Liturgies from Below - UK Edition. Carvalhaes, Claudio
What It Means and Why It’s Important
Faced with pain that rips apart, we cry out in one voice,
intercede with us,
oh solidarity Lord.
Faced with death that wounds,
and marks with pain,
give us the strength of an embrace
and the peace that your love gives us.
Faced with injustice that kills
and cries out for conversion,
move us to transform the world
and let all death become a song.
In the face of desolation and crying,
faced with impotence and frustration,
come to our side,
sustain us with your life, Lord.
You are the God of the poor, the One who sows hope,
you are the God of solidarity, the One who gives love.
You are God with us, the Eternal, the Great I am.
God of the embrace, God of song, God who caresses,
God who strengthens, God who surrenders, God of action.
O Lord of Solidarity: Your kingdom come to the mourner,
lean your ear to the cry,
your sons and daughters are coming
to show your great love. 1
Introduction
A diverse group of about one hundred pastors, theologians, students, artists, and activists from various Christians traditions, churches, and walks of life from about fifty countries gathered together during 2018–2019 in four different countries on four continents, blessed and supported by the Council for World Mission.2 They gathered for a common purpose: learning to pray with local communities in order to create liturgical resources for Christian communities around the world. This project is rooted in God’s demand for us to live a life of compassion, listening to those who are suffering and learning how to pray with them. We hope that, in the desire of God and the strength of our faith, we will respond to the challenges of our world today.
Challenges in Our World, Challenges for Our Praying
Many people are feeling, in one way or another, that the world is moving toward a difficult place, that we are moving toward an impending collective death. Inequality soars. The vast majority of people around the earth are getting poorer. As Oxfam says, “The world’s 2,153 billionaires have more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population.”3 We live in a slow-moving catastrophe that doesn’t make headlines. Our era has been designated as anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, or chthulucene.4 Most of us humans, who place ourselves above any other form of life, are extracting more from the earth than it can offer, straining natural resources beyond the earth’s sustainable supply. Our planet is losing its balance. Global warming, melting ice caps, erratic seasons, droughts, overpopulation, deforestation, the ocean’s warming, extinction of species, death, and loss are showing up everywhere. Geopolitical configurations are marked by an expanding movement of migrants and refugees due to climate change and civil wars. Democracies are collapsing, social inequality is widening, nation states are dissolving into dictatorships with fascist leaders, public spaces are collapsing, fear is the political emotion of our time, various forms of destruction and violence are becoming normalized, and the consequences of an unrestrained neoliberal economy are thrusting us toward a place of no return.
What prayers are Christians called to pray during these times? How are we to pray as we are confronted by a world in collapse? While some Christians recite the ancient prayers in the midst of a church burnt by wars, other Christians try to find words to pray that make sense of the absurdity of their conditions. For the ways of praying that we are proposing here, the condition of our world begs for different prayers and different forms of prayer. As we witness the pain of the poor, the collapsing of the world we know, and the natural disasters around the globe, there seems to be no prayer that can respond to it all. However, we must pray anyway, and the way we pray makes total difference! Where should our prayers come from? If our prayers come from places of collapse and the debris of horrors, then what prayers may Christians offer to God and the world? That is what this book is wrestling with.
Learning New Grammar for Our Faith
If we are to pray today from real historical and social locations, from places of deep pain and places that are entirely foreign to us, we Christians must learn a new grammar for our faith. We must learn new prayers and new ways to pray.5 We will have to look at tradition differently. We will have to delve into a variety of prayer resources to engage with the earth and other people more fully. We will have to be willing to understand other people’s lives, ways of being, and religions. Our prayers must learn how to speak of the trauma poor people face every day. Our prayers must teach us to reject altogether any historical construction founded in the unhappiness and oppression of others. Otherwise our prayers are something other than prayer.
As God’s voice in the world is expressed in our prayers, we are called to be radically converted in our ways of praying, to go deeper within ourselves, and to relate more deeply with nature. We are called to be radically converted toward forms of action that heal, recuperate, reconfigure, restore, and restitute our communities, the earth, and our social-natural systems. May our prayers be anathema to any form of government that sustains war, that oppresses people, animals, mountains, oceans, and the whole earth! Instead of being apart, prayers can reconcile us back into a deep sense of communities. And blessed be those who understand that we live in conjunto, together, with the same rights and responsibilities.
Composing a New Tradition to Breathe God’s Breath in the World
It is within our “anathema” and our “blessed be” that we compose tradition. This entails betrayal, a break with that which is harmful, and a rupture in our longtime habits and assumptions. But it also entails moving along with that which is important to our living. This form of living tradition goes beyond texts. The group of pastors, theologians, students, artists, and activists who joined in this project decided to hear firsthand what was meaningful for people living at the margins of the world and to compose a bundle of resources for the rest of the world’s Christians. In this way, this collection of liturgies is more a path, a journey into and from places where people are struggling, rather than a self-enclosed set of prayers.
Only a prayer that has its ear attached to the earth, its eye upon those who suffer, and its hands stretched out in solidarity can help us realize our distance from God and a world in flaming pain. If prayer is about loving God, then prayer is also about building a house for the abandoned, becoming a wall of protection for the vulnerable, and giving our life away for those who are at the brink of disappearance. This building of a common happiness and place of safety for those who are vulnerable is an absolute imperative in our world today. Fascism and white nationalism globally have become a fundamental power effect in our times. The de-negration of the world; of the poor; of brown, yellow, red, and black bodies; as well as of the natural world has become the global political process