Honoring Earth in Liturgical Language
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Future Renewals: Looking Toward the Next Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice,” was co-edited by Andrew Wymer, vice-president of the Liturgical Conference board and professor of worship at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and me.
We solicited essays from a range of members of the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) looking at what has changed in liturgical scholarship and liturgical practice in the years since NAAL was founded in response to the Second Vatican Council.
Here is an excerpt from an essay by Stephen Burns on the legacy of colonialism in Australia and the reluctance of the church to address the injustices liturgically. “Narrm” is the First Peoples’ name for Australia. –– Melinda Quivik
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Including traditional ceremonies in liturgical celebration that are otherwise impervious to native wisdoms runs the risk of them being mere blips. Lessons from strangeness (at least to many western ears) might be anticipated by tuning in to Wali Fejo, a Larrika man who describes the land as “mother, provider, keeper” to be looked after as a mother, just as in its turn the land looks after the people of the land. While on the one hand, Fejo writes of land as maternal, on the other hand, he impresses that land is no other at all, because it is “within.” And his native perspective holds that “every rock is an extension of Uluru,” linked physically and spiritually to it.
Fejo identifies divine presence in the land itself: God “is in the Earth,” such that “God is as close as the ground on which we walk.” Fejo considers Genesis’s myth of the flood, stressing that when Earth flooded, God was “not at a distance on some cloud watching,” but rather was under the waters, so that when the ark landed on the rock, it landed on God. Moreover, in the covenant signaled by a rainbow, “God makes the same personal promises to kangaroos and crocodiles, to turtles and beetles, as to human beings”; the rainbow itself is a “revelation of the Rainbow Spirit,” Kurraj, emerging from the Earth.
. . . I wonder if a start might be made by searching for some resonance in Gordon Lathrop’s engagement with nature writer Barry Lopez who in his turn wrote from another place (the Arctic) about bowing to “the landscape under arctic light,” to birds in their nests, to whales and seals, to ice and water, to the “pale sulphur sky,” and more. . .
I suggest that the likes of both psalms of mercy and nationalistic ditties need to find their place in future liturgical theology in/from Australia. “Dark deeds in a sunny land” need to be exposed. Such realities need to be carried into prayer. The questions that present themselves have to do with what justice requires of land on which stand places of Christian assembly—the churches’ buildings—and what part should be paid by reparation and “compensation.”
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To make the point to which these reflections lead: I don’t suppose that there can be much “future renewal” of liturgy in Australia until the truth of the past finds better acknowledgement in common prayer and until the ways that liturgical traditions, forms, and resources arrived here find more focus in liturgical study. Moreover, the problem is not simply one for Australians (whomever they may be: “Aborigine, Islander, latecomer,” as UiW2’s Australian Benedicite puts it), but is—and should be—a problem in colonizing contexts, too. Everywhere we await better attention from liturgists to the question R.S. Sugirtharajah asks of theologians in the west about “European expansionism and the rise of their own discipline.”
The full essay with full references is available now in the digital and print editions of Liturgy. All of the essays in Liturgy 38, no. 1 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.
Stephen Burns is a professor of liturgical and practical theology at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. Among his publications are From the Shores of Silence: Conversations in Feminist Practical Theology (ed. with Ashley Cocksworth and Rachel Starr; London: SCM Press, 2022); Feminist Theology: Interstices and Fractures (ed. with Rebekah Pryor; Lanham: Lexington Books, 2023), and Conversations About Divine Mystery: Engagements with the Work of Gail Ramshaw (ed. with HyeRan Kim-Cragg; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023).
Stephen Burns, “A Postcard from Narrm,” Liturgy 38, no. 1 (2023): 11–17.