Toward a Genuine Congregation 41 which he emphasizes that they remain quiet,33 while allocating seven pages to the preacher’s responsibility. Even the mosque administration, to which he devotes six pages, receives more coverage than the congregation. A Friday Liturgy of Praxis As an alternative, I propose a new paradigm that draws on liberation theology’s dialectical character. Liberation theology requires “three moments: the moment of praxis [practice], the moment of reflection on praxis, and the moment of return to a renewed praxis. It begins and ends in praxis.”34 In this methodology, therefore, concrete reality acts as the point of departure for theological thinking, or “the moment of reflection on praxis.” Lived experience is as integral a source as theology. In fact, insofar as experience constitutes the framework, the parameters for religious thought— and not the other way around—this experience is more consequential. Building on praxis, I argue that the Friday prayer needs to integrate, structurally, one’s context as the starting point for Islamic reflection. Recall that the sermon actually comprises two sermons, which are viewed as replacing the first two cycles of the daily noon prayer. This layout can be used, rather effortlessly, to mirror a praxis-based approach. Specifically, the preacher could devote the first sermon to expounding the immediate sociopolitical circumstances of the community, focusing on one problem that it is facing. I write “expounding” here because the task is not merely descriptive, but must also entail an explanation of the origins of the problem and, just as importantly, the practices that allow the problem to persist. This is the first moment. The theological component emerges in the second sermon—the second moment—in which the preacher offers a personal reflection on the problem in light of Islamic teachings.35 The congregation then performs the prayer, after which there would be an open discussion. This is the third moment. The discussion could take different directions: it could be a critical reflection on the two sermons—perhaps someone disagrees with the substance of either of them, including the very framing of the problem as a problem?—a critical reflection on a renewed praxis, that is, how the problem could be addressed more effectively, or even a critical reflection on a related issue. The existence of this forum, fostering exchange and divergent views, desacralizes the preacher’s words, which are not treated as truth but as one fallible (albeit insightful) interpretation of truth. Ultimately, where the discussion goes is for the congregation to decide. This is the people’s time to speak. Conversely, it is the preacher’s time to listen, to learn, to reflect humbly upon his/her own positions in light of the congregation’s insights and interventions. Indeed, at this stage, the preacher ceases to exist altogether, dissolving into the wider assembly. There is now no longer an individual, a locus of authority. There is only a community.
42 Shadaab Rahemtulla This praxis-based model raises an inevitable question: does this approach not politicize the Friday prayer? My broader response to this question is that being political is not an option—a choice—but an inescapable fact of life. That is, everything has a political orientation, since we all exist within relations of power. Furthermore, with regard to the Friday prayer in particular, this ritual, from its inception, has been overtly political. In the time of the Prophet, the service was more than a communal act of devotion, for attendance reflected one’s allegiance to the burgeoning Muslim state and, therefore, can more accurately be described as a “sociopolitical gathering.”36 As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the sermon always carried a practical, even profane, component. The preacher would not only exhort the congregation to piety, to inculcating the awareness of God in their hearts, but would also try “to mobilize opinion on issues of general political, social, economic, and military relevance.”37 The custom of invoking protection for the reigning caliph or sultan is a classic example of the prayer’s expressly politicized dimension. Throughout Muslim history, mentioning the sovereign has been a prominent feature of the Friday sermon, and failing to do so could elicit suspicion from the ruling authorities.38 The Friday prayer, then, has historically been in an explicit conversation with the political context in which it was performed, whether this conversation meant complicity with the status quo or opposition to it. What makes my methodological approach different is that it foregrounds this context by integrating it into the form, the structure of the prayer, thereby placing one’s immediate sociopolitical reality at the core of the liturgical task. Conclusion By offering two critiques of the Friday prayer—the visual imagery of the pulpit and staff on the one hand and the absence of an analytic, participatory role for the congregation on the other—I have tried to stretch our horizons of what rethinking this central liturgical practice entails. While the call for women’s ritual leadership in Islam is pioneering, this chapter qualifies this statement by showing that it is a pioneering step toward a more systematic and comprehensive review of the entire service in the light of justice. Women’s ritual leadership is a hermeneutical catalyst, a means, not an end. And to the extent that we consider it an end, contenting ourselves merely by placing women at the helm of a religious structure that is exclusionary, we have failed to live up to the heart of feminism, which entails a radical critique of all forms of gendered hierarchy. But critique alone is incomplete, inadequate. Just as significantly, the progressive Muslim theologian needs to provide creative alternatives in order to construct new liberative possibilities. A praxis-based approach to the prayer is one such alternative, not only allowing the congregants to play
Toward a Genuine Congregation 43 an engaged analytical role within the service, but also positioning their lived context as the point of departure for Islamic reflection. Notes 1. For Wadud’s personal account of the prayer, as well as a transcript of the sermon, see Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 246–253. 2. S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 111. 3. Linda G. Jones, The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 75. 4. Tahera Qutbuddin, “Khutba: The Evolution of Early Arabic Oration,” in Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs, ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Michael Cooperson (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 198. 5. Jones, The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World, 75. 6. Mazen Hashem, “The Ummah in the Khutba: A Religious Sermon or a Civil Discourse?” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 30.1 (2010): 49. 7. This Qur’anic quotation is taken from Ali Quli Qara’i, The Qur’an, with a Phrase-by-Phrase Translation (London: Islamic College for Advanced Studies Press, 2004), 788. 8. Farid Esack, The Qur’an: A User’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 186. 9. Ibid. 10. Patrick D. Gaffney, “Friday Prayer.” In Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, vol. 2, ed. Jane D. McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 11. A. J. Wensinck, “Khutba.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill Online, 2013), accessed May 8 2013, http://referenceworks.brillonline .com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-Islam-2/khutba-SIM_4352. 12. Ch. Pellet, “Quss b. Sa’ida.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill Online, 2013), accessed May 9, 2013, http://referenceworks.brillonline .com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-Islam-2/kuss-b-saida-SIM_4566. 13. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 112–113. 14. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 168. 15. Kathy E. Ferguson, “Patriarchy.” In Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, ed. Helen Tierney (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), accessed January 27, 2014, http://gem.greenwood.com/wse/wseDisplay.jsp?id=id496&ss=resistance. 16. R. W. Connell, Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 4. 17. Gaffney, “Friday Prayer.” 18. Naima Chikhaoui and Fatima J. Casewit (trans. and ed.), “The Minbar: Symbol of Verticality and Elevation,” Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity 14 (2004): 95, accessed January 11, 2014, http://www.sacredweb .com/online_articles/sw14_chikhaoui-casewit.pdf. 19. Ibid., 98–99. 20. Ibid. 21. Esack, The Qur’an, 148. 22. Wael Alkhairo, Speaking for Change: A Guide to Making Effective Friday Sermons (Khutbas) (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 1998), 33. My parentheses.
44 Shadaab Rahemtulla 23. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 120. Goitein, referring to the earlier work of C. H. Becker, notes that the judge may have also used a sword or lance. 24. Jones, The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World, 257. My parentheses. 25. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra B. Ramos (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 53. This path-breaking book was first published in 1968. 26. Jones, The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World, 238. 27. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 84. 28. Ibid. 29. Mazen Hashem, The Muslim Friday Sermon: Veiled and Unveiled Themes (Dearborn, MI: Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 2009), 35. 30. Ibid. 31. Alkhairo, Speaking for Change, 52. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid., 21. 34. Zoë Bennett, “‘Action Is the Life of All’: The Praxis-Based Epistemology of Liberation Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, ed. Christopher Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39. My parentheses. 35. Alkhairo proposes a similar (but ultimately different) methodology, arguing that the preacher should understand reality and, thus, today’s most relevant issues; should reflect on the Qur’an with regard to this reality; and, finally, should think about how to implement these teachings practically. See Alkhairo, Speaking for Change, 43–45. I should point out, at the outset, that I arrived at my own approach independently, drawing on my background in liberation theology and its praxis-based hermeneutic. More importantly, my approach differs from that used by Alkhairo. First, his method is designed for the preacher who is preparing the sermon. What I am trying to do with a praxisbased paradigm is to give it structural expression within the service itself, as reflected in an opening contextual sermon and a subsequent theological one. Second, communal participation plays no role in Alkhairo’s methodology. 36. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, 122. 37. Patrick D. Gaffney, The Prophet’s Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 120. 38. Wensinck, “Khutba.”
3 After the Holocaust and Israel : On Liturgy and the Post colonial ( Jewish) Prophetic in the New Diaspora Marc H. Ellis Is only One holy? In the New Diaspora everything is up for grabs, even the oneness of God. Indeed, in the New Diaspora, God’s presence can hardly be assumed. After all, the New Diaspora is made up of exiles from around the world and from diverse religious and nonreligious affiliations. Many of these exiles have experienced the trauma that violence and colonialism bring. They have not been rescued by humanity or by God. In the New Diaspora nurturing one another rather than praise of God is required. Affirmation of life rather than dogmatic assertions—even about the Oneness of God—is the watchword. In the New Diaspora an encounter of people with different faiths and no faith takes place. Many exiles come from monotheistic religions that have failed them. Others come from non-monotheistic and indigenous religions that have failed them. Those who hang onto their faiths do so by the skin of their teeth.1 The New Diaspora is a place of interfaith and no-faith encounter. Since the interfaith dialogue has become bogged down in its service to power, what a postcolonial interfaith encounter might look like is an open question. Obviously, such an encounter would have to include all faiths and no faith. In the New Diaspora, such an expansion—in light of a postcolonial critique—might bring us closer to a genuine spirituality. Whether recognized or not, all of us live within the largest and most powerful world religion, modernity. Every knee bows before modernity, including those who profess a postcolonial mentality. Modernity is a God,
46 Marc H. Ellis the God worshipped most fervently. It is also the God that exacts the greatest price. Modernity is colonial materiality run wild. In the past, the path of colonialism could be marked. Its trajectory was clear. Today the colonial is within. It infects everything. The brokenness found in modernity is endless and growing. From economic and political deprivation to ecological destruction, modernity is the One that confronts us. Traditional religions of the world are mere bystanders in relation to modernity. Either they align with modernity and modernity’s God, thus becoming modernity’s servant, or they are defined as irrelevant. Those within the world’s religion who say no to modernity’s God are branded subversive and banished. Most religions are experts in bending their knees to power. Christianity and Islam, especially, have become global religions on the coattails of colonial power. Of course, both religions had their own expansionistic dreams and trajectory. The combination of power and desire for expansion has driven Christianity and Islam for so long that their origins have, for the most part, been occluded. Exiles always believe they are returning to the places, communities, and religions they come from. Yet, in the end, we know that exiles rarely return. Even when they return, it is to an altered landscape. During the time of exile, the external landscape has been altered. More importantly, the internal landscape of the exile is changed. Exiles never go home. In the end, exiles choose either a profound and unrelenting alienation or embrace the broader tradition of faith and struggle. The foundation of this broader tradition is the prophetic. If exiles in the New Diaspora are to continue their struggle and make sense of their experience, they have no choice but to embrace the prophetic. The alternative is cynicism without end.2 The prophetic is a high-stakes gamble on meaning in history. Without the prophetic, there is no meaning in history. Because of their experience in life, politics, and religion, exiles know more than others the challenge to find meaning in history. After all, there might be no meaning in history. While no assurances can be made, the prophetic embodies the possibility of meaning in history. One way of portraying exiles is the struggle within them surrounding meaning. For what reasons were they exiled? What affect does that exile have? Is what exiles fight and suffer for a charade? Or does sacrifice and suffering have a purpose beyond the pain and dislocation exiles experience? The broader tradition of faith and struggle is complex and varied. Put simply, it is the place in history and the present where exiles go for strength and hope. In the broader tradition of faith and struggle, all is fair game, anywhere in history where conscience has been practiced and justice uplifted is accessed and celebrated. In the broader tradition of faith
After the Holocaust and Israel 47 and struggle, it matters little when one struggled and sacrificed for justice, what God or no-God they believed in, or which religious or ideological identity they embraced.3 As we shall see, though the prophetic is foundational in the New Diaspora, it is on its own. While some exiles affirm God in the prophetic, the majority in the New Diaspora experience the prophetic without God. Though neither affirmation nor negation definitively determines the reality of God’s existence, a liturgical rendering in the New Diaspora cannot simply assume God, God’s Oneness, or God’s holiness. Would exiles in the New Diaspora affirm a postcolonial God if one was presented to them? Since that God is absent today in at least normative Christianity and Islam, it is difficult to think God in another way. If that God exists, it will have to be worked out in the New Diaspora. Also, the prophetic is fraught. Since the prophetic exists in history, it too has been interpreted and transformed in colonial concepts. Looked at from certain directions, the prophetic can be judgmental and oppressive. It can even be used to justify the spread of dominant religions and cultures. However, freed from its accumulations in history, the prophetic might discern a future beyond oppression. Will there be a liturgical rendering of the exile experience in the New Diaspora? Will the communal aspect of the exile’s new life be celebrated and, if so, because of the New Diaspora’s diversity, what form can such a celebration take? Will critical thinking help free the prophetic from its own colonial bondage? A postcolonial prophetic—what is that to become? These are questions for the future. What we know at this point in time is that any liturgical rendering in the New Diaspora will begin somewhere else than God. The reason here is clear. Even God has been caught up in a history of religious expansion and domination. The New Diaspora will have to liberate God from the confines that religion has placed upon God. By then, though, the very concept of God may have run its course. When we think of liturgy in a postcolonial framework, we also have to imagine a postcolonial God. Jews of Conscience in the New Diaspora Whether liturgy can begin somewhere other than God is the question of questions. If liturgy is a form and arrangement of public worship promulgated by a religious body for a specific community, disputes over liturgy, even in the New Diaspora, can be endless. One option in the New Diaspora is to do without liturgy, at least in public. Another option is to gather the community at certain times without a defined liturgy and consider what emerges from the life of the community. Nonetheless, in the New Diaspora it is unlikely that anything resembling liturgy as we know it will arise. The exile experience of such liturgies
48 Marc H. Ellis is tainted with injustice, colonialism, and empire. Though some exiles attempt to rescue liturgy from its misuse, for others the time of rescue has long since passed. If the liturgy itself is infected with the cycle of violence and atrocity, how can it be used to celebrate a community that has suffered from that cycle? Most of that infection is disguised under layers of prayers, pomp, and ceremony. That is why a critical appraisal of liturgy is necessary. But since many in the New Diaspora are already distant from the faiths that have enabled violence and, in any case, provided no place of rescue, how is this inquiry to take place? Exiles in the New Diaspora will no doubt ask why the limited resources of the New Diaspora should be allocated for this inquiry. The justification—that religion and liturgy might be a source of reflection and strength—will be highly contested in the New Diaspora and for good historical reasons. Many will see such efforts as irredentist. The liturgy may be under colonial rule, as it were, but support for the recovery of the original subversive qualities of liturgy will be difficult to mobilize. Whatever the exile take on the liturgy of their birth community, the normative community keeps reverting to its abusive predisposition. Participation in such liturgies becomes suspect even for the well-intended. In any case, exiles are now part of a diverse community. Their liturgy is no longer the liturgy. This also may be true with efforts at rescuing God. Exiles experience (un)holiness and God’s absence. Their trauma is too deep for assertions of holiness and God’s presence. Exiles carry traumatized fragments of their cultural, political, and religious traditions into exile. This includes their understanding of God. A fragmented God necessarily includes (no) God. The exiles who attempt to put their God back together again are confronted in the New Diaspora with those who refuse such attempts. Like liturgy, and perhaps even more so, the experience of God in the world carries such strong warnings of abuse that the attempt to reclaim God is—and should be—suspect. Nonetheless, the argument can be made that notions of God exist in every community, even communities that pretend to dispense with God altogether. This returns us to the conceptual nature of God, which is the human way of communicating a reality beyond human understanding. It could be that the God exiles reject is a certain understanding of God. Another understanding of God might well fit the exiles’ experiences. Yet, again, the question is whether a project of reconceptualizing God will be supported in the New Diaspora. Most likely it will be seen as the divergence of valuable resources.4 Culture, politics, and religion are bundled together in ways that become obvious in the New Diaspora. No one thread can be extricated
After the Holocaust and Israel 49 by itself and no single thread is the same for exiles from different places and experiences. This is true of our conception of God, especially when we come to understand God is part of a larger sociopolitical configuration. The challenge of disentangling culture, politics, and religion applies to God as well.5 Since liturgy often pretends that its domain is primarily or only religious, many exiles experience the proclamation of liturgy’s innocence as naive. Moreover, all liturgies assert some form of redemption. For most exiles, redemption is pretense. Their experience belies it. Coupled with innocence, exiles understand redemption as a palliative, one with dangerous implications. After all, exiles experience redemption in their preexilic lives as culpable in their exile in the first place. Traumatized by false claims of redemption, exiles are rightfully wary of any such claims in the New Diaspora. Humbled and broken, exiles fear surrendering to forces beyond their control. Since the exile’s life is defined by vulnerability, why let one’s guard down on any level, especially the level of the ultimate? Letting one’s guard down allows the kind of exposure that has grave consequences for those on the run from the powers that be. Fighting notions of redemption, then, is self-defense for exiles. It is the exilic form of martial arts par excellence. The refusal to be vulnerable has its consequences. Liturgy opens up the person to a reality beyond self and individual experience. It can make us aware of another level of meaning in lives where meaning is far from obvious. Fighting redemption limits other possible paths for the individual and the gathered exile community. Yet, this is the place many exiles have arrived. They fear being sucked back into patterns of meaning that have become enablers of everything the exile fights against. Liturgy pretends to inclusion and finality. Gathering in the New Diaspora, the last thing exiles can abide is another totality. The experience of the exile is failure. Totality is seen as yet another imperial offering for the subjugated. If there is to be hope within failure, healing rather than totality is the watchword. Yet, like redemption, the prospect of healing is suspect. Is healing one more assurance that the trauma of exile has meaning? Exiles come from different geographies, cultures, and religions. Each exile experiences their former and new community in their own way. As a Jew in the New Diaspora, I remain Jewish, intensely so—but not only. I live and hope in a community where people of different backgrounds struggle and suffer together for a better world. This is the experience of Jews of Conscience who are in exile from the rhetoric and policies of the Jewish establishment in America and Israel. Especially with regard to the suffering of the Palestinian people, more and more in Jews are in exile. The violence of contemporary Jewish life forces
50 Marc H. Ellis Jews of Conscience to disassociate from mainstream Jewry and its definition of what it means to be an “authentic” Jew. With the birth of the state of Israel, a colonial reality has entered Jewish life. As with other communities, colonialism now permeates Jewish thought, culture, and religion. Where once Jews were victims of the colonial mentality of Christianity and Islam, in modern times Jews have created their own colonized victims, the Palestinian people. If we look at the trajectory of Christianity in its Constantinian framework, joining the empire in the fourth century and beyond, and then Islam in its globalization, we now have the development of a Constantinian Judaism. It is Constantinian Judaism in Israel and America that has enabled Israel’s colonial project to succeed and expand.6 Jews are in peculiar situation. On the one hand, Jews come after the Holocaust that when understood historically comes from the colonial and imperial sensibilities of a violent European dominated Christianity. On the other hand, after the Holocaust, Jews have embarked on a project that, seen from the Palestinian side, can only be named as colonial. Thus, Jews have taken up and projected the same colonial project that oppressed them. With this colonial project, Jewish life today should be seen as coming after the Holocaust and after Israel. Since Israel continues on in the present, by after Israel, I mean after what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinian people.7 In the New Diaspora, no one faith or secular community dominates. Each inheritance finds its way with other inheritances. What this will mean for the Jewishness of Jews of Conscience in general is unknown. Forming Jewish identity in the New Diaspora after the Holocaust and after Israel is a challenge. The question remains as to whether Jews will think it important enough to reconstruct Jewish identity after. As with liturgy, Jews may see reconstructing Jewish identity as a divergence of resources, a retrograde effort that can be used at another point against them. The New Diaspora faces a challenge regarding Jewishness. The challenge is found in anti-Semitism that is part of the colonial legacy of Christianity and Islam but which as well has a history in the tradition of anticolonial struggles. In the mobilization against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, aspects of anti-Semitism continue to rear their head. This means that the prejudice about Jews, though colonial in nature, has spread into the fabric of the Left. Anti-Semitism on the Left reminds us that the New Diaspora is not free of the prejudices it inherits. The New Diaspora may even further promulgate them in their struggle for justice.8 In the New Diaspora, inheritances merge and diverge without a formula determined in advance. The future is open. This is how faith communities have always emerged. This is the before of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is only after they became religions that they were linked with, and are defined by, power.
After the Holocaust and Israel 51 The after of each religion is as defining as it origins. Hence the perpetual search for the definition of “authentic” Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The New Diaspora finds these definitions to be pretenses promulgated by the powerful. Thus, as with political and cultural definitions of authenticity, the New Diaspora seeks to break down definitions of authentic religiosity. If, at one point, the exile thought their responsibility was primarily to their birth tradition, over time that struggle and responsibility fades. The communities and traditions that the exiles come from will not be converted into the exile’s image of what they should “really” be. Can the New Diaspora spend its time redefining what it means to be an authentic Jew, Christian, or Muslim or, for that matter, what it means to be Hindu, Buddhist, or modern? In many faith traditions, liturgy and the affirmations found within liturgy define authenticity. More often than not, liturgy features dogmas and doctrines that are recited and assented to. Various doxologies are declaimed and chanted. Yet when we investigate the world religions, including modernity, most of these doxologies are formed in empire. Instead of faith, doxologies often reflect empire or the aspirations to empire.9 Empire doxologies implicate God as well, at least in what religion presents liturgically as God. Doxology points toward totality. Doxological totality typically either arises within or at another time serves power. Whether this totality was there from the origins or became embedded later, through liturgy it is received as a matter of faith. Critically analyzing doxologies is one way of critically evaluating the historical layers of tradition. There are rich traditions found in different faith communities that believe a radicalized transcendental totality can subvert earthly powers. The battle, then, is between a real totality and a false totality. Here the memory contained in faith traditions, even the memory of the tradition’s complicity in injustice, can be understood as subversive. For most exiles in the New Diaspora, that option is exhausted. Even the radicalized transcendental totality has failed the exile.10 The idea of an “authentic” Jew, Christian, or Muslim is deconstructed by the experience of injustice. Jews, Christians, and Muslims of Conscience have been driven into exile precisely because the “authentic” sense of what it means to be religious is wanting. In its enablement of injustice, in its practice of violence and atrocity, the very notion of what it means to be a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim has been deformed. Or is there something within each religious formation that propels it toward empire? Are religions themselves the persecutors of the prophetic? As a carrier of the “truth” of each religion, liturgy is thus implicated. Exiles demand that the prophetic be set free.
52 Marc H. Ellis Liturgies pretend to be outside of history. They seek to sum up the intent and the ends of history. Teleological by nature, religion asserts final causes, designs, and purposes as existing in nature and God. Through liturgy, religion asserts certainty as self-evident. Yet, if anything, exiles have learned to be skeptical of truth claims on all levels. If the political hypocrisy and pretense to innocence is formative to the exile’s life on the run, religion is the ultimate seal. Liturgy hardly disguises its intent. In its symbolic formation, liturgy mirrors the totality of power. For the most part, however, exiles are not going near symbolic totality. They rather deal with power upfront, thus making the hypocrisy of totality’s pretense public. The New Diaspora is a community in formation. It is happening right before our eyes. Will the New Diaspora one day be known as a faith community? The importance of that naming is debatable. After all, many of the exiles in the New Diaspora are victims of previous religious naming. Judaism, Christianity, Islam—are these faith namings or institutionalized formations itself part of the problem? Is naming itself a prelude to power and empire? As a Jew, I ask what will become of Jews in the New Diaspora. Having been exiled from the established Jewish community, Jews of Conscience find their community among others. Yet, since Jewish identity is distinct and the New Diaspora mixed, the challenge is whether Jewish distinctiveness will dissipate or become, in yet another turn in Jewish history, more distinct. In other words, Jews are faced with the question of whether this new link of Jewishness and colonialism will drive Jews of Conscience into the New Diaspora to provide their witness and then disappear. Another possibility is whether the assimilative possibilities of exile force Jews of Conscience to imagine Jewish identity in a new way.11 Jews are faced with a variety of challenges in the New Diaspora. For example, most Jews of Conscience are secular in their orientation, though in a distinctive Jewish way. Many non-Jews in the New Diaspora have specific religious sensibilities. How secular Jews of Conscience will interact with the more overtly religious New Diaspora community members over time is unknown. One possibility is that, with their rigorous critique of religiosity across the board, Jews of Conscience will force those who hold to religion to think more seriously about what their religious witness might mean in the New Diaspora. Another possibility is that those non-Jews who adopt a critical, justice-oriented religiosity will prompt secular Jews of Conscience to think again about religiosity. It might be that the wholesale rejection of religiosity is an overreaction, a superficial reaction to the abuse of religion. If the New Diaspora raises many questions for Jews and for the future of Jewish life, this is true for Christians and Muslims as well. What does it mean to be Christian in a community that does not accept Christianity as the final word on the matter of faith? Muslims face challenges of their
After the Holocaust and Israel 53 own. If Islam seeks to create a Muslim-oriented culture, Muslims in the New Diaspora have to reorient their sensibility. All three communities believe it is important to pass on one’s faith inheritance to the next generation. How that will be accomplished in the New Diaspora is unknown. In the New Diaspora, identity is hotly contested. Why else would people from different traditions and geographical locations be in exile if identity—and truth-telling—were not of utmost importance? That does not mean, however, that the identities exiles carry into the New Diaspora will be the identity they pass on to their children. Exiles in the New Diaspora are under tremendous pressure. For many exiles, the experience within their own community has been traumatic. The New Diaspora is hardly a place for relaxed and academic theorizing about identity. People in the New Diaspora are on the run because their exercise of conscience has come at great cost. Rubbing shoulders with other exiles can be contentious. Most believe they will soon be returning from the places and traditions. When they realize there is no going back, another set of challenges appears. The experiential effect on identity formation is direct. Identity questions are widespread in the New Diaspora. Here the postcolonial understanding of fluidity of identity is crucial. Obviously, the naming of Jew, Christian, Muslim, or any identity of long duration, is contested. We know that identity is always an amalgam of identities through history, and that identity is fluid even when orthodoxy claims it to be unchanging and unchangeable. Even in the present, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are interpreted differently by individuals in diverse geographic communities.12 For example, to be a Muslim in Saudi Arabia and Indonesia is to claim commonalities amid great diversity. American Islam is simply the latest claim on Islam. The Americanization of Islam, like the Americanization of Christianity and Judaism, will produce yet another variant subsumed under a generalized rubric “Islam.” Identities move in many and sometimes unpredictable directions. In America, for example, Islam is developing within an empire with Christian foundations. Yet America’s peculiar empire formation also presages a new wrinkle in Islam’s diverse character. To be thoroughly American, American Muslims will have to make choices in relation to the larger Islamic world. Just as Judaism and Christianity did before it, Muslims will eventually symbolize their distinctiveness in America by deemphasizing it. They will aspire to the fruits of American empire as they signal solidarity with their Islamic brothers and sisters throughout the world. That is, in escaping their colonized heritages, and wanting to be free of their colonial vestiges, they will adopt an American exceptionalism, itself a colonial variant. In fact, over the next 50 years, Islam in America might become the poster child for American empire exceptionalism.13
54 Marc H. Ellis Yet that identification with empire will also encourage an exile of Muslims who exercise conscience. What has transpired in the Jewish and Christian communities will follow in the Muslim community as well. When religions— reflected in their liturgical renderings—adopt empire, the prophetic rears its head. Then even colonized religions were up for grabs, or at least parts of the community who once thought they were safe within its folds. Broaching the (Weakened) Prophetic Identity notwithstanding, the most daunting issue facing the New Diaspora is the prophetic. In the New Diaspora, the prophetic is practiced but, as well, it will have to be critically analyzed. In a sense, the prophetic in the New Diaspora will be honed and humbled. Exiles know the cost of the prophetic. They also know the prophetic has failed. The birth communities represented in the New Diaspora have turned their back on the prophetic message. A major issue facing the New Diaspora is whether it will be able to actualize what political and religious communities have not. The existence of the New Diaspora is itself testimony that the prophetic is alive—and has failed. After all, if the prophetic had succeeded the exile would not have occurred. It is in the dynamic of the living and failing prophetic that the New Diaspora forms. In the New Diaspora each person and community needs each other precisely because they hold out the possibility of working through the living and failing prophetic in a creative way.14 Perhaps the defining aspect of the New Diaspora is presenting and representing the possibility and failure of the prophetic. This sets the stage for the next and deepest encounter of the world’s faith traditions. In the trenches of world history, the issue before the individual, the community, and religiosity in general, is what each has to contribute to the renewed realization of the prophetic. This is the next—perhaps final—hurdle for liberation theologies around the world. In the beginning, liberation theology sought to present a take on the prophetic in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. Liberation theology became the locus of a struggle within each tradition to claim—or reclaim—the prophetic intent of their tradition.15 The hope, to win over the tradition back to its origins, was noble. Jews would become more authentically Jewish. Christians would become more authentically Christian. Muslims would become more authentically Muslim. What liberationists found along the way is that this conversion— framed in early liberation theology as moving from orthodoxy to orthopraxis—was waylaid by religious authorities and by a sizable part of each community invested in or aspiring to empire. Religions conspire against
After the Holocaust and Israel 55 this conversion. More than the prophetic, the majority of believers want religion to navigate the complexities of personal life rather than issue a collective clarion call for justice. For the most part, the question of empire and colonialism—the movement toward a postcolonial religiosity—falls on deaf ears. Mobilizing the masses in religious terms is more difficult than originally thought. Too, mobilized religiosity can move in different directions. As is evidenced in parts of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds, religion is a two-edged sword among the powerful and those suffering under oppression. The dynamic between the two sides does not always end in a liberating spirituality. Sometimes the vision of a new society that the oppressed holds is as oppressive as the rulers they seek to replace.16 Perhaps in the New Diaspora we come to the end of religion—as we have known and inherited it. This means thinking through our identities in a radically different way. If in the New Diaspora, exiles wait to return to a renewed and transformed community from which they came, disappointment is guaranteed. By concentrating on former communities, exiles dwell in the past. Exiles waste valuable time and energy in renewing a community they left precisely because it was not going to be reformed. It is much better for exiles to recognize they have chosen another community and set about working there. Over time, exiles turn toward the future to discern what they can contribute to the evolution of their chosen community, the New Diaspora. Since “truth” cannot be proclaimed in the New Diaspora, “truths” of the journey can be shared with others who, in turn, share these truths with others. Sharing truths with others, more truth is created. Unlike the traditions exiles come from, in the New Diaspora the truths shared and created remain constantly in flux.17 What remains essential to the New Diaspora is the underlying and shared prophetic. That, too, needs to be discussed and refined as it is embodied and practiced. If we understand the prophetic as the New Diaspora’s stability—knowing that the prophetic is at the same time unstable—the New Diaspora will acquire depth only as it continues to move in history. The issue of fidelity remains. It is difficult enough to know what it means to be faithful in the religious traditions exiles come from. When those notions of fidelity are exhausted and become a cause for exile, the New Diaspora becomes the new arena for the struggle to be faithful.18 Fidelity in the New Diaspora will be worked out through prophetic practice and reflection. How the prophetic is to be symbolized remains a subject for discussion. The New Diaspora has to learn how to celebrate and mourn the failure of the prophetic. In the New Diaspora, the issue is how to balance celebration and mourning without stripping the prophetic of its deep ongoing entry into history.
56 Marc H. Ellis Here God comes into play. In liberation theology, God is among the poor and the oppressed working to set them free. In some ways, the New Diaspora represents the failure of God. After decades of liberation theologies around world, for the most part, the poor remain poor. Further, the oppressed now empowered create new populations of the oppressed. The situation is so dire that the very presence of God is called into question. For those who believed in God and no longer can, those who never believed in God and those who have returned to God in exile, the issue of God is urgent. How are these various experiences of God’s presence/absence to be thought through and ritualized? Is the prophetic possible without God? Or is the God traditional religions present too limited for our current situation? It may be that the New Diaspora, as a prophetic community, must exist as if God is in doubt. Calling on God in a univocal way is no longer possible after the Holocaust. At least the thinkers associated with Holocaust theology—Elie Wiesel, Richard Rubenstein, Emil Fackenheim, and Irving Greenberg—have questioned God’s presence. Where was God in Auschwitz? That question remains unanswered. Though liberation theology seems certain about God, around the edges the God-question is also at issue. In his writing on Job, Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology, asks how Christians can speak about God when so many lie in the “corners of the dead.”19 Perhaps the reason the God-question is less forcefully argued in liberation theology than in Holocaust theology is because of the liberation theologians’ strategic commitment to struggle within the confines of the organized churches. Now with the realization that such an internal struggle is essentially a dead end, a more open and honest questioning of God is possible. This might bring liberation theologians closer to Holocaust theologians in positing the absence of God. In Holocaust and liberation theologies, we witness a prime example of the creative interaction of diverse communities in the New Diaspora. On the one hand, Jews suffered the trauma of Holocaust and are now empowered. Holocaust theology posits the absence of God in the Holocaust. With God absent, Jews are called upon to determine their own destiny through empowerment. The result has been unfortunate. To secure empowerment, Jews linked with empire in Israel and America. The result is a thoroughly colonial outlook on the world. In fact, we might say today that coloniality resides at the very heart of the Jewish covenant.20 Liberation theology posits God among the poor and oppressed. That God is with empire is unthinkable—heretical. Yet, where has the liberation of the poor actually occurred? Does this throw liberation theology’s God in doubt? It could be that in the mutual interaction of Holocaust and liberation theologies, the Holocaust understanding of God and empowerment
After the Holocaust and Israel 57 wins out. The future for any people’s survival lay in gaining or enabling empire. The battle of the powerful and powerless will continue. However, the present, admittedly failing, witness of liberation theology could take another turn. It might remind Jews of the limits of empire empowerment for Jews and any other people. Because in the end, what has empire gained for the Jewish people? Security? Healing? Ascending to empire might be a people’s ultimate protection. Following the contemporary Jewish trajectory in Israel, it also leads to a violence that becomes embedded in a way of life. In turn, any ethical character that remains within the tradition is suspended, if not destroyed. Empowerment by itself and over against others continues the cycle of violence and atrocity that once engulfed the now powerful. With that cycle continued by the once oppressed, the newly oppressed simply bide their time for their opportunity for vengeance. Contracting the (Colonized) Prophetic The New Diaspora is the postcolonial prophetic community par excellence—if the postcolonial can exist in, give birth to, and help sustain community for the future. This challenge is hardly academic. If the exiles of the New Diaspora are on the run for their lives because of their exercise of conscience, the foundations of conscience must be affirmed, articulated, and passed down to future generations. That foundation is the prophetic. Yet, the prophetic itself bears scrutiny. The prophetic as we have inherited it comes within the failed religions that exiles flee. Moreover, the prophetic has been molded within patriarchal religions and has often been utilized in colonial endeavors. What the prophetic is when freed from its historical baggage is unknown. This begs the question as to whether the prophetic was free of baggage even in origins.21 The prophetic comes from a particular place and people—ancient Israel. There is no question that the prophetic as understood in the Hebrew Bible emerged in a patriarchal culture. The Hebrew Bible is saturated with patriarchy. The Hebrew Bible has a patriarchal God. Moreover, the Israelite culture and journey is fixated on itself and its ability to dominate the cultures it encounters. The Biblical promise of the land involves all of the above and more. As feminist Biblical scholars have pointed out, the cycle of violence and atrocity that the Hebrew Bible narrates is intense and at times unremitting. The violence against women and the earth cannot be explained away.22 Yet the patriarchal nature of the Biblical prophetic and the need to deconstruct it should not blind us to the persistence of the prophetic and its evolution in history. Nor should it deter us from attempting to understand the way that the prophetic, though passed down through
58 Marc H. Ellis patriarchal and colonial sensibilities, has the ability to breakthrough this inheritance and become transformed in different contexts. The prophetic alive in the present constantly challenges the prophetic as it originated. At the same time, the prophetic challenges its diminishment within oppressive historic and religious systems. Liberation theologies around the world exemplify the persistence and contested nature of the prophetic. Most peoples practicing liberation theology today were historically conquered by a European colonial Christianity. This is the case in Latin America but as well applies in other parts of the world. In fact the people of the Philippines provide a model for how indigenous people “contracted colonialism.” Though overpowered and conquered by the Spanish, the people of Philippines negotiated and contested Spanish and Christian power through their own interpretative framework. Thus, in contacting colonialism, Filipinos succumbed to and resisted imperialism.23 In Christian liberation theology, the prophetic represents a further negotiation as the realization of the relationship between the oppressed and oppressor reaches an endpoint. Here, both sides of the oppressor/ oppressed dynamic understand that history has bequeathed a cycle of violence and atrocity without end and that a new path must be taken up. After the initial negotiation with power and later in confrontation with the history of that power, liberation theology is pushed even further to the edges of the Biblical and colonial religious sensibility it inherits. This inheritance includes questioning the presence of God and the realization that the postcolonial prophetic has to exist without a certainty about God. One finds this discussion in Gustavo Gutierrez’s writing on Job and even more starkly in an essay—“The Task of Making God Exist”—by the Spanish priest Joan Casanas. Both question easy talk about God even in the defense of the poor. Both posit only a remnant of God-talk because the suffering God is supposed to respond to continues unabated. For Casanas, the issue is justice, without which there is no reason, rationale, or ability to speak about God. To the contrary, God is only possible in the context of justice. Only when justice is established can God be thought without a vast hypocrisy becoming the norm.24 With Casanas, contracting colonialism places Christianity and God in a contested arena. Both the oppressor and the oppressed claim God on their side. But traveling with “atheist” guerrillas fighting the Pinochet regime in Chile during the 1980s, Casanas asserts that even the oppressed sometimes accept a God that is not decisive and does not deliver. This is a vestige of the colonial Christianity, no doubt, and for some provides solace for their bereavement and strength for their struggle. Others in the struggle, though, see God-talk itself and even prophetic speech as a palliative, a compromise with the raw reality of suffering and death that has no redress. Casanas embraces the rebels and atheists that often know more
After the Holocaust and Israel 59 about God and the prophetic than is possible for either to survive intact. That is, at least as we have known and inherited God and the prophetic. Again we refer back to the interaction of Holocaust and liberation theology on God and the prophetic. Jews in Europe were the colonial Other of dominant European Christianity. Those outside Europe, most of whom were conquered by Europe and Christianized in the process, were the colonial Other to European Christianity. Thus the dialogue between Holocaust and liberation theology is a discussion between two historically oppressed and colonized peoples. Today they are on different sides of the “empire divide” but the possibility remains if exilic segments of each community renew their solidarity in the New Diaspora.25 Since Jews did not change their religion in their contest with Christian power while colonized peoples were forced to, this disguises the fact that both Jews and indigenous peoples around the world negotiated and contracted with Christian colonialism. Though it is more obvious with those who became Christian, Jews continue to contract with Christian power. In the post-Holocaust era, Jews have successfully maintained their identity after reaching a deal with dominant European—and American— Christianity. That deal is one of shared empire. However, at the same time, we should not forget that this deal was reached only in the second half of the twentieth century and after the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. In some ways, Jews represent the original and latest survivors of Europe’s Christian empire religion. Jews were the first and one of the last victims of what might be called the “Gospel of Colonialism.”26 When contracting colonialism, religion and politics move in diverse ways. Post-Holocaust Jewish theology has refocused toward a confrontation with God and the embrace of empire. Liberation theology is about the confrontation with empire and the empire’s embrace of God. Now, having seen the limits of liberation, some Christians question the liberating potential of God and the prophetic—at least as both have been known and inherited. On the Jewish side, the emergence of Jews of Conscience in confrontation with Israeli power and its abuse of Palestinians sees a similar questioning of God and the prophetic. This means that parts of the Jewish and Christian community have entered into a new dialogue beyond the normative theological and interfaith discourse. According to Casanas, the Christian task is to make God exist. God can only be discussed once justice has been established. Among Jews of Conscience, justice is the only issue. The lack of God or even the hypocrisy of discussing God is lacking in the discourse of Jews of Conscience. For Jews of Conscience, God language has been so thoroughly discredited that there is no way back to the question of God. If justice is achieved, a fruitful discussion between Casanas and Jews of Conscience might take place. This discussion would occur on a different terrain that Holocaust and liberation theology as it is known today.
60 Marc H. Ellis On the issue of whether there can be a liturgy without God, Holocaust theology responds in the affirmative. In evoking a people’s pain and abandonment, Holocaust theologians like Elie Wiesel speak and write in a liturgical manner. Wiesel’s autobiographical Night transgresses liturgical boundaries even as it invokes them. In Night, Wiesel and his fellow Auschwitz prisoners deliberately challenge God by declaring God absent and placing God on trial.27 Yet even as hope is denied and God becomes absent and at times an object of derision, God’s past association with the Jewish people is remembered. God’s past association is important if only as a point of rebellion in the present. In some ways, confrontation with God is an appeal to the God that was. In Holocaust theology, the question “Where was God in Auschwitz?” is better phrased as “Where was the God that led out us out of Egypt and promised to be with us in history?”28 Is it to posit the prophetic as central to prioritize Jews and thus diminish others in the New Diaspora? No matter the attractive elements of the prophetic, is the prophetic a new totality and, as much, an unannounced way of returning God to center stage? The stakes are high. If the “authentic” of culture, politics, and religion is at stake and even God and the prophetic needs to be deconstructed, the very real possibility of nothingness looms. The possibility that nothingness can sustain a community of conscience is slim. What is beyond nothingness is important to identify. Can this “beyond” be made up of traumatized fragments of the past traditions—only? Should these traumatized fragments be further dissected with the chance that what is left in exile will also disappear? It is certainly the case that the world’s monotheistic religions are dependent on the prophetic even as they seek to discipline it to maintain their religious systems. It is also the case, though, that much of secular literature with a prophetic cast are dependent on the religious systems they dissent from. It is in the asserted, disciplined, and contested nature of the prophetic that radical literature, including postcolonial theory, makes possible. Postcolonial literature is in some ways a commentary on the prophetic, a post-religious dissent on the failure of the prophetic in culture, politics, and religion. Could the reading and writing of postcolonial literature also be a ritual, in a sense a liturgical rendering of the failure and possibilities of our lives? There is a Talmudic quality to the postcolonial with commentaries following upon commentaries. For the most part in postcolonial literature, however, the question of the traditional canon is raised only to be dismissed. Of course, postcolonial literature is establishing its own canon. Is it time for the postcolonial canon to be interrupted by its own, for the most part, unannounced presuppositions?
After the Holocaust and Israel 61 Holocaust Mourning and the Liturgical Construction of (Innocent) Empire Holocaust theology is a confrontation with God. Holocaust theology also mourns the loss of God. The haunting aspect of God’s absence is thus felt more keenly than when the presence of God is easily affirmed. Mourning a God that once was present may be a Jewish way of confirming the central insight of Casanas—that without justice in the present God cannot be affirmed. Casanas’s theology is confrontational, at least with religious language about God. He writes less about mourning. In Holocaust theology, God no longer appears. Mourning is the last word about God’s presence. With Casanas, God will appear again when justice is achieved. In Holocaust theology, even the justice served by the creation of the state of Israel does not signal God’s reappearance. Why Jewish empowerment in the state of Israel does not occasion God’s reappearance is important. For Holocaust theologians, Israel is a necessity after the Holocaust and it does take on a religious dimension but only because empowerment is seen as a commandment. However, there is a profound difference between the traditional Commanding Voice of Sinai that issues the traditional commandments and what Emil Fackenheim calls the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz.29 In Fackenheim’s understanding, Jews heard the Commanding Voice of Auschwitz in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when Jews around the world united behind Israel to defeat the Arab countries. The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz is the voice of the survivors and all Jews who know that God was absent in the Holocaust. The Commanding Voice of Auschwitz warns Jews that God cannot be depended on for Jewish empowerment in the present either. The divine task of protection has fallen by default to the Jewish people themselves. Only Jews can make sure that the sacred task of Jewish survival is achieved. Thus Fackenheim proposes the 614th commandment that Jews have added to the 613 God-given traditional commandments. The 614th commandment is about Jewish survival in the face of Hitler’s desire for Jews to disappear from the earth.30 Initially, Wiesel and Fackenheim make sense in the world Casanas narrates. After all, the Chilean guerrilla warriors in face of Pinochet’s dictatorship fight for empowerment like Jews did after the Holocaust. Yet, it is here they diverge. The Jewish warriors who created the state of Israel after the Holocaust participated as well in a colonial adventure by displacing the Palestinian people. That displacement continues in the present. Holocaust theology is silent on the origins of the state of Israel and its continuing expansion. It does not mention, let alone affirm, that Israel was born in the ethnic cleansing of over 700 thousand Palestinians whose
62 Marc H. Ellis ancestors continue to live as refugees around the world. For Holocaust theologians, the state of Israel is a Jewish drama framed by annihilation and redemption. The Palestinians are foils in that drama. Holocaust theology refuses to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinian people. Moreover, through commission and omission, by prioritizing Jewish needs and destiny, Holocaust theology adopts a colonial sensibility toward Palestinians and the Arab world in general. Even without God’s presence in the contemporary life of the Jewish people, Jews have a destiny. Nowhere in Holocaust theology do Palestinians appear as a people with a destiny. When Palestinians are mentioned they are seen within the framework of denying Jewish rights to the land, as terrorists, and as those willing to carry out another Holocaust.31 What is striking is how a liturgical rendering of the death of six million Jews at the hands of an empire-ridden, anti-Semitic, and a thoroughly colonial Christianity can move from a deep and searching anticolonial liturgy to one that enables a colonial venture like the state of Israel. Even if the early naiveté of a deeply traumatized people is excused, how can one excuse the decades-long attempt to delegitimize Jewish and non-Jewish criticism of a theology that enables the oppressed to triumph while neglecting and/or demonizing the plight of those on the other side of Jewish power? In the short space of several decades, Holocaust theology traversed a similar path to that of Christianity. Historically, Christianity moved from being a marginalized and oppressed faith community to an enabling and a blessing empire. In the post-Holocaust world, Jews have done the same thing. This is why Jews of Conscience see the established Jewish community as having adopted a Constantinian modality much like the Constantinian Christianity before it. Indeed, we live in the “Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism.”32 As with Christian liturgy, Holocaust theology’s rendering of Jewish liturgy—as well as in the more traditional Jewish liturgies throughout the Jewish world—is complicit in the suffering of Palestinians. By invoking Jewish suffering and destiny as if Jews are innocent in their suffering and empowerment, Jewish liturgy takes the path of Christian liturgies throughout the ages. In the main, Jewish liturgy, like Jewish theology, pretends to an innocence that is contradicted by the behavior of the community. Thus normative Jewish liturgy today, again like Christian liturgy, is suspect. It invokes Holocaust theology to cover up injustice. Jewish liturgy today trivializes the suffering of Europe’s Jews in the Holocaust by announcing Jewish martyrdom while neglecting the actuality of Jewish power. By neglecting the costs of Jewish power, Holocaust theology refuses to acknowledge that Jews today have created a tradition of Palestinian martyrdom. Today we have a Holocaust doxology—in reverse. Holocaust memorialization is conducted like a religious service, with death camps and
After the Holocaust and Israel 63 names of victims recited and sometimes chanted in cadence, like a hymn. Moreover, Holocaust memorialization has become formulaic. Once you enter a Holocaust sanctuary, no thought is needed—or allowed. In Holocaust memorials, all are penitents. Only the felt expression of regret and sorrow for the sins committed against Jews are allowed. And this, even though the penitent is not at fault since few who visit Holocaust memorials were involved in the Holocaust as a perpetrator. Of course, one becomes a penitent only after confessing to his or her sins. In Holocaust memorials, confession, and penance are assumed and conflated. The sinner bows his head before the victims of the Holocaust. Have the victims of the Holocaust become the High Priests of our contemporary age? Holocaust remembrance is now deeply embedded in Western culture. Monuments to the Holocaust victims are found throughout European and American landscapes. Annual Holocaust remembrance events involving churches and synagogues are expected, solemn, and well attended. This is how the Holocaust functions today rather than the reality of the Holocaust in history. In the background of Holocaust memorialization and remembrance is Holocaust theology. The innocence about Jewish empowerment after the Holocaust—in the state of Israel as well as the elite sectors of American society—is expressed institutionally in Holocaust memorials and remembrance. Whatever the original intent of remembering the Holocaust, the instrumentalization of the Holocaust embeds in its liturgical rendering Jewish ascendancy.33 The instrumentalization of memory, especially the memory of suffering, can be found in every culture, people, and religion. That it is used as a lever for power is typical. Yet, in the Jewish case, the prophetic as the indigenous of Jewish life, rests uneasy with this use. This unease may also exist in other cultures but again in the Jewish case the prophetic is foundational. Therefore, those who construct Holocaust theologies and liturgies are profoundly aware of the prophetic possibilities that undermine the use of Jewish suffering to cause suffering to others. In short, for establishment Jews mourning for the Holocaust can never end. They are afraid of the lurking prophetic.34 Isn’t this the fate of all liturgies, to live with fear that there is something next, something lurking after what has been declared eternal? Eternal guilt and repentance for the Holocaust has become the source for Jewish power and Jewish identity itself. In this way, the Holocaust has replaced God or become a modern God for many Jews. For some, the Holocaust has become an idol. Could it be then that Jews of Conscience embody the Jewish prophetic in our time because they refuse the idol that the Holocaust has become? Jews of Conscience are in exile from the Jewish mainstream. In their journey, Jews of Conscience carry the covenant into exile with them.
64 Marc H. Ellis Among Jews of Conscience another form of mourning occurs, though without a liturgical expression. Looked at from a different vantage point though, an exilic mourning for the squandering of the Jewish witness through the trivialization of the Holocaust and its use as cover for the suffering of others—their very embodiment of the prophetic—might be the essence of the Jewish liturgical experience. Sacrificing for justice can be an anti-ritual ritual, especially when the refusal of idolatry is the center. In Jewish life, idolatry is intimately tied to God. Practicing injustice is invalidating belief in God, at least the God that is presented as God. It could be that another image of God is available somewhere, one that refuses to consort with injustice. Following Casanas, himself deeply indebted to the prophetic, what image is appropriate when injustice continues? In an unjust world, every God-image is suspect. Moreover, there have been successions of Gods through history that have been caught up short. For Jews of Conscience, the God-image storehouse is exhausted. The God that comes after the Holocaust and after Israel is not reappearing. Or perhaps the Holocaust has become a stand-in for God. Jews of Conscience reject the Holocaust as God because of its assertion of power and pretense to innocence. This Holocaust God formation extends to the state of Israel another element of contemporary Jewish worship. So, as what has become almost a cliché, Jews come after the Holocaust, which makes support of the state of Israel a sacred duty. Since Jews of Conscience see Jews as coming after the Holocaust and after Israel the sacred quality of both is compromised. The God that might be must come after both as well. What is left after the Holocaust and after Israel, other than the unvarnished decolonized prophetic? Holocaust theology and the memorialization/remembrance liturgy it spawned anticipated a Jewish prophetic upheaval but thought, as all established narratives do, that the force of the prophetic could be handled. Nor, in their defense, did they realize that the state of Israel would play such a dominant role in Jewish life and, at the same time, prove so recalcitrant. In some ways, Holocaust theology was overwhelmed by the continuing violence and expansion of Israel. The culpability of Holocaust theology rests in its refusal to establish a limit. Even in their celebration of the 1967 victory of Israel over the Arab countries, Holocaust theologians did not anticipate Israel’s ongoing occupation, extensive settlement, and control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Rather, Holocaust theology saw Israel as a dream response to the Holocaust and mythologized Israel’s empowerment as innocent. Israel’s empowerment was never innocent, thus there were already fissures in the post-Holocaust narrative of Jewish innocence from the beginning, Nonetheless, Holocaust theologians had no idea that Israel would remain and become even more deeply embedded in penetrating the cycle of violence and atrocity Jews had suffered from. In the end, Holocaust theologians could not control the idol it had helped create.
After the Holocaust and Israel 65 When mourning overwhelms critical thought, the prophetic is awakened. However, the desire to deflect the warnings of the prophetic is natural. The prophetic calls all power—and liturgy—into question but, in the end, what person or community can live the prophetic? That is why Jews have always been on both sides of the “empire divide.” One side, the indigenous of Jewish life, the prophetic, is always at battle with the empire proclivity of Jews that seeks to manage, discipline, and if possible banish the prophetic. In Holocaust theology, we see a desperate struggle to emerge from a targeted annihilation. How is that accomplished without aspirations and achievement of empire? Of course, in deference to the prophetic, Holocaust theology cannot announce empire and, because of the situation of Jews in and right after the Holocaust, could not even imagine Jews as empire enablers and stakeholders. When empowerment was achieved, Holocaust theologians were wary of its announcement. This had to do with the external world and antiSemitism but, as well and perhaps more importantly, with the internal dynamics of Jewish life. Jews had been down and powerless. Having achieved power, was it wise to give it up? Moreover, Holocaust theologians knew that Empire Jewishness would be struggled against by the prophetic. It was only a matter of time. Time it is. But what happens when time is up? In the New Diaspora, time is marked by the prophetic. It is here that a Jewish theology of liberation takes hold and encounters liberation theologies from around the world in the context of a shared exile. What fruit that encounter will bear will be known only in the future. Notes 1. For my extended take on the New Diaspora, see Practicing Exile: The Journey of an American Jew (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2002). 2. I am developing this theme in The Future Prophetic: Israel’s Ancient Wisdom Re-Presented (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014). Also, see Judaism Does Not Equal Israel (New York: New Press, 2009). 3. I discuss the broader tradition of faith and struggle in more depth in Practicing Exile. 4. On the difficulty of “God” see Martin Buber, Meetings: Autobiographical Fragments, ed. Martin Friedman (London: Routledge, 2003), 55–65. 5. Yet another challenge is whether religions actually share what we assume they share—the belief in one God. That challenge is presented in Stephen Prothero, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter (New York: HarperOne, 2010). 6. On Constantinian Judaism, see the first chapter “A Time to Mourn: The Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism” in my Reading the Torah Out Loud: A Journey of Lament and Hope (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 1–18.
66 Marc H. Ellis 7. Understanding Jewish life as coming after the Holocaust and after Israel is the next step in reframing Jewish identity. For my discussion of major theological voices of the twentieth century and their inability to take this step, see my Encounter the Jewish Future: With Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2011). For a recent exploration of this theme, see Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 8. For a provocative take on anti-Semitism, see Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (London: AK Press, 2003). 9. On the relation of Christianity and empire, see Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2007), 69–118. 10. For the subversive memory of suffering, see Johannes Baptist Metz, Faith in Society: Toward a Fundamental Practical Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 1980). 11. This is a recurring subject/theme in Butler, Parting Ways. On Jewish identity formation, Butler is brilliant and elusive. My own view is that Butler performs the prophetic without accounting for its persistence. 12. Much of Edward Said’s writing was devoted to this theme of identity. For one of his last attempts at this discussion, see his Freud and the European (London: Verso, 2004). 13. For a popular take on the future of Islam in America, see Anaour Majid, Islam and America: Building a Future without Prejudice (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2011). 14. For a take on the failure of the prophetic in the Bible and beyond, see Martin Buber, Israel and the World: Essays in a Time of Crisis (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1976), 119–136. 15. To follow the trajectory of Christian liberation theology, see David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Boston, MA: Brill, 2002). For an exploration of Islam and liberation, see Farid Esack, Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism (London: Oneworld, 1997). The first attempt at a Jewish theology of liberation was my Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987). 16. Thus the revival of fundamentalism, the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1980s, for example. As an interesting case study, see Michael Sean Winters, God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right (New York: HarperOne, 2012). 17. In a 1975 lecture “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” Adrienne Rich writes: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” The lecture can be found in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose Reviews and Criticism, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 200. 18. For an exploration of fidelity in history, see my Faithfulness in an Age of Holocaust (Warwick, NY: Amity House, 1986). 19. For an analysis of the main figures of Holocaust theology, see my Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation, 3rd ed. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 15–50. For a deep rendering of Job in the Latin American perspective,
After the Holocaust and Israel 67 see Gustavo Gutierrez, On Job: God-talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987). 20. See my O’Jerusalem: The Contested Future of the Jewish Covenant (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000). 21. For the origins of the prophetic, see Jack R. Ludbom, The Hebrew Prophets: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010.) 22. On travails of women in the Hebrew Bible, see Susanne Scholz, Sacred Witness: Rape in the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010). 23. Vincente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Manila: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 1988). 24. Joan Casanas, “The Task of Making God Exist,” in The Idols of Death and the God of Life: A Theology, ed. Pablo Richard (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1983), 113–149. 25. For my understanding of the empire divide as a way of linking those of conscience on one side and Constantinians on the other side, see my The Future Prophetic. 26. For what I call the “Historical Gospels” see my Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 86–96. 27. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). The Jewish scholar David Roskies refers to this liturgical aspect as the Jewish liturgy of destruction. See his The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989.) 28. On the question of the memory of God, see Michael Berenbaum, Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust and the Children of Israel (Springfield, NJ: Behrman House, 1994). 29. For an early rendering of this discussion, see Emil Fackenheim, “Jewish Values in the Post-Holocaust Future,” Judaism 16 (Summer 1967): 272. Also see his God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970). 30. Ibid. 31. The anticipation of a second Holocaust runs through Holocaust theology. For an extended attempt to “normalize” the Jewish condition and discipline the Jewish prophetic, lest it intentionally or unintentionally allow another Holocaust, see Irving Greenberg, “The Ethics of Jewish Power,” in Beyond Occupation: American Jewish, Christian and Palestinian Voices for Peace, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marc H. Ellis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990), 22–74. 32. On the Golden Age of Constantinian Judaism, see my Reading the Torah Out Loud. 33. The story of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is fascinating in this regard. See Edward Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University, 2001). 34. See Irving Greenberg’s “The Ethics of Jewish Power,” 59–74.
Part II African and African American Perspectives
4 The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy : An African Postcolonial Perspective Beatrice Okyere-Manu Introduction The global phenomenon of migration continues to confront most Christian communities and churches in postcolonial Africa. Because of globalization, twice as many people are migrating as were 25 years ago1 and many scholars describe this century as the “age of migration.”2 In spite of the fact that many of those who make up the flow of migrants are undocumented, we know that there are about 20–50 million migrants in Africa.3 An International Organization for Migration document reveals that “nearly 200 million people, or one out of every 35 people, around the world, are living away from their homelands.”4 Migration is a highly complex phenomenon because of its economic, sociopolitical, cultural, and religious causation, as well as its implications for migrants, their native countries, and the host countries. To most Africans, religion is deeply rooted and forms an integral part of their lifestyle, particularly so for most African Christians. As the popular saying “When the people move the church moves”5 implies, as people move, they do not leave behind their faith, practices, values, spirituality, and experiences of worship; instead, they move with them and articulate their migration experiences in the light of personal theological reflections of the journey. Liturgy is greatly entrenched in their day-to-day practices and experiences, making it easier for them to carry their faith, liturgical observances, and practices with them wherever they go. Yet most Christian communities and churches in Africa and beyond have not been equipped enough to accommodate migrant Christians, given their diverse liturgical practices, observance, languages, and identities.
72 Beatrice Okyere-Manu In the process of enculturation, most migrant Christians face the dilemma between clinging onto their old liturgical identities and lifestyles or abandoning the observances that they are familiar with and adopting new forms of liturgy. The situation most migrants find themselves in can be compared with the Jews in exile who, out of despair, lamented that they could not understand singing the Lord’s Song in a strange land.6 Most African Christian migrants are unable to engage in their own liturgical practices in their new environment. This happens because, to some extent, their identities are often misplaced for lack of a safe space for familial liturgical expression. Therefore, they must decide whether to continue to hold onto their old forms and practices of liturgy or to engage in a mental shift and embrace new liturgical practices and identities. To my knowledge, this area has received little attention from literature, and therefore this chapter explores the ethical implications of migration on liturgical identities and practices of African Christian migrants, the homeland church as well as the host church. First, it briefly explores the meaning of liturgy as expressed in the Christian religion in postcolonial Africa, because the meaning of liturgy has been contested: while people attribute liturgy to the order of service in a particular congregation on a weekly basis, a number of studies indicate that it is more than what happens on a Sunday morning. Second, the chapter examines the African migration situation and argues that migrations have been and continue to be part of African life through time and space. Third, it explores the impact of migration on the liturgical practices of the individual in the foreign land or the host church. Fourth, it looks at the ethical implications of migration on liturgy and argues for the need to reconstruct new liturgical norms to restore the sense of belonging compromised by the displacement of familiar liturgies in and outside the church. This requires ongoing shaping, constructing, and negotiating of the new practices on the part of the migrant as well as the host church. Defining Liturgy As previously alluded to, a number of scholars have contested the definition of liturgy: Gregory Dix defines liturgy as “the name given ever since the days of the apostles to the act of taking part in the solemn corporate worship of God by the ‘priestly’ society of Christians who are ‘the body Christ, the church.’7 This suggests worship activities such as prayer and the Eucharist by the early Christians when they come together on their meeting days to worship God. To others, liturgy is tied to the order of worship service synonymously limiting it to the Holy Communion.8 Kelvin Irwin says that liturgy “is a series of action, prayers, proclamations, and symbolic gestures which comprises the Christian community’s response in faith to all that has been accomplished in Christ.” Yet, as Carol M. Noren has observed,
The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy 73 “in other Christian circles, the word liturgy is not used because the idea of a fixed order of service seems contrary to the free movement of the Holy spirit in worship.”9 To them, since the Holy Spirit cannot be contained or confined, neither should liturgy. She continues to say that to others, liturgy seems mysterious, something for ordained clergy rather than the laity.10 Lawrence Hoffman, on the other hand, believes that “liturgy ranges from the most elaborate Holy ceremonial to the simple sacred markings of otherwise pedestrian time: like grace before and after meals, or weddings, which bestow cosmic significance on the decisions of men and women to live together or funerals, which cast equal grace on evens no one chooses at all.”11 Thus, apart from the common meaning alluding to how the church responds in praise and other forms of worship to God on Sunday mornings, liturgy can also have a secondary connotation that incorporates even the simplicity and unceremonious nature of an individual’s personal spiritual life as well as the Christian community’s daily activities and practices. As is evident in the discussion above, liturgy clearly denotes more than the rites shared in the confinement of the place of worship. The practices, teachings, and the convictions of the church must influence individuals’ daily lives: their clothing, food, work, and even free time. Accordingly, the church’s teachings and practices develop value systems manifested in people’s daily lives; thus, the Christian is expected to live out the spiritual experiences developed through observances of liturgy learned in the church. Liturgy is learned in the doing of it, and so is faith. Even more than expressing the faith we have in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, liturgy shapes our faith. That is an especially important concern for evangelism. Believers come to know the object of their faith and the content of a received tradition of the apostolic tradition through worship, through the doing of liturgy.12 These learned liturgical practices eventually must form the identity of the individual Christian and is indivisible from who he or she is. Christian migrants carry it with them wherever they go and it influences their way of life. It is with this background that here I take liturgy as the daily expression of a Christian: the way of life of a Christian. In doing so, I work from a position that migration has an impact on the Christian’s spirituality, faith, and worship, and thus on the Christian’s daily life. The African Migration Situation Since time immemorial, migration has been part and parcel of African life. Many historians and anthropologists such as Veronika Bilger and Albert Kraler believe that Africa has and continues to be a mobile continent.13 This is because almost all the ethnic groups found in present-day Africa
74 Beatrice Okyere-Manu claim to have migrated from somewhere (else) to their present place; some trace their mobility as far back as the trans-Saharan caravan routes within the subregions of the continent.14 Writing about migration in precolonial Africa, Beyani Chaloka says that the history of Africa is one of migration in time and space in the Northern, Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern parts of the continent. Barring the slave trade within and outside Africa, migration in pre-colonial Africa had positive effects in resolving protracted conflicts as defeated communities migrated elsewhere in search of peaceful environments, security, livelihoods, water, and resources.15 Other scholars believe that Colonialism transformed this situation. For example, Beyani attributes the change in migration in Africa to the demarcation of Africa into territorial entities based on the Westphalian model of statehood after the Berlin Conference in 1884 meant that the newly created boundaries became obstacles to open migration. Paradoxically, colonialism itself constituted migration from the global North to the global South in search of territory, space, resources, and new opportunities for economic expansion on the part of colonial powers.16 The boundaries created by colonialism did not deter Africans from moving from one place to another, within and even beyond the continent. According to Beyani, “colonial domination and control thus forcibly displaced many communities from their lands and source of livelihood, restricting their residence to specific areas in which economic productivity and livelihoods were poor.”17 This state of affairs actually encouraged many families to move in search of other areas for economic productivity. It is clear that in precolonial Africa, migration became part of life because of the search for security and economic prospects, which has continued to fuel postcolonial migration. Today, patterns of migration within Africa have become more complex and diverse. More Africans are migrating within the continent than ever before. According to Kalu Ogbu, Since the end of the slave trade, a new form of migration has started caused by new forces and endowed with new patterns: during the slave trade a few rescued slaves remained in Africa but now large groups of immigrants leave home but never leave the continent. The direction of the old migration is multi-dimensional but the directions in the new are even more complex: some travel to the north globe, others to the south and in all directions.18 There are between 20 and 50 million migrants in Africa, “although statistical data on migration flows are incomplete and often outdated, and there
The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy 75 are significant undocumented flows.”19 Ogbu says that “we are experiencing push or compelled desertion of homelands rather than mild push.”20 Currently there are internal, regional, and international forms of migration on the continent, either voluntary or involuntary. Voluntary migration includes the search for greener pastures mostly caused by structural adjustment and weakening economies, whereas involuntary migration may refer to the search for places of refuge after natural disasters, political and religious upheavals, and wars.21 As noted above, in postcolonial Africa, migration “has become a source for the transformation of identities and the redefinition as well as reshaping of culture and religion as sources of empowerment, making it a site for reconstructing the meanings of the human condition.”22 A recent phenomenon involves a number of people migrating for the sake of missionary work in fulfillment of the biblical great commandment: “therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mathew 28:19). For instance, Jehu Hanciles has observed that “many African Christian who have recently migrated to Europe, generally to find work, consider that God has given them a unique opportunity to spread the good news among those who have gone astray.”23 In all these categories, Ogbu has also noted four types of migrants: Those residing en route, those residing in the new destination as exiles who sing choruses in foreign lands: those who believe they have crossed the Jordan, cut off ancient ties, and burnt the wooden frames of the native xylophone and the circulatory migrants who return to the homeland after a period of forced or voluntary exile.24 Here, even though Ogbu is referring to African migrants in the Diaspora, this description is also true of African migrants within the continent. My own interactions with other immigrants show that most migrants found within the continent are en route to other African countries or to Europe and the United States of America to seek greener pastures. While some continue to maintain contacts and may return home on retirement or out of frustration and disappointment in the foreign land, others may never return to their homelands. “The question of migration is not always if ever a question of paying a short visit, but is a permanent component of contemporary social reality.”25 Yet, across the various categories of immigrants, one thing that remains commonplace and is carried across borders is native religious practice. Cruz says that migrants are like Israel in the wilderness, on a journey of hope that the promised rest lies ahead. As a people who travel across seas and deserts in search of their “promised land,” migrants are like pilgrims. The journey that forces them to survive and, for a few, thrive in strange places is a journey of hope and faith.26
76 Beatrice Okyere-Manu Clearly, the African people are naturally mobile, carrying with them strong religious beliefs, values, and practices, as they move across their borders. Realities of Migration on the Liturgy: Singing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land So far, the study has argued that liturgy is the daily expression of observances such as the Eucharist, baptism, prayer and the Christian life. As noted above, “When people move, they carry their ideas, beliefs and religious practices with them . . . the migration movement was—and still is a prime factor in the global spread of world religions, notably in Islam and Christianity.”27 It is with this background that Cruz has argued that migrants, constituting a pilgrim community, can have a profound experience of God. As they move from one reality to another, so does their God, who is not established in a solid temple but shares in their provisional life. God walks alongside them and becomes a pilgrim on the roads of this uneven world, nurturing and blessing them by the power of renewed relationships and community within the household of life.28 Evidently, migration tends to have a tremendous impact on the liturgical practices of Christians. Migration affects liturgical practices for all migrants, but this section explores the impact on nonprofessional migrants, who lack academic or needed skill sets. Statistically, “there is rather less available data on flows of migrants within African countries, though evidence from micro-level studies suggests that this form of mobility is very substantial across most African countries.”29 For nonprofessional migrants, in addition to the push factors already discussed, lies the background reality of dropping out of school enrolment as well as enduring changing economies that have not been able to accommodate them in their home countries. Therefore, they see migration as an opportunity to fulfill their dreams. For these people, clinging to their liturgies in these foreign places is like “singing the Lord’s Song in a strange land.” With a little imagination and literary license, a parallel can be drawn to the journey taken by the Israelites in captivity: the toll of the journey, the harshness of their “captors” or the conditions they find themselves up against can be said to be similar to what the Jews faced. Yet unlike the Jews, these migrants may not necessarily become captive in wars but through social challenges such as fear, insecurity, unemployment, lack of adequate social amenities, and poverty. Challenges such as the lack of appropriate legal documentation and professional qualifications render them vulnerable in a foreign land. Such conditions may have both positive and negative impacts on the liturgies of these migrants.
The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy 77 For most of them, migration may mean giving up church attendance, social contacts with and through the church, and other elements that come with being part of a local religious community. This is because the struggle for survival, insecurities, and the desire to make quick money offer a challenge to their deeply rooted values and liturgical practices that have formed their identities in their homelands. To survive, some of them end up in gangs that operate with illicit drugs and armed robbery, as pimps and even prostitutes. Ogbu has noted that in some circles “smugglers use migrant women’s bodies in the transportation of illicit drugs.”30 For example, “from Cape Verde Island to the Sunnyside slums of Pretoria, the criminality of African immigrants has elicited public outcry.”31 The harshness of migration, survival, and the desire to make money quickly has forced a/the majority of migrants to compromise with their Christian beliefs and values. The other side of the coin is that in their vulnerability, trying to be creative and avoid illegal trades, others resort to self-employment in street vending, shoe repairing, hair braiding, barbering, and many other lowstatus, low-paying jobs that require thorough, hard work in order to survive. Most people from the host countries take advantage of migrants in such a vulnerable condition. The challenge here is that these jobs may limit their social networks and preclude them from having room to exercise their liturgical practices. The lack of Christian network eventually drains their faith and liturgies. The new environment may also affect the liturgical practices of professional migrants, even though their challenges may differ from those of nonprofessionals. For some, there is a pressure to compromise their beliefs, practices, and values to conform to particular social networks or workplace culture in order to cope with the global standards of life. For other immigrants, this is the time to exhibit their faith and their liturgies. Most Christian immigrants from mainline church backgrounds easily join familiar denominations to enrich and maintain their liturgies, while others find it difficult to integrate. Therefore, in order to maintain their ethnic identities, language, and worship in their mother tongue, and to avoid hostile ethnicities, they are forced to form their own churches, like the many Nigerian, Ghanaian, Congolese, and Swahili churches in South Africa. The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgical Practices The above discussion calls on both the home and the host church to reassess their role and approach to migration. The church in general has not been prepared enough to deal with the complexities and implications of migration.
78 Beatrice Okyere-Manu In postcolonial Africa, migration “has become a source for the transformation of identities and the redefinition as well as reshaping of culture and religion as sources of empowerment, making it a site for reconstructing the meanings of the human condition.”32 This situation raises a number of moral questions for both the home and the host Christian Church. The movement of people across borders does not only have ecclesiastical implications as “part of God’s purpose, from the Garden of Eden onwards,”33 but also important ethical implications that calls the church to look again at its role in the world, especially its duty toward strangers and aliens. From an ethical perspective, there are three areas of responsibility that require attention, each presenting an ethical question. First, what is the responsibility of the host church to these migrants when they arrive in the foreign land? Second, what is the spectrum of responsibilities to be addressed by the home church as the migrants leave, both initially and on an ongoing basis? Finally, what is the responsibility of the individual with regard to guarding their own liturgical practices (singing the Lord’s Song in a foreign land)? These questions make it apparent that a deontological approach is required when dealing with migration; the church must respond to the challenge affecting its members. Migrants, whether professionals or nonprofessionals, can be a great asset to the church. However, members of the host church often react with ignorance, suspicion, and fear toward migrant Christians, finding it difficult to accept them in their midst. Being a migrant myself, I can attest to this. Not only because of clash of cultural identities, but also because of different understanding of liturgical practices and beliefs. Migrants bring with them different theological traditions, teachings, practices, and liturgies, and different music that can enrich host churches—but also may divide them,34 and therefore ongoing dialogue, shaping and reshaping of beliefs and practices is required. Kabasele Lumbala has argued that “liturgical prayer responds to and reflects everyday life; it cannot remain identical in every location and in all places. Jesus Christ—the same for all, encounters each one in our own particularity in a unique relationship.35 Leaving the Christian community that one is used to, where these individuals have strong ties, may feel like a threat to someone’s religious practice, and more often than not this is compounded by the “When in Rome you do as the Romans do” attitude adopted by most congregations. They expect the migrant to throw away all their liturgies, religious practices, and value systems they have learnt in their lifetime from their home church and to adopt the practices and values of the host country.36 Joanne Appleton interviewed Singaporean church leader Ravi Chandran, who said that in the mind of the foreigner, especially one who has come to a new culture, assimilation is giving up the way you think and your values, and adopting
The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy 79 the host’s values. The Romans went all over the world and conquered. The mind-set you communicate when you say “when in Rome . . . ” is basically going back to colonisation, particularly for African and Asian migrants. They feel “I have come to your country and you want to colonise me?”37 Even though Chandran was referring to migrants in the West, this statement is true of African migrants. It is not easy for one to throw off the core belief systems and practices that have been part of their entire lives and adopt new forms because of change in space. On the church’s duty, Kobia says that it is easier for a church to welcome migrants as long as they adapt to the traditions and policies established by the host church. This is assimilation. Integration, on the other hand, implies a willingness to accept the contributions of migrants to change the church and to create something new. This is more difficult for many to accept. It has been argued that one of the reasons migrants establish their own church is because they don’t feel that the established churches are ready to change to accommodate their needs.38 Adjustment is very difficult and therefore any clash in practices can be an easy excuse to give up churchgoing or fellowshipping with the Christian communities in the host country. As Chandran correctly noted, “one of the dangers of demanding assimilation is that the migrant will react against the demands to give up their value systems by retreating into their own subcultures and refusing to interact in meaningful way with the host culture.”39 It is from this premise that Groody reiterated Paul VI and John Paul II that there is need to adopt “a civilization of love and a culture of life”40 when it comes to the church’s dealings with migrants. Nagy quoted a document from the World Council of Churches saying victims of migration represent “symbols and reminders of an unjust and unmerciful world and the church is called to act on their behalf to build a new community that points towards the Kingdom.”41 Since migration is inevitable, it requires love, acceptance, and tolerance from the host church. Leviticus 19:33–34, is clear about the responsibilities of the host community that “when an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your nativeborn. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt.” Nagy also cautions that “love for the alien does not mean tolerance and acceptance of all that who the person is, on the contrary it means a love which becomes active as soon as the alien enters the country with the aim to “make him or herself one of us.”42 The church’s teachings must reemphasize these virtues to enable individuals in the church to see beyond the differences in cultures and accept that migrants are also made in the image of God. Since it is our duty to treat them with dignity, the host church is challenged to accept migrants as brothers and sisters
80 Beatrice Okyere-Manu despite the practical challenges that comes with it.43 Kobia further challenges contemporary church: The community that is called to share the bread and the wine with each other, and to follow Jesus in his ministry of healing and reconciliation, must not aggravate divisions; rather, it should become a bridge-builder. It ought to provide space for those who are different from one another to experience that they all belong to one humanity meant by God to share life on this planet.44 Clearly there is a need for acceptance and “social inclusion (cohesion) for migrants and the church can provide uncontested space for the marginalized people such as refugees and migrants.45 As Rodney Clapp has noted, “The church exists for the sake of the world. . . . Worship teaches and forms us to live by the Jesus story so that others—the entire world, the church prays, will learn to live according to reality and wholeness.”46 Conclusion This article explored the ethical implications of migration on liturgical practices. First, it argued that liturgy is more than what happens on Sunday mornings in the various Christian worship places, which in turn must reflect on the daily life of the Christian. Second, it investigated the migration situation in postcolonial Africa arguing that Africans are religious and mobile people who, wherever they go, move with their religious values, beliefs, and practices. Third, I argued that migration has ethical implications on liturgical practices whether a migrant is a professional or not. Realities such as the harshness of migration, the need for acceptance in various social networks in the foreign land, clashes of cultural, liturgical practices, and identities were among the major issues that challenge individual liturgical practices. In order to overcome these ethical challenges the migrant, both the migrant and the home churches need to reassess their God-given role as they engage with their own contexts. Notes 1. Khalid Koser, International Migration: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University, 2007), 5. 2. Stephen Castles, Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 5th ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 3. R. Black, et al., Migration and Development in Africa: An Overview (Cape Town Southern: Idasa, 2006). 4. Daniel Groody, G., CSC, “Crossing the Divide: Foundations of a Theology of Migration and Refugees,” Theological Studies 70 (2009): 638.
The Ethical Implications of Migration on Liturgy 81 5. Jacob Sol, Refugees: A Challenge to the South African Churches—A Ministry to Refugees Handbook, The South African Council of Churches, 1982. 6. Ps 137:4. 7. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (New York: Continuum, 1945): 1. 8. Jasper Ronald and Claud Dudley, “Liturgies,” in The Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, ed. Davies J. G. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), 314. 9. Carol M. Noren, What Happens Sunday Morning: A Layperson’s Guide to Worship (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1992): 85. 10. Ibid. 11. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Beyond the Text: A Holistic Approach to Liturgy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): 1. 12. Marva Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 242. 13. Veronica Bilger and Albert Kraler, “Introduction: African Migrations; Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Dynamics,” Stichproben Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien, Special Issue: African Migrations, Historical Perspective and Contemporary Dynamics 8 (2005): 9. 14. Ibid. 15. Chaloka Beyani, Migration in Africa, Enduring Phenomenon? The Nansen Lecture, Johannesburg, South Africa (September 15, 2011), 1–7, accessed August 5, 2013, http://bit.ly/postcol2-17.> 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Kalu Ogbu, “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora,” PentecoStudies: An Interdisplinary Journal of Research on Pentecostal and Charismatic Movement 9.1 (2010): 176. 19. Black et al., Migration and Development in Africa, 2. 20. Ogbu, “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora,” 191. 21. Ibid. 22. T. G. Cruz, “Between Identity and Security: Theological Implications of Migration in the Context of Globalization,” Theological Studies 69.2 (June 2008): 368. 23. Jehu J. Hanciles, “Migration and Mission: Some Implications for the Twentyfirst Century Church,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 27.4 (2003): 150. 24. Ogbu, “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora,” 170. 25. Dorottya Nagy, A Theology of Migration (Boekencentrum: Utrecht, 2009): 242. 26. Gemma Talud Cruz, “Between Identity and Security: Theological Implications of Migration in the Context of Globalization,” Theological Studies 69.2 (2008): 369. 27. Hanciles, “Migration and Mission,” 146. 28. Cruz, “Between Identity and Security,” 369. 29. Black et al., Migration and Development in Africa, 5. 30. Ogbu, “African Pentecostalism in Diaspora,” 195 31. Ibid. 32. Cruz, “Between Identity and Security,” 368.
82 Beatrice Okyere-Manu 33. T. Huston, R. Thomson, R. Gidoomal, and L. Chinn, “The New People Next Door,” Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 55, Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, accessed August 5, 2013, http://www.lausanne.org /documents/2004forum/LOP55_IG26.pdf. 34. Samuel Kobia, “Global Migration and New Ecclesial Realities,” accessed April 25, 2007, http://www.oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents /general-secretary/speeches/global-migration-and-new-ecclesial-realities, 6. 35. Francois Kabasele Lumbala, Celebrating Jesus Christ in Africa: Liturgy and Inculturation (New York: Orbis Books, 1998). 36. Wolfgang Bosswick and Friedrich Heckmann, Integration of Migrants: Contribution of Local and Regional Authorities, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, 2006, accessed July 20, 2013, http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2006/22/en/1/ef0622en.pdf. 37. Joanne Appleton, “Assimilation or Integration: Migrants in Europe,” Encounters Mission Journal 36 (March 2011): 1. 38. Kobia, Address on Global Migration and New Ecclesial Realities, 6. 39. Appleton, “Assimilation or Integration,” 2. 40. Groody, “Crossing the Divide,”644. 41. Nagy, A Theology of Migration, 225. 42. Ibid., 239. 43. Appleton, “Assimilation or Integration,” 5. 44. Kobia, Address on Global Migration and New Ecclesial Realities, 7. 45. William S. J. O’Neill, “Rights of Passage: Ethics of Forced Displacement,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 27 (2007): 115. 46. Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1996), 114–115.
5 “D o This in Remembrance of Me”: An African Feminist Contestation of the Embodied Sacred Liturgical Space in the Celebration of Eucharist Lilian Cheelo Siwila Introduction The Eucharist is understood as a renewal of commitment to justice for all humanity. The Christian faith makes use of the term “Eucharistic,” which took shape in ancient Greek society. Even though a Eurocentric perspective prevails, the Eucharist is also observed in African churches’ different forms of worship. For example, most mainline churches would prefer to use the word “Holy Communion”; others call it the Lord’s Table. For the sake of this chapter, l will use the words interchangeably. Liturgically, Christians are viewed as the church of God, a community of all believers, the all-inclusive body of Christ that is open to everyone. Thus, the Lord’s Table is seen as the sacred space that is meant to unite all humanity. On the other hand, the Lord’s Table can also be a gendered contested space where power dynamics are at play. Following such dynamics, this chapter hopes to answer the questions, what is the interpretation of Eucharist in the postcolonial context? To what extent have the words of Jesus, “do this in memory of me,” influenced the way in which modern society responds to the Eucharist? Who is eligible to participate at the Lord’s Table? What are the power dynamics at play in this sacred space? This chapter also aims to critically engage a feminist discourse of embodiment and disembodiment of gendered sacred space in an attempt to create an all-inclusive space for all humanity.
84 Lilian Cheelo Siwila Using feminist postcolonial round table theory, the chapter investigates the African concept of community and understanding of the Lord’s Table as a space for celebration, joy, and religious experience as advocated in most African cultures. It will also discuss the power dynamics centered around Eucharist, and how these power dynamics influence the embodiment and disembodiment of sacred space, focusing on a feminist critique of how these powers have limited women’s participation in the celebration of Eucharist. A Brief History of Liturgy According to Smith, the earliest texts that give us a clear picture of the early forms of liturgy are not in the New Testament, but are described by the early fathers. While the New Testament is involved in the development of the liturgy, it it works alongside forms developed by the early church, rather than as an independent witness.1 Uzukwu sees Eucharist as the recalling of the event of the Christian story.2 As one of the earliest forms of worship, Eucharist became prominent in the early church (assembled in house-churches) to commemorate the death of Christ, who is confessed as raised or as alive in the community of faith through the spirit. The meals taken in these house-churches were to be all-inclusive and to cut across all differences. According to Senn, liturgical movements gained momentum between the 1960s and 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement emerged. During this period, liturgical reforms reflected women’s concerns for economic and social equality with men.3 During the early years of Christianity, when persecutions broke out, celebration of the Eucharist strengthened their faith. This was evident in the fact that Christians celebrated the Eucharist anywhere, as they argued that it was impossible for them to live without it, emphasizing the central place of the Eucharist in the life of the Christian community.4 Toward a Round Table Theory In order to effectively respond to the feminist contestation of embodied sacred space in the liturgy, and to show thereafter the value of community life that can be drawn from the Lord’s Table, I use Letty Russell’s feminist interpretation of church as a round table as a theoretical framework for this study. According to Russell, in most nations, the round table has become the symbol of hospitality and a metaphor for gathering, sharing, and dialogue. It speaks of our experiences in coming together and connecting at home, at work, and at worship.5 Russell further argues that the Church as a round table also points to the reality where people are often excluded from the tables of life, through denial of shared food, resources,
“Do This in Remembrance of Me” 85 and practices of naming and decision-making affecting the community, nation, and the world. Those who are denied such privileges are sometimes also seen as less human, and are only allowed to live in the community but not be part of the community. Russell sees the round table as a reminder to the church that the Eucharistic table is an expression of commitment to Jesus Christ, and that it is commissioned to welcome all those whom Christ has welcomed and to be a meeting point for all believers. A feminist approach to the round table concept is also a challenge to connect with one another. This is because our societies are normally formulated through acts of exclusion, where you are either in or out. Those who gather around the table should be connected in an association or relationship with each other. As Smith’s historical exposure of the Lord’s Table shows, Those who dined together were to be treated equally. This was a standard feature of ancient dinning protocol. It functioned as an elaboration of the concept of social bonding at the meal and was a strong feature of banquet ideology at all levels of data. The idea was that a meal was shared in common and that created a sense of community among the participants . . . in essence then a meal concurred in this way had the potential to breakdown social barriers . . . 6 In her discussion, Russell states that the round table is also talking back in the sense that feminist interpreters are no longer willing to allow talk about them to continue within a patriarchal framework.7 Therefore, one of the ways in which round table theory is employed in this study is by showing how a feminist understanding of the Lord’s Table can allow talk back to take place. This will involve a call for the voices of women to be heard as they respond to the patriarchal contested space at the Eucharist table. Although developed from a western feminist perspective, the round table theory has also made a significant contribution to the discussions of African concepts of community, which is also the focus in addressing gender contestation at the Lord’s Table. Kanyoro has used the engendered communal theology framework to speak of the value of community life in an attempt to change oppressive systems within their communities.8 A Discourse Analysis on the Concept of Safe Space and Communal Meals One of the simplest and possibly oldest acts of fellowship in the world is that of having communal meals. In the African context, and particularly among the Tonga ethnic group,9 meals are regarded as a major social event—no function is complete without a meal. This kind of approach relates to the ethos of African religious life, which upholds the concept
86 Lilian Cheelo Siwila of community. Smith, discussing the history of meals and banquets in the early Christian, world argues that formal meals in the Mediterranean culture of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the period encompassing the origin and development of Christianity, took on homogenous form. Although there were minor differences in the meal customs as practised in the regions and social groups, the evidence suggests that meals took similar meanings and interpretations across a broad range of ancient worlds.10 Mary Douglas, an expert in the study of meals and culture, states that food encodes a message about the pattern of social relations being expressed. For example, one of the ceremonial meals that has messages coded in it is called matebeto.11 Douglas further argues that the messages are also about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries, and transactions across boundaries.12 In the case of the Matebeto ritual, only the groom is entitled to receive the coded message in the chicken, and the only people entrusted to communicate the message to the groom are the male elders escorting him. Therefore, even though such communal meals are meant for all the family members, they involve hierarchical and coded messages, just as the meal at the Lord’s Table involves the hiddenness of the message of the cross and his resurrection in the bread and wine. Another observance related to the communal meal within the African context is sharing. My experience of growing up in my ethnic group was learning to share one’s belongings communally. As a farmer, our father adopted the concept of gleaning. During harvest time, he instructed the workers to leave some of the produce in the fields for the sojourners and for those who did not have a good harvest to glean. As these people came to glean in the fields, our father found satisfaction in the fact that everyone in the village had food to eat. Russell, who sees hospitality as an expression of unity without uniformity, since unity in Christ has its own purpose, supports this kind of response to otherness, the sharing of God’s hospitality with a stranger, the one who is “other” (1993:173). Russell’s statement acts as a challenge to the church’s way of celebrating the Lord’s Table, which in most cases calls for uniformity at the expense of the “other.” While the church sees the “other” as an outsider who does not deserve space at the Table, Russell’s concept of otherness is inclusive, advocating for unity in diversity that Christ calls all the believers to celebrate. The other who is a woman and her menstruating body; people with disabilities; polygamous Christians or people of different sexual orientations: all need a safe space at the Lord’s Table. Another point that reflected the power of communal life was the act of eating together. Coming from an extended African family, we learned early on to eat at a communal meal from the round table, which was made of a
“Do This in Remembrance of Me” 87 mat with food placed at the center. This took place in spite of the gender dimensions that separated men and women during these meal times. This organized spirit of sharing a family meal was so real, especially to us children, who had to look to grandmother as the head of this round table (just like Jesus was during the last supper) as she provided guidance on how to behave during these meals. Uzukwu contends that to share a meal is to share a relationship in assembly that breaks down discrimination on the level of the constitution of membership, and consequently on the level of interaction. The author also sees meals as social boundary-makers.13 Thus this kind of approach to communal life calls for a need to analyze the liberative nature of the Lord’s Table, especially for women using a feminist lens. A Feminist Critique of the Contestation at the Lord’s Table When dealing with the concept of space, we always think of the geographical sphere. In this study, “safe space” is used metaphorically to define the contestation that is reflected in the celebration of the Lord’s Table within most African churches. Senn observes that the Christian Eucharist is phenomenologically considered both as sacred and as a sacrificial meal, with the understanding that the communicants enter into fellowship with the one who is both priest and victim.14 A feminist approach to this phenomenon calls for a theology of inclusivity, where all believers see themselves as both priests and victims, as opposed to a priestly theology that makes use of hierarchical attitudes. A critical analysis of discourses in the Eucharist celebration will show that the Lord’s Table has been a contested space, especially for women and other key populations. Rakoczy has shown that debates as to whether women historically presided at the Eucharist table in the earliest years of the church have been used as one argument against the ordination of women. Scholars who advocate for this theory argue that Jesus ordained the 12 (all men) at the last supper; thus no woman is allowed to offer liturgical worship.15 Symbolically, most pictures in churches that depict Jesus’s last supper do not seem to reflect the presence of women. Rakoczy concludes that this face has also influenced the denial of ordination to women in some Christian circles, a claim that advocates of women’s ordination have rejected.16 Despite the fact that the last supper does not seem to have space for women, feminist scholars have used both scripture and archaeological evidence to question this argument. Rakoczy raises two important issues: first, who was present at the last supper? She argues that all four gospels state that the disciples were gathered with Jesus, referencing a general term, disciples, for those who followed Jesus, including women.17 The 12 are only mentioned in the passages in which the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is mentioned (Mk 14: 10, 17, 20) (2004:205). Tetlow further adds that John’s
88 Lilian Cheelo Siwila gospel describes those present as “Jesus’s own,” a term which denoted the disciples, and included at least one woman, Mary of Magdala.18 Thus it is likely, since we do not have a guest list, that some women disciples were with Jesus during this last meal.19 If this could be true, then why should the women, who were also part of the last supper at the same table with Jesus, be excluded from this symbolic table representing the presence of the same Master who said, “Do this in memory of me?” I am also personally motivated to write this chapter due to the manner in which disability is treated in some churches in Africa. Apart from the fact that most of the churches have not readjusted the architectural space in their altars, most of these congregations have also feminized disability, and still struggle to include the disabled in what the church calls a safe space. In one of the evening services conducted at the seminary where I worked, I was privileged to listen to the story of an ordained woman minister who had a physical disability. This minister related the story of how she struggled to be accepted in the ministry due to her physical disability. Even after being finally ordained, she was not allowed to conduct communion services.20 This kind of treatment by the church leaves one wondering about how the church defines this liturgical space. As women live with internalized oppression, they almost get conditioned to the patriarchal contestation which views the Lord’s Table as a male space, arguing that “after all, Jesus only had male disciples during the last supper.” This hypothesis has, in many Christian circles, been turned into a norm. Senn comments that efforts to make liturgy more inclusive of women and men included the elimination of gender-specific references as regards human community and liturgical assembly. This practice is also reflected in the use of language and in the metaphors for God used in hymns and prayers.21 One of the ways in which the use of language has been addressed in my church is to employ inclusive language in the book of liturgical prayers. Senn, however, argues that even gender-inclusive language is inadequate to women’s concerns, because it does not help to overcome notions of the maleness of God embedded in our cultural assumptions and images of God,22 which are also reflected during the liturgical worship. Therefore, to exclude women from the Lord’s Table on these theological grounds may not be the best way to respond to a cultural meal that was traditionally taken as a formal evening meal, and that was later transformed into a Eucharist as part of the church’s liturgy. Smith proposes that a banquet was an evening meal to which the ancients gave the most symbolic significance.23 Smith further contends that “if we take full account of the richness of the earliest Christian traditional meal, we can find in its models of renewal of Christian theology and liturgy today . . . the primary change from symposium to Eucharist is the evolution of the ritual from the dining table to the altar and from the social world of the banquet to that of the church order.”24
“Do This in Remembrance of Me” 89 The second question raised by Rakoczy is: What happened at this meal? She further argues that the gospels, which are supposed to be the proponents of what happened at the last supper, do not seem to clearly bring out the events that took place.25 The question as to whether the last supper was an all-inclusive one, that is, including women, and whether the events that took place were to be observed later in our liturgical spaces, requires theological engagement, because even the celebrations that we embody today need to be theologically examined. To conclude the argument above, it is imperative to state that a feminist critique of the Eucharist celebration also calls for an analysis of the historical theological content of the liturgy of the church. The Influence of Culture on Women’s Alienation from the Lord’s Table Traditionally, most Protestant churches have had patriarchal biases in their liturgical forms of worship, forms that are also informed by the cultural contexts from which these churches emerged. Senn, discussing the influence of culture on liturgy, states that there is no doubt that liturgy has been influenced by the culture of the people who have performed it in every stage of its development. There are no aspects of Christian liturgy that are not derived from the various cultures through which it has been passed on in its historical evolution. For example Jewish culture . . . each of these cultural expressions has been transformed by use of an ecclesiastical culture.26 (1997: 676). Following Senn’s argument, this paper also needs to be cautious of the role of culture in influencing the contestation at the Lord’s Table. As observed above, most African cultures have also perpetuated the contestation at the Lord’s Table by bringing the same cultural barriers that they use in their societies to measure women’s worthiness to partake at the Lord’s Table. For example, widows in most African churches are not allowed to partake of communion until the mourning period is over, which in most cases lasts close to a year or two. Pregnant women, unmarried or menstruating women, and many other groups seen as “other” by the church, are also denied communion on both ecclesial and cultural grounds. Kanyoro argues that African women are custodians of culture, which both binds them and denies them their full humanity. They are not only culturally excluded from some of the rituals performed in their communities, but are from those of the church as well. Coupled with both African religio-culture and Judeo-Christian traditions, women have been and are still being excluded from liturgical celebrations based upon the fact of menstruation.27 Speaking from a feminist
90 Lilian Cheelo Siwila ecclesiology, Watson further argues that women are not excluded from church activities because of what they have done but who they are.28 Historically, women’s biological makeup has influenced the church’s perception of women’s participation in church activities. Celebrating the Eucharist Without the “Body” According to Schalkwyk, the history of Western dualism led to the oppression of the male and female body and to the exclusion and devaluation of all that is fleshly, bodily and material. This fleshly and material domain of life in the early church fathers’ thinking included the entirety of female existence.29 As Moltmann-Wendel notes, the doctrine of original sin has affected women through the ages, and much of the evil and suffering as far as their bodies were concerned were caused by the church’s dogma that told women that their bodies and sexuality were to be despised.30 As a result, Schalkwyk confirms that the doctrine of original sin created a situation where women internalized images of themselves as evil and debased, due to the church’s and society’s indoctrination of this negative message.31 One of the most contentious issues that has continuously been used against women in the African church is that of menstruation. Just like in Jewish culture, most African communities have taboos associated with menstrual blood. Although most churches are slowly beginning to address this issue, my aim is not to reduplicate the already existing conversation of a number of scholars, but is, rather, to address the matter from a point of inclusivity and partnership for all humanity at the Lord’s Table. In my discussions of this inclusivity and partnership, I use case studies of incidences that have been occurring in in my context. The incident which left me wondering whether the Lord’s Table will ever be a safe space for women happened in one of the local churches during a communion service. As the time came to receive the sacrament, a handful of women, including some of the ordained woman ministers, remained in their seats, while everyone else went forward to receive the bread and wine. After the service, I asked one of the women about what had happened, and she explained to me that the women who remained in their seats could not go forward to the altar and participate at the Lord’s Table because they were menstruating. In my final analysis of this discussion, I want to bring in the story of the woman with a flow of blood in Mark 5:24–34. Schalkwyk narrates: The story of the woman with a menstrual blood is both an analogy and a reference to the story of the last supper; here Jesus’s life giving body heals the broken body of an ostracised woman. In the story of the last supper
“Do This in Remembrance of Me” 91 Jesus prepares the disciples for the breaking of his body; an act through which his body will bring about healing and liberation for broken bodies. Here Jesus is concerned about the restoration of shalom in the wholeness and healing of the whole creation.220 Therefore, unless we see the role that Jesus plays in both stories from a liberative perspective, we will always miss the mark. If Jesus, who calls all humanity to the table, is the same Jesus who heals the woman with the flow of blood, how can we differentiate today the blood that flows from these women who are excluded from the Lord’s Table and that of the woman in Mt 5:24–34? How can we help these marginalized groups to reach out and touch the cloak of Jesus? The crowd that surrounded Jesus then can still be seen at the Lord’s Table excluding those deemed as “others.” The challenge to the church today is that while we fail to name these women, labelling them with reference to their status (woman with . . . ), Jesus comes to give them identities by calling them daughters, children, just as he did to the woman in Mark 5: 24–34. In view of all this, we need to radically transform and heal the damaging, misogynist aspects of the Christian tradition that deal with the body. 220 Toward a Theology of Partnership Russell argues that the theme of hospitality is basic to the life of any church, yet it is often ignored when that hospitality requires including “outsiders” . . . For instance, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman tells us a lot about animosity between Jews and Samaritans and their unwillingness to worship together.32 What is very interesting in this scenario is the way Jesus breaks the patriarchal religio-cultural barriers when he speaks to the woman and welcomes her into the contested space. Russell, talking about partnership, states that the church of Jesus Christ gathers around the table, around which there are no seats, so as not to limit the number of people present.33 Therefore, in an effort to work toward partnership at the Eucharist, the church needs to be cautious of the boundaries created by institutionalized sexism that perpetuate the oppression of others. Conclusion Feminist theology as part of liberation theology begins and ends with the experiences of the oppressed. Therefore, its aim is to deconstruct these ideologies that perpetuate oppression and dehumanize others. Many factors have led to women being denied participation at the Lord’s Table. Despite the fact that much has been written on the church’s perception of women’s bodies and their relatedness to sin, we need to revisit some of the contestations related to the participation at the Lord’s Table. The
92 Lilian Cheelo Siwila questions that should continuously be asked are: following the liturgical power structures at play in the debates around the Eucharist, whose table and whose space is it for? How should the church respond to the theology of purity that is associated with women’s bodies and the Lord’s Table? These questions demonstrate the need for a theology of ordination and purity that will address the contested liturgical space. Notes 1. D. E. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist the Banquet in the Early Christian World (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2003), 15. 2. O. E. Uzukwu, Worship as Body Language Introduction to Christian Worship: An African Orientation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 191. 3. F. C. Senn, Christian Liturgy Catholic and Evangelical (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 684. 4. Uzukwu, Worship as Body Language, 197. 5. L. M. Russell, Church in the Round Feminism Interpretation of the Church (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1993), 17. 6. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist the Banquet in the Early Christian World, 11. 7. Russell, Church in the Round Feminism Interpretation of the Church, 35. 8. Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, “Engendered Communal Theology: Africa Women’s Contribution to Theology in the 21st Century,” in Talitha cum! Theologies of African Women, ed. N. J. Njoroge and Musa W. Dube (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2001), 169. 9. I use this group of people, who also are my ethnic group, to show how our lived experiences can influence our interpretation of the world around us. 10. Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, 2. 11. This is one of the rituals performed during the wedding preparations. The ritual is common among the people from the Northern and Luapula provinces of Zambia. During the period of marriage preparations, the family of the girl will prepare a variety of traditional foods from their ethnic group and present them to the family of the boy. One of the special dishes among the meals prepared is a chicken, which is cooked whole with the head and feet fitted inside. This chicken, a special gift to the groom, is presented with songs and symbolic actions, and when presented to him, the elders accompanying him will explain the coded message in the meal. The women involved in the preparation of Matebeto sing special songs at the presentation of these meals. The songs are all focused on teaching the couple how to take care of their marriage. 12. Uzukwu, Worship as Body Language, 61. 13. Ibid., 64. 14. Senn, Christian Liturgy, 17. 15. S. Rakoczy, In Her Name: Women Doing Theology (Pietermaritzburg: Cluster, 2004), 205. 16. Ibid.