The Ricci Legacy: Finding God in Cultures

THE RICCI LEGACY: FINDING GOD IN CULTURES IGNATIAN SYMPOSIUM – HONG KONG, DECEMBER 2-5, 2010

Workshop 2: Peter McIsaac, SJ

Negotiation: Ritual and Liturgical Style

In the panel presentation and in the first workshop, I developed the notion that the principle form of inter-cultural dialogue (and the most successful method of inculturation) in Jamaica has been the implicit “negotiation” that transpired on the level of praxis in which symbols acquire new meaning through use. The apparent contradiction of African and Euro-Christian worlds was sublated not by an intellectual synthesis realized by intentional analogy or translation, but by means of the “subversion” or the transformation of Christian symbols in the practice of worship.

Thus, although African traditional religion with its eudemonic emphasis of enthusiastic ritual could hardly be more different than the ethical rationalism of the British Baptists, a unique cultural form of Christianity emerged. The process of cultural fusion however was fraught with complications: Christianity, prior to the evangelization of the African slaves, was for the most part embedded in a social structure of violent subjugation, and religious association had created social groups that were identified ethnically, adopting the wider socio-racial hierarchy.

1. Marriage as a Social and Religious Reality

In the highly stratified and discriminatory Jamaican social context, African culture and the elements of its transplanted religious belief and practice were seen by the European Christians of the time as superstitious and immoral: superstitious for its healing lore and immoral for its enthusiasm and its lack of a marriage rite.1 Marriage, then, became a locus for a stratification of society not only on the level of religion and morality, but as an indication of “black” social subordination to the hegemonic class.

It was only to the extent that the Baptists were able to surmount the social obstacles to conversion, then, that the full process of dialogue and “negotiation” became possible. But marriage as a symbol both of morality and of social status would continue to remain

1 Austin-Broos, Diane J. Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral Orders. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 8.

of 5 problematic for the majority of Jamaican Christians.2 And so it was in the same social context that Pentecostalism was introduced in the next century.

Part of the success of the Pentecostals at the time was due to their introduction of important elements of enthusiasm and spirit possession in rite, but prior to that more liturgical negotiation, a vital factor in their success was the sanctioning of lower class African Jamaicans for the performance of the marriage rite. It is not until the African Jamaicans could transcend the alienation of the social situation that Christianity could negotiate its unique Jamaican identity. The anthropologist Austin-Broos expresses this phenomenon well:

The emphasis on marriage that reaches back to healing elements of the cosmological bio-moral malaise in rite; but also reaches toward the moral perfectionism of American revival culture –unifying folk practice and institutional religion – as well as providing the opportunity for transgressing the central Jamaican symbolic representation of being black and lower class, confined to concubinage and bio-moral malaise.3

The role of the congregational leader in the Pentecostal movement is significant here. Usually a lower class black male of a predominantly lower class black female congregation, the “pastor” who is given social (and moral) authority to perform the marriage rites, also possesses the spiritual and charismatic authority – the spiritual “gifts”, if you will – that effect the healing and enthusiasm of the older eudemonic (African) tradition. The pastor is vital for bridging the two worlds and creating a Jamaican form of Christianity in the ritual act.4

2. Grace and Free Will

The case of the rite of marriage provides insight into the process in which the apparently opposed ethical rationalism of Euro-Christianity (particularly its Protestant forms) and eudemonism of the African Traditional Religion is fused. Perhaps the intellectual dissonance between the two worldviews finds analogy in the classic theological tension between the acknowledgement of free will and the experience of grace in the process of conversion. In the Jamaican case, of course, the tension is not resolved intellectually by theological

2 In my seven years as pastor of a church in the “inner city”, among the lower classes, I officially witnessed only one marriage. Few of the members of the parish were married, and the majority of members were in “irregular relationships”. 3 Austin-Broos (1997), p.11. 4 In my third workshop, I explore further the importance of the pastor/evangelizer – particularly the “foreigner” – in the process of negotiation.

of 5 argumentation, but rather deflected by symbolic ritual and pre-conceptual religious experiences.

In this way, Jamaican Pentecostalism is able to maintain its rigid moral discipline while creating a ritual “space” for purification and healing through the media of music, dance, and the transformed rites of the Christian tradition. In the first workshop, I referred to the example of the prohibition of music and dance in daily life that is nevertheless suspended in ritual celebration in order provide the opportunity for spiritual enthusiasm through rhythmic chant and movement reminiscent of their African roots. Even a cursory view of the history of religious music in Jamaica reveals the consistent and persistent importance of music as part of the fundamental experience of “grace” beyond the explicitly professed primacy of ethical purity. In the language of anthropology, we may say that for Jamaicans, music is not a framework for religious worship, but the embodiment of worship.5

Likewise, the “superstition” of African healing lore is explicitly rejected by the Jamaican Pentecostal, and superseded by the power of the Christian will and the moral discipline of Christianity. But it is clear that the “bio-moral malaise” in which the Christian continues to encounter sin is addressed by ritual acts that have some relationship to older African rites. The meaning of baptism, and the adoption of its full immersion form, for example, seems to have shifted in the Jamaican context, to allow for some frequency (and to connect it to enthusiastic possession of the Spirit) in those cases when African healing rites would have been otherwise appropriately employed.6

3. The Roman Catholic Church: A New Dialogue

In some respects, one might have legitimately expected that the symbolic depth of the liturgy and rites of the Roman Catholic Church would have provided the occasion for a manifold of meanings essential to the inculturation of Christianity in the Jamaican context. Here, however, we are reminded of the social and historical factors that would have militated against such a movement: namely, the social status of the Church’s membership and its relationship to the hegemonic social structures that discriminated against the African slaves. Neither is it clear that

5 Austin-Broos (1997), p.4. I would further submit that forms and styles of “evangelical” preaching function in a similar manner. Biblical quotations and often repeated moralistic aphorisms are presented in a style that intend spiritual and emotional response rather than conceptual explication (as might be the case in more European forms of preaching). In this case too, it is more an embodiment of worship than a framework for worship. 6 I deliberately bracket here the consideration of the prohibited but (apparently) popular appeal to traditional African medicine – “obeah” as it is called in Jamaica. The charisma and personal power of the spiritual leader would again be important in this case, but it would be difficult and perhaps unfair to attribute meanings of some liturgical actions to this more traditional practice.

of 5 the liturgy of the Roman Church would have been open to the musical forms (and rhythms) and the enthusiastic, charismatic character of liturgical practice that would have been appealing to the African-Jamaicans of the time.

The more recent development of liturgical music in the Roman Catholic Church of Jamaica, the more dynamic preaching style of its clergy, and its consideration of the role of personal testimonies in Eucharistic and non-Eucharistic liturgies has created wider appeal, particularly among the urban and rural poor. It is not clear, however, that the fundamental tension between grace and free will has been adequately addressed by its ritual practice or by the witness of its members in daily life. Pentecostal Christians continue to criticize Roman Catholics for their empty and superstitious rituals (that is, not affectively infused with the Spirit – “grace”), as well as for their lax morality (the priority of ethical rationalism in the Jamaican form of Christianity – “free will”).

In my first workshop, I identified three different forms of dialogue the Catholic Church must undertake at this point in Jamaica.7 The important ecumenical dialogue with Jamaican Pentecostal Christians is assisted by Catholic negotiation on the level of liturgical praxis – and the recent developments identified above are vital to that process. But in light of the further union of minds and hearts that will be necessary (and the spiritual synthesis of the dissonant experiences of grace and free will), it seems vital that the emerging “charismatic” movements of the Caribbean have greater currency among the pastors of the local churches.

In my experience with Protestants of various denominations, dialogue and union is achieved most easily through the sharing of the Spiritual Exercises. Focusing on the personal, affective, and imaginative encounter with Christ, the Exercises seem to provide a context (and an opportunity) for dialogue and shared liturgy that theological discussion cannot. And it has been through the medium of performance (music, dance and drama) in groups that the Exercises have been most effective in this regard. The Exercises in some sense have become for the groups with which I have worked, a dramatization of the encounter with Christ that takes on the symbolic depth of spirit-infused ritual that has proven so vital for the inculturation of Christianity in Jamaica.

The imaginative dimension of the Exercises is a “spiritual” space for synthesis and fusion on the level of symbol – which, as I indicated earlier – allows for the diversified and evolving multiplicity of meanings in a context of the intellectual dissonance of opposed theological “worlds”.

7 They are: An ecumenical dialogue (with Pentecostal Protestantism); an inter-cultural dialogue (with the non- denominational “Christian” poor) and the inter-religious dialogue (with Rastafarianism).

of 5 Discussion Questions

In what way did the “Chinese Rites” express a fusion of worlds? What were the principal methods for creating and establishing those Rites?

How did Ricci’s use of imagination and the Jesuit charism contribute to the establishment of the Chinese Rites and for providing a “space” for dialogue?

How would the dialogue with the culture(s) of China take shape today? What would be the principal dialogue groupings? How would they vary? What “language” would be the most effective medium in that dialogue?