A Too-Common Legacy of Colonialism
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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We know something about the early days of settlement around Melbourne because of the extant writing of the second-in-command on Calcutta, James Tuckey. This includes his notes on encounter with and opinions about the naked (barring face-paint), unarmed (at least at first), yet “hostile” and “savage” local people. They were, Tuckey wrote, not just “stupidly devoid of curiosity” but lacking in a sense of right and wrong and altogether “disagreeable neighbours.” Some, he added, were so “abominably beastly, that it required the strongest stomach to look upon them without nausea.”
Worse still, Tuckey’s writing also records killings. His diary provides some evidence about the first wave of deaths in what within decades decimated the local population. When First Peoples were not in the firing line, they were felled by diseases brought by the colonizers—Smallpox, for instance. Knopwood’s journals record some of the same deaths by violence—sometimes adjacent to the details of “divine service.” On the morning of October 23, 1803, for example, he records shooting at eight o’clock and liturgy at eleven o’clock. Contemporary research continues to uncover sites of massacre and increasing numbers of human lives lost.
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There is not much evidence that contemporary churches have many means for (nor much interest in?) dealing liturgically with this legacy. The Anglican A Prayer Book for Australia (APBA) imports a confession that echoes the BCP’s heavy lines about “intolerable burdens” and was written by Janet Morley for indigenous reconciliation in Canada. APBA also has a paragraph or two about and one prayer in the voice of Aboriginal people. The most notable example, addressed to the “God of holy dreaming, Great Creator Spirit,” reads in part:
You spoke and the gum tree grew.
In the vast desert and dense forest,
and in cities at the water’s edge,
creation sings your praise…
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA)’s Uniting in Worship 2 (UiW2) has eucharistic prayers raising praise for the “wide, red land,” for God’s molding of Uluru (the staggering gigantic rock in the desert in the middle of the country), for the nation’s vast rivers, and for creatutres like the echidna and dancing brolga. UiW2 also commends an Acknowledgement of First Peoples, such as:
We acknowledge the N people,
the first inhabitants of this place.
We honour them for their custodianship of the land,
on which we gather today.
However, such Acknowledgements fall among ancillary resources for the “Service of the Lord’s Day,” and like the Anglican book, but for different reasons, the book is not widely used. The Uniting Church has, however, revised the Preamble to its Constitution, recognizing that when people from the uniting traditions arrived downunder they did so “as part of the process of colonisation [and] entered a land that had been created and sustained by the Triune God they knew in Jesus Christ” (Revised Preamble ¶1). . .
. . . Such theological moves have not gone uncontested within the UCA itself, with some fearing that a new form of paternalism (to repeat a phrase in the Revised Preamble) is at play. And in terms of how it might be worked out liturgically, there are few clues.
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