Healing aspects of mourning liturgies.

The Women's Liturgy Movement--a Place of Healing Experiences for Women

In the women's liturgical movement, which has evolved in the last thirty years in America, Europe and all over the world (1) the moment of bodily expression of mourning and loss, of grief and suffering has had a broad space. (2) The long centuries in which women were condemned to silence were over. They finally began to speak, to speak about their experiences of denigration, of denial, of being held like things in the household of man. They began to talk among themselves about their experiences to survive in contexts of terror, to overcome in some niches the violence of everyday-life. They began to shout, to cry out their lament over the lives of daughters, of friends who suffered death from a system of violence.

Liturgies of Lament

Among the many creative aspects in women's liturgies, I am convinced that the "liturgies of lament" are the most helpful and necessary liturgies we can find today. They are not always very aesthetic and beautiful liturgies. One cannot sit in the pews and wait for a wonderful sermon, nor can you sit and sing a song without coming in contact with your neighbor, her feelings, her sorrows, her expression. You have to get involved in such liturgies if you want or you have to leave.

Silence and Cry

What can be seen as a healing effect and intention of those liturgies can be explained through two examples: two opposing forms of expressions in a long range of possibilities. First we find in women's liturgies the possibility to be silent, silent at all- in front of a serious danger, of a hurting experience, of a story of violence in the life of a woman. (3) The group meets in a circle. The lamenting woman sits in the midst of it. The issue of liturgy is named. For e.g. the lamenting woman has to undergo heavy surgery as she has a breast cancer. She has invited her friends to mourn about this coming loss, a loss which will have a heavy impact on her body, on her life in total.

After naming the issue, there is a long time of silence. Then all participants are invited to feel her pulse and to connect with their lives. Texts of Adrienne Rich, an American author who died of cancer, are read. Then a sharing follows. The question is "Is this woman who struggled for the rights of women in the Church worth to suffer this illness?". With the answer "Yes!" the group affirms the her life struggle and the situation the lamenting woman is in now. Nothing has to be denied. The ambivalence of her situation is given a life giving perspective. At the end of the liturgy, the women bless one another.

This liturgy as I have described it shortly is a liturgy of silence and empathy, of solidarity and grieving all together. It is a liturgy of "awaiting one another" (Janet Walton).

The opposite form to this is a liturgy of crying, of expressing the experience of violence with the voice and body of women, (4) screaming, crying, weeping and sobbing. That means that we have to tolerate and bear such expressions which are not used in our traditional Western worship at least.

The Ecumenical Decade liturgy (5) on Judges 19 (the Daugther of Jephta) can be drawn on as an example: Jephta, the judge and general in war, kills his daughter because of an oath he had given to God for winning the battle. The lamenting in the liturgy is therefore about the picture and image of a God who wants such sacrifices. And the women asks: "How can we overcome such an image of God?". What has to be done to get reconciliation in a right way? Lamenting helps to change situations. It has a prophetic quality. Lamenting asks both, the perpetrators and the victim in a new community which is healed from violence and injustice.

Two women stand back to back, with their arms together and their sides to the assembly. The heads of them are masked with a paper on which a big but twofold face is to be seen. This face looks to the community. The voices of the women articulate the lament. One of the voices is representing the daughter as an obedient daughter. The other voice is the voice of the rebelling daughter. Thus the ambivalence in the daughter is shown very clearly. The pantomime brings the lament into shape. The voices get louder and louder culminating in a cry. The women tear off the mask and rise their arms. Then silence follows. After that, all participants of the liturgy dance a slow dance of lament.

This liturgy shows that crying, expressing with voice and the whole body is avery dramatic way of communication. It is a form of regression to the source of communication--the relationship between the tiny child and her mother. The whole body is the space of resonance in the expression.

Between those extreme points of liturgical shaping, we find many sorts of expressions, perhaps softer and easier to integrate in our worship tradition. Nonetheless I am convinced that we can learn mostly from the unusual and extreme methods of shaping liturgies as we can find it in women's liturgies.

Creating No-Liturgies

Crying means in one way to say 'NO' to violence, to suffering, to humanity denying things. What we need more than ever in Christian liturgical life is an ability to create and celebrate together so called NO-Liturgies, as the Dallas Methodist University Liturgical scholar, Marjorie Procter-Smith puts it. (6)

In the Mid-Decade-Procession we held in 1993 in Munich, Bavaria, during the Evangelische Kirchentag, we as 7 women from the preparatory group, celebrated such a liturgical form of expulsion of life-destroying power. In a form of litany, one woman after the other named a certain power which was a danger to life. After that sentence we shouted together: "The right of women to live is not to destroy!" Then, every woman stamped thirteen times with a stick at the wooden platform. The sound of it could be heard all over the central place in Munich. Then we as a group shouted again. It was a powerful ritual and celebration of saying "NO!" to every form of denigration and destruction of life for women, men and children in our country. (7)

To celebrate such liturgies of resistance, crying NO! means to activate our prophetic ability, to fulfill the vocation to women and means to care for the life of the coming generations. Celebrating such NO-Liturgies means to stop the destroying power in a spiritual and liturgical way which was originally meant by the traditional form of exorcism. I do not plead for the revival of old forms but to find new forms of handling the over-individualistic and global powers of life destroying interests and powers which destroy the earth.

In a similar way, in the Pentecost Liturgy of the WATER, women celebrate such a NO-liturgy and exorcism form. (8) With the common cry "Be gone!", the destroying powers were expelled from the community. The naming of the powers and the answering cry "Be gone!" is a way of effective speaking. It does what it means. It has consequences like the power of blessing.

The Healing and Consoling Circle of Women

What does crying, and silence mean to women experiencing suffering? To suffer from violence for example means a feeling of being strapped to silence. You wonder what to say about the injury you have suffered, the cruelty you have undergone, the treachery you have felt. Sharing the silence means to share this first phase of being strapped to silence and being unable to say anything to anybody.

But when a woman has felt a consoling and sharing circle of women around her, she will start to tell her story again and again. To cry out her story with expression and pain, with tears and sobs, without clear words but full bodily expression. It is wonderful to have such a circle of women around her saying to such a woman: "Your suffering is our suffering, your pain is our pain!", like the women did at the final Decade Festival 1998 in Harare.

A woman can work through her experience of suffering, of loss and grief if there is a group of women in solidarity with her, hearing, listening, being silent, saying no words, but giving the space to come out with all the hurting, the loss, the hatred and fear, the dark feelings which are powerful enough to overwhelm her. Women's liturgies give this space, they form such a healing and consoling women's circle. They encourage a woman to come out with her grief and express her feelings.

Reviving the Tradition of Weeping Women

We find the tradition of weeping women till today in some cultures and with such liturgies we revive these old traditions. In the situation of mourning, of death, before and after a funeral, a group of women will come to the house of the deceased and cry and weep together. Through that, the saddened community gets a voice, gets a way of expression where the individual ways are barred. Jesus himself when he was going to the house of the daughter of Jairus (MK 5,41) was confronted with such a group of weeping women.

Christian parishes should become places of healing experiences, a space where women can build up such "circles of consolation". There should always be a group of women working through their own experiences of suffering, of losses, of mourning and grief. A group of women who know how such dark feelings can burn inside yourself. Who knows how it feels when you want to cry and no cry comes out of your mouth and your body. They are like midwives of life, a life being born in the crying and weeping of a woman suffering under many experiences of violence.

In such line we will find Jesus himself who was not driven back by the mourning and crying, by the weeping of women and men. It was his vocation which he lived out to heal and to bring to life what he has suffered. Therefore the liturgies of lament are a special contribution to the liturgical life of the Church, but also to the healing of the body of Christ itself.

(1) See Teresa Berger, ed. Dissident Daughters, Collegeville 2001.

(2) See Rosmary R. Ruether, Women-Church. Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, San Francisco 1986.

(3) The liturgy you can find in Janet Walton, Feminist Liturgy--A Matter of Justice, Collegevile 2000. The work of the group itself is described in "The Fist Six, Interviews with the founding members of the Women's Liturgy Group of New York City", Founded February 1981, New York 2001.

(4) Vg. Auch Reinhold Boschki, Der Schrei, Gott un Mensch im Werk yon Elle Wiesel, Mainz 1995, 2. Auflage.

(5) Der Zusammenhang yon Klage and Schrei finder sich Hi 19,6-7 oder Ex 2,23-25: das Volk schreit zu Gott in der Situation des Ausgeliefersteins. Das hebraische Verb "zaak" bedeutet den Sehrei "Gewalt-Hilfe!".

(6) See Marjorie Procter-Smith, Praying With Our Eyes Open, Nashville 1990.

(7) See Mid Decade Women's Procession in: Frauen im Zentrum, ed. Sigrid Schneider-Grube et al, Miinich 1994.

(8) See the description in Diann L. Neu, Women-Church Transforming Liturgy.

REV. DR. BRIGITTE ENZNER-PROBST, GERMANY

Regional Coordinator, W1CAS