Liturgies from Below - UK Edition. Carvalhaes, Claudio
to honor it and keep the prayers “real.” But we have worked to make the prayers clear enough for you to use in your own setting.
Prayer embraces the language of pain. The group was very diverse, and we expressed our prayers very differently. Some of the prayers written by participants were especially challenging. When these difficult prayers were first spoken, the group talked about how painful it was for some to accept them. Yet, even when participants disagreed with the theology and language that was used, everyone understood the pain that was present. We all had been together in very difficult places, and love for the people kept us alive and together! We realized that what united us was not doctrine, beliefs, or faith orientations but a spirit of compassion and loving-kindness.
What we realized is that when we pray together, we tap into a force that is within, around, and beyond us. Through that power, we learn to adapt and create unthought possibilities. The world as it exists is never the final answer. With God, the world is always open to becoming something else, always looping and circling into new ways of flourishing. Praying with one another teaches us that we are never done. Through prayers God changes us as we change the world, and God becomes more significant than we first thought. With God we move, we cry, we survive, we become, we organize, we struggle. Prayers remind us that, through God, we understand that to become human is far more than the indoctrination of any human dominion. Instead, we learn that we are always collective, in our own communities as well as our communities with other species and the earth. Our prayers are liturgies where God transforms the world through us.
Doing This Work Where You Are
We hope with this book to offer a new methodology for praying with those who suffer. We encourage you to adapt it to your own context. Find ways to use these prayers in your worship services and other gatherings, in your small group meetings and classes, in your ministry team meetings, and as part of the work you do in your community. And use them in your own personal devotional times, where you can quietly absorb and feel and express the pain and joy of these prayers, in communion with the people who created them.
Below is a list of considerations we made for the gatherings during this project. Adjust them for your own community. Perhaps you feel inadequate or anxious (as I did and still do), but I encourage you to do it anyway. What we have presented here is not complete—it is an opening and an invitation for you to expand this work!
1)Teach your church to imagine. Engage with art and artists, go to plays, watch movies, try exercises in imagining new forms of life. What are the symbols that keep your community alive? Songs, poetry, gestures? Imagine a life together with those we never thought we could/would/should live. What are the hardships, the difficulties in imaging that?
2)Teach your church how to pray with the poor. Use biblical and theological resources that can help you learn about God’s preferential option for the poor. Engage your community to go out and do mission by praying with people. This work does not prioritize giving money to other organizations, and it is not intended to create an environment for others to come to church but rather to have people moving outside of the church building and into the places where people who are suffering live.
3)Teach your community to think in border terms, within a plurality of ideas, views, and ways of living. Keep checking on the places and forms of belonging, mutual otherness, differences, and possibilities of life together in communities, groups of peoples, species, animals, and nature.1
4)Examine your community to see where people are hurting economically. From this economic sense, you will see why a few people have so much and so many have so little. Become aware of the ways we establish the law of our living together, the eco-nomos. Witness the many forms of violence and hurt that are present. Attend to who/what you have not seen before.
5)Choose one community or group of people with whom you want to connect. Make contact, listen to them, identify their needs, and ask if you can be a part of their lives. However, only say that if you mean it, if you are open to your own transformation.
6)Before you go, learn why they are there. If you are engaging with people who are experiencing homelessness, learn the history of public policies in your city/state that has contributed to this situation. Is there a lack of medical assistance? Possibilities of jobs? Education opportunities? What is the agency of the people? Their forms of survival?
Check if there are other organizations working with them, and add your presence. See what they are doing for themselves and ask how to support them. Evaluate strategies of action: interview people, spend time with them, and learn what they eat, what they celebrate, and how they struggle. A pastor friend once told me about a church who wanted to welcome people in experiencing homelessness. When coffee hour came, the children ate all of the donuts immediately. The church was outraged by their “lack of manners,” not understanding their hunger and fear of deprivation. The children were devastated by the church’s judgment. Good intentions are never enough. We must change ourselves. We must become flexible enough to understand through other people’s experiences.
7)While there, learn how people think, feel, imagine, and resist. Try to think from their perspective and learn their traditions and resources of wisdom, immersing yourselves in their worldviews.
8)Bring people of other knowledges to work with you. Artists, lawyers, farmers, teachers, and others help imagine new forms of life and create resistance within the community.
9)In John 10:10 Jesus said that “The thief enters only to steal, kill, and destroy.” Search for what has been stolen or destroyed in your community over the years, and learn about the policies of death that are prevalent in your communities. Do the research, find the policies, name the injustices, and go after them to make change. We must stop the theft, the destruction, and the killing. Jesus calls us to abundant life—which must include our neighbors!
10) Imagine strategies for communities to get to know each other. Listening deeply is paramount. What is at stake here? Are there class divisions? Racism? Sexism? Differences of beliefs? How can we learn together to engage injustice? We do not seek to save anybody, we are simply reaching out to learn about life, to be with and to be transformed.
11) Every time you meet with those “outside the gate,” start praying and naming the real, concrete situations of those you are gathered with. May your prayer be an opportunity for conversion and transformation. Continue to pray and meet with the community. Invite them in, create opportunities for more gatherings, and find ways to promote inclusion and the revamping of the entire community.
12) Imagine ways for common prayers to go beyond the worship space. See how prayers can change the way the church creates the budget. How can this new community be central to the ways the church worships and exists in the world? What needs to be changed? Use of the space? Mission provision? Offerings? What are the church’s priorities now? How can you make sure that each person who is experiencing homelessness can have a house to live in?
13) Imagine new rituals, prayers, and spiritual practices. Imagine fasting with those going hungry until we all can eat. Create rituals of mourning with people and species and the earth who are dying. ¡Presente! Make rituals of cleansing bodies and spaces for new moments and meanings, rituals where a plethora of voices is present, rituals of healing amidst the diseases created by the Empire, and rituals of unloading bad practices, ideologies, and destructive theologies.
14) Continue to write your own book of prayers with the prayers of your own tradition. What prayers can be prayed? With whom? In sum, who do your prayers say is your God?
15) Evaluate what is missing in this project, path, or imagination. What haven’t you prayed yet? Who still needs a blessing, an anointing, or a presence? What needs to be changed, rethought, or critically accessed?