It is dark but I sing’
Liturgical theopoetics and the aesthetics of the night
We live in dark times. The world is getting darker and darker. Everything seems out of proportion, lost, everything is falling apart. Is there a place for everyone under the sun? Cláudio Carvalhaes makes a case for ‘theopoetry’ that is born ‘in the night’ and is deployed as a militant song of liturgy: to find God in a world of ‘discarded’.
Capitalism is leading the economic impoverishment of the world and neoliberalism controls the state and the laws. Fascism is a fabricated state apparatus to contain the resistance of minorities who simply want to live with some dignity: homosexuals, indigenous people, women, criminals and the poor. We live in a samba of a single note: loss.
We lose the right to education, our rights as workers, the right to protest without being arrested, we lose our being created in the image of God, the right to health care and to free and critical education. We are attacked day and night. The devil of our time, neoliberalism, comes to steal and destroy, as Jesus says in John 10:10.
However, if we do not live through that night and do not consider it as our theological-poetic starting point, as an epistemology of space and time, then we will not get the sun. The day can only be lived courageously if the soul knows how to deal with the fear of the night: we run towards the sun and do not let ourselves be immersed by the black night.
European modernity was presented as the place of light, and the Enlightenment preached against the darkness of the Middle Ages. Indigenous wisdom, African philosophy, the knowledge of our mothers and grandmothers, have always been written off in that history of the European Enlightenment as superstition, side effects and epilogue.
It is against this modernist ‘lightness’ that we claim the night, the shadow, the darkness as our place to think, to feel, to live. We must get used to the night, because the oppressed have always lived in the night of history. It is in the night that we seek solidarity and camaraderie.
We need poetry, ‘theopoetry’, to find a way to theorize the impossible, to pitch makeshift tents in the midst of desolation, to find God in a world of ‘discarded’.
For the night is resourceful, it pauses, creates, conjures and connects words that do not live in the light of day, when new meanings and possibilities want to be awakened. Words that are not born from fear of abstract thoughts, but from the breathing of real bodies. At night our bodies need to be caressed with words that heal and give strength for the next day.
We need a God who hides from those who seek him in the light of day, but reveals himself to those who seek him in the eddies and swirls of the night. A God who by day despises the powerful in their nocturnal maneuvers of betrayal, but by day supports the work of the vulnerable and by night stands by them in their moments of greatest vulnerability. To practice “theopoetics” at night is to learn to be alone with oneself and with God in moments of loneliness and fear, as the Brazilian singer Thiago de Mello sings:
It is dark but I sing
for the morning will come.
Come with me, friend, and we will see
the color of the world change.
It is worth not sleeping and waiting
for the color of the world to change.
It is already morning
the sun is rising, I want joy,
to forget what I have suffered.
Whoever suffers stays awake
to defend the heart.
Let us together, in great numbers,
work for joy,
tomorrow is a new day. 1
Listen to the the song in Portuguese here:
‘It is dark, but I sing’: that is theopoetry written in the night! We sing in the middle of the night, as people who have learned to see beyond twilight and darkness.
We sing as a vigil for our fellow human beings, a vigil that consists of songs, prayers, gathering, deep listening, sharing, solidarity. Until the sun rises in the morning: then the strikes begin, the blockades of burning tires, the political acts, the resistance and the demands.
Only theopoetry can make us hear what we have never been taught to hear and sing what words cannot say. In the silence of the night we hear the earth, the rivers, the trees, and we wait for the song of the birds. Not only the poor, but the earth suffers unspeakable pain that we must hear. At night we mourn our dead and the earth that dies every day, every night. We cry, pray and ask for forgiveness and mercy. Thus, during the night, theopoetry transforms itself into partner and presence, comfort and mutual healing.
The liturgy of theopoetry revolves around: silence, songs, pauses, contemplation, gestures, objects, presence, mysticism, lamentation, sharing, births and funerals, walks, plantations, celebrations, experiencing that the impossible of the night is possible during the day.
It is the candle that glows in the night, the song that can be heard in the distance, the murmur of soft voices rocking children, the thin conversation in the living room, the smell of cake and coffee in the kitchen, the whispered prayer in the bedroom, the call of dawn, the lament of the night. In everything, life lived together.
The mysticism of the liturgy is the multitude of bodies in motion with what is available. These liturgies are ways of bearing witness together, of watching over those who come to eat and sleep, of keeping watch through the night, of cherishing broken bodies with healing balm and warmth, of making nets to catch the most vulnerable, so that the interplay of strength and toil may be stronger.
The liturgy of theopoetry is militant and knows where its commitment and loyalty lie. Since the early days of the church of Jesus Christ, these have been with the poor and the persecuted. We must not forget that we are heirs of the persecuted church, of the catacombs. We must be faithful to the church and the aesthetics of the persecuted, and not to the church of the Roman Empire, which has always been in cahoots with the powers ever since.
We ‘discover’ the darkness in the daylight and the light that lives in the night. We make ourselves strong together, so that the poor can emerge from the shadows of oblivion. Our quest is not metaphysics but metapraxis: emancipation movements that organize thinking from the practice that is always saturated by the deep-rooted needs of the people.
In A Estética dos Pobres (‘The Aesthetics of the Poor’), Jaci Maraschin sought the song of the people: ‘made by the people or inspired by their needs and forms of expression, it assumes authenticity and beauty to be in harmony and truth’. This song of beauty is the liturgical foundation, because it is the true lived aesthetics of the people and manifests itself as revelation. It aligns day and night, interior and exterior, the individual and the collective in aesthetic processes that eliminate the dichotomy between high art and low art of modernist aesthetics.
Beyond these dualisms, Maraschin seeks a liturgical hermeneutics that is interwoven with the world as alternative and promise.
Alternative faith that expresses the possibility of believing in and hoping for a world that can be created and lived. In this way, the liturgy is a space of utopia and reality, through the connections between man, world and the Word of God. that actualize themselves in line with the greatest needs and the most needy.
In the liturgical space of utopia and the creation of other ways of life – in homes or churches, in gatherings in halls, on streets and on corners – the focus must always be the presence of the earth. For every utopia and every alternative we live towards can only become reality if we remember our deepest connection with the earth. Every movement to worship God must be a movement between the stars and the roots, the sky and the earth.
Thus, the celebration of Holy Communion invites us not only to lift up our hearts, but also to place our hands on the ground. The earth is our dwelling place, our sacred space. In the liturgical space, with our bodies as interpretive places, we play, celebrate, laugh and invent.
Theopoetry is the search for the breath that produces a common life with decency and dignity. We breathe together, mind and body, to account for the need, to repair the separation between body and earth, heart and mind, me and you.
Breathing with the earth, we re-arrange and re-democratize the rights of all, including biodiverse systems. Democracy is not only a human art, but must acquire a pluri-humanitarian and even planetary dimension. If this is so, the liturgy of theopoetics must lead us to put our hands in the earth, to walk barefoot, to plant sunflowers, to grind the roots of the cassava, and to honor the ground on which we walk. Everything becomes sacrament.
The liturgy must also enable us to sing and to cry out together with the life that comes and goes in the song of the bird and every seed that germinates. We learn our desires to be the desires of the earth: desires for a life in fullness for animals, for the earth, and also for man.
We do not live the night with fear, but as people who know that the night nourishes the soul for the day that comes. Courage to live in the middle of the night to reshape the day, courage to live the day and entrench ourselves together in the night. We have both the soul and the song and the dance of the night. Sometimes we cry, but sometimes we don’t. We prepare life and the stories of life to tell all night long. And so full of courage we live to repair and remake what has fallen apart. In history. In life and in death.
We will dance and play for seven days and then seven more and seven more until it is seventy times seven. We will celebrate life in a thousand liturgies. We will write poems and liturgies about life that presents itself in so many forms and shapes and colors and flavors and sweat and feelings and thoughts. Next to God! And in the night of adversity? We will sing of what we can express.
Our God is the God of the night!
Our aesthetics are the aesthetics of the night
and of those who survive.
In the night we protect ourselves.
At night we do what we have to do.
At night we protect those who need it most.
At night organ
Note
1 Listen to: youtube.com
Cláudio Carvalhães is a Brazilian ‘thinker about the earth’, theologian, liturgist and artist. He is a university lecturer with a focus on worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York and a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Translated from Portuguese by Nienke Pruiksma
Literature
More about Carvalhães’ liturgical approach: — What does worship have to do with it? Interpreting life, church and the world liturgically, New York: Cascade Books, 2018
— Praying with every heart. Orienting our lives to the wholeness of the world, New York: Cascade Books, 2021
— Ritual at the world’s end. Essays on ecoliturgical liberation theology, Barber’s Son Press, 2021