Puzzling over Postcolonial Liturgical Heteroglossia: In Search of Liturgical Decoloniality and Dialogic Orthodoxy

Abstract

What could the “post” mean in postcolonial liturgies?¹ Does it mean decoloniality in liturgy? What is the difference, if any, between postcolonial and decolonial liturgies? And second, what would a decolonial liturgical sensibility sound/look like? What kind of orthodoxy could underwrite such a decolonial liturgical sensibility? While focusing on the postcolonial/post-Soviet Latvian Lutheran liturgies, this chapter suggests that the ethos of decoloniality advocates both resistance to and transformation of Occidental coloniality—the enduring imaginary of dominance, hegemony, coercion, and its competitive dualisms of being, power, and knowledge. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia to the characteristic manifestations of a Baltic liturgical postcoloniality, I argue that the postcolonial spectrum of orthodoxy ought to be conceived as simultaneously veridical and dialogic, or it cannot be earnestly postcolonial—let alone decolonial—at all. It ought to be dialogic in the sense of irreducible multivoicedness wherein meaning is made through spiritual, imaginative, intellectual, social, somatic, linguistic, affective, and cultural encounters and transformations. It also ought to be veridical: namely, a liturgical orthodoxy shot through with readiness to ground liturgy in the truth of the “ethical universal” of historical, cultural, episte-mological, and ultimately, spiritual, decoloniality.