Liturgy in the Age of Migration

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Preaching Migrations,” guest-edited by Jerusha Matsen Neal, looks at movement of people; trajectories of social, economic, and cultural change; the impact of these changes on preaching. What follows is an excerpt from an article by Seforosa Carroll who is, among others things, the programme executive for Mission from the Margins/Ecumenical Indigenous Peoples Network, World Council of Churches, Geneva. She writes about the impact of rising seas on Pacific island nations and the hard choices facing the people. –– Melinda Quivik

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Recent years have brought a surge of interest in migration as an interpretive lens for liturgical life, practice, and the study of liturgy. The Liturgy in Migration conference organized by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in 2011. . . sought to explore how the category or optic of migration lends itself to rethinking liturgical developments in history. The aim of the conference was to “examine a select number of liturgical migrations past and present, across a variety of boundaries, among them geographic, ethnic, ecclesial and chronological” through the lens of migration and to ascertain what could be revealed and gleaned as a consequence.

. . . HyeRan Kim-Craig and Stephen Burns assert that the “realities of migration need to be understood, acknowledged, and have an impact on numerous commonplace notions in liturgical studies. This is an imperative because the church not only expresses itself in its liturgical life but is in fact formed by it.” Liturgical practices, traditions, and texts migrate and are shaped by migration, but more poignantly, as Kim-Craig and Burns emphasize, “it may be that it is not so much that the liturgy migrates but that the liturgy makes known a God who is present in every culture and location. . . .”

Throughout its historical development, the liturgy responds to the physical and spiritual needs of the People-of-God on the move. [Kristine Suna-Koro] concludes that the liturgy appropriate for the “Age of Migration” must be a liturgy without borders because the borderless God who is worshiped can only be found in migration. Liturgy, Suna-Koro maintains, is “the migration of God to us and our migration (in)to God.” Drawing on Virgil Michel’s O.S.B. insistence that there must be an integral and transformative link between liturgy and social justice, Suna-Koro argues for “reimagining liturgy through the optics of migration as precisely an incessant migration from the rites of worship to righteous action in the world and back again in a mutually co-constitutive way.”

. . . In the Pacific context, a liturgy that erases the divide between sacred and everyday life is required to counter the notion that Sunday is the only holy day of the week!

Suna-Koro’s notion of a borderless liturgy alongside Peter Phan’s theology of Deus Migrator is helpful in re-envisioning liturgy in the Pacific context. . . Phan shows that from the history of Abraham to the people of God’s migration in Egypt, wandering in the desert, exile, returning from exile, and the rebuilding of the nation, God accompanied them as an exile and returning exile in God’s glory/presence. . . .

In this here and now the Pacific church is called upon to make a journey. This journey is not just simply a physical moving from one place to another. This journey is spiritual, pastoral, and theological, requiring leaders who will rise to the challenge of seeking an eschatological vision of a new heaven and new earth by drawing from both our deepest Christian convictions and our Pacific wisdom to lead, sustain, and nourish us in this journey.

All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no. 2 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Seforosa Carroll, “Displacing Liturgy: A Pacific Exploration,” Liturgy 36, no. 2 (2021): 26-35, DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2021.1895642.