Tag Archive: Theopoetics
Was Rubem Alves a poet, psychoanalyst, theologian, or philosopher? Yes.
Somewhere beyond tidy definition and cataloguing “The Poet, The Warrior, The Prophet” is an invitation to visit a place that you’ve been before but forgotten you knew.
In the same way the Eucharist is a poetic ritual of anthropophagy Rubem asks us to take in his words and be changed by them.
Gleanings shared with the Spiritual Reading Group at the Carmelite Centre, Middle Park – 19 June 2018.
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 4 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 8 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.
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 theologyand 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.”
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 (“Happy Oysters Don’t Make Pearls”) and many articles on education, philosophy and religion.
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 their children 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 Stateshe returned to the US covertly 8 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. ( A Theology of Human Hope. Washington: Corpus Books. Revised version of his doctorate thesis, originally titled Towards a Theology of Liberation.) 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”
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.
I woke to an awareness of You
It is profound
and yet not articulate.
Some reaching out and
re-membering You Are Here.
Not far, but Near,
in this and all things.
4 – 5 August 2017, the Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies curated a symposium to explore feminist theological perspectives on dialogue, disagreement and conflict, as well as the intersections of theology with ethnicity, race, and cultural “norms”. Welcoming international keynote speakers M. Shawn Copeland (Boston College, Boston), Ruth Duck and Cynthia Wilson (both Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Chicago).
Questions, Connections and Stories – Ruth Duck
Womb of life, and source of being, home of every restless heart,
in your arms the world’s awakened; you have loved us from the start.
We, you children, gather ’round you, at the table you prepare.
Sharing stories, tears and laughter, we are nurtured by your care.
(Chalice Hymnal, 1995 Ruth Duck)
Many women clergy are part time – is that our of necessity or by choice?
Invited to share our gifts with the church but not invited into leadership and planning.
Sugar-coated feminism unites people by choosing to ignore our differences. Are woman respecting one another in their diversity? How can we share a position on issues without marginalising one another?
Been re-writing hymns since 1974, need to be wary of use of language e.g. using light (good) and dark (bad) > this language reinforces racial stereotypes. Need to be using accessible and expansive language. Not just male or female but neither like living water, bread, vine….
Galatians: 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Lead on, O cloud of Presence, the exodus is come,
in wilderness and desert our tribe shall make its home.
Our slavery left behind us, new hopes within us grow.
We seek the land of promise where milk and honey flow.
(The Faith We Sing Hymnal, Ruth Duck ref: Exod. 13:21-22)
“Being ordained and finding a job are two different things”
– Bryan Cones
“A woman in leadership is not necessarily a feminist in leadership”
– Stephen Burns
At the table of Christa – Nicola Slee
The women do not serve
but are served
The children are not silent
but chatter
The menfolk do not dominate
but co-operate
The animals are not shussed away
but are welcomed
At the table of Christa
There is no seat of honour
for all are honoured
There is no etiquette
except for the performance of grace
There is no dress code
except the garments of honesty
There is no fine cuisine
other than the bread of justice…. (cont.)
WELCOME TO HER TABLE
“Why don’t you call him your husband?” Negotiating the Heteronorm – Bryan Cones
In a parallel reading of the Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant (same-sex civil union) and the Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage in the Episcopal tradition we see differences in the rubrics (instructional notes), spoken words, and bible readings selected.
- erasing gender from language also erases hierarchy
- same-sex couple recognised as arriving as a couple/unit rather than starting the liturgy as individuals who are brought together but the rite e.g. compare: do you take this man/woman to be your husband/wife vs. I [name] take you [name]
- taking or giving language? e.g. compare “do you take…” language vs. “I [name] give myself to you [name]”
- Hetero weddings use Genesis or Mark reading; Covenant Blessing uses Ruth or Samuel.
What are some of the implications of the differences?
Wedding symbolising Christ with Church. Return to Creation – brought together by God, made by God, seen as “good” by God. None of that in the Covenant Blessing but instead Trinity readings – work in the world and perfect communion.
Is this version equivalency or equality? Relationship not treated the same by theology or text. Changes to the gendered language has impacted the liturgical theology. Different, competing (?!) theological accounts.
Biblically “covenant” not helpful language as it has usually followed some punishment/ judgement (Hosea, Jeremiah, Ezekiel…).
A relationship is already present and active – church ritual recognises and affirms what’s already there.
Missed an opportunity to have one liturgy. A liturgy should be written recognising all types of households and relationships and families that are currently being erased.
Like the Catholic approach of couple marrying themselves to each other but others witness… helpful to have resources to offer but not to impose them I think.
‘You don’t understand me’: Serena Williams, Christology, and non-identity – Janice McRandal
Between tennis, race, her gender… we don’t see Serena in the fullness of her humanity. We hold her up to an ideal of personhood and she becomes a series of failures of conform.
Born 6 September 1981 in Compton, Serena has 23 Grand Slam titles and is one of the greatest sportsman of all time. She is seen as both hypersexual and hypermuscular.
People of colour are seen to have “natural ability” whereas white people are considered as being intelligent and working hard.
Serena disrupts narrative. A commentator calls her a “crusader” and she responds:
“Nah, I’m just doing me.”
Another interview ends…
“You don’t understand me.”
Theology is trying to understand (perhaps proscribe?) the personhood of Christ… but we need to let Jesus move not be locked in. Jesus can, and does, say: “You do not understand me.” e.g. WWJD bracelets lock in ‘rules’ about what that looks like with non-normative standards… this creates exclusion. This is a commodification of Jesus. Which Jesus do you buy/sell? Once you make something a commodity you will want to measure it’s productivity and see a return on investment.
Disciple-driven sublimation vs. Christology of non-identity
Not a timeless call but relationality… Knowing here and now. This gives us multiplicity instead of a single discourse. We need to de-economise theology from capitalism.
Unknowing is a dispossessing that remembers and forgets.
Poem: Listen (I lost my voice again today) – Talitha Fraser
“Why the Body Matters: Feminism and Christian Faith” – Shawn Copeland
Theology is worrying about what God worries about – God worries about the world that is broken.
The terms body, feminist, and Christian have many diverse meanings and understandings. Also, imperatives, involved in a period and a context. Symbols that point to what is visible and invisible. Gender, race, sexuality become concrete in the body. The body is us but there is more to you and more to me. SImilar but different. SPirit and body are not separate but one. We need embodiment and engagement and communion with other embodied selves.
There are physical and social layers of meaning to gender, sex and sexuality. Meaning and worth are allocated externally to our bodies through sex, gender, sexuality. The transcendence of men is an ideology. God makes the earth… Creature. ALL created matter very good. This is contextual theology.
Jesus had gender, sex, race… existed within the social morays of his time and transcends these. Feminism is not monolithic but pluralist. Where bodies matter… eucharist matters.
We need to live in a humble praxis of solidarity
with the bodies piled up.
Race
Statements such as “racism did not exist in the US before Obama” silences and makes invisible.
Having no race then can also therefore mean no identity > race matters SO much. When race is considered an objective condition intelligence is seen as fixed and hereditary. When one is equal to one’s race your identity becomes “fixed”. This tramples on personhood and experience. Racial formation (or deform-ation) is organised around a society of oppression. Knowing race becomes crucial to “knowing” relationships – how to relate to and treat people. Are you black or brown? Chinese or Vietnamese? Once I can categorise your identity I will know how to treat and talk to you.
Sex and Gender
There is a disconnect between our body and our identity. Became medical. Sex is biological and our gender is subject to socio-normative treatment/behaviour. There are differences amongst women… what about class, race, sexual orientation…? You can be dually discriminated. Plurality of discourse can be disruptive.
Ref: Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Eucharist
Love forms one body with our body. Joined with the eternal transcendent. Solidarity is the incarnation of Christian love. Standing with the other in their otherness.
Owe the wealth and privilege we have to exploitation, massacre, death, slavery… we need to acknowledge the humanness of the other. Even if we suffer rejection or loss.
Solidarity must always affirm life.
Christianity
Stand beside/join with others. Because you are the body of Christ. It is your mystery that lies behind the altar. Our gendered, raced, sexed bodies are one in eucharist. Our ceremonies – we must give as as well as receive.
Be what you receive.
Incarnation means loving others.
political theology > systemic theology. What does it look like to do communion in Baltimore or Ferguson, Missouri (#blacklivesmatter). Not just “All that we have” but “ALL that we have” How can I express myself without my hands, my voice, my body…?! My body is not an illusion. Our body has to be part of our spirituality. It’s what sops us being all-spirit. Ordinary and extraordinary that. We are given and embodied example (enfleshed) of what that looks like lived out. [Christ].
Ref: Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her
Q+A
Latin ‘procure’ meant ‘care for’ NOT ‘acquire’
Multiculturalism – honour diversity and richness without “smushedness”. Individuality and interculturality – no domination/subjugation to make alike.
How? Engage, encounter, serious conversation, humility… not acquire or appropriate. Can’t pick up the cultural mores but you can learn. The Word is being made flesh now. It’s about being filled with divine breath and living that out.
Rubem Alves tells a story of a spider, safe and happy over empty space – building her house – no hesitation and with precision. Fragile yet perfect, symmetrical, beautiful, fit to its purpose. “…I did not see her first move, the move which was the beginning of the web, the leap into the void…” (p.3)
What the spider needs to fulfil her intention is within her body. “Her body knows, her body remembers. But we have forgotten it.” (p.4)
Rubem Alves tells a story of a boy who found the body of a dead man
washed up on the edge of a seaside village.
There is only one thing to do with the dead: they must be buried.
In that village it was the custom for the women to prepare the dead for burial,
so the women began to clean the body in preparation for the funeral.
As they did, the women began to talk and
ponder about the dead stranger.
He was tall… and would have had to duck his head to enter their houses.
His voice… was it like a whisper or like thunder.
His hands… they were big. Did they play with children
or sail the seas or know how to caress and embrace a woman’s body.
The women laughed
“and were surprised as they realised that the funeral had become resurrection:
a moment in their flesh, dreams, long believed to be dead,
returning… their bodies alive again”. (p.24)
The husbands, waiting outside, and watching what was happening,
became jealous of the drowned man
as they realised he had power which they did not have.
And they thought about the dreams they had never had…
Alves ends this part of the story by telling that they finally buried the dead man.
But the village was never the same again.
“The dead man did not say one single word.
He was full of silence.
And his silence was the space of remembrance.
His dead body was full of their lost memories…” (p.31)
“Hoc est corpus meum. This is the bit of my flesh which became alive again by the power of the silence of this dead man…
What are we without the help of that which does not exist? – Valerie” (p.35)
Acts 17:22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
(NRSV)
Reading 1: (Read through twice) What word or passage touches/speaks to you?
Reading 2: How does this word/passage touch your life/experience?
Reading 3: How are we called into being/doing by this word/passage?
Pleasure is when love and its object meet.
To love is to eat.
To love is to give oneself to be eaten. (p.84)
The Latin languages preserve an intuition which seems to be absent from English. Their words for ‘knowledge’ and ‘taste’ come from the same root. Sapere, in Latin, means both to ‘know’ and to ‘have flavour’. In my language, saber – to know, and sabor taste. Eating and knowing have the same origin. To know something is to feel its taste, what it does to my body. Reality is not rawness, the ‘things-in-themselves’. Reality is the result of the alchemic transformation by fire, the food which is taken inside my body. (p.85-86)
The dead man: the raw.
But it was transformed by the fire of the villagers’ imagination.
And they, themselves, were resurrected by participating in the anthropophagic ritual…
The body is a kitchen.
Without the fire that burns inside,
the fire of hunger,
desire,
longing,
imagination
there cannot be any hope of resurrection, because we are what we eat. (p.87)
Human consciousness projects itself. It is dynamic and daimonic. Its excess – like the imagination of a child – cannot be content with immediate appearance and actuality but transfigures these and moves in new geographies. As a listener becomes aware of higher and deeper octaves, so more generally man-in-the-world takes possession of ever richer and more subtle registers of existence and maps them as best he can.
No one is going to stop human nature from its impulse to shape the mystery that lies about us. Thank the powers that be that we can dream in this sense, that we can send out feelers in the unknown and fly coloured kites into the azure or the storm. It is as natural to fabulate as to breathe, and as necessary… the human heart would suffocate if it were restricted to logic.
p.74-75 Theopoetics, Amos Niven Wilder
“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.
Before any new theologies however secular and radical there must be a contemporary theopoetic. The structures of faith and confession have always rested on hierophanics and images. But in each new age and climate the theopoetic of the church is reshaped in inseparable relation to the general imagination of the time.”
– from the foreword to Grace Confounding: Poems
– poetry + aesthetics + theology = theopoetics
– if theology is logical applied to God then theopoetics is poetry applied to God
– sense of place and spiritual quest = songlines
Poetry is ontology – Rowan Williams
Work of love. Poet is a seer/prophet/the songman > the paths we must take and sing in order to renew the world. “This becomes obvious the closer you are to death… I do not aspire to anything anymore except to be invaded by the roses in the garden”.
In the end end it’s a journey of imagination.
HOMO SAPIENS (Land of Gold, p.21)
If, to be alive, I am alive,
And if the witness to this
Is I, myself, watching the grass grow,
What is the meaning of the river?
Why does it sparkle, why does it twist?
In a slow meander, why do the weeds
Grow into islands, why is the sun
Sucking it into the sky?
Long have I dreamed
On the borders of creation
But seldom have I seen
The meaning of the river.
Now it is clear,
Established by the ages,
The river is myself,
An artery of the sky.
Sebastian Barker
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