On Sundays we have only about five people in church,” the young priest told us. “But at funerals we have as many as seven hundred.” The numbers astounded us. What’s going on among indigenous people on Native reservations in western Canada? We already knew some of the story. But the details grew overwhelming. Again it was the numbers.
“One year we had as many as three hundred funerals,” she continued. “And that was in a community of a thousand or so people. That’s because there was a suicide every week. That was the worst year. There were so many funerals that I had lots of ministry to do, but no increase in church attendance.”
The April 2002 meeting of the Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission had been scheduled to meet in British Columbia because we wanted to investigate one of the most grievous scandals in the history of the modern church. In that connection we devoted one day of travel to reach a reserve (in U. S. English, a “reservation”), tour the site of a former residential school, and interview there an Anglican priest on the challenges of her ministry among Canada’s Native (“First Nations”) people.
Some of us already know this story, which compares with the current scandal involving the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests here in the U. S. For more than a hundred years, from the early 1800s until 1969, the Anglican Church of Canada operated residential schools for native children. Many other schools were run by the Canadian government and by other church denominations, Roman Catholic among them. But lest we Anglicans only point our fingers today at other churches we must also acknowledge our own historical complicity in the same cycle of tolerating and covering up known cases of abuse.
Across Canada thousands of native children were forcibly removed from their families to attend residential schools as part of a national policy of assimilating the nomadic peoples who were formerly free to roam the continent as hunters and gatherers. After World War II, however, the quality of personnel and supervision in the schools deteriorated significantly. It was then that a problem endemic to such institutions escalated drastically. Literally hundreds of children were physically mistreated and intimately abused in the worst ways that we can imagine, in the most vulnerable and defenseless period in their lives; as the impounded children of a subjugated people.
For each child the emotional injury was lifelong, but it was not until the 1990s that the adult survivors of this horrific history began to come forward to tell their stories. We can imagine the following sequence: first they told their stories to counselors and caseworkers, then in court and in lawsuits, and finally in newspapers and other media. Since then an avalanche of lawsuits and lawyers have overwhelmed the government agencies and the churches involved. So many plaintiffs have come forward in recent years that one diocese is already bankrupt from paying cash settlements, and others are nearing bankruptcy.
Then there were the suicides. When former residents of the school testified in court they had to name not only their abusers but also other victims. For some who were exposed in that way the shame of being publicly identified was too much to bear, notably for the men who resorted to suicide. Even a successful cash settlement of a lawsuit could be shame-filled– ‘dirty money’ that one settled for in lieu of any better compensation.
What better compensation is there? How can the church make amends to whole generations who have suffered under its institutional failures and complicity in evil? Is the gospel of Jesus Christ adequate to the reality of such horrific history? As theologian John Cobb has queried and explored in his book of the same title, Can Christ Become Good News Again?
Can Christ become good news again?
In order to answer that question my own theological commitments have led me to conduct continuing research at the intersection of religion, victimization and violence. In that research nothing compels my attention as much as the recovery in our time of what Charles Emmanuel McCarthy has called the “nonviolent eucharist.” According to McCarthy, the nonviolent imperative of the “mass,” the “holy communion” or the “eucharist” (Greek for “thanksgiving”) has been suppressed and subverted during the centuries since Christianity became the established religion in its host societies:
It is possible today, as it has been possible for 1700 years, for a normal person to spend a lifetime listening to the eucharistic prayers of all the mainline Christian churches and never apprehend that what is being remembered is a Person who–at the moments being remembered in the prayers– rejected violence, forgave everyone, prayed for persecutors, returned good for evil. In other words, in most Christian churches, the anamnesis has become an agency for amnesia about truths in the suffering and death of Christ that if consistently brought to consciousness at the sacred time of the community’s eucharist would stand in judgment on a multitude of community activities, past and present.
McCarthy’s passion is to counter that “eucharistic amnesia” by recovering in stead a genuine an-amnesis (un-forgetting) of the “Person” of Christ. More holistic and less “spiritualizing,” that anamnesis that would “stand in judgment on a multitude of community activities, past and present.” Toward that end, McCarthy proposes emending the eucharistic prayers of the mainline liturgical traditions to include specific references to the nonviolent intention of Jesus’ life and ministry, death and resurrection. Such emendations are explicit in the Sorrento Statement that issued from APLM’s April meeting, albeit stated in prose form and not yet framed in liturgical formulae (nor yet in gestalt with ritual action).
My own passion expands McCarthy’s focus on nonviolence in order to encompass John Cobb’s more general query, “Can Christ become good news again?” Paraphrasing Cobb, “Can eucharist counteract victimization again?” This more general question presupposes that eucharist reenacts the core phenomenon of Christianity: the paschal phenomenon of Jesus as the archetypal victim whose suffering- death-resurrection exposes, repudiates and transfigures victimization. As a liturgical re-enactment of that countervictimary phenomenon, eucharist conveys similar power to overcome victimization in its communities of re-enactment. Moreover, such an expansion of eucharist links liturgy and mission in concert with the Sorrento Statement.
The following excerpts from the Sorrento Statement are selected, on the one hand, to highlight the statement’s espousal of what I call a “counter-victimary eucharist.” In that regard I have selected passages that apply a paschal perspective to the crisis of reconciliation between the First Nations and the Anglican Church of Canada. In addition, the statement conveys a practical theology that links liturgy and mission. In that connection let it not be forgotten that the residential schools operated as agencies of Anglican Church mission to the indigenous peoples of Canada.
As Christians, our identity is rooted in Christ, who died on the cross rather than repay violence with violence, thus breaking the power of evil to reproduce itself and opening a new way to live.
With this opening evocation of the paschal mystery, the Sorrento Statement makes explicit what is at best implicit in the eucharistic prayers of the liturgical traditions, that Christ “died on the cross rather than repay violence with violence.” Then immediately following the passage above, the statement goes on to specify, in the context of current events like the Mideast crisis and the war on terrorism, concrete ways in which identifying with Christ also identifies us with his “breaking the power of evil to reproduce itself and opening a new way to live.”
We met in British Columbia to witness and learn from the struggle for reconciliation between Native and non-Native peoples in the Anglican Church of Canada. . . . In all of this we are amazed at the ways in which God brings good out of evil, for example...the repentance of the Anglican Church of Canada, its repudiation of the ongoing victimization of Native peoples, and its commitment to reconciliation and healing.
What the Statement makes explicit here is the counteractive power of Paschal mystery– a power that induces us first to acknowledge and confess, then to self-censure and repudiate, and finally seek to heal and redeem, our complicity in victimization and violence.
Reflecting on the violence we are witnessing, we recognize and confess a tendency to dehumanize and even demonize others. . . . [D]uring the nineteenth century the Church of England in Canada encountered the First Nations and had the opportunity to enter a cultural and religious dialogue that shared the Gospel and honored the First Nations peoples. Instead, despite the intent to share the Gospel, in reality we chose the path of cooperation with the policy of assimilation of the government of Canada. In [such] situations our churches, acting out of our historical Anglican legacy as established churches, have collaborated with our governments in this sacrilege of dehumanization and demonization.
However the statement does not wallow in self-censure but turns, like eucharist itself, from confession to absolution and then to thanksgiving (Greek: eucharist).
But as Christians we have another legacy: the Paschal mystery. In the crucifixion an innocent victim was put to death by the state, with the collaboration of religious authorities and the complicity of his own disciples. Yet this innocent victim refused to participate in the cycle of violence and instead healed and reversed its consequences . . .
The basis of our absolution and thanksgiving is the paschal mystery of a divine suffering universal enough to forgive all of our human sins–somehow, because it has endured all our sins–somehow (in mystery, the mystery of atonement). Thus our eucharistic thanksgiving follows upon our faith in Christ’s pardon from the cross: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Lk. 23:34). Only ignorance of such a gospel (such good news!), or unbelief in its all-encompassing forgiveness (for both ourselves and our enemies), can account for our failure to respond with eucharistic thanksgiving for the restoration of our fellowship with God and each other, or account for our failure to carry this good news to others.
On the cross, Jesus forgave his executioners. In his resurrection appearances, Jesus greets the despairing disciples with love and restores table fellowship with them. Jesus is risen in them and in us as we become a new humanity, peacemakers in the world. Paschal mystery thus provides the basis for our own resurrection from the power of death, in which we are restored to fellowship with God and each other and therein empowered to “become a new humanity, peacemakers in the world” who acknowledge and heal our violations of one another. In identification with, or imitation of Jesus (imitatio Christi), we too “refuse to participate in the cycle of violence and instead heal and reverse its consequences.”
Reversal of consequences
The holy eucharist is our ritual reenactment of such “reversal of consequences”– the consequences of our participation “in the cycle of violence” and victimization. That healing potency of the eucharist is received and released– whether subliminally or with our quasiconscious cooperation–wherever the following constitutive reversals occur:
- The reversal from being mere victims to becoming prospective Christtypes All victims are potential Christ-types for us, and become so liturgically when the eucharistic prayers and intercessions reverse their identity as just a statistic for our disinterest or just an object of our enmity. Rather, they become prospective scapegoats who, like Jesus himself, have been wrongfully victimized and whose blood is therefore included in the paschal blood symbolized by the wine on our eucharistic altar. At the altar the blood of such victims is symbolically collected with all the blood “shed from the foundation of the world...from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary” (Lk. 11:50-51)
- The reversal from purity to complicity, then to repentance and pardon All of us are subject to discovering that, instead of being mere observers of events (or mere participants in liturgy), we have become culpable as either disinterested bystanders, self-interested accomplices, or even vicious perpetrators in some context of victimization. In such reversals of our moral or ritual purity, eucharist can recapitulate for us the transition of those first disciples from a state of unawareness to their later state of confessing themselves to be betrayers, implicated in the abandonment of Jesus that facilitated his arrest and execution. But if we let ourselves enter deeper, persisting in the logic of the liturgy, then another and more gracious reversal awaits us–how many so often miss it! For all our complicities are met by the divine word of pardon uttered from the cross and received in eucharistic thanksgiving. In order to experience that more gracious reversal we must first be persuaded of our need for it.
Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I tell you, all this will come upon this generation. (Mt. 23:34-36)
- The reversal from being mere congregants to becoming prospective Christ-types All of us are capable of such transformations, and finally the transformation from being mere communicants–whether mechanically or super-spiritually participating in liturgy– to becoming potential Christ-types in mission in the world. In that reversal we are enabled by the grace of God to render our own bodies and souls as flesh and blood on behalf of others. Thus we too become eucharistic bread and wine–“broken bread and poured-out wine for the life of the world.” We thus fulfill the ancient eucharistic injunction, “Behold what you are; become what you see!” and obey those scriptures that commend to us the imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi):
In my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. (Col. 1:24) I am the living bread that came down from heaven...and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. (Jn. 6:51)
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Eph. 5:1-2)
This call to be, in concrete ways, the eucharistic “body of Christ” in the world today provides the concluding emphasis of the Sorrento Statement, a conclusion that effectively fuses liturgy and mission: As a grateful part of this new humanity the Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission calls our churches to reclaim our Paschal legacy.
Our liturgies are to be effective signs of the reign of God. In the waters of baptism we are given our Paschal identity as agents of reconciliation. We strengthen our Paschal identity by proclaiming the sacred story in Word and at Table. We love our enemies by praying for them. We are a community of reconciliation by sharing the Body and Blood of the crucified and risen One. We are sent forth to be Christ’s Body in the world.
Concluding exhortation
I exhort all readers of the Sorrento Statement to discern and heed the confessional framework of its recovery of our “Paschal legacy.” In this more irenic and non-polemical framework we can to recover our identity as a “confessing church,” whose members are so convicted by our own complicity that we feel compelled to make extraordinary efforts to counter that complicity in ourselves and others (cf. the Confessing Church of the German Christians who dissented from the policies of the Nazi regime during World War II). In this confessional mode I urge us to avoid uncharitably polarizing ourselves against others, in and out of our church, who are not convinced or convicted as we are precisely because they do not share our realization of complicity on the one hand, nor our experiences of the gospel rescuing us from that complicity on the other. Indeed it is uncharitable of us to expect from others evidence of a grace that they have not yet received, and received from the One who alone gives sufficient grace to transform any of us.
Nonetheless I encourage us to continue to bear witness prophetically, even provocatively and agonistically, wherever following Christ requires us to dissent from our customary support for “the powers that be,” in and out of our church. The balance I endorse is skillfully expressed in that watchword of the Hartford Appeal from several years ago: “Against the world for the world.” God grant us grace to discern and practice such balance.