Re-membering Christ crucified and living

Drea Fröchtling

Jennings defines liturgy as "any system or set of rituals that is prescribed for public or corporate performance". He emphasizes that "[l]iturgical systems typically exhibit an interplay of symbols and actions drawn from dimensions of experience as diverse as the psychological-emotive (sexuality, mortality), the domestic (hearth), the socio-economic (authority and exchange), the natural (relation to animals, to agriculture, to seasons), and the celestial".¹ Thus, liturgy goes beyond the realm of words; the Greek term leitourgia already points to its active character. And, as Jennings suggests, it goes beyond a merely vertical approach. Liturgy comprises life experiences as a whole, on the horizontal as much as on the vertical level. It relates the past to the present, the present to the future, the vertical to the horizontal, and the crucifixion to the resurrection.

"All life reacts",² says Josuttis at the beginning of his introduction to a service based on behavioural research, and "some life reacts sometimes according to a liturgy".³ Liturgy reacts to past experiences, and it reacts to and towards the Holy, the extra nos. As a sacred liturgy in the orthodox sense it can re-en-act the story of salvation, and as a liturgy of protest in times of status confessionis, it can counter-act histories of depression, dehumanization and degradation.

This article tries to sketch some of the main features of a liturgy of protest as a re-action and an action against structural violence, exclusion and oppression and the manifold forms of death, ranging from the spiritual to the physical. It will take as its point of departure the aspect of remembrance - of dangerous memory,⁴ as Metz puts it - and it will explore the notions of confession, sharing and hope as constitutive elements of a liturgy of protest before concluding with some comments on a liturgical framework within the process of covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth.

Liturgy as an act of remembrance

In contexts where violent ruptures have occurred in individual and communal lives, memories are often difficult to bear, to share and to live with.⁵ They have become memoria passionis in the literal sense: memories of suffering, where suffering is best defined as "pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness".⁶ Like pain itself, such suffering involves physical as well as psychological and spiritual aspects,⁷ and "an experience of loneliness and isolation".⁸

Such suffering can be found in oppressive systems where the ideological meta-story of the "victors" destroys the his-stories and her-stories of those subjected to it, their sense of belonging, self-worth and identity, and finally their option for a life in shalom and fullness. In such contexts, Metz suggests the construction of a counter-history that is based on the memory of suffering, "an understanding of history ex memoria passionis as the history of the vanquished".⁹ As a subversive remembrance it prevents premature and easy reconciliation with the "given" or the status quo. Metz links memoria passionis and memoria resurrectionis closely: "There is no understanding of the resurrection that does not have to be developed by way of and beyond the memory of suffering. There is no understanding of the joyousness of resurrection that is free of the shadows and threats of the human history of suffering".¹⁰

For Metz, faith based upon the hope of resurrection is an active faith which acts "contra-factually" and which keeps in mind past hope and suffering. Such a faith "allows not only a "forward-looking solidarity'..., but a "backward-looking solidarity'". Memoria passionis et resurrectionis implies that the dead and those vanquished and forgotten in history have a meaning that is as yet unrealized. Sacred history is world history, "that world history in which the vanquished and forgotten possibilities of human existence that we call "death' are allowed a meaning that is not recalled or cancelled by the future course of history". ¹¹ As such, sacred history cannot be said to be a privatized religious niche but rather "prevents the privatization and internalization of suffering, and the reduction of its social and political dimension".¹²

Metz considers history and society as the places for God-talk; theology takes place right in the middle of the agora, the market-place. In addition, theology gains its political character in the preservation of the dangerous memory of the messianic God of resurrection and its eschatological anticipation.¹³ Thus, Metz claims in his article Facing the Jews that historical theology should rediscover and reintroduce "the struggle for remembrance, the struggle for the subject-centred memory knowledge, into the general understanding of history".¹⁴ Such a struggle is predominantly a practical one, based upon Metz's assumption that the idea of God is a practical idea and that "the concept of God is basically narrative and memorative".¹⁵

Putting Metz's concept of memoria passionis into liturgical practice would mean claiming the market-place as a place to stage protest against ongoing victimization - victimization based on prevalent structures of racism, sexism and economic exploitation - and to stage and live counter-stories of hope and change. The agora is a busy place, a place of encounter, a place of exchange, a public space. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) during its hearings was a kind of agora: a semi-public space for an often ritualized encounter between the formerly forgotten victims/survivors of apartheid and those whose violent acts wrote its history. It is true that many victims/survivors were excluded from publicizing their suffering and memoria passionis by the limited definition of "gross human rights violations", many stories were told as "extremely edited stories, if at all",¹⁶ and the quest for the restoration of land and land rights and the suffering resulting from forced removals and consolidation was excluded from the hearings due to its cut-off date.¹⁷ In spite of these shortcomings, the TRC process has, besides other relevant aspects in the quest for justice, truth and reconciliation, encouraged the development of liturgical or semi-liturgical material like, for example, the South Africa Council of Churches' Rite of Reconciliation (1996) or the Healing of Memories workshops with their fixed liturgical settings and elements.

Similar commissions are needed today in many countries. Public spaces are needed for the many victims/survivors of racism, torture, warfare, gendered violence, HIV/AIDS, economic injustice and violence, etc., in our world. Different liturgies of mourning, of remembering and of publicizing pain may be needed, to avoid drowning the local voices in an all too generalized or globalized cantus firmus. During Lent I imagine crosses in various market-places around the world. The cross-bearers and their specific concerns may differ from country to country, but the challenge is the same: To re-member those who were dis-membered by violence and exclusion in its various forms, and to strive for healing, justice and shalom of the one body of Christ, crucified and resurrected.¹⁸

Liturgy as an act of confession¹⁹

Thurneysen in his work Lebendige Gemeinde und Bekenntnis, released during the German church struggle, describes confessing as an act that involves the whole person, a practical event and an act of trust in the divine truth in which human existence is grounded. He concludes his reflection on confession and the church by emphasizing that only a confessing church can be true church.²⁰ Like belief systems,²¹ a confession (in the sense of profession) requires a certain commitment on the side of the confessing person. A confession reflects a textual, con-textual and relational truth. In a situation of status confessionis, the textual truth (for example biblical scriptures), the current context and the individual and collective relationship with the source of hope attested to in the textual truth, are interacting. Fides quae and fides qua are of equal importance.

Ulrich characterizes confession as the congregation's response to God's salvific acts - it is confession of faith (credo) and confession of sins (confiteor)²² at the same time.²³ A confession in times of status confessionis, be it the Belhar Confession or the Barmen Theological Declaration, often witnesses as much to what it believes as to what it denounces. And it often witnesses to what should have been done, but was left undone. A confession of faith as much as a confession of sins is driven by a longing for wholeness, for healing and just relationships - and for the recognition of the imago Dei in the other: "life in abundance, the expulsion of disorder and evil" are expected.²⁴

A confession of faith acknowledges a reality beyond the status quo and its inherent suffering; a confession of sins acknowledges our human responsibility to become co-workers towards that reality. While interviewing survivors of the Shoah and the apartheid system on their perceptions of God during and after apartheid and Shoah, I also, mostly accidentally, met a number of perpetrators on both the German and the South African side. Their confession of faith after apartheid and Shoah was closely linked to their confession of guilt, and their confession of guilt was expressed in bodily terms. Two examples to illustrate my point:

University of South Africa, Pretoria, 1997

Opposite me in the library, at the other side of the table, sat an elderly white man - a former employee at the Bureau of State Security, as I found out later - browsing through the pages of an Afrikaans Bible, mumbling and groaning as he did so. At some stage, he stopped and read out a passage to himself, the healing of the paralysed in Mark 2.2-12. Realizing that he had caught my attention, he said with an apologetic smile:

"I have just found what I was looking for since 1994. Apartheid crippled my heart, my compassion, my sympathy and my ability to love, and while working for the security branch, I just don't know how many people I crippled during the interrogations. It was a sin, lassie, and it was not only what some of these smart books here call a "structural sin', it was more, much more. It was more because I could have used my mouth not to shout, but to tell the truth and say "Nie, man!' to apartheid. And I could have used my hands to support, not to destroy. And I could have used my feet to change direction and to walk side by side with those I oppressed instead. It is redeeming now, lassie, to learn now that my sins are forgiven and that I can try to use my crippled body again, this time to walk on the road of justice."

He paused for a moment, then added:

"I know now that if I believe in God I can't believe in apartheid, but I didn't know then, because I didn't want to know. When I said God, I always meant "God of the Voortrekkers", but there is no such God, it doesn't exist."

I met him once more, again accidentally, at the same place in August 1999. He was sitting there with one of his former torture victims. They were discussing how best to utilize two brick-making machines that the old man had donated to the family of the torture victim.

Oranienburg, north of Berlin, Germany, 1992

An old man is walking up and down a small lane on the premises of the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen. He is nervous, obviously moved by something. Nobody else is around, and the old man starts talking. He once was a guard at that place, and it is the first time since 1944 that he is visiting the former camp again. He told his story, first slowly, reluctantly, then in a rush. When he came to the question of guilt, he remarked:

"These Jews, they were vermin for me in those days, and the only sensible thing to do with vermin is to destroy them. Just like that. But then we lost that war, and you start thinking. Hitler, yes, he was our God, but when we lost the war we lost our faith in him. And when you return to God, the true God, I mean, then you see all of a sudden that the Jews were no vermin, they were the image of God, we all are the image of God. I killed the image of God, that's what I did. After the war, I got arthritis, a bad one, I could hardly move, I was crippled. But I don't think it was the disease, it was my guilt that crippled me. Then I asked God for forgiveness. That was the easy part. But I knew that wasn't enough, so one day when I met an old Jew on the street I was so overwhelmed by my guilt that I fell on my knees in front of him and cried "I am a bloody murderer - a bloody murderer, a bloody..." I couldn't stop, everybody was staring at me, and the Jew, he helped me to scramble to my feet, he looked into my face, smiled and said "You may well be a bloody murderer, but I guess your Jesus would say "Go and sin no more' - but if you think your Jesus is not enough, let me assure you, our God and I myself will say the same.' It may sound ridiculous, but that day I could walk again without pain in my limbs. That night I found myself reading the Old Testament, and I was surprised to see that the ideas of restoration and reparation made sense to me. That was when I started to donate ten per cent of my salary every month to the families of those two people whom I personally had beaten to death in the camp."

Confession of faith as much as confession of sin will depend on the perception of God held by the confessing person.²⁵ The Hitler-God as well as the God of the Afrikaaner is likely to lead to a different interpretation of the exodus (Voortrekker myth, Volk ohne Raum) than a post-Shoah Jewish interpretation or a liberation theology approach. Each liturgy paints a picture of God. These pictures may be more negotiated, as in the case of many western liturgies, or they may be more strongly based on life-experiences as in the case of many base communities. Sharing perceptions of God as well as negotiating faith and its socio-political impact will be needed as a basis for our covenanted process of confession, if we are to rediscover the oneness of the body of Christ, with all its broken and crippled limbs.

Liturgy as an act of sharing

The El Escorial consultation on koinonia in 1987 highlighted the necessity of sharing to further the oneness and the wellbeing of the whole body of Christ.²⁶; Strategic and liturgical approaches towards sharing were developed, ranging from sharing spirituality to sharing material resources.²⁷ Sharing here was considered as confessing the one God on the one earth in the unity of the broken body of Christ. Such a confession is, once again, a confession in word and deed.²⁸

Campaigns like Jubilee 2000 and Kairos Europa, as well as numerous theologians, have pointed to the kairos: metanoia is needed to avoid further deepening of the gap between the rich and the poor countries and restorative sharing is needed to further justice and shalom on a global scale where currently asymetrical relationships prevail.²⁹ A decisive question here is the notae ecclesiae and the central tenets of the gospel and the history of salvation.³⁰ The churches have been confronted and challenged by the eucharistic vision of unity and sharing at the one table. Exploring the roots of the eucharist and the potential socio-political impact of its imagery, possibly in connection with the notion of covenanting, will be a necessary exercise of a church that confesses Jesus Christ who came so that all may have life in fullness.

Liturgy as an act of protesting hope

Liturgy is a form of God-talk. God-talk takes place in differing contexts, different circumstances. Suffering in its various forms as experienced by the majority of the world's population can and does affect such God-talk. Suffering can produce speechlessness. And suffering can throw a person into the depths of Godforsakenness:

"All extreme suffering evokes the experience of being forsaken by God. In the depth of suffering people see themselves as abandoned and forsaken by everyone. That which gave life its meaning has become empty and void: it turned out to be an error, an illusion that is shattered, a guilt that cannot be rectified, a void. The paths that lead to this experience of nothingness are diverse, but the experience of annihilation that occurs in unremitting suffering is the same."³¹

Sölle distinguishes three phases in dealing with suffering: The first phase is characterized by muteness, moaning, wailing, the feeling of being isolated, an inward turn towards one's pain, the loss of autonomy and active potential, dis-organisation, a merely re-active behaviour, submissiveness and the feeling of powerlessness to cope with a situation that seems overpowering. The first step in overcoming suffering is the search for a language that can explain what is, that is able to grasp the situation and its inherent feelings.

Phase two is the period of voicing, of articulation, of lament. Here it is often a psalmic language that is applied to bind together rationality and emotion and to break through isolation by communicating. Objectives, often utopian ones, find their formulation in prayer, and in articulating a certain situation of suffering, an analysis of it takes place at the same time. Acceptance and conquest within the existing structures occurs.

The organization of liberation from suffering constitutes the third and final phase. Language has become rational, solidarity prevails, autonomy is reached again and an active behaviour contributes towards "acceptance and conquest of powerlessness in changed structures". In the process of voicing towards change, "[p]rayer is an all-encompassing act by which people transcend the mute God of an apathetically endured reality and go over to the speaking God of a reality experienced with feeling in pain and happiness. It was this God with whom Christ spoke in Gethsamane".³²

Lamenting as depicted above is a way of expressing one's feelings openly. A lament is directed towards the other, be it a fellow human being or God. A lament aims at breaking isolation, it intends to be heard. The lament "puts the sufferer in relationship with all those sufferers who went before, and with all those who are alive today". Thus, lament enables working through the pain by facing and confronting it openly.³³

Westermann describes lamentation as "a phenomenon with three determinant elements: the one who laments, God, and the others".³⁴ He distinguishes the lament of the people and the lament of the individual and asserts that, generally speaking, the lament psalm is composed of five parts: an introductory address, often including an introductory petition; the lament itself; a turning towards God/confession of trust in God; a petition; and a concluding vow of praise. Westermann holds the opinion that in the early stages the complaint against God took precedence over the two other determinant elements mentioned above,³⁵ while at a later stage the upcoming theology of the Deuteronomic school,

"sought to prove that political annihilation was the righteous judgment of God... [and] began to formulate a way of thinking in which complaint against God was absolutely disallowed. The guilt of the Patriarchs was so earnestly and consciously taken over that, in place of the complaint against God formerly found in laments concerned with the fate of the nation, now the exact opposite appears, viz., the justification of God's righteousness or simply praise of the righteous God."³⁶

Nevertheless, mainstream theology and individual God-talk do not necessarily coincide and thus "[t]he accusatory questions "Why?' and "How long?' could not be silenced altogether".³⁷ Thus, lament and accusingly addressing a source of ultimate hope remained essential elements of God-talk.

Especially in the German context, there has been a lengthy debate on whether prayer after Auschitz is still possible. Metz asserts that prayer after Auschwitz is possible because there was prayer in Auschwitz.³⁸ "Stammering, stuttering, not ceasing, trying it again and again, lamenting, screaming, being silent, addressing, remembering, mentioning suffering - that is Metz's prayer after Auschwitz."³⁹

Metz himself describes such prayer as an "assault on the prevailing apathy with which we consistently and increasingly protect ourselves against hurt and disappointment until we finally reach the stage where nothing can touch us any more". Prayer, therefore, means remaining in touch with God, in touch with the suffering of the world and our own suffering by voicing the contradictions experienced. "To pray is to say Yes to God, to affirm the sense of contradiction we experience, the pain of mortality and death, the suffering caused by violence and oppression."⁴⁰ Thus, prayer acknowledges the existing tensions and contradictions and addresses them when approaching the Divine, the source of hope whose actions or omissions are often seen as primary cause for the petitionary prayer and the lament. God is approached in a confrontational way, chutzpah, a boldness with regard to heaven is exercised by the covenant partners.

A definition of chutzpah is offered by Lane: ""Hutzpa k'lapei shamaya' is the name given to the lament pattern of prayer in the Jewish tradition - a boldness with regard to heaven". Chutzpah is a kind of re-ligo, a way of binding back, or, as Lane argues, a tradition that "engages both the person praying and the Person addressed in a paradoxical bond, mutually and inescapably committing themselves to each other". Lane describes Chutzpah as ranging from "tortured complaint in the face of suffering to outrageous anger in the absence of justice. It sometimes cajoles and bargains with God; at other times it challenges and even defies". ⁴¹

In chutzpah, responsibility for the world and the wellbeing of God's people is assumed. Injustices are questioned and utopia aimed at:

"The world can no longer afford the luxury of unquestioning faith... All faith that asks for a total surrender of will is finally not only pagan but demonic... The test of authentic faith is the possibility of dissent against all authority in the name of human dignity. Such audacity demonstrates an authentic transcendence, one which reflects the utopianism of being created in the image of a God without image and enables one to struggle to make the world anew".⁴¹

Chutzpah is as much a protest as it is protesting hope. Chutzpah is a liturgical act that drives towards change and that is driven by the tension between history and eschatology. Chutzpah confesses faith in a qualitatively other future, and it accepts co-responsibility for that very future. Chutzpah as I encountered it in interviews with survivors of apartheid and the Shoah was characterized by contextual, biographical narrativity determined by ruptures, by memoria passionis and by changing perceptions of God, ranging from the abusive to the mourning one. With the anticipation of Easter in mind, chutzpah counter-acts the "sin of despair" and leaves the present open to change.⁴³

A liturgical framework within the covenanting process

A process is something ongoing, on the move, prone to change. A process is often more like pitching a tent than creating stable structures. Similarly, liturgy is a confession of faith in word and deed that is on the way and under way. Liturgy within the process of covenanting for justice in the economy and the earth is likely to have six characteristics:

1. It is likely to be narrative and contextual, relating its own experiences and relating past stories of faith with current crises.
2. It is likely to be based on memoria passionis et resurrectionis and its backward- and forward-looking solidarity.
3. It is likely to be influenced by postcolonial criticism.
4. It is likely to be based upon the exodus motif and an eucharistic vision.
5. It is likely to reflect the brokenness of the body of Christ.
6. It is likely to struggle with the question Cochrane once asked: "What might it mean to speak of God - taking concrete contexts seriously without losing that which transcends these contexts...?"⁴⁴

I started this paper with a definition of liturgy. The term definition comes from the Latin finis: end, limitation. Liturgy, however, is an unlimited expression of hope against despair, of resurrection against death. Thus, liturgy cannot be defined. It can only be lived.

Drea Fröchtling is a Lutheran pastor working in Peine, Germany. She has a doctorate in systematic theology from the University of Pietzmaritzburg, and formerly worked in the justice department of the South Africa Council of Churches.

Notes