Left to right: Philip Harvey, Jean-Dominique Mellot, Wallace Kirsop
Photograph: Susan Southall
Tuesday, 26 June 2018
Monday, 25 June 2018
Rubem Alves TALITHA FRASER
On Tuesday the 19th of June Talitha Fraser led
the Spiritual Reading Group in readings and discussion on the poet,
psychoanalyst, theologian and philosopher Rubem Alves. Here are her words from
that event, interspersed with images by Talitha and pages from Rubem’s lectures.
In In his article “An Anthropophagous Ritual, “ Rubem
Alves wrote:
Anthropophagy
is the eating of human flesh – cannibalism, something savage. But so-called
savages don’t think so. A tribe of Brazilian Indians who practices
anthropophagy justified it thus: “You
who call yourselves civilised don’t love your dead. You made deep holes and bury them to be eaten
by worms. We, on the other hand, love our dead. We don’t want them to be
dead. But they are dead! There is only
one way to keep them alive: if we eat them. If we eat them, their flesh and
blood continue to live on in our own bodies.
Anthropophagy
isn’t done for nutritional reasons. It isn’t a barbecue. It’s a magical
ceremony. It is believed that, by eating
the dead, their virtues are incorporated into those who eat them.
Psychoanalysts agree. They believe that our personality is formed by successive
anthropophagus meals at which we devour a piece of one person, a piece of
another... the Eucharist is a poetic ritual of anthropophagy: “This bread is my
body; eat of it. This wine is my blood: drink of it.”
...that
is what I wish. To be eaten.
Rubem
Alves died on the of 19 July 2014, aged 80 – almost exactly four years ago - this
material we’re about to read was originally delivered at the 1990 Edward
Cadbury Lectures in the University of Birmingham, segments of eight talks given
over two weeks and our invitation today is to read Alves work and take him in. Rubem Alves had a pretty extraordinary view of
life and way of expressing that descriptively to others.
[WEBS and WORDS]
Although Stanley Hopper
and David Miller are credited with coining the term theopoetics, and Amos Wilder’s “Theopoetics: Theology and the Religious Imagination” is considered
the seminal text of the field, Rubem Alves’ writing takes credit as a premium
model of the style – combining theology and poetry.
Theopoetics is an interdisciplinary field of study
that combines elements of narrative theology, poetic analysis, process theology and postmodern
philosophy.
Amos
Wilder says: “Old words do not reach
across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the
unknown and new-name the creatures. Before
the message there must be the vision, before the sermon, the hymn, before the
prose, the poem.” Rubem calls us
into an encounter of the Mystery of the Divine saying: “it’s not science that can explain this, but our lived embodied
experiences.”
Anything stand out?
[RESURRECTION]
Anything stand out?
Rubem
Alves was a forerunner of the liberation theology movement and key to the
transformation of Christian social ethics in light of this thinking. He was a writer, a psychoanalyst, a
theologian, an educator, a storyteller, a poet... During his career, Alves collaborated with
notable personalities such as Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and Paulo Freire. He
was widely read and frequently included art and quotes from the work of others
in confluence with his own including writers such as Rilke, Emily Dickinson,
Tolstoi, e.e.cummings, Bonhoffer, and Sigmund Freud among others – 74 different
references in these lectures alone. You gain from this a sense of a man who is
listening to the world and taking it in. These lectures perhaps the map of some
of Alves’ anthopophagus meals. . Alves was a prolific writer contributing over
100 books, some of these translated into six different languages, children’s
books and many articles on education, philosophy and religion.
Anything
stand out?
[SILENCE
- PRAYER]
Rubem
Alves was born in a small rural town, Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, of Brazil
in1933. His father was once rich but went broke during the depression and his
family had to move to Rio de Janeiro where he was seen as a “hick” from the
country. This crisis was also what led
his family to the church as, unable to afford to send the children to school,
the family accepted assistance from Presbyterian missionaries to get an
education. After high school Alves
studied theology, doing outreach to factory workers, then returning to his home
state to serve as a pastor amongst simple and poor people (1957). His religion was practiced and interpreted from
the perspective of the poor. Less about
sin, and more about love and freedom, Alves saw religion as a means to improve
the world of the living rather than guaranteeing something to people once
they’re dead. Much of what resonates in
his writing is the way he takes ordinary human things and makes them sacred.
The honesty with which he does this, asks listeners to consider the truth of
themselves and invites them to know that as wholeness. He writes about bodies, love, death, food,
communion – universal themes... and he
writes beautifully... believing: “…the goal of our struggle for justice and
all political struggles is for the world to be more beautiful. Poverty is horrid, it’s ugly. Poverty is
death, death of children, suffering.
These are terrible things! They must end!”
In
1959, he married Lídia Nopper and they had three children together -- Sergio,
Marcos, and Raquel. Through the 1960s, Alves alternated between
service as a Presbyterian parish pastor and study as a graduate researcher in
theology. Alves went to New York to do his Masters but
flew back to Brazil following the US-supported military coup of 1964. The
Presbyterian Church of Brazil chose six intellectuals as scapegoats and offered
these names to the new military dictatorship to avert persecution
themselves. Immediately upon his return to
Brazil, rather than being reunited with his wife and children, Alves had to go
into hiding. With assistance from Brazilian Freemasons and the Presbyterian
Church in the United States he returned to the US covertly eight weeks later
and secured an invitation from Princeton
Theological Seminary to commence doctoral studies there – where he hated it – he was
not allowed to write using similes or poetry and thought this writing his
ugliest. Alves received the lowest possible grade that was still a pass for his
PhD. Of this academic theological approach Alves commented:
“Theology is not a
net that is woven in order to capture God in its meshes, for God is not a fish
but Wind that no one can hold.
Theology is a net
which we weave for ourselves so that we may stretch out our body in it”
Anything
stand out?
[TWO
SISTERS]
When
he eventually returned to Brazil in 1974, Rubem became a University Professor. Having been expelled by the denomination he
belonged to, Rubem (along with other communities and pastors) had a painful
period of isolation and dispersion until 1978, when together they founded the
National Federation of Presbyterian Churches which, from 1983 on was named the
United Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPU). Rubem made significant
contribution to the founding documents of this new church and it was said of
this work by The Rev. Sonia Gomes Mota: “He
was not interested in giving us moral lessons or transmitting the absolute and
indisputable truth. As a good theologian, philosopher and educator, he was more
interested in making us think, reflect and question the immutable truths of
theology and urged us to envision new possibilities and new ways of living our
faith. Rubem led us to deserts and invited us to be gardeners and planters of
hope.”
Born in a context of
political and social oppression, preaching and teaching of God’s word as well
as social programmes such as nurseries, sewing workshops, health centres,
psychological services, and literacy courses are just a few examples of the
integrated activities developed by these new church communities. They were the
first Presbyterian church in Brazil to ordain women.
Alves once remarked, “Prophets are
not visionaries who announce a future that is coming. Prophets are poets who
design a future that may happen. Poets suggest a way.”
Rubem
Alves would go on to add psychotherapy to his portfolio and establish his own
clinic. In later life, although he maintained a pastoral and prophetic touch
with the people he encountered, Rubem’s association with institutional religion
became more detached as he came to believe that space, that curiosity, that out
of the “nothing” offered by poetry, more good could come than of liberation
theology.
[UNLEARNING – I try therefore...]
Tuesday, 5 June 2018
Thomas Merton, Zen & Aboriginal Spirituality GLENN LOUGHREY
On Friday the 25th
of May, Glenn Loughrey offered a paper on the Cistercian spiritual writer Thomas
Merton, Zen, and Aboriginal Spirituality, as part of this year’s Carmelite
Centre Symposium, ‘A Readers’ Festival of Spirituality’. The paper was informed
by three of Glenn’s art works, which are reproduced here where they first
display during the paper.
In
preparing for this talk, I found myself pondering on a peculiarity within the
Australian religious scene. In looking at the program for this week I found
myself reading about voices from other countries and other sensibilities. There
are no Australian voices, and more importantly, there is no representative of
the ancient spirituality that preceded western civilisation.
Now,
in the context of this conference there are obviously good reasons for that.
This is a reader’s conference and we are looking at authors and spiritual
guides who have made an indelible impact on the Christian religious landscape.
It makes sense to look at those writers and contemplatives included in the
program. Yet I would like to make a claim for the indigenous spiritual voice to
not only be heard, but to be included in the spirituality of the indigenised
commonwealth we call Australia. As the Hindu guru Bramachari suggested to
Merton when the young man asked him to suggest some writers to read on
mysticism and contemplation, look first at your own mystics and when you know
all about them I will recommend some for you, but only then.
The
author Richard Flanagan, in a recent talk at the National Press Club, stated
that Australia is not a European or an Asian nation. He asserted that because
of our engagement with the land on which we live we have become indigenised. We
have taken into ourselves some of the sensibility of Aboriginal spirituality
found in our relationship with the land, landscape and all that makes this a rugged
and dangerous place. An understanding of this perspective makes sense of the
loose affiliation Australians have to organised religion and the sacrificial
guilt that is inherent in traditional religion. We are not people of Europe,
Asia or even America, and our perspective on spirituality and faith comes
primarily from that which we have unconsciously absorbed on a land we stole
from the sovereign custodians.
A
recent project of mine has been to translate the Christian liturgy and its
imported language into the symbols and language (not traditional spoken language)
of the Aboriginal spirituality and worldview. If the church in Australia is to
grow up, it must grapple with the task of becoming one with what is already
here. Much of the history of the church and of spirituality, contemplative and
other, has been one of supplanting that which already exists. The church has
been complicit in the destruction of language, ritual and culture through such
as its role in the civilisation of the natives and its continuation of the
Doctrine of Discovery. The church exists on stolen ground and has continued to
steal the identity and vibrant spirituality from those who have been here for
85,000 years.
I
have been using this new liturgy in our Wednesday service which is streamed on
line. It averages over 120 viewers every week. The question I have asked myself
is: how does a service, which is not welcomed or embraced by the church
hierarchy or liturgical commission, connect to a relatively large group of
non-church attending Australians? Is there something within the ordinary
Australian that hears a voice from the deep and responds without understanding
and why? Or are these ordinary Australians more in tune with the land, the dirt
beneath their feet, than we recognise?
In
the beginning of Merton’s autobiography we read: ''On the
last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a
great war, and down in the shadows of some French mountains on the borders of
Spain, I came into the world.''[1] In this
single line we read, I could suggest, all we need to know about Merton. Merton
places himself in the world, not in a specific town our place, but in the midst
of a wide sweep of time, place and awareness which frames all he does from that
moment forward.
Yes, Merton lived in England, emigrated to America, travelled
to Cuba and had connections to New Zealand, but he remained always within the
description he gives of his birth. He was European in both origin and thought.
He was scarred by the war he was born on the edge of and the subsequent second
major European war that followed. He was influenced by the southern French
landscape and beauty.
His copious correspondence was primarily with those on the
continent and he remained always deeply Roman Catholic even in the midst of the
changes wrought by Vatican II. Merton was, at his centre, a product of the
enlightenment, unable to connect with English niceness or American
commercialism. It is true he engaged with American thinkers and leaders but it
was always from the starting point of European thought and practice.
Merton carried the country of his birth in his body and he
could never break free from it. This is key idea in Aboriginal culture – we
carry our country in our body. That is why, when you ask me who I am, I say
Wiradjuri and my name is…….. I am my country first and it dictates how I
respond to and engage in the world both
physical and spiritual. Like Merton, no matter how far I may travel from my
place of birth physically or through such as education or faith, I remain
always in one place because that place is here, in my body.
Such an idea holds great possibilities for the church if we
could understand that the body broken on the cross was not just Jesus’s
physical body but his country. Country referring to the place he came from and
the place he was born into. He remained always in the first and made his home
in the second and in his brokenness he opens up the possibility for us in both
countries.
It could be suggested this is Merton’s life story. He lived a
life broken in many ways by his experiences and his constant spiritual struggle
with identity, freedom and his past. He failed to reach the spiritual high bar
he sought as a contemplative, had an affair with a much younger woman and lived
in conflict with authority. His was a life that was incomplete in many ways yet
held within it the wisdom one can only find in the deep abyss, deep beneath the
surface. Merton was a man of his country in that sense. A man from a rugged inner
and outer landscape requiring personal engagement with everything that makes us
human and whose voice remains relevant.
Out of his country Merton, like Jesus, shares with us the
wisdom given to him for his own personal benefit. Merton is one in a long-line
of elders, just as Jesus was. The idea that Jesus is our elder strikes fear
into the hearts of some theologians who wish for him to remain always Lord. For
Aboriginal people the concept of Lord is a foreign one. There is no such
concept for us. We are a matriarchal people built on relationships of respect
and trust and not on the hierarchal model of power favoured by Western
theologians. Power is shared by the land to those who listen to it and are
invited into the role of elder. Like Jesus who said that he only shares what he
heard from the Father, Aboriginal elders only share that which comes from the
country on which they were born and live.
Speaking of Jesus as elder is not just appropriate, for us it
is the only way. Merton has become an elder, a holder of transmitted wisdom
which began in the nature of his birth and continued in the nature of his life
as a contemplative monk. Merton shares with us only that which he has heard
through quietness and stillness, reading and learning, prayer and practice as
well as though the interaction as a flawed human being in an even more flawed
world. As my father would say, “ Walk your country and your country will tell
you what it needs and what you need to hear.”
This was the practice that governed Merton’s life. His last secretary,
Patrick Hart relates that Merton would leave the monastery on an afternoon
walk, walking calmly away from the building into his beloved woods. Sometime
later he would reappear, in a frenzied hurry, robes billowing in the wind as he
scurried to his room and began to feverishly record what he had heard in the
wild. Again, this encapsulates Merton as elder, one who listened deeply to that
which gave him life, life itself, and who shares that with us in his writings.
Finally there is in Merton much of the child of the Dreaming.
For Aboriginal people the Dreaming is not a far off place of creation stories
but the everywhere, then of meta-spatial spirituality. Everything that has
existed, exists or will exist exists now within the material environment in
which we live. The ancestors are not past, they are present. Every creature,
stone, tree or river is alive with story and presence. They speak from the deep
the truth we need to hear.
Merton
embraces this idea in his engagement with Zen as well as with his Christianity.
For one he says “all is Zen” and the other he says the hills here are full of
the New Testament. This everywhere, then of spirituality is an always renewing,
ever remaining connected to the deep experience of living. Merton could see the
presence of the spirit in everything from the birds in the air to the
blacksnake in his toilet, the sound of Kentucky storms or the ancient chanting
of the monks. These all held the stillness and quietness of the still small
voice of God defying the noise of the bombers flying overhead with the nuclear
egg in its hold. His last statement in Polunnaruwa, “ I have finally found what
I was looking for” was a nod to this everywhere, then of the Spirit, Zen and
the Dreaming. It was not about knowledge, power, wisdom or fame. It was about a
sense of being that pervades all things all the time and through all of time.
Conclusion:
How
we understand country, eldership and dreaming impacts on how we engage with
Aboriginal people in terms of spirituality and respect.
A
friend of mine in Utiopia, Central Australia, was talking to Centre-link on
behalf of a female client. They wanted to know where she was born. She said,
“Under the tree”. They wanted a more concrete address and after several
attempts my friend said 1 Main Street. Centre link said, “You made that up”. He
replied it is either that or under the tree.
He
went on to say that under the Closing the Gap program, all mothers-to-be are
moved off country to have their babies. The result is young people born
disconnected from the law, language and culture on someone else’s country. This
creates materially and spiritually disconnected young people and deeply shamed
mothers.
Merton
lived a life in conversation with these three integral ideas and challenges us
to do so in this place and at this time.
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