Liturgies from Below - UK Edition. Carvalhaes, Claudio
book is a collection of prayers, songs, rituals, rites of healing, Eucharistic and baptismal prayers, meditations, poetry, and art from four continents: Asia-Pacific Islands, Africa, Americas, and Europe. It is the result of a project called Re-Imagining Worship as Acts of Defiance and Alternatives in the Context of Empire, organized by the Council for World Mission (CWM) during the years 2018–2019.
The project gathered about one hundred people to serve as participants. They are scholars, pastors, artists, activists, and students from radically different ethnicities, races, sexualities, churches, and theological backgrounds. The participants traveled to four different cities in four different countries (Manila, Philippines; Johannesburg, South Africa; Kingston, Jamaica; and Scicli, Italy). At each location, they spent a week together in different local neighborhoods and communities, where they lived alongside people, breathing in the circumstances of extreme poverty, oppression, violence, and pain. These communities are coping every day with issues of state-violence, drugs, land grabbing, immigration, war, attacks on women, militarization, climate change, ecological disasters, unjust wages, unsafe working conditions, inhumane living conditions, abandonment, and more. These are people who are living at the ends of the world.
The participants spent time with the people who live in these places, and some worshipped and prayed with them in their own worship contexts. The people in each location accepted us and allowed us to be with them. They shared their lives, stories, food, wisdom, households, joy, struggles, dreams, demands for justice, and pain. After listening to them, we gathered together as a group and prayed together. In this praying together, we created new prayers and liturgies with and for the people in each place. The words you will encounter in this collection include words from the participants and the people living in the locations we visited.
After we lived with the people, we soon realized that we were actually learning how to pray. When we were praying, we were not only praying with those affected by violence and poverty but we were also praying for ourselves. By praying with those living in inhumane conditions, we were challenged to change. Together, with contradictions, heavy and full hearts, bringing with us their struggles and the ones from our own communities, we created these prayers for our own churches, not for the poor, with the hopes that we might learn how to pray for ourselves and go into deep change. In a circular movement, we were also praying with those at the ends of the world.
We wrestle with the tension between witness and solidarity on the one hand and poverty tourism on the other. In these prayers, we profess and confess both. We were there to learn and change, undoing a mission model that goes to “provide” something. We hope this work becomes a gesture toward a necessarily long and deeper stay with those who are suffering. From there we will learn what needs to change in us and in our ways of being in the world, and how to make the change. From the ends of the world, we came out praying, singing, creating art, and crying out loud for the mercy and power of God. The experiences reflected in this resource aim to give churches and Christians a new methodology and a new vocabulary to pray, so that we might reorient ourselves in the world. Figuratively and concretely, this is a wave of liturgies coming from the bottom up.
The Locations
Manila, Philippines
In Manila we experienced how the world will become in the future. After many years of colonialism, Philippines is a fertile ground for fascism. The country is controlled by a few rich people, and neoliberalism is the preferred weapon of the state. A fascist government led by Rodrigo Duterte is in place, using martial law and extrajudicial killings as necropolitics, expelling indigenous people from their own lands and selling the country’s natural resources to agribusiness. The government is in the hands of China’s economy and US militarization, and it doesn’t know how to address poverty. The top twenty richest men and women in the Philippines have more money than the entire national budget of the country.1 There are no workers’ rights, and most jobs offer low wages.
In Manila we visited four communities:
Indigenous people’s communities in the province of Rizal. The people we were with here are victims of militarization, forced evacuations, demolitions, and extrajudicial killings. They are continuously harassed by land grabbers, mining companies, and government military forces.
Workers’ organizations in the province of Bulacan and Southern Tagalog areas. The workers are victims of unfair labor practices, and two workers’ organizations located in different communities are on hunger strikes at the time of writing this book.
Urban poor communities, where people are victims of demolition because of development aggressions.
Peasant communities in Batangas or Kalinga areas, who are victims of land conversions, militarization, demolitions, and extrajudicial killings.
Johannesburg, South Africa
In Johannesburg, we experienced the wonderful development of South Africa in the midst of its still deeply entangled history of racism and colonialism. The brutal history of apartheid has racist historical consequences that continue to plague the country. Trapped in a deep wound opened by white settlers, South Africa is still wrestling to find ways out of this complex situation. Here, we questioned how we could help when the situation was so difficult and seemed to require years of knowledge. In spite of these challenges, we tried to learn both from our insurmountable limitations and our struggle to write something about experiences and events that seem indescribable. Holding on to these dilemmas, we gathered to make a composition of African spaces and situations and to pray from that complex web of issues, histories, pain, violence, and struggles.
In Johannesburg we visited four communities:
Marikana, where there is exploitation of the workers that resembles modern day slavery, as capitalist corporations profit at the expense of human dignity by taking away the communities’ resources.
Soweto, which is a township of Johannesburg located along the mining belt to the south of the city. Soweto is synonymous with the South African struggle, and is the site of the 1976 Soweto uprising. It is also considered the home of the liberationist leaders. Here, Moroka has become Johannesburg’s worst slum area, where residents have erected their shanties on plots measuring six-by-six meters with only communal bucket-system toilets and very few water taps.
Alexandra, a township in the Gauteng province of South Africa. A poor urban area in the country, Alexandra made news during xenophobic attacks in 2019.
Johannesburg CBD (Central Business District), where we were able to spend time with economic and political refugees. In Johannesburg we interacted with people who experienced the brutal effects of wars, economic looting, and political instability. We also engaged with the realities of displaced communities (local and international), mostly made up of undocumented local residents and refugees.
Kingston, Jamaica
The third leg of this global project took place in Kingston, Jamaica. In keeping with the model structures of the workshops held in Manila and Johannesburg, this workshop also had a variety of participants from American countries who formed an expansive ecumenical group of scholars, pastors, students, and church leaders who came with the desire to create something new. Several issues were considered: state violence, urban displacement, land grabbing, neoliberal policies, corruption, climate change, poverty, hunger, violence, and so forth.
In Jamaica, we visited the following communities:
Tivoli Gardens, where seventy-three people were shot in a massacre by the state in 2010. Local residents claim that it was more likely one hundred or possibly even two hundred people who were killed. All these deaths were forgotten by the state. We heard the searing testimonies of people who survived the shootings, and we visited communities abandoned by the government.
August Town and Trench Town, communities