re-producing racism and Mary’s talking back rap By Michael Jagessar (Council for World Mission)
locating my reflection For this issue of INSiGHT, I was asked to do a sort of year-end reflection as a mission secretary with responsibility for two CWM regions (Caribbean and Europe). My tasks also include facilitating (with a great team of colleagues) the cutting-edge, challenging, and relevant work of eDARE. What to write about? Should I (a greying privileged heterosexual male) focus on the many Breastfeeding God. Via https://www.redletterchristians.org/breastfeeding-god/ exciting things happening across the regions and in the life of the member churches in spite of the pandemic? Or would it be better to reflect on the ways our online life has created an array of exciting conversation openings, opportunities for newer voices, greater cross-regional and ecumenical engagement, and much more? Perhaps, the excitement and refreshing insights from the recent engagement and encounter of poets, artists and theologians through eDARE webinars would be just ideal? Or how about a focus on regional struggles and challenges of COVID 19, revealing the many intersecting and endemic inequities which CWM and its member churches continue to highlight, chant down, and take on?
portal – an apt metaphor The Spirit, though, is full of surprises. She dragged me in the direction of the familiar in the advent and Christmas stories we have grown so accustomed to and prodded me to look again at the very familiar in the stories we reel out for a clue on an urgent theme. For both the Caribbean and Europe regions, looking back in 2021 and looking forward to 2022 and beyond, Arundhati Roy’s apt descriptor of the pandemic as a portal “as a gateway between one world and the next” continues to spin around me like a nervous parent awaiting the birth of their first child. I felt as if I was sucked up and thrown into, and floating in, like a new-born baby. In caustic and prophetic fashion Roy wrote: “We can choose to walk through it [portal], dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” Churches and communities in both regions would do well to continue to heed Roy’s insight given current existential realities. So, with my feet now touching ground but still on an imaginative journey through that portal, my 2021 ‘unending’ reflections take me into the uncomfortable space of gender justice and racism as I strain to imagine a new world with a very familiar figure of the advent and Christmas story, Mary. Her story of womb, birthing, breastfeeding her infant, a dazed fiancé, her radical rap (named as Magnificat) is located in the midst of occupation, empire/state control (Augustus and his governor Quirinius), patriarchal control, headcounts, women represented as producers, and much more. A baby stirs or swims in her womb, later clinging to her breast, yet somehow, we have turned the blood, sweat and tears of her life, through artistic depictions, songs, liturgies and theologies into a layered story that has lost its edge. Over the centuries we have ended up with an ‘air-brushed Mary of L’Oréal’ without traces of toughness, resilience and that revolutionary spirit rapping against the empire’s occupation (political, economic, religious, and patriarchal to name a few)
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