Liturgies from Below - UK Edition. Carvalhaes, Claudio
and abandonment by the government. August Town is a local community finding ways to survive. Trench Town was the town of Bob Marley. Our people walked on the streets and through local marketplaces with pastors and local leaders, and we heard the people’s stories. We also heard the heart-wrenching testimonies of workers who are going to be displaced from the market where they have lived for the last fifty-five years because the place was sold to the owner of a nearby shopping mall. We were able to have a worship service organized by Jamaica Theological Seminary with all of the evicted vendors.
Bobo Shanti Rastafari community in Bull Bay, a thriving community of Rastafarians in the woods. Our people were able to participate in worship services and learn about their life and beliefs and proposal for a new society.
Two rural communities in Low River and Manchester, small, rural farm communities who received our people with joy. They taught us how to care for the earth, and they shared with us their struggles to survive against extractivism and big corporations.
Scicli, Italy
The fourth and last meeting of this global project happened in Scicli, on the island of Sicily, Italy. This small town on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea receives refugees and welcomes immigrants from Africa, Syria, Iraq, and other parts of the world. We were hosted by Mediterranean Hope—Refugee and Migrant Programme, a recent migration project conceived by the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy, which is associated with Protestant churches in Europe. With them, we listened to refugees and immigrants. We ate with them, shared smiles, learned about their struggles, the ways they faced death in order to survive, the so-many losses along the way, and the fears and newness of life they experienced in a place where they didn’t know how they would be received. These precious people went through unspeakable forms of trauma. With them, we started to understand the disastrous situations of migrants and refugees.
In all of these places, we heard testimonies about extremely difficult situations of people who are dealing with violence across the globe. In every community, we saw a multiplicity of wisdom, a variety of cosmologies, and the resilience, agency, subversion, and subterfuge in people’s everyday lives. In the ways they keep going, in their resisting ways of smiling either to please or to dismiss, in moving with what they had, in praying and crying, in sharing, in being tricksters, in being bold in many forms of living and survival, in creating new forms of exchange and informal economies, in their struggles and fights, in their uses of religion and being religious, in their genuine hopes and trusts, in many forms of solidarity, in breathing life in the midst of suffocating death, in resisting the shadows casted upon them, and in calling themselves alive when they undergo others’ endless attempts to bring their death.
Being with them gave us a sense that we were praying with those at the ends of the world. But also, with so much suffering, violence, and destruction, we felt that we are all at the end of the world as we know it. Hearing the call of God to live our faith in Jesus fully, we wanted to breathe with them. Because prayer is nothing more than breathing together.
1.Jay B. Hilotin, “Meet the 20 richest Filipinos and how much they’re worth,” Gulf News, January 21, 2020, https://gulfnews.com/photos/news/meet-the-20-richest-filipinos-and-how-much-theyre-worth-1.1579603693637.
PRAYING IN YOUR COMMUNITY
What This Book Can Do, and How to Use It
Prayer as a Circular Movement
Prayer does something; it is a potent ritual action! Prayer effects a deep circular movement within us, moving between our inside and outside without separation. When we pray to God, our prayer first changes us, and then, while the movements of our hearts go toward God, our prayers have ripple effects into the world, affecting the course of our individual and communal life. Prayer affects our personal and political thinking, feelings, actions, and ways of being. In the United States, when there are disasters or mass gun shootings that kill many people, including children, or even in the midst of COVID-19, politicians typically say they are sending “thoughts and prayers” to the victims. But, most of the time, that is empty rhetoric since nothing else happens, nothing really changes. The public quickly learns from the rote repetition of this expression that prayers do not really matter. In these cases, however, we can also see an evident circularity: prayers and thoughts unaccompanied by socio-political and economic actions and changes are not really genuine prayers. When we think of our prayers, we have to remember Jesus saying: “You will know them by their fruit” (Matt 7:16). When we pray, the fruits of gratitude, solidarity, justice, and compassion are seeds that, once planted in us, make the soil of our hearts and communities rich and grow into new gardens of collective harvest and bounty. When we pray together, no one should go hungry or be abandoned. When we pray, genuinely, for families who have lost their children to gun violence, to jail, or poverty, a whole network of life and solidarity should come to fruition and be turned into laws against guns, social disparity, and systems of death and exclusion. If prayer has indeed a live and full circularity within one’s body and spirit, the whole community will breathe this prayer and be connected in love and true solidarity. Prayer can be the starting point for change.
Praying can bring people into re-existence. We are called to pray into reexistence those people who were hidden in a shadow of oblivion, hidden and forgotten in abject and obscure places, whose lives are considered disposable. To pray people into re-existence is to bring them closer to our hearts and neighborhoods, rewriting laws and offering a new way of organizing and living our social life. For those abandoned at the ends of the world, we pray to God to bring them into full existence, and we pray for an end to the necropolitics of Empire that tortures and exterminates the poor.
When we believe that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, demons of death that devour life around the world will be cast away, a light will shine where there was once only shadow. A new life, fully and morally imagined through prayers, can radically change our own hearts and neighborhoods. When we pray with those who were thrown into abandonment, we can draw closer to those who live at the ends of the world, like the people who participated in the project for this book.
We can develop new ways of praying in our own contexts. This book may be used in a variety of ways for that transformative purpose, according to the readers’ context. In whatever way you choose to use this book, we hope it will help you pray with your community for a greater awareness of the forces of Empire all around us and for a new inhabitation of the Holy Spirit, self-transformation, conversion, and solidarity with the poor. May this book help you develop a new prayer language to live out the Christian faith more fully and to become a community of resistance and solidarity, where you are, with those who are suffering. We hope you will expand liturgy, worship, and prayers into transnational solidarity against Empire and on behalf of those who live at the ends of the world. Get to know their wisdom, call them by their names, listen to their stories, shift your gaze away from fear or condescending thought, and begin to hold them close to your heart as precious ones, as those who can actually teach you how to pray.
The language of prayer is the language of real people. We have kept the written texts mostly raw, as they were created. Since we have offered in this introduction information about each city where the workshops took place, we decided not to organize the prayers geographically. We wanted to avoid creating an Olympic contest of oppression. Each prayer shows a reality that is experienced everywhere. The globalization of Empire has created various forms of violence that are repeated globally but that need to be responded to with the particularities of each location and community. Many languages and colloquialisms are used, reflecting the language and environments of particular communities. We have