- Hello everyone, I'm Eben Graves,
I coordinate the Fellows Program here
at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
We are an interdisciplinary
graduate center at Yale,
for the study and practice
of sacred music, worship,
and the related arts.
And this interview today is a continuation
of our grass roots
and socially distant
Zoom-style interviews,
which we're calling
Reflections from Quarantine.
And today I'm with my
colleague Dr. Mark Roosien,
who is a fellow at the
Institute of Sacred Music
for the academic year,
and a lecturer in the
Yale Divinity School.
He specializes in liturgical studies
and Christianity in Late Antiquity,
with a special focus on the intersection
of natural disasters and liturgical rites.
Hello Dr. Roosien.
- Hello, good to be with
you from my bedroom.
- Yeah, it's great to
be with you, as well.
I'm kind of from my home office
with a spectral Yale ISM
background behind me.
But, in case you don't know,
for those listening in,
the ISM Fellows Program
now in its tenth year,
it's a program here at the
Institute of Sacred Music,
meant to diversify the work being done
on sacred music, worship,
and the related arts.
Scholars and artists such as Dr. Roosien
from around the world apply
with an interdisciplinary project
that adds to and draws from
the rich, intellectual,
and artistic environment here at the ISM.
So Dr. Roosien in a minute
I think you're going
to talk about the current
coronavirus crisis
and how features of
liturgical rites and worship
are reacting to what's going on today.
But I wanted to start
off just by asking you
to talk a little bit about
your research project
for this year at the ISM,
and how it focuses on ritual
and liturgical responses
to earthquakes in early Christianity.
- Thanks yeah, so this year at the ISM
I have been continuing
research and writing
on my dissertation project
which was about liturgical
and ritual responses to
earthquakes in Constantinople,
which is modern day Istanbul in Turkey.
The period that I discuss stretches
from around the year 400 to 900 A.D.
And it is a unique rite
among early Christian
liturgy and ritual
in that it responds
to the
particular natural disaster
that was endemic to this
region, which was earthquakes.
So Constantinople,
Istanbul, is situated right
on a fault line, and
experienced many earthquakes
over the course of its history.
After the conversion of
the Emperor, Constantine,
in the early fourth century,
the church in Constantinople developed
and became quite large.
And over the course of the
next couple of centuries,
created more and more
liturgical rituals based
on local practices and local traditions.
So one of the unique traditions
of this location was
to commemorate local earthquakes
each year on the dates
on which they occurred.
And what was interesting
about this ritual,
was that it in a sense mimicked
and imitated the response
of people to earthquakes in the moments
in which they occurred.
So if you picture a city
of about 200,000 people,
and buildings packed very
tightly together on a peninsula,
when earthquakes hit the
city, people had to evacuate
not only their homes, but
the whole city itself,
because the city was so
tightly packed together.
So they fled down the city streets,
and exited through the city walls,
where they congregated in a
large field, all together.
And at the field they
sort of prayed to God
and cried out for God
to stop the earthquake.
The nice thing about earthquakes
is that they do stop.
They do sort of come to a definite end.
Sometimes there are after shocks,
but unlike the current
pandemic crisis where it seems
like it's stretching out
over a long period of time,
earthquakes sort of have a firm beginning
and usually a pretty firm ending.
So to commemorate these
often very traumatic events,
the church authorities created a rite,
by which the people could
make sense of that experience.
So it began
with readings from the Old Testament
that discussed God's wrath
against God's people.
And then the people of the
city would all embark on this,
upon the evacuation route.
But instead of evacuation of the city,
it now became a ritual procession.
In this ritual procession,
they chanted hymns and prayers
that were written specifically
for these commemorations,
asking God for God's mercy,
congregated at the field,
once again where it was
that they congregated
in times of earthquakes, and
at the field they celebrated
a Eucharist, and liturgy, and read
from the New Testament, about
God's mercy and the story
of Jesus calming the sea,
calming the storm on the sea of Galilee.
So there's a whole rhythm and a sort
of theological framework
within this liturgy
that would be performed as a way
of making sense of these disasters.
The research I'm doing
at the ISM this year,
is expanding on my dissertation research,
examining how this ritual
developed over time,
and what ecological
implications can we draw
from this ritual about
how ancient Christians
experienced the world,
and the relationship
between themselves, the
land on which they lived,
and God through these ritual performances.
- Yeah it's fascinating,
and what occurred to me
while you were speaking
now is that the very nature
of the temporality of a natural disaster.
I mean I think we're used to thinking
about liturgical and ritual
rites having a feature
of temporality, in the
way they unfold over time.
But of course, they're often reacting
to very different temporal forms
in terms of natural disasters.
- Yeah, so this has been an
interesting revelation to me,
going through this Covid-19 disaster.
It's just how,
how time is stretched
and loses a sense of
definite markers, right?
You wake up every morning
and wonder what it day it is,
and is this a day where I need
to put on pants, you know,
is this a day where I
have some responsibility?
It's very hard to tell
from one day to the next
what you are to do.
So we don't have these weekly or annual
or monthly markers in our lives.
Today we're speaking on Good Friday,
which is a day many
Christians all over the world
would be going to church,
going to services,
and most people are staying home.
So it disrupts that sense of regularity
that often rituals and
liturgical traditions
can provide for communities.
- Yeah, well if we could
just back up a little bit
from your current research
project, and perhaps talk about,
look at more of an overview
of how ritual responses
to natural disaster have changed over time
in the Christian tradition.
Because I know this is kind of an overview
that you're looking at in the
current class you're teaching
this semester, so maybe
you could just say a bit
about your class, and the larger picture
of how ritual responses to
natural disaster have changed.
- Sure, yeah, so I'm teaching
a class this semester
at Yale Divinity School called
Natural Disasters in
the Christian Tradition
Ritual and Theology.
And the class is both an
overview of historical overview
of how Christians in
the past have responded
in ritual and their theology
to various natural disasters.
And then we're also thinking
kind of constructively too
about how to think through,
how Christian communities
might respond to disasters
in the present day.
So I did not expect when
I created this class
that I would be teaching about something
that we are currently experiencing.
So that has been quite a unique
and unforgettable experience.
The first half of the class we've explored
many different kinds and examples
of Christian responses to disasters.
And one thing that I've noticed
and that we've discussed
together is not just
how responses to disaster
change over time,
but also the nature of response
to different kinds of natural disasters.
So we did look at earthquakes
in Constantinople,
we also looked at drought and famine
in Syria and Mesopotamia.
We compared Christian and
Jewish ritual responses to that.
We looked at floods, we looked at plagues,
actually on the day that we
examined the Black Death,
the Bubonic Plague, in the
fourteenth century in Italy,
was the same day in
February that we heard,
it was all over the headlines that Italy
had a big problem with Covid-19.
So it became surreal about
through the middle of the class.
Now whereas in early pre-modern,
Late Antique and Medieval
Christian groups,
often interpreted natural
disasters as manifestations
of Divine wrath, or Divine
chastisement somehow.
It was not consistent across the board.
This was not a, well it
was a very common theology,
and it structured in many ways the rituals
by which Christians responded to disaster.
There are also other
rituals that didn't frame
natural disasters as Divine wrath.
Sometimes there were other kinds
of messages coming from God,
or coming from the earth itself.
But when you get to the modern period,
particularly after this
really massive earthquake
that hit the city of
Lisbon, Portugal in 1755.
A lot of the more classical
Christian thinking
about natural disasters
as being manifestations
of Divine wrath, was called into question,
by the growing Humanist
movement in Europe at the time.
And so, what you see after that period
is that natural disasters
lose a sense of transcendent meaning,
as science and technology
come to dominate the way
that we view natural disasters
and how to cope with them.
So one of the, sort of,
streams that we've traced
in this class, is how whereas today
natural disasters often suffer
from a lack of ultimate meaning,
in the past they had the opposite problem,
there was an overabundance of meaning,
and the problem was often
assigning what it is
that a natural disaster meant.
- Yeah, and I mean I wonder
if you could just extend
that line of thought into how you see
Christian communities
in particular responding
to the Covid-19 crisis, and is there
that same continuation of the idea that
this is not a manifestation
of kind of Divine meaning.
- That's a great question.
I've noticed such a variety of responses.
I think most Christian groups
have pretty well abandoned
this idea that natural disasters are
somehow manifestations of Divine wrath,
or there's some Divine
causality involved here.
Do still occasionally see the occasional
right wing figure talking
about this Apocalyptic, you know,
manifestation of God's wrath.
But I think for the most
part, Christian communities
are responding to the crisis as it unfolds
on a day to day basis,
rather than assigning some
grandiose meaning to it
in the abstract.
One thing that really
came out of the class
that I'm teaching now, is when we discuss,
we spent a day discussing
the problem of the Odyssey,
which is a philosophical
or theological problem
of how do you reconcile
the existence of evil
with the goodness of God?
And this is usually
conducted in a very abstract
and philosophical way.
But as we were reading
these philosophical sources,
and yet going through
ourselves this unfolding crisis
of Covid-19, it became clear to all of us
that this kind of
abstract level of thinking
is not helpful in a moment of crisis.
So I, what I get the sense
is that Christian communities
and leaders are trying to stay in touch
with their faithful,
with their communities
mostly through drawing
points of connection
wherever they can, and
helping people respond
to the problems they
encounter on a day to day
or moment to moment basis,
rather than providing,
"Oh, here's a grand
theological explanation."
Which most people in this
moment don't really need.
- Right, in addition to that
one point you just mentioned
are there other ways that
going through this experience
of living through the
Covid-19 crisis has changed
the way you think about
some of the research you do,
and in early Christianity,
and the responses
to natural disaster you
find in say, you know,
your research on earthquakes, for example.
- That's a great question.
This is something that's
been developing my own mind
as I go through this
along with everybody else.
It relates to something that
we've already discussed,
which is this aspect of temporality.
That it's hard to know where
one day or one week begins
and the next ends, when you're
in the middle of a crisis.
One of the conceptual tools
that I've used in my research
is to talk about disasters
as moments of liminal
space, or liminal time.
Where you're in between a
previously structured society
which breaks down in
the moment of a crisis,
but is yet awaiting it's
reconstitution afterwards.
So living in a space of
liminal time where things
are sort of topsy-turvy is not
something I really understood
before this crisis, where now I see more
how much uncertainty there is, with,
in this time
and the sense that it's hard to expect
when it will be over, and
what society will look like
when it is over.
So I think it will be interesting to see
how religious communities
respond to this crisis
and provide a framework for looking back
and remembering what it was about.
- Right, it seems that so much of the way
we anchor ourselves
temporally, throughout a week
or a month or a year is often done
through social gatherings, right?
So today being Good Friday,
we know it is on the calendar
yet it might not feel that
way for a lot of people today,
as there isn't that coming together
that people normally
experience on a day like this
in a service or what have you.
- Yeah, exactly.
- Yeah, well thanks for that,
that was wonderful, you know,
quick dive into your research
and how this current period
is helping us kind of
make sense of it all.
So thanks so much for being part of it,
and I'm going to have to make a cut there,
that was like, totally
tripped over myself.
So I'm going to give a
pause, and try that again.
- [Dr. Roosien] Sure.
- So give me a couple seconds.
Thank you so much Dr.
Roosien for that interview,
and thanks everyone else for listening in.
There will be more of
these Zoom-style interviews
coming out soon,
and I hope you'll follow
us at ism.yale.edu,
and other various social media platforms,
so we wish for the current
period everyone just,
wish everyone good health, stay safe,
and do look out for
more interviews from us.
So thanks again Dr. Roosien.
- Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here.
