A meditation by Simei Monteiro on the Terra sem Males - the Land without evil

This meditation was preached by Simei Monteiro on Monday 16th June in the week when the ecumenical prayer cycle turned to Brazil. In this mediaiton Simei tells part of the story of the concept of the Guarini people's Land without evil and outlines some of the elements of the extraordinary Mass of the Land without Evil. Simei works at the WCC at the worship consultant and is also a composer.

Telling the Story of the land Without Evil ("Terra sem Males" in Portuguese or "Maíra", in Guarani)

In the Sixteenth Century the Tupy- Guarani peoples lived in a vast area in the middle of South America- from the region of the Amazon as far as the Chaco region almost to the frontiers of the Inca Empire. Now only small Guarani groups remain in Brazil and mostly in Paraguay where the Guarani language is still spoken.
The Tupy people disappeared at the beginning if the Eighteen Century because they lived near the coast and had much contact with the colonizers.

The first colonizers, Spanish and Portuguese, misunderstood the main point of the Guarani religion. They looked for a totem, an altar, a temple, or at least a name for God, the Creator, but they could not find any word except the name the indigenous used for lightening: "Tupã". Then this word was understood as the designation for "God". They did not realize that the Guarani religion was a "Prophetical religion" meaning that the Guarani held a very deep belief that a land without evil existed; a land that could be beyond the mountains or beyond the Sea.
"Y vy mara ey" or simply Maíra, the "terra sem males" is like a conception of an Eden in Guarani Theology. That is why they did not need any established priest or god. They simply need a prophet ,the one who could guide them to the Maíra.
They called the prophet: "caraí", the one who knew the way to the Land without Evil. The "caraí” also knew the "ayvu porã"- "the beautiful words", the "sacred words", the true words, a common language of human beings and gods, the sacred teachings.
These "beautiful words" were poems, the poetical language which could describe the reality of all things and its values. The good words to celebrate the divine dimension in the people's life just because they were related to the true dimension of human beings understood as being gods that have lost the "original song". This song was conceived as an original sound born from the "the divine wisdom".
The originality of this theology is that the language was also conceived as a song: and I quote some phrases of their mythical cosmological poem which says: "the song was conceived before Earth exists… in the middle of original darkness"…"before we could conceive things…"
The "ayvu porã" were appropriate to singing, not to speak and they were beautiful because they celebrate the "sacred" dimension, a remembrance of being among gods, an "anamnesis" of their own divinity. That kind of "longing for godhood" produced a great number of internal migrations in Brazil, from the borders of the Ocean to the inland while others tried to cross the Andes mountains, always searching for the Land Without Evil. According to Tupi-Guarani belief, the land without evil was a place where crops grew by themselves, people spent their time feasting and dancing, and no one ever died. They also believe that "the land with evil ", we still live in will be destroyed.
The prophetic bent of Tupi-Guarani religion and its dream of an earthly paradise provide an indigenous scenario for a Church seeking to reclaim its own prophetic role and to locate the struggle for salvation in the unfolding of human history.

On 22 April, 1979, in the Cathedral da Sé in São Paulo, the first celebration of a mass entitled "The Mass of the Land Without Evil" (Missa Da Terra sem Males) took place. Using native music drawn from various regions of South America also performed with native instruments like quena, tarkat-anat, bombo legüero, charango, zikuri or zampoña, cul-trum, pinkuko; the mass is primarily the work of one of the most famous of Brazil's bishops, Dom Pedro Casaldáliga, an Spanish-Catalan and Pedro Tierra, nickname of Hamilton Pereira da Silva one of the victims of repression in Brasil. The music is by Matín Coplas, an Argentinian descended from Quechua and Aymara peoples.

The Mass of the Land Without Evil was composed during the year that was declared by the Brazilian Church as the Ano dos Mártires (Year of the Martyrs),1978. This commemoration involved a pointed redefinition of the notion of "martyr" to focus specifically on those missionaries who had lost their lives in recent years struggling for Indian rights and, more significantly, on the thousands of Indians martyred by the Church-supported colonial enterprise over the centuries.
At one point in the mass, a voice representing the colonial Church says:
And we missionized you,
betrayers of the gospel,
driving the Cross into your lives
like a sword,
the Good News ringing
a death knell.
Betrayers of the Gospel,
of the Word Incarnate,
we gave you as a message
an alien culture
We tore asunder
the peace of your life, …

The general message of the mass is that the Church must face up to its past sins and compensate for them with a new commitment. As Pedro Tierra says in his preface to the mass,

The same Church that blessed the sword of the conquistadors and sacramentalized the massacre and extermination of entire peoples, in this mass covers itself with ashes and makes its own profound penance... [despite the past]history continues and the Church maintains deep ties with the oppressed of America. Let our penitence contribute to transforming this tie into a march forward, side by side with the people on the path to their liberation [Casaldáliga et al. 1980:23]

The Church confesses and, having confessed, moves on.
The special significance of the land without evil theme for the contemporary Church is revealed in this same preface, in an insistence that the belief of the Tupi-Guarani peoples "was not [in] a 'Heaven-without-evil', but a Land-without-evil, a possible utopia" (1980:23).

Tupi-Guarani beliefs are thus mobilized in support of a particular interpretation of the Kingdom of God. Though not fully realizable in this world, the Kingdom of God must be struggled for first of all in this world, since its meaning is to be understood not within a purely apocalyptic/millenarian frame of reference, but through locating God's purposes in human history.

The Land Without Evil (Terra sem Males) which the Guarani people and so many other indigenous peoples have been searching for in a moving quest is a possible land (a possible Earth), a fundamental duty of our human history; the joy of our hope in Jesus Christ , our risen Lord. The New Heaven and the New Earth our God promised us.
We have the good news, "beautiful words" of the Gospel, we have a new song in our hearts and we are the people of the WAY on the way. Let us also dream and search for the “Land without Evil”.
copyright (c) Simei Monteiro/WCC