Easter in the Highlands of Sumatra

This year, sadly, is the first Easter since getting married which I have had to celebrate apart from the rest of my family. However, I had the unexpected blessing of being able to do so amongst the Karo Batak people of the highlands of northern Sumatra.

The Bataks are famous for being the best singers in Indonesia – a bit like the Welsh in the U.K. The posh restaurants of Jakarta invariably sport Batak singing groups, and Batak songs have become popular throughout the country. The Bataks are proudly Christian – and proud of their ancient heritage of music, dance, costumes and architecture, but live in harmony with their Muslim neighbours.

The recently-built “Inculturative” Karo Batak Church of St. Francis of Assisi, Berastagi, looks like this:

(for more, see: http://albertusgregory.blogspot.my/2014/03/gereja-katolik-st-fransiskus-assisi.html)

– and that’s just the outside! The inside is just as flamboyantly decorated, its tabernacle designed as a miniature version of the church building, in the traditional Karo Batak style.

I visited the church early on Maundy Thursday to check mass times, and was assured by the parish priest that that evening’s liturgy would begin at 7.00 p.m. Accordingly, I arrived at 6.45 – to find the church empty. By 7.00, there were perhaps a dozen people there at most. Nobody seemed bothered, and indeed over the next half an hour the building gradually filled up. By 7.40 the priest seemed to have decided that enough people had arrived to make it worthwhile beginning the liturgy!

The sights and sounds of the next three days made this one of the most profoundly moving Easter Triduum experiences I have ever had. Some of the highlights:

At the end of the Thursday liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, the Blessed Sacrament was carried aloft, leading a grand procession throughout the packed church, up and down every single aisle, stopping at every single row for censing and for blessing those standing there. It must have taken at least 20 minutes. Then up into the balcony, where a lavish Altar of Repose had been prepared, decorated with a massive variety of fresh flowers, for which this area of Sumatra is famous, surrounded by straw mats on which the people knelt barefoot or prostrated themselves in prayer for long afterwards.

The Friday Passion was sung throughout, in the Karo Batak language and style. The narration was sung from the pulpit, a deacon sang the words of Christ from the altar, and a chorus of four men and one woman sang the other parts – the crowd parts in modal five-part harmony. Traditional gongs and cymbals provided intermittent ostinato accompaniment, the text was sung slowly and reverently in a flexible declamatory rhythm, and the organ provided guiding pitches, incipits, and occasional accompaniment in parallel thirds or fourths. Despite the fact that it lasted about 45 minutes, and I can understand no more than half a dozen words of Karo, it was the most gripping rendering of the Passion I have ever heard this side of Bach – or, more aptly, Arvo Pärt.

At the Easter Vigil, the joy of the Resurrection burst through in dance. Accompanied by traditional Batak drums and gongs, the water for the font was carried in in earthenware jars and bamboo tubes borne aloft by 19 dancing girls. The same dancers led the offertory procession, bearing not just the collection baskets and the eucharistic gifts, but examples of all the traditional fruits and vegetables for which Berastagi is famous.

The homily at the Vigil was preached (in Indonesian, so I was able to follow it) by a firebrand of a priest, who led us through the entire typological history of Resurrection, from Abraham and Isaac to the parousia, frequently punctuating his sermon with the Indonesian equivalent of “Let her hear you say ‘Amen!’” – to which the congregation responded thunderously. I would describe him as a sort of cross between Melito of Sardis and Billy Graham – i.e. the best of both worlds.

What have I learnt from this? That a renewed liturgy does not require either exclusivism or dumbing-down – which are sometimes its most common manifestations in modern British Catholicism. The Karo people, as a people, are at home with themselves and their identity. Therefore they are at home in their liturgy. There was no race to the lowest-common-denominator of cultural expression here; nor was there any hint of half-heartedness. And so Billy Graham and Melito of Sardis could happily coexist – as could banana-bearing dancing girls and uncompromised sacramentalism; for everything was done with both the utmost dignity and the utmost commitment. Here was the Church, not artificially shorn down to its sola fide rump, nor made “relevant” by the imposition of musical pabulum – but the People of God, wheat and tares alike, joining in common worship of the Risen One. The Batak people have welcomed many new cultural influences over the past two hundred years, from Latin plainchant to Dutch hymns to pop songs; but because they are unapologetic about their own cultural identity, all these influences have been gently and intelligently adopted by and subsumed into their own liturgical language.

Is anything like this possible in the U.K.? We cannot create a liturgical style which represents the wholeness of our society until our society actually has a wholeness to represent. An atomised dumbed-down society will not be attracted to an atomised dumbed-down liturgy; it seeks something greater, and knows when it is not being given that.

The Batak people are poorer than anyone in the U.K. could possibly imagine, Yet they are rich in time – rich enough to devote lengthy swathes of their days and evenings to celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ; rich enough to not worry what time the liturgy starts or ends, knowing that the Church will wait for them; rich enough to dress up in their traditional fineries to celebrate the liturgy (the entire congregation was dressed in red on Good Friday, and white for the Vigil); rich enough, clearly, to have spent hours and hours preparing the church to look absolutely resplendent.

I think I will start praying for a Batak pope…!

Happy Easter, all.

N.