down “other possibilities of meaning that would open the opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue with others.”78 From a postcolonial biblical perspective, we need to explore Christian liturgical discourse by looking “beyond the limitations of the Jewish-Hellenistic context and pay attention also to the Jewish-Aramaic influence,”79 which will produce a different set of questions. Looking at the early Church through Jewish-Aramaic optics will reveal how Jewish Christians “were the original hybridizers who wished to remain within the Jewish religious parameters and reconfigured their faith in the light of the teachings of Jesus.” It was early Christianity and the later Eurocentric version that
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 233 “flattened significant or cultural differences”80 into restrictive monotheism or oneness of almost everything, including the mind. Hybridity, Mystery, and In-Between Spaces As Silvio Torres-Saillant observes, many find difficult “to recognize the possible coexistence of unity and diversity or the unity existing outside of singularity and purity.”81 Though the biblical world is replete with hybrid situations, contexts, moments, and intercultural engagements, we still need to overcome the aversion to hybridities as we continue to favor notions of purity, election, and being set apart. Within such a framework, hybridity means mess, danger and terror. Edward Foley makes a case for Jesus’s table as an experience of hybridity with a specific focus. He suggests that “hybridity as ‘third space’ provides a lens to the table as a moment of subversive, ambiguous and liminal encounter.”82 Foley points specifically to ways Jesus “exercises his authority to negotiate that ‘third space’ while at table” and beyond. In some of these encounters, Foley notes that in “the time-space liminality of the meal, there are a series of reversals: Jesus who was invited as the guest becomes the host.”83 While stories of Jesus’s table ministry are often presented as transformative encounters, it seems that if they were truly an experience of hybridity, then the experience had to be disruptive and liminal for both Jesus and those who broke bread with him. Jesus pushed the boundaries of his religious tradition through reversals and redefining the notion of “table,” “where a new understanding of God’s reign was being negotiated, and previous understandings of covenant were being turned inside out.”84 It was more than a “negotiation between Jesus and those with whom he shared a table and common meal.” It was also a negotiation with the gatekeepers of the religious status quo who took Jesus to task for his eating and drinking habits, which often included sharing the table with a host of dodgy people. To protect a pure version of faith, tradition, and practice, the religious status quo also contributed to the experience of this “third space.” For “by naming the subaltern, they contributed to the creation of an experience of subalternity. And by announcing their separation from the Jesus table, they effected such a separation.”85 Foley’s rereading of Jesus’s table encounters through the metaphors of “third space” and hybridity opens up possibilities of rethinking our eucharistic theologies and practice.86 Foley draws on Homi Bhabha’s analysis of turmoil-rich hybrid spaces. Bhabha gives agency to individual/ local experiences noting that it is in the overlap and displacement that the intersubjective and collective experiences of community and its values are renegotiated.87 Can it be that in the complex exchange in the “in– between–space” at the table, the Spirit is working overtime to produce
234 Michael N. Jagessar mutual inconveniencing and transformation in terms of identities and belonging? Unknowingly, Bhabha “aptly provides a powerful lens for considering this eucharistic matrix in which identities are not only expressed but are also in the process of being created and transformed”88and where hybridity functions to destabilize the discourse of dominant identitarian positions.89 From a Reformed perspective, could the idea of a “third or in-between space” help to recover a lost dimension of sacramental mystery? According to Regina Schwartz, our “wordy” eucharistic liturgies with their “sacramental poetry” may be pointing to a larger meaning than and beyond themselves. For, the liturgy “signifies more than it says,” “creates more than it signs” through “image, sound and time, in language that takes the hearer beyond each of those elements.”90 I agree with Schwartz that the Reformers, in response to their perception of the idolatry around eucharistic theology and practices of their time, lost out when they replaced the doctrine of transubstantiation with their various versions of mystery and presence. Understandably, the Reformers were responding to a situation of the eucharist being turned into “a locus where the Church could exercise its control over the sacred.” For, in attempting to make the “visible invisible,” the Church before the Reformation gave the eucharist “a strategic function” aimed at consolidating the Church. They did so “by positing not just the equivalence but the identity between mystical reality and the visible and by making that depend upon hierarchical authority.”91 Among the consequences of such eucharistic co-opting was the fact that mystery had become “instrumentalized.”92 Schwartz notes: “In one of the more influential co-optations of its sacramental meaning, then, the mystical body came to refer more and more to the absolute monarch and to the body of the monarch, the nation.”93 The Protestant Reformers, preoccupied with idolatry and fearing “instrumentality that sought to control the domain of mystery,” ended up reinscribing instrumentality “not of the Eucharist by the Church, but of the sacred by the state.”94 While attempting to destroy and restrict the many variations of “idols,” purging churches of icons, art, crosses, liturgical wear, carvings, tapestry, monuments, and ceremonies, “the state was simultaneously embracing images and processionals full of pomp and ceremony.”95 Eventually, the state consolidated and legitimatized its power. Hence, Elizabethan iconography transferred “the power of mysticism from medieval Mariology,” incorporating it with “embodiments of power, wealth, [and] empire”; portraits of Elizabeth featured the queen “not only holding the globe, but planting her feet on it, spanning the starry heavens and regulating the thunderstorms, thereby projecting the order of the state onto the very cosmos.” What was once mystery became the Queen’s property!96 With the corresponding expansion in the “new world” at that time, the colonial links with our inherited liturgical traditions and practices become evident.
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 235 The Reformers, in their zeal to purge the doctrine of transubstantiation lost a sense of mystery that “infuses all materiality, spirituality, and signification with the presence of God.”97 Schwartz deduces that “when it is stripped of its mystical sense, even the Eucharist—the mysterion—is no longer about faith, hope, and charity, but refers to identity, one that forges insiders, with corporate shared values, and outsiders who do not share them.”98 Could the Protestant tendency (its own idolatry) to overemphasize word and give agency to rationalism, along with its culturally linear thinking and an obsession with “oneness,” be one reason why we find it challenging to handle multiple identities, belonging, and diversity? Perhaps a rediscovery of sacramental “mystery” may open up ways for us to reimagine community in terms of in-between space(s) and “homelessness” around the table. Not a fixed space/place that “removes any possibility of a genuine, open-ended engagement with others,” or “of seeing community in multiple contexts and through the lens of diversity,”99 but as a “third space” of a community that displaces all because there is more meaning than each of us around the table may be able to comprehend. Signifying Sweet-Talk—Unending Table Conversations My Muslim and Hindu grandmothers held the view that “we are what we eat.” For them, at the heart of food, cooking, eating, and table is a sense of God’s abundance and presence; while eating, we break out from incurvatus in se to rediscover our transfigured selves. In retrospect, I have come to realize the ecstatic, gastro-ingenious, and subversive dimensions of their kitchen spaces and to grasp why we always gravitate toward them, especially for the delightfully signifying and sensual “savories” (desserts) that stimulated relaxation and helped the rediscovering of pleasure in tough circumstances. Their kitchens and table-spaces demonstrated imaginative play at its best, creating an alternative world in impoverished circumstances, where “little” was abundance. Their cooking and the food they “dished out” drew us in and sent us out with a feeling that there were still more flavors to discover, ingest, digest, and taste. “Taste and see,” declared the psalmist. My grandmothers’ culinary abilities showed what this command/invitation really means. This chapter points in the direction of decolonized eucharistic table/ space and rites where the arousal of the senses is given more agency over the tendency to intellectualize eucharistic God-talk and practice. Can our eating, drinking, and sharing at table be an act of giving and receiving gifts in gratitude and generosity? Can it be an act of reconstructing a different world and of celebrating an economy that contradicts a market ideology of scarcity? Can our sharing at table be experienced as being drawn into liminal/hybrid spaces of healing, mystery, reconciliation, mutual
236 Michael N. Jagessar inconveniencing, and transformation through divine “culinary art” where we are no longer able to “distinguish between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety”?100 I continue to taste, see, dream, and imagine. Notes 1. Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011), x. 2. Ibid., 30. 3. Michael N. Jagessar and Stephen Burns, “Fragments of a Postcolonial Perspective on Christian Worship,” in Worship and Ministry: Shaped towards God, ed. Stephen Burns (Preston, Victoria: Mosaic Press, 2012), 52–77. 4. Stephen Burns, ed., Worship and Ministry: Shaped towards God (Preston, Victoria: Mosaic Press, 2012), 73. 5. Angel F. Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 3. 6.. Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ our Compassion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 149. 7. Roberto S. Goizueta, Christ our Compassion: Toward a Theological Aesthetics of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 152. 8. Yung Suk Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth: The Politics of a Metaphor (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 7. 9. Tissa Balasuriya, The Eucharist and Human Liberation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), xi–xii. 10. Mary Grey, “Catholic Feminist Theology”, in Exploring Theology: Making sense of Catholic Tradition, ed. Anne Hession and Patricia Kieran (Dublin: Veritas Publishers, 2007), 277. 11. Kim Power and Carol Hogan, “Introduction,” in Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Exploration in Feminist Theology and Ethics, ed. Anne Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Claire Renkin (Equinox Publishers, 2013), 2–3 (1–9). 12. We have to learn to live with a history of loss of identity and with a feeling of displacement/dislocation, due to the necessity of inhabiting in-between worlds. Displacement then serves as a catalyst for the development of self, and is central to the search for identity—a postcolonial reality. These dislocations have brought along the complexities of power, social, and cultural relations connected with the question of ethnicity and race. They also entail a quest for a sense of belonging, a need to relocate oneself in the midst of so much cultural diversity and an attempt to reconstruct a sense of selfhood layered with multiplicity. To connect place and identity, one has to “live out” these places in order to feel spiritually connected to displacement and its history. 13. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 14. Mayra Riveria, The Touch of Transcendence: A postcolonial Theology of God (Louisville & London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 10. 15. Emmanuel Lartey, Pastoral Theology in an Intercultural World (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2006), 149.
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 237 16. Janet Wootton, Introducing a Practical Feminist Theology of Worship (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 134. 17. John Agard, “Listen Mr. Oxford Don,” Mangoes and Bullets (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1985). 18. Cláudio Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization: Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality (Eugene: Pickwick, 2013), 9. 19. Kwok Pui-lan, “The Legacy of Cultural Hegemony in the Anglican Church,” in Beyond Colonial Anglicanism: The Anglican Communion in the Twenty– First Century, ed. Ian T. Douglas and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Church Publishing, 2001), 59–60, [47–70]. 20. Wootton, Introducing a Practical Feminist Theology of Worship (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 29–30. 21. See R. S. Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation: The Next Phase,” The Bible and Postcolonialism, 13, series editor, R. S. Sugirtharajah (London: T&T Clark, 2007). 22. R. S. Sugirtharajah, “The First, Second and Third Letters of John,” in A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, ed. Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 413. 23. Kwok Pui-lan, “Theology and Social Theory,” in Empire: The Christian Tradition; New Readings of Classical Theologians, ed. Kwok Pui–lan, Don H. Compier, and Joerg Rieger (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 19 (15–30). 24. See Stephen Burns and Michael N. Jagessar, ‘Thank You for the Night: Images in Worship–Postcolonial Perspectives,” in Worship and Ministry: Shaped towards God (Preston, Victoria: Mosaic Press, 2012), 77 (52–77). 25. “Holy things for the Holy People. One is Holy, One is Lord, Jesus Christ. O taste and see that the Lord is Good” [Liturgy of Jerusalem in Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Catecheses 5:19–20]. 26. See the three books by Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999); Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998); and Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003). 27. Lathrop, Holy Ground, 218. 28. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 10. 29. Laurel C. Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 26 30. Ibid., 139. 31. Carvalhaes, Eucharist and Globalization, 17. 32. See Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Postcolonializing God: New Perspectives on Pastoral and Practical Theology (London: SCM Press, 2013), xvi–xviii. 33. Paula Gooder and Michael Perham, Echoing the Word: The Bible in the Eucharist (London: SPCK, 2013), ix. 34. Ibid., x. [with my emphasis]. 35. Ibid., 122. 36. Ibid., 123. 37. Ibid., 123–124. 38. Ibid., 124.
238 Michael N. Jagessar 39. David Joy, “Liturgical Explorations in a Postcolonial Context,” in The Edge of God: New Liturgical Texts and Contexts in Conversation, ed. Stephen Burns, Nicola Slee, and Michael Jagessar (Marylebone: Epworth, 2008), 45–46 (39–49). 40. Heather Walton, “Breaking Open the Bible,” in Life-cycles: Women and Pastoral Care, ed. E. Graham and M. Halsey (London: SPCK, 1993), 195. Walton was quoting Rowan Williams, “Postmodern Theology and the Judgement of the World,” in F. Burnham (ed.), Postmodern Theology: Christian Faith in a Pluralist World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989). 41. A copy of the liturgy can be found at http://bit.ly/postcol5-51. 42. Susanna Snyder, “‘Strangers’ in the Sanctuary: Asylum Seekers, Faith and the Church” in The Edge of God: New Liturgical texts and Contexts in Conversation, ed. Stephen Burns, Nicola Slee and Michael Jagessar (Marylebone: Epworth, 2008), 83 (73–87). 43. Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (London: T&T Clark, 1997), 278. 44. Walton, “Breaking Open the Bible,” 196. 45. John Barton, “The Bible in Liturgy,” in The People of the Book? The Authority of the Bible in Christianity, ed. John Barton (London: SPCK, 1988), 77 [69–78]. 46. Burns, Worship and Ministry, 77; Sugirtharajah, Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation, 206. 47. Cf. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (North Blackburn: CollinsDove, 1991). 48. Ruth C. Duck, Worship for the Whole People of God: Vital Worship for the 21st Century (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2013), 187. 49. Burns, Worship and Ministry, 134. 50. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, trans. Patrick Madigan SJ and Madeleine Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 198. 51. Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 30. 52. See Musa W. Dube, “Reading for Decolonization (John 4:1–42),” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube, Jeffrey L. Staley (London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), [51–75]. 53. Jione Havea, “Who is Strange(r)? A Pacific Native Muses Over Mission,” Journal of Theologies and Cultures in Asia 7–8 (2008/2009): 135–136 [121–137]. 54. Carmel Pilcher, “The Sunday Eucharist: Embodying Christ in a Prophetic Act,” in Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Exploration in Feminist Theology and Ethics, ed. Anne Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Claire Renkin (Sheffield: Equinox, 2013), 33. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 36. 57. Gerard Aching, “Masking Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean,” Cultural Studies Series of the Americas, edited by George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 32. 58. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 121.
Holy Crumbs, Table Habits 239 59. See Chauvet, Symbol and Existence. 60. William Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2007), 184. 61. Ibid., 169. 62. Frances Gray, “Mystery Appropriated: Disembodied Eucharist and MetaTheology” in Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Exploration in Feminist Theology and Ethics, ed. Anne Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Claire Renkin, 125. 63. As Bob Marley sang: “Almighty God is a living man [sic]”. 64. Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist. 65. Cf. Musa W. Dube, “To Pray the Lord’s Prayer in the Global Economic Era (Matt. 6:9–13),” in The Bible in Africa: Transactions, Trajectories and Trends, ed. Gerald O. West and Musa W. Dube (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 66. See William Cavanaugh, Torture and the Eucharist: theology, politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 67. Wootton, Introducing a Practical Feminist Theology of Worship, 46. 68. Pilcher, The Sunday Eucharist, 42. 69. Ricardo Garcia, Teaching in a Pluralistic Society: Concepts, Models and Strategies (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 35. 70. William T. Cavanaugh, “The World in a Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization,” Modern Theology 15.2 (April 1999): 191, [182–196]. 71. Murphy O’Connor, “Eucharist and Community in First Corinthians,” in Living Bread, Saving Cup: Readings on the Eucharist, ed. R. Kevin Seasoltz, OSB (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1982), 16. 72. Ibid., 43. 73. O’Connor, “Eucharist and Community in First Corinthians,” 44. 74. Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth, 11. 75. Ibid., 12–13. 76. See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 77. Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth, 29. 78. Ibid., 30. 79. Sugirtharajah, “Postcolonial and Biblical Interpretation,” 455 [455–466]. 80. Ibid. 81. Silvio Torres–Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75. 82. Edward Foley, “Eucharist, Postcolonial Theory and Developmental Disabilities: A Practical Theologian Revisits the Jesus Table,” International Journal of Pastoral Theology 15 (2011): 63–64. 83. Ibid., 64. 84. Ibid., 65. 85. Ibid., 66. 86. Ibid. 87. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 88. Foley, “Eucharist, Postcolonial Theory and Developmental Disabilities,” 71. See also Susan Abraham, “What Does Mumbai Have to do with Rome? Postcolonial Perspectives on Globalization and Theology,” Theological Studies 69 (2008): 376–393.
240 Michael N. Jagessar 89. Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth, 37. 90. Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 6–7. 91. Ibid., 20. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 22. 94. Ibid., 29. 95. Ibid., 31. 96. Ibid., 32. 97. Ibid.,13. 98. Ibid., 35. 99. Kim, Christ’s Body in Corinth, 37. 100. Méndez-Montoya, The Theology of Food, 142.
18 Puzzling over Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia : In Search of Liturgical Decoloniality and Dialogic Orthodoxy Kristine Suna-Koro What could the “post” mean in postcolonial liturgies?1 Does it mean decoloniality in liturgy? What is the difference, if any, between postcolonial and decolonial liturgies? And second, what would a decolonial liturgical sensibility sound/look like? What kind of orthodoxy could underwrite such a decolonial liturgical sensibility? While focusing on the postcolonial/post-Soviet Latvian Lutheran liturgies, this chapter suggests that the ethos of decoloniality advocates both resistance to and transformation of Occidental coloniality—the enduring imaginary of dominance, hegemony, coercion, and its competitive dualisms of being, power, and knowledge. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia to the characteristic manifestations of a Baltic liturgical postcoloniality, I argue that the postcolonial spectrum of orthodoxy ought to be conceived as simultaneously veridical and dialogic, or it cannot be earnestly postcolonial—let alone decolonial—at all. It ought to be dialogic in the sense of irreducible multivoicedness wherein meaning is made through spiritual, imaginative, intellectual, social, somatic, linguistic, affective, and cultural encounters and transformations. It also ought to be veridical: namely, a liturgical orthodoxy shot through with readiness to ground liturgy in the truth of the “ethical universal” of historical, cultural, epistemological, and ultimately, spiritual, decoloniality. To probe for answers, I first turn to a familiar postcolonial—and post-Soviet—liturgical turf: the Latvian Lutheran liturgies that have
242 Kristine Suna-Koro emerged since the former Soviet colony, Latvia, regained its independence in the early 1990s. Familiar turf, that is, to me as a diasporic LatvianAmerican. Yet it is a continually overlooked, opaque, and still rather contested location of postcoloniality for both high postcolonial theory and for the Latvian cultural milieu itself—albeit for starkly different reasons. In a chronological and historical sense, the “post” attempts to name the often contradictory and deeply ambiguous lived realities that permeate the cultural and political milieus that were and are subjugated by certain modern colonial empires in Europe (mostly but not exclusively—just think about Russia/USSR and beyond)! In an axiological sense, the “post” goes beyond the mere acknowledgment of the existence of the messy global postcolony—the chronologically and historically postcolonial spaces across the continents. In this sense, the “post” engenders a trajectory of transdisciplinary and ethicopolitically invested and accountable sensibility and comportment. The “post” here suggests not just postcolony but postcolonialism as a comportment that strives to generate post-binary imagination and a way of living in the world not by abolishing difference but by calling into question the hierarchical inertias of dualistic colonial dominance in thought and action. It seeks to modulate the colonial and imperial habits of mind and patterns of relationality that enact competitive hegemony and coercion, especially when those are locally enthroned but universally projected onto all humans and cultures as natural and desirable. The axiological vector of the “post” resides, to quote Kwame Anthony Appiah’s classically provocative expression, “in the appeal to an ethical universal” in postcolonialism, which in turn is grounded “in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering.”2 The postcolonial challenge proceeds, to express it in explicitly theological terms, anamnetically and proleptically—“in the name of the suffering victims”3 and for their restoration and healing. Postcolonialism engenders a trajectory of desire for a new intersubjective and intercultural space as “an arena where inequalities, imbalances and asymmetries could historicize themselves ‘relationally,’ an arena where dominant historiographies could be made accountable to the ethico-political authority of emerging histories.”4 In the following explorations, I argue that there is an important difference between the liturgies of postcolony—the liturgies that are produced and practiced within various historical locales of postcolony—and liturgies that deliberately strive to embody the axiologies and teleologies of postcolonialism to open up liturgical spaces so that these spaces could enable and enact the decoloniality of being, power, sensibility, imagination, spirituality, knowledge, agency in worship and beyond. In other words, I suggest that axiological postcoloniality requires a vector of decoloniality for liturgy to be earnestly postcolonial. Historically speaking,
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 243 liturgies can be postcolonial in both senses—but not necessarily and not automatically. A Remedial Gloss on (a Somewhat Unusual) Postcolonial History After several centuries of colonial rule and serfdom under both “core” and “subaltern” European and Eurasian imperial formations (medieval Latin Christian, German, Polish, Swedish, Czarist Russian, and finally Soviet), Latvia regained its sovereignty in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet empire. Before the hated Iron Curtain was torn down literally and culturally, and as the whole “Second World” regained freedom in the late 1980s, the colonial history of Latvia was positively interrupted only once (1918–1949). The most intriguing liturgical artifact in the transnational Latvian postcolony is the Agenda or the Pastoral Handbook for Divine Service in the Congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia (ELCL) and the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church Abroad (LELCAb), vol. 1. The book is a joint venture of both Churches, despite their substantial theological and liturgical differences. After publication, it was immediately—and very mockingly—named as Pagenda (Temp[orary] Agenda)5 based on official announcements that this volume was supposed to serve as a stopgap resource for Eucharistic worship and as what Lutherans in the English-speaking world usually call occasional/pastoral services “until a new and complete ELCL and LELCAb Agenda will be produced.”6 TempAgenda is an odd book as I will show below. Whatever else it may be, the volume does come across as a peculiarly postcolonial—yet not decolonial—hybrid in its discordant liturgical, theological, or even linguistic orientations. To this vexing volume—to which that shiny “new and complete” successor is nowhere in sight a decade later, at least among the diaspora—I now turn. Wedged in Heteroglossia: Exploring the Latvian Lutheran Liturgical Postcolony Regardless of how one reacts to the TempAgenda, it is a peculiar and intentional liturgical hybrid. It entails several stylistically and theologically frictional liturgical approaches. The volume opens with two Eucharistic rites. The first rite is the fruit of Latvian liturgists’ involvement with the modern western Liturgical Movement and its historical ressourcement. It offers an elaborate “evangelical mass” structure of worship restoring
244 Kristine Suna-Koro several Medieval Latin and Reformation-era elements through the reinsertion of options for a full Confiteor, the full Latin-based version of Gloria in excelsis Major Doxology in place of the habitual Latvian Gloria Patri Minor Doxology. The long-ignored Pax and Fractio panis are finally included as well. The second rite is, for all practical purposes, a repetition of the “traditional” or the so-called Prussian Eucharistic rite, with only cosmetic changes made vis-à-vis its “normative” 1900/1928 version. As might already be clear from my description above, all major parts of the Eucharistic rites are designated in red marginalia in both Latvian (for example, Mūsu Tēvs and Euharistiskā lūgšana) and Latin (correspondingly, Pater Noster and Prex Eucharistica). Doubtless, what signifies liturgical renewal for some, simultaneously spells ominous betrayal of allegedly “pure” Latvian and/ or Lutheran identity for others. TempAgenda has generated considerable tensions: diasporic communities have mostly ignored the first rite as “alien to us.” The most intriguing elements of the TempAgenda are to be found in the second part of the volume. The Eucharistic rites are followed by two baptismal rites for children and adults. The first is a newly produced version rooted in the ancient traditions of initiation, but the second rite is facsimiled from the 1900/1928 Agenda, including its old “Gothic” orthography that had already been phased out in the 1930s! In the same vein, the volume also contains occasional services, such as a confirmation rite, a funeral rite that is named in a now glaringly outdated way as “The Interment of Corpses” (Līķu glabāšana), as well as rites for private confession, matrimony, and various blessings—all of them in all their impenetrable “Gothic” glory in facsimile! Even the rare ability to read the antiquated script does not ease the burden of pastoral and cultural obsolescence of these texts that, at least theoretically, are meant to accompany the most significant life passages in the lives of faith communities and individuals in search of meaning, consolation, and inspiration. The postcolonial irony, however, goes well beyond orthography, rhetorical perplexity, and a good dose of embarrassment about the pricey publication of texts of highly debatable usefulness. Obviously, some versions of postcolonial liturgical hybridity have acquired the aura of national(istic) “authenticity,” while others are interpreted as “alien” and even identity-threatening. Yet any kind of intentional postcoloniality is nowhere to be found in TempAgenda. This situation is not surprising: in general, the Latvian postcolonial sentiment in homeland and in diaspora is eager to recognize and lament the country’s colonial history and to fervently chastise various groups of colonizers from the Teutonic Order to the Communist Party. It exhibits a predictable disavowal of its own actual postcoloniality as I will discuss below—its predicaments as well as the
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 245 various possibilities of global postcolonial solidarity—as if such matured postcolonial self-awareness were adding an insult to the already unhealed injury. The Latvian postcolonial disavowal is regrettable. It is not limited to theology and liturgical creativity: it is an aspect of a broader cultural and psycho-spiritual imaginary of the post-Soviet Latvia and its diaspora. Acknowledging the postcolonial disavowal (or perhaps, avoidant selfabnegation?), the interface of variously inflected postcolonial hybridities that have converged in the Latvian Lutheran liturgical space could nevertheless engender a bold and pastorally nuanced liturgical renewal. Such a renewal could fruitfully and, perhaps even therapeutically, address the simmering Latvian colonial traumas regarding the ever ambiguous and sometimes deeply resented role of Christianity and Europeanization in the country’s psychospiritual, cultural, and political history. It also could open up a healing and transformative space for contemporary ethical exigencies that permeate the uncertain terrains of neo-imperial globalization for Latvians in the homeland as well as in their mushrooming post-Soviet diasporas worldwide. Regrettably, these trajectories do not cross TempAgenda’s radar screen. Instead, what TempAgenda offers is a thought-provoking snapshot of the postcolonial growing pains within a particular—post-Soviet, diasporic, and transnational—liturgical space within the global postcolony. It is this angle of TempAgenda that can be most useful for further explorations in the realm of postcolonial liturgical studies. What we actually do find in TempAgenda’s texts and liturgical performances is what the Russian philosopher of language Mikhail Bakhtin called разноречие/разноречивость (heteroglossia) and намеренный гибрид (intentional hybrid). Hybridization (гибридизация) is one of the key analytical concepts in Bakhtin’s work. It has certain similarities with the notions of postcolonial hybridity. Bakhtin’s emphasis, however, is pivotal in terms of understanding the dynamics of the liturgical chronotope (time-space) as it is revealed in the postcolonial TempAgenda. Namely, hybridization is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.7 The sociocultural and theological heteroglossia of TempAgenda is intentionally hybrid in a Bakhtinian sense: the multilayered heteroglossia or polyphony is not camouflaged or repressed but, on the contrary, it is foregrounded in a somewhat clumsy ecclesiastical truce. There is no imposed homogenization in polyphony: what obtains is “a plurality of independent
246 Kristine Suna-Koro and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.”8 But even more interestingly, TempAgenda allows different ecclesiological, liturgical, historical, and sociolinguistic imaginaries—sometimes even seemingly incommensurable consciousnesses—to, in Bakhtin’s words, intentionally “come together and consciously fight it out”9 in the liturgical space. In this sense, the postcolonial hybridity and heteroglossia is boldly acknowledged. The coercive impulse of totalitarian uniformity is pragmatically resisted. This liturgical space is open for at least a potential dialogic “fighting it out.” The space is not fixed and closed; multiple voices can be heard and diverse performances of these liturgical texts can continue to add even more complexity and contextualization and interculturality depending on where, when, by whom, and for whom these rites are embodied in actual worship. A polyphonic “orthodoxy” (right worship!) is, at least temporarily, acknowledged and even legitimized in the TempAgenda, including the open-ended, unresolved tension and insecurity that such an orthodoxy necessarily brings. Furthermore, the very fact of offering noticeably different yet, presumably, equally acceptable alternatives of orthodoxy in a post-totalitarian context should not be underestimated. Perspectival pluralism is not a disposition that obtains effortlessly as opposed to naïve, over-compensating, and tempestuous relativism that has characterized the post-Soviet lifeworlds in many areas of life. To sum up, the TempAgenda’s liturgical milieu is historically and reflexively postcolonial. But is it also decolonial? Clearly not—or at least not yet. This liturgical chronotope of texts and performances certainly labors hard to negotiate the ambiguous terrain of post-Soviet and postcolonial identity, memory, authority, orthodoxy, and hybridity. Some reconfigurations bear a considerable transformative potential through creative application of the insights of Liturgical Movement while others are guilelessly grotesque, past-worshipping, and linguistically contrived. In this regard, TempAgenda’s liturgical trajectory is perhaps better approached as a cautionary tale. Why so? According to what criteria? From Historical Postcoloniality to Decoloniality? What might the criteria be for discerning decolonial potentialities and actualities within a liturgical endeavor? Some useful suggestions are sketched by Stephen Burns and Michael Jagessar in their pioneering creation of a distinctly postcolonial liturgical theology. They advocate for a “postcolonial optic” of liturgical analysis and creativity that uncovers, critiques, and transforms the coloniality of being, power, agency, gender, ability, sexuality, and knowledge in liturgy. The agenda of the postcolonial optic entails the following “examen” of liturgical conscience:
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 247 Do the discourses, texts, symbols and imageries perpetuate bondage and notions of empire? How do they represent Black peoples, ethnic minorities, the Other, gender and sexuality? What do the symbols, the language and the shape of liturgical/worship spaces communicate vis-à-vis the agenda of empire/colonialism and the politics of location? What do they communicate in terms of inclusivity of recent migrants who have to re-negotiate sacred spaces?10 Approaching TempAgenda not just as an artifact of historical postcolony— which it undoubtedly is with its indisputable merits—but more importantly, as a potentially decolonial artifact, yields disappointment. It was created through an innovative and intentional collaboration between postcolonial liturgists emerging out of the homo postsovieticus turf and diasporic liturgists. But the postcoloniality at work here has not been intentional; the historical postcoloniality is rather reluctant or even resented due to the ongoing and unresolved ambivalence about the specifically Christian colonial legacy for the Latvian people. TempAgenda’s rites and the current Latvian liturgical lifeworld are silent about this very sensitive and divisive issue. What is more than symptomatic in the context of Eastern European postcolonial locations is TempAgenda’s stagnant ahistoricity and acontextuality of liturgical language and imagery. TempAgenda’s language of the Eucharistic prayers is strongly Christocentric—but in an ahistorical and acontextual, if not outright otherworldly, way. There is not the slightest hint about any sociopolitical or justice dimensions of the life of Jesus of Nazareth in the Eucharistic prayers. Similar contextual and interrelational oblivion is paramount in the Confession rites. This is clearly a sad failure since, as Don Saliers summarizes, prayer that seeks withdrawal from the realm of human forces—social, economic and otherwise—and seeks only to enjoy the symbols of faith fails to exercise fully the religious affections as motives in well-doing. To be moved by the love of God in Christ requires engagement with the principalities and powers of the world.11 In the present form, TempAgenda’s rites, at least in their codified verbal shape, are mute about virtually all of the pivotal themes of postcolonial optic as laid out by Jagessar and Burns. Moreover, when it comes to the images of God vis-à-vis the postcolonial concerns about gender, sexuality, and the whole spectrum of diversity of human identities, TempAgenda is as colonial and as patriarchal an artifact as they come. This is, arguably, the most un–postcolonial aspect of this liturgical artifact originating in the post-Soviet postcolony. It is related to the very complex grip of sexism, racism, and xenophobia that continue to plague postcolonial Latvia. In that liturgical universe, even such a staple of contemporary Western social and cultural consciousness as feminist awareness about sexism in language
248 Kristine Suna-Koro and imagery—at least in the West, where many postcolonial Latvians so desperately want to “belong” at last—simply does not exist or is deliberately ignored and defied. But never mind feminism. It continues to have a deeply ambiguous and complex resonance in the postcolonial non-West and Europe’s “oriental” border zones such as Latvia. What is most striking here is the obliviousness about the openly colonial connotations of the arguably most routine image of God as the Lord. The two virtually exclusive images of God in the TempAgenda’s rites are God as Lord and Father. What is interesting here is that in the Latvian language, the word K/kungs can mean two things: if used with the capital “K,” it is attributed to God in the sense of “the Lord.” If used with the small “k” as in kungs, it means mister, sir, lord, master. In Latvian folklore and literature, the word kungs is precisely the term that is used extensively to denote the cruel and vicious German and other colonial aristocracy, the masters (in plural bargi kungi) who are commonly represented as strangers and who are feared, resented, and despised! It is curious that no systematic theological, liturgical, and pastoral attention has been devoted to this very specific and sensitive (perhaps even neurotic) colonial nuance during the production of new liturgical rites and theological inquiry in general. The “tas Kungs/Lord” imagery in Latvian Christianity is of an old colonial origin. The pre-Christian indigenous tribes of Zemgaļi, Sēļi, Latgaļi, and Līvi did not have their local equivalents of the Occidental institution and imaginary of a king/ monarch. The religious “tas Kungs/the Lord” language entered with Christian vocabulary, which was predominantly created by German and other colonial church envoys who produced the initial Latvian alphabets and written texts from the sixteenth century onward. The uncritical proliferation of the “Lord” God-image without a search for other, less colonially loaded and less wounding images of God, illustrates rather acutely the substantial qualitative difference between historical postcoloniality and decoloniality. In this regard, TempAgenda swims in the anxious waters of postcolony in search of its liturgical identity while remaining virtually (and perhaps obstinately) asleep when it comes to addressing the issues of postcolonial/decolonial integrity. This situation is a sadly apposite illustration of Musa Dube’s sobering insight that imperializing texts, however, take many forms and are written by a variety of people. Sometimes even by the colonized who either collaborate with the dominant forces or yearn for the same power. Regardless of who writes imperializing texts, they are characterized by literary constructions, representations, and uses that authorize taking possession of foreign geographical spaces and people.12 As a postcolonial artifact, TempAgenda goes after the presumed pure origins of liturgical authenticity—wherever they may be found and however
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 249 unscrupulous the varied genealogies of such authenticity may be. The recognition of its own postcolonial and decolonial oblivion is conspicuously missing. In other words, what is missing is a conscious awareness of the Latvian and even broader Eastern European liturgical and theological interculturality that would finally acknowledge the depths of its own postcolonial ambiguity. Liturgical Postcoloniality: Beyond the “lex” Wars How could a postcolonial/decolonial matrix of “orthodoxy” be imagined? Is it even sincerely postcolonial to invoke the notion of orthodoxy, given how often Christian invocations of orthodoxy have served, endorsed, and enabled colonial arrogance, intolerance, and even genocidal violence? To venture a few conjectures in response to these taxing questions at the conclusion of this chapter, I turn again to Mikhail Bakhtin and his ideas about the dialogic nature of language, culture, and social reality. To see reality as dialogic is to foreground its irreducible communicative multivoicedness: an epistemological and ontological heteroglossia wherein meaning is made through imaginative, intellectual, social, somatic, linguistic, affective, and cultural encounters. In a Bakhtinian vein, “to be means to communicate,” since “life by its very nature is dialogical.”13 The authoritative meaning of anything does not merely exist as a simple given in the space of languages or sociocultural and spiritual relations. Indeed, the space preexists us. Yet the existence of authoritative and persuasive meaning is, as it were, in becoming: it evolves, and it is contested in the actual lifeworlds as human beings interact among themselves and the Divine. Bakhtin’s relational ontology is multiperspectival (in a truly poignant way, considering his long struggle for survival and scholarly integrity under Soviet totalitarianism). Dialogism is “the ineradicable condition of interactivity and responsiveness in all signification.”14 Neither language, nor life, nor liturgy is a one-way or top-down street. But in the mainstream liturgical context, the routine interpretation of the lex orandi, lex credendi principle suggests that the rule of prayer determines the rule of belief. Or, from Alexander Schmemann’s very influential point of view regarding the method of liturgical theology, the lex orandi is the “principal criterion and standard” for lex credendi. 15 The perennial tussle about which lex comes first and determines what in relation to whatever else is going on in religious practices suggests a sorely undialogic methodological disposition. But postcolonial disagreement goes beyond historical murkiness and methodological overcompensation. From a postcolonial perspective, for too long the Christian churches have been praying for the good health of tyrants, ancient and modern; for victorious empires and emperors; for
250 Kristine Suna-Koro imperialistic campaigns, and military triumphs that have been far from defensive “just wars”; for policies and cultural attitudes that have brought grave suffering upon lands and peoples—all of that allegedly in the name of the one true God who was, and in many instances is, still, invoked with full conviction that “He” is on “our side.” Liturgy has been part and parcel of the coloniality of being, power, and knowledge. Many Christian liturgies, including those being celebrated in the global postcolony, are still permeated with unexamined imperialistic symbols, images of conquest, patriarchy, and racism. In this context to claim that the lex orandi as the “criterion and standard” of theological imagination and spiritual practice strikes me as gullible at best and irresponsible at worst. To move beyond the unproductive and distracting lex tussle, it is necessary to move beyond the claims of liturgy’s aesthetic insularity of uselessness and its alleged utter anti-instrumentality. True, these gestures aspire to preempt and neutralize ideological and utilitarian hijacking of liturgy. But they also end up preempting constructive critiques of the ongoing ritual lull of self-sufficiency and self-righteousness. To advocate for any sort of insular aesthetic self-sufficiency of liturgy is in itself a reductive misunderstanding of the aesthetic dimension of human consciousness, knowledge, rationality, sensibility, and agency. Reality is dialogic, and so is liturgy in its truest, redemptive, and most sacramental manifestations. At a minimum, the insular imaginaries of liturgy should allow themselves to be interrupted by another lex—lex agendi/vivendi—the rule of righteous acting and faithful living. Postcolonial liturgical imaginary is aligned with the impetus which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has poetically described as the “joining of hands” between history and literary criticism “in search of the ethical as it interrupts the epistemological.”16 If the splendid isolation of epistemology can and should be interrupted by postcolonial ethics, why not liturgical imagination and ritual practices as well? If welcomed, the ethical interruption opens up a truly dialogic interface within liturgical practices and imagination to enable them to transcend self-referential habits, particularly their incurvatus in se fixations, without forfeiting the unique and unsubstitutable endowment and charism of liturgy in the Triune economy of salvation. Postcolonialism challenges liturgy with what Appiah called the “ethical universal,” grounded “in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering.”17 Suffering, especially unjustly inflicted suffering, is always already theological in the Christian worldview. Hence, the postcolonial challenge to liturgy proceeds always and everywhere “in the name of the suffering victims”18 and in the name of God who becomes one of them in Christ. It strives for their restoration and healing, and ultimately for the opportunity for all God’s creatures to be fully alive precisely as a way of glorifying God (gloria Dei vivens homo).
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 251 The linchpin of postcolonial orthodoxy is neither a lofty time-honored dogma nor a scholarly verified authenticity of an ancient manuscript. Rather, I would venture, it resides in the ceaseless liturgical focus on the ethical universal in the name of the suffering damnés de la terre that weaves through lex orandi, lex credendi, and lex agenda/vivendi to finally weave all of them together in a polyphonic performance of faithful Christian discipleship. Such a discipleship in itself is liturgy writ large: the work of the triune God in, under, and through the work of God’s friends. Neither longevity nor popularity equals Christocentric integrity and authenticity. Rather, the integrity and authenticity is that which embodies in language, in sound, in gesture, in movement, in image, in touch, in architecture, in liturgical vestments, linens, vessels, smells, and bells the passion of Jesus Christ for the “least of these” (Mt 25:40)—the widows, the orphans, the strangers, and all those whose spirits, souls, and bodies have been broken by the empires of conquest and cruelty. Liturgical Postcoloniality: Toward a Veridical and Dialogic Orthodoxy Two characteristics of postcolonial liturgical orthodoxy strike me as prudent, fitting, and desirable. First, postcolonial orthodoxy is veridical. I gratefully borrow the crucial adjective “veridical” from Sandra Lubarsky’s Jewish perspective on religious pluralism. Veridical has to do with “the plurality of truth laden positions” (veritas in Latin, hence “veridical”), according to Lubarsky.19 The usefulness of the veridical approach does not need to be limited to Lubarsky’s comparativist metaphysics, which implies that there is one coherent truth, but that it is not a monopoly of any single spiritual tradition or liturgical expression. To speak of postcolonial liturgical orthodoxy as veridical, I submit, is to consider not just the plethora of diverse liturgical practices and imaginaries throughout the present global postcolony, such as the Latvian Lutheran TempAgenda, as informative ethnographic facts. Above all, veridical orthodoxy stands or falls depending on its willingness and readiness to examine the relationship between liturgy and the “ethical universal” of historical, cultural, epistemological, and spiritual decoloniality. Can the truth of subaltern suffering, as well as longing for respectful recognition and redemptive wholeness, be heard in liturgical praise? To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s seminal challenge, can those whose lives, languages, wisdom traditions, and cultural memories have been conquered and colonized speak and be seen for what they really are in postcolonial worship? Can les damnés de la terre truly sing, dance, and praise in our liturgies? Plurality in truth does not equal relativism, postcolonial or otherwise. Not all liturgies in postcolony genuinely form fruitful decolonial spiritualities, sensibilities, values, habits, and rationalities. Some have and will
252 Kristine Suna-Koro continue to malform rather than transform. To discern the glimpses of truth and the itineraries of error, veridical orthodoxy, or truthful glorification of God in liturgy, contests the tendency to separate lex orandi from lex credendi and lex agendi/vivendi. And this is where veridical orthodoxy transmigrates into a dialogic orthodoxy. And so, secondly, postcolonial orthodoxy is dialogic. The dialogic quality of postcolonial liturgy gravitates around Bakhtinian themes of open-endedness (незавершенность/unfinalizability), interactivity, and responsiveness even if it includes the vigorous intentionality of “fighting it out” as ever-new encounters with otherness create ever- new hybridities of life, hope, and thought. Postcolonial orthodoxy, insofar as it is dialogic, is a verb of action. Like meaning, it is not a semiotic or doctrinal fossil. It unfolds as a dialogic conversation with the past and with hopes for future. It is not a verdict that is always already complete and passed upon us. Dialogic perception of truth and authenticity bears the promise of genuine transformation. The process of dialogue yields the recognition of one’s own blind spots and helps to “correct, enlarge, restate and/or reform our knowledge”20 and our worship in order to achieve personal and communal regeneration. Hence, it can yield genuine transformation. That, of course, brings relief to some, yet may sound nightmarish to others in the liturgical universe. Ultimately, according to Lubarsky, it “leads to what [Martin] Buber terms ‘holy insecurity.’ The price that we pay for responsiveness and creativity is a loss of security.”21 As veridical and dialogic, postcolonial liturgical orthodoxy is a bit like the Jesuits and their spiritual ethos of discernment according to the Roman Catholic Pope Francis’s recent description: “The mystical dimension of discernment never defines its edges and does not complete the thought. The Jesuit must be a person whose thought is incomplete, in the sense of open-ended thinking.”22 Precisely as veridical and dialogic, this style of orthodoxy can only be open-ended and incomplete. It is open for metanoia with all the strings of holy insecurity attached. It is open for transformation not on the whim of partisan liturgical tastes, left-wing or right-wing, subaltern or elite, postcolonial or neo-colonial, but only by being mature and compassionate enough for judicious discernment of all things liturgical to see if they indeed serve as sacramental signs of divine love, grace, and justice for all. The right glory and praise of God, according to this liturgical orthodoxy, is precisely les damnés de la terre becoming fully alive. Notes 1. The work on this essay was made possible by Xavier University’s Faculty Development Research fellowship, for which I am grateful. The essay itself is dedicated to Don E. Saliers, to honor and celebrate his liturgical vision of humanity at its full stretch before God.
Post colonial Liturgical Heteroglossia 253 2. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, 17.2 (1991): 353. 3. Ibid. 4. R. Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo 16.4 (1993):762. 5. In the Latvian Lutheran tradition, the collection of Eucharistic rites as well as the official rites for occasional/pastoral services is called Agenda. The facetious and mocking term Pagenda is a collusion of the adjective pagaidu (temporary) with “Agenda.” 6. Priekšvārds (Foreword), Rokasgrāmata dievkalpošanai LELB un LELBāL draudzēs: 1. sējums (Rīga: Klints, 2003):6. 7. English translation quoted from Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (Michael Holquist, ed.; Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 358. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Caryl Emerson, ed., trans.; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 7. 9. Ibid., 360. 10. Michael Jagessar and Stephen Burns, “Liturgical Studies and Christian Worship: The Postcolonial Challenge,” in Black Theology: An International Journal 5.1 (2007): 45. For an expanded treatment of the core postcolonial dynamic in liturgical studies, see also Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives (Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2011) by the same authors. 11. Don E. Saliers, “Liturgy and Ethics: Some New Beginnings,” in Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch before God. Essays in Honor of Don E. Saliers, ed. E. Byron Anderson and Bruce T. Morrill S. J. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 24–25. 12. Musa W. Dube, “Reading for Decolonization (John 4.1–42),” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey L. Staley (London and New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002): 56. 13. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 287, 293. 14. Adam Hammond, “The Honest and Dishonest Critic: Style and Substance in Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Discourse in the Novel’ and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,” Style 45.4 (Winter 2011): 639. 15. Alexander Schmemann, “Liturgical Theology: Remarks on Method,” in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann, ed. Thomas Fisch (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 138. 16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “In Memoriam: Edward W. Said,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23.1&2 (2003): 7. 17. Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” 353. 18. Ibid. 19. Sandra Lubarsky, Tolerance and Transformation: Jewish Approaches to Religious Pluralism (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1990), 2. 20. Ibid. 21. Sandra Lubarsky, “Dialogue: ‘Holy Insecurity,’” Religious Education 91.4 (1996): 545. 22. Antonio Spadaro, S. J. “A Big Heart Open to God: An Exclusive Interview with Pope Francis,” America, September 30, 2013. Available at http://bit .ly/postcol5-131.
19 When Seminaries Get Stuck Stephen Burns Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives1 began with a narrative about a seminary and drew toward a close with reflection on content in the academic curriculum, at least in relation to liturgical studies. Throughout, the book was peppered with references to seminaries—from particular services, such as a Woman’s World Day of Prayer liturgy, to the wider work of ministerial formation that leads some participants in seminary life to ordination. Given the book’s intent to mediate between “the academy” (in which so much postcolonial theory has been generated and situated) and the church—as well as other “publics” that intersect within the orbit of seminaries—its concern with its own context, and like-kind, was, I think, apt. The book set out the charge that even when seminaries self-designate as “progressive” and are perhaps most likely to consider postcolonial approaches to theology in the academic curriculum, they still get stuck when it comes to manifesting postcolonial practice. By “postcolonial practice,” I mean the values defined on the opening page of the first chapter of Christian Worship: (i) affirmation of the equal dignity of human beings, (ii) exposure of imperial dynamics at play in culture and politics, unreflective everyday practices as well as carefully and intentionally constructed policies, and (iii) celebration of subaltern wisdom, creativity and resistance to dominant supposed “norms.”2 I would maintain that within the book’s aim to shift postcolonial commitments beyond the academic curriculum so that they are not confined there—and to as it were release postcolonial liturgical resources into the practice of Christian assemblies—seminaries have been and perhaps remain an important, perhaps crucial, mediating space.3 Christian Worship was piecemeal and fragmentary in all kinds of ways, and whether or not it was even partially successful in its aim, certainly