Читать книгу Liturgies from Below - UK Edition - Carvalhaes Claudio - Страница 19

Prayer does something; it is a potent ritual action! Prayer effects a deep circular movement within us, moving between our inside and outside without separation. When we pray to God, our prayer first changes us, and then, while the movements of our hearts go toward God, our prayers have ripple effects into the world, affecting the course of our individual and communal life. Prayer affects our personal and political thinking, feelings, actions, and ways of being. In the United States, when there are disasters or mass gun shootings that kill many people, including children, or even in the midst of COVID-19, politicians typically say they are sending “thoughts and prayers” to the victims. But, most of the time, that is empty rhetoric since nothing else happens, nothing really changes. The public quickly learns from the rote repetition of this expression that prayers do not really matter. In these cases, however, we can also see an evident circularity: prayers and thoughts unaccompanied by socio-political and economic actions and changes are not really genuine prayers. When we think of our prayers, we have to remember Jesus saying: “You will know them by their fruit” (Matt 7:16). When we pray, the fruits of gratitude, solidarity, justice, and compassion are seeds that, once planted in us, make the soil of our hearts and communities rich and grow into new gardens of collective harvest and bounty. When we pray together, no one should go hungry or be abandoned. When we pray, genuinely, for families who have lost their children to gun violence, to jail, or poverty, a whole network of life and solidarity should come to fruition and be turned into laws against guns, social disparity, and systems of death and exclusion. If prayer has indeed a live and full circularity within one’s body and spirit, the whole community will breathe this prayer and be connected in love and true solidarity. Prayer can be the starting point for change.

Praying can bring people into re-existence. We are called to pray into reexistence those people who were hidden in a shadow of oblivion, hidden and forgotten in abject and obscure places, whose lives are considered disposable. To pray people into re-existence is to bring them closer to our hearts and neighborhoods, rewriting laws and offering a new way of organizing and living our social life. For those abandoned at the ends of the world, we pray to God to bring them into full existence, and we pray for an end to the necropolitics of Empire that tortures and exterminates the poor.

When we believe that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, demons of death that devour life around the world will be cast away, a light will shine where there was once only shadow. A new life, fully and morally imagined through prayers, can radically change our own hearts and neighborhoods. When we pray with those who were thrown into abandonment, we can draw closer to those who live at the ends of the world, like the people who participated in the project for this book.

We can develop new ways of praying in our own contexts. This book may be used in a variety of ways for that transformative purpose, according to the readers’ context. In whatever way you choose to use this book, we hope it will help you pray with your community for a greater awareness of the forces of Empire all around us and for a new inhabitation of the Holy Spirit, self-transformation, conversion, and solidarity with the poor. May this book help you develop a new prayer language to live out the Christian faith more fully and to become a community of resistance and solidarity, where you are, with those who are suffering. We hope you will expand liturgy, worship, and prayers into transnational solidarity against Empire and on behalf of those who live at the ends of the world. Get to know their wisdom, call them by their names, listen to their stories, shift your gaze away from fear or condescending thought, and begin to hold them close to your heart as precious ones, as those who can actually teach you how to pray.

The language of prayer is the language of real people. We have kept the written texts mostly raw, as they were created. Since we have offered in this introduction information about each city where the workshops took place, we decided not to organize the prayers geographically. We wanted to avoid creating an Olympic contest of oppression. Each prayer shows a reality that is experienced everywhere. The globalization of Empire has created various forms of violence that are repeated globally but that need to be responded to with the particularities of each location and community. Many languages and colloquialisms are used, reflecting the language and environments of particular communities. We have left some of the language untouched, to honor it and keep the prayers “real.” But we have worked to make the prayers clear enough for you to use in your own setting.

Prayer embraces the language of pain. The group was very diverse, and we expressed our prayers very differently. Some of the prayers written by participants were especially challenging. When these difficult prayers were first spoken, the group talked about how painful it was for some to accept them. Yet, even when participants disagreed with the theology and language that was used, everyone understood the pain that was present. We all had been together in very difficult places, and love for the people kept us alive and together! We realized that what united us was not doctrine, beliefs, or faith orientations but a spirit of compassion and loving-kindness.

What we realized is that when we pray together, we tap into a force that is within, around, and beyond us. Through that power, we learn to adapt and create unthought possibilities. The world as it exists is never the final answer. With God, the world is always open to becoming something else, always looping and circling into new ways of flourishing. Praying with one another teaches us that we are never done. Through prayers God changes us as we change the world, and God becomes more significant than we first thought. With God we move, we cry, we survive, we become, we organize, we struggle. Prayers remind us that, through God, we understand that to become human is far more than the indoctrination of any human dominion. Instead, we learn that we are always collective, in our own communities as well as our communities with other species and the earth. Our prayers are liturgies where God transforms the world through us.