Lent 2009: Faith and public security

Lord, don't stop the Carnival!

How the British manage to reduce the preparation for Lent to a pancake I do not know. Because Brazilians came up with Carnival and made Rio de Janeiro the Carnival capital of the world.

Carnival came to Rio in the 1500s. Locals hit the streets in colourful costumes with giant dolls. In the 19th century lavish balls and masquerade parties were imported from Paris. Pagenat groups began parading through the city avenues playing instruments and dancing. Aristocrats would wear the clothes of commoners, men would cross-dress as women and the poor became princes and princesses - social roles and class differences forgotten once a year.

Carnival was revolutionised when samba was born on the eve of the 20th century and samba schools appeared. In 1932 Rio's first official samba parade was begun in a city centre street and in 1986 the Sambodromo - a kind of long concrete catwalk - was opened to allow the schools to parade down a lane lined with grandstands. Thousands of members per school dress in fabulous costumes and dance a rehearsed routine to original music reflecting a specific theme, competing for the championship.

Today the Carnival Parade is as commercialised an event as Premier Football which many locals lament. It is the 'blocos' - small neighbourhood bands - that give ordinary people a chance to don a costume, dance in the streets and drink until dawn.

In Cidade de Deus, the samba school founded 40 years ago struggles to be more than the Wycombe Wanderers or Accrington Stanley of the English Football League. GRES Mocidade Unida de Jacarepagua only made it into Group E last year and, inspite of twice-weekly practices, it's 13 years since they paraded in the Sambodromo. But Luizinho, the Carnival Director, is hopeful: "There's always next year."

Meanwhile, as I walk to church after dark I stumble across a group of little children in a back street dressed up as kings and queens rehearsing their performance. In the City of God dreams of a different tomorrow keep hope alive.

An Englishman abroad

I first met James Walters when he walked into St. Michael's, Camden Town in 2000 and started banging a drum. At 10.30am on a Sunday morning, when most people his age were just getting back from a hard night's clubbing in Soho, James had already discovered, as a pariliamentary researcher at Westminster, that the church offered an alternative politics. And so as we rose to our feet to welcome Jesus Christ in the proclamation of the Gospel, he banged a little drum from his place in the music group to accompany the Alleluia.

As James writes in the preface to his doctoral thesis: Renewing Politics: the possibilities of liturgical enactment in the consumer age: "I came to realise that the political life that this church helped shape and form was no less important and in many respects was more promising and exciting than the politics that was the occupation of my professional life."

Now ordained and Curate of Hampstead Parish Church, Fr. James was the first priest to come from the UK to visit me in Rio. He arrived just in time for Carnival, so as well as sorting me out and sighteseeing, he celebrated Ash Wednesday for the first time in his life with a headache!

St. John's had already made a big commitment to support my ministry in Cidade de Deus through USPG: Anglicans in World Mission but James brought two additional gifts from the congregation: a beautiful purple chasuble (we have no vestments in the Parish of Christ the King as yet!) and a striking set of Stations of the Cross.

Back home in London, he said in his first sermon at St. John's after his visit: "Receiving our citizenship of the kingdom is partly about embracing our solidarity with all who bear the name of Christ, and particularly those whose lives are afflicted by hardships. We are not citizens in isolation; we who share the one bread are one body."

Journey to the City of God

For most people the journey to the City of God takes a lifetime. For me it takes about an hour if the traffic is good.

I’ve still not got over the excitement of getting on a bus whose destination plate reads ‘Cidade de Deus’. Just like my spiritual pilgrimage there are times when it’s really exhilarating and the mountains and hills we pass ‘skip like rams’. Most of the time we’re ground to a halt in a bottleneck that is the hallmark of this city’s road network.

You’ll never think twice about a rollercoaster once you’ve been for a ride on one of Rio de Janeiro’s buses. They hurtle along at break neck speed paying scant attention to bus stops and turning a blind eye to passengers boarding at traffic lights. Once on you just have to push your way through the narrow turnstile – which is no joke if you’re old or fat – and grab a seat before the driver hits the accelerator and sends you flying into the lap of a stranger. Another way to travel is by van. Privately owned, these Volkswagen minibuses offer comfort and safety. Annoyingly, though, most people opt for the seat on the end of the row and adamantly refuse to move when someone else gets on. Bodies push intimately and awkwardly past each other until everyone is finally settled. How determined we all seem to be to hold on to what we deem to be 'ours'. A young apprentice takes the fares and leans out of a window to yell out the route in a bid to turn passers-by into passengers. The drivers are often members of Pentecostal churches so the journey is often made to the accompaniment of Gospel music.

I set off from Ipanema Beach as the tourists gather to worship either the sun god or the body beautiful. One of these deities delivers skin cancer and the other is often approached only with an extensive intake of steroids but both remain a big draw. Of course I’m just jealous as I really still have both feet in the City of Man. I try my best to switch allegiance and get out my daily office book and say morning prayer.

We wind our way round the hill of the Two Brothers passing love hotels like ‘Sinless’ which can be rented by the hour by fast lovers. Then into Rocinha – said to be the biggest slum in Brazil – and past innumerable Pentecostal churches, the country’s fastest-growing denomination, many promising healing miracles and preaching a gospel of prosperity. A quick change of transport before heading along the stunning coastline of Sao Conrado before we plunge into the darkness of one of the city’s many tunnels, emerging in Barra da Tijuca, home to Brazil’s new middle-class. The neighbourhood grew at a breathtaking pace in the 1980s when wealthy Cariocas sought refuge from the burgeoning violence in the centre of town. Shopping malls like ‘Barra Shopping’ leave you thinking you’ve just stumbled upon Miami until the Statue of Liberty suddenly rears up and it could be New York.

One of the few architectural features of Barra is ‘Cidade da Musica’, South America’s largest concert hall built at a cost of £200m by the city’s last mayor and opened unfinished in a mudbath in December just days before his term of office finished. Set to be the home of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra , it was to be dedicated to the late empresario Roberto Marinho but his family saw the way the wind was blowing and opted not to have their loved one’s name attached to what many fear will be just another white elephant.

Then it’s on the home straight. The multi-coloured apartment blocks built to be the athletes’ village for the 2006 Pan American Games; a new residential technical college for Brazil’s brightest and best young hopefuls then the little neighbourhood of Gardenia announces that for the foreseeable future privilege is at an end and poverty is the new order of things.

And finally the river that makes glad the City of God, which is really an open sewer, comes into view and the apartment blocks that featured in Fernando Meirelles film ‘Cidade de Deus’ declare that we have arrived . It’s been a journey where the tale of the two cities that is Rio de Janeiro has been powerfully told by the man-made landscapes through which we’ve travelled. And so many thoughts have turned into prayers.

Remembering the 'rebellious saint'