A Postcolonial Eucharist

What would a postcolonial Eucharist look like? How would it break down the hierarchal setup of traditional Eucharistic services? How would we use the sacred space? What would we use for the hymns? What should be the preaching style?

Today at the St. John’s Chapel at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS), we had the opportunity to try out a Eucharistic liturgy written by Dr. Michael N. Jagessar, the former Moderator of the United Reformed Church in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Jagessar was one of the speakers at the “Challenging the Church: Postcolonial Practice of Ministry” conference held at EDS in November, 2014. In his presentation on postcolonial liturgy, he referenced a liturgy that he has written. After the conference, we had many requests to have a copy of the liturgy and it was posted on the school’s website.

The invitation of the liturgy says, “Welcome to the table with no corners. LOVE calls us—friend or stranger, saint or sinner. God’s table is the meeting place of generosity and abundance.” To honor this, we used a round table as the altar. The Bible and the bread and wine were carried and placed on the round table during the singing of the first hymn. As we sat in a circle surrounding the altar, we were reminded of Letty M. Russell’s vision of the church in the round.

When I tried to find an image of the Last Supper with a round table for the service bulletin, I found out it was not an easy task, for most of the images have a rectangular table. Fortunately I was able to find one painted by the well-known Japanese artist Sadeo Watanabe (1913-1996).

We opened the service with Fred Kaan’s hymn:

            The church is like a round table, a table that is round.

            It has no sides or corners, no first or last, no honours;

            Here people are in oneness and love together bound.

We included a Japanese hymn* with a Japanese student singing the first verse, and all joined for the following verses. Two students from Burma sang a beautiful hymn from their country, “Jesus Is My Friend.” The closing hymn was a Chinese hymn of blessing.

The scriptural readings were read by a Malaysian student in Malay and a student from the Bahamas in Portuguese. The Lord’s Prayer was recited in participants’ mother tongues.

Instead of a sermon from the pulpit, the liturgy called for a “table conversation” following the scriptural readings. The assumption was that all have truth and wisdom to share to benefit the whole Body of God. We divided into groups of two and three to have these table conversations. After the small group discussion, we invited participants to share insights with the whole group.

During the Communion, we passed the bread and wine among the people sitting in a circle. The Communion hymn was one of my favorites: “My God, And Is Thy Table Spread.”

            My God, Thou table is now spread,

            Thy cup with love doth overflow;

Be all your children thither led,

And let them thy sweet mercy know.

Michael Jagessar’s presentation at the EDS conference provided a theological rationale for his liturgy of the round table. He has further developed it as a chapter of the book Postcolonial Practice of Ministry coedited by former EDS professor Stephen Burns and me. Jagessar situates the Eucharist in the cultural discourse of eating, drinking, and table habits, and in such a way connects Eucharist with what we do in our daily lives and in community. He uses the metaphor of Pelau, a Trinidad meal with mixed ingredients that can be cooked in different ethnic styles, and invites us to rethink Eucharist as an open table that welcomes ambiguity, creolization, and the encounter of multiple identities.

 

When examining different Eucharistic theologies, he asks us to ponder what kind of table habits—rules of eating and drinking and conversations—are encouraged. Colonial table habits tend to reinforce the colonial class structure, such that those on the lower rung of society would be excluded or made to feel unwelcome. In contrast, Jagessar points out that Jesus’ table ministry welcomed all kinds of people, pushed social hierarchy and boundaries, and created new spaces in the interest of God’s kingdom. In our postcolonial world in which cultures collide and peoples comingle, the Eucharist should not be a ritual to safeguard doctrinal and cultural purity, but a symbolic act that welcomes hybridity, difference, and liminality.  

Jagessar also finds the metaphor of the third or in-between space helpful in understanding the mystery of the sacrament of Eucharist. In the exchange in the in-between space of the table, he says, the spirit is at work “to produce mutual inconveniencing, transformation, and new creation with regard to identities and belonging.”  

I hope the church will be bold enough to try out different styles of postcolonial Eucharist because the postcolonial church is not a cozy and secure place reinforcing the status quo and what we already know. It is a messy, in-between space such that God’s grace, beyond human understanding, can be made known.**

* The Japanese hymn was "Sekai no tomo to te tsunagi!" (Here, O Lord, Your Servants Gather) and the English version can be found in many hymnals.

** The last four paragraphs are taken and adapted from my “Epilogue” in Postcolonial Practice of Ministry (Lexington Press, 2016).

Church in the Round

St. John's Memorial Chapel

Sermon preached at St. John's Memorial Chapel, December 6, 2012

St. John’s Memorial Chapel at the Episcopal Divinity School was built in the nineteenth century. I asked historian David Sigenthaler what chapel and worship was like when he was a student at the school in the 1950s.

At that time the altar was set against the east wall, the faculty sat up in the chancel, and the students sat in the pews facing each other. Each would have an assigned seat and chapel during that time was compulsory. The design of sacred space mirrored the hierarchical setup of the community. In the 1960s when Christopher Durasingh and Ed Rodman were students, the pews were removed and replaced with chairs.

In 1992 when I joined the school, the altar was brought forward to the crossing and the ambo was placed on the west side near the entrance. The students sat facing each other.

To honor Brett Donham who renovated St. Paul’s at Brookline after the fire in 1976 and our presider Rev. Jeffrey Mello, the rector of St. Paul’s, we have created a worshipping space modeling after St. Paul’s in which the congregation and the choir sit surrounding the altar. Donham talked about the rationale of why he designed the church in such a way:

“The traditional forms of church buildings, with everyone facing in the same direction and with the ‘expert’; the intermediary or interpreter, on a raised stage addressing an audience is the antithesis of gathering in community.”

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Brookline, MA

Today many churches are recovering the early roots of Christianity. Donham continues, “In these places people gather in community to offer praise and thanksgiving, to reflect on scripture, to share stories about Jesus Christ and his impact on their lives, to share a commemorative meal, and through this to come into communion with Christ, and with one another. These are communal activities, with many players, several centers of action and movement, and require the ability to see one another and feel as a gathered body.”



We have shifted the feast days and celebrate today the feast of Macrina, theologian, teacher, and monastic. I would like to invite you to reflect for a moment on the image of the church in the round.

Several things in Macrina’s life lead me to think that she will be open to the church in the round. Her brothers Basil and Gregory of Nyssa were bishops and renowned theologians in Cappadocia in modern day Turkey. Macrina as their elder sister admonished them to lead a life of simplicity and not to depend on their knowledge and rhetorical skills, their wealth, and their high positions in church and society.

In the Life of St. Macrina, Gregory said Macrina persuaded her mother to give up all showy style of living and the services of domestics. She urged her mother to share the life of the maids and to treat all her slave girls and menials as if they were sisters and belonged to the same rank as herself.

During her life, Macrina embodied what Philippians said, “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord” (3:8).  When we think of the church in the round, we imagine a more egalitarian model in which social status and hierarchal structure both in the church and society can be transgressed.

Most Holy Redeemer Church, San Francisco, CA
(Catholic)

 

Although we don’t have any writings from Macrina about the religious community she has formed, her brother Basil has written a Rule of Life, which preserved some of her ideals. The Rule of Life describes a community living together for worship, prayers, mutual help, exercise of virtue, and assisting others. Though the Rule prescribes obedience to the superior, it also exhorts the superior to reprove offenders with meekness and gentleness. In such a way, power within the community can be more shared and not restricted to the top.



The church in the round exists not for itself but for others. One of the hallmarks of the church in the round, as theologian Letty Russell has described in her book with the same title is hospitality to those on the margins. Macrina demonstrated her hospitality by feeding the hungry, providing for the needy, and taking care of young women. The two aspects of gathering for worship and sending out to service are inseparable.



Sometimes we are disheartened because we find the church more like the form of a triangle, in which power is concentrated at the top, instead of in the round. The church design and liturgy reinforce the separation between the clergy and the laity. Worship is often separated from ordinary life and from a sense of mission. It fails to give the sustenance that we need or meet the deepest longing we have for God.

In the season of Advent, a time of anticipation and expectation, let us renew our hope and work for a church in the round. One of my students Lucretia Mann brought to my attention an Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, who has said that church is not an institution, but a way of being, that is deeply bound to the being of human, the being of the world, and the being of God.*


We can each bring something new to rejuvenate and enliven our community and way of being. We do not need to abolish the old church in order to create something new. We can redesign and reoccupy sacred space within traditional buildings so that we can experiment with different ways of being with God. In this semester, we have seen several creative expressions of using sacred space, particularly in the Eucharist led by Stephen Burns and Christopher Duraisingh. In the course of doing so, we experienced new centers and movements as people of God.

As a teacher of spirituality, I believe that external space also shapes and nurtures our internal space. The change of external space gives us a new sense of our own place in the world. It is no coincidence that many sacred traditions embrace the circle in their holiest sites, such as the prehistoric Stonehenge in England and the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and in their religious imagination, such as the Tibetan Mandala (a sanskrit word meaning circle), the Native American dreamcatcher, and the labyrinth found in many cultures.

The reading from Sirach 51:13-22 talks about Ben Sira setting out on a journey to find Wisdom. Sometimes he is delighted for having found her and listened to her. Other times he spreads out his hands to heaven and laments his ignorance of her. The spiritual path is never straightforward, but winds back and forth, and sometimes we will get lost on our way.

The church in the round is also a process and not a perfect circle. Sometimes we move two steps forward and one step back. All we are asked to do is to transform the triangle or the rectangular form in our chapel to make it rounder each day to the glory of God. Amen.

 

* John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 15.



99 Brattle: A Blog for EDS

Last December, I discussed with Charlene Smith, the new Director of Communications and Marketing of the Episcopal Divinity School, and my colleague Patrick S. Cheng about starting a communal blog for the EDS community. The blog called 99 Brattle was started on Jan. 1, 2011. Please follow us at http://99Brattle.blogspot.com/. I wrote about why we started the blog here.

Chinese President Hu Jintao was in the USA for a state visit from Jan. 18-21. I wrote an essay about the religious revival in China in Religion Dispatches. I visited universities and seminaries in China in the fall of 2009 and discussed issues such as methodologies for the study of religion, homosexuality, and popular religion with my Chinese colleagues.

You are most welcome to follow my blog and leave your comments.