Creatively Receiving the Aboriginal Gift
The Rev'd Dr Gregory James Moses, Nowra, NSW
As I stated in the Autumn 2019 edition of The Swag, I think we need to do this not just as individuals but as believing and worshipping Australian church, as local communities and as a nation, and as if the possibility of living a harmonious life in the country which claims us partly depended on it. We need to take it into our heart, our liturgy and our lives, not just as something peripheral, exactly like John Paul II said in Alice Springs. Finally, we need to do this not as an alternative to doing justice, but as an intrinsic part of that, as one of the ways in which we express respect, beyond just some 'acknowledgement of country'. This would in other language constitute a kind of embedding in Australian general culture and Church culture going beyond just using Indigenous language also for place names, though that might be a start.
We can try to do this much at least, for the sake of working towards a semblance of harmony in our personal and communal lives in the country which claims us, while we await and perhaps try to shape what is going to happen next in the economic substance of our lives and what might be the superstructural consequences of that.
My question then, which I will explore in this paper, is whether our metaphysically grounded Process Relational Spirituality of Life and Creation as Gift (see last edition of The Swag) can help us in any way for doing this. But first a no doubt extremely inadequate expedition into Indigenous Australian culture and spirituality.
Indigenous Spirituality from Bangalore paper:
At a conference in Bangalore in January I began a paper I gave with an attempt to evoke something of Indigenous Australian culture and spirituality, something better than nothing for an Indian and international audience. I tried to do this with the help of three examples.
With particular acknowledgement to Mudrooroo, Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: Introduction to Indigenous Australia (Angus and Robertson/Harper Collins, Sydney, 1995), and to Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye - What it means to be an Aboriginal Person (as told to Barry McDonald Perrurle, with translations by Veronica Perrurle Dobson) (IAD Press, Alice Springs, 2010). Also to Elders: Wisdom from Australia's Indigenous Leaders, photographed and recorded by Peter McConchie (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003). I have been reading for going on two years.
Example 1: there is the story told to me about Australian Aboriginal artwork in traditional mode. I am told (initially by Fr. Frank Fletcher, MSC, would you believe, in a paper he gave at ACTA in the 1980's when I was at Kensington) that in its traditional setting and for people whose country that artwork is, Australian Aboriginal artwork is capable of functioning symbolically on multiple levels. The painting will have geographical and ecological functionings, mapping the lay of the land, waterholes, where the animals and plants are etc., a guide for biological survival and flourishing for the people claimed by that bit of country. On another level it will have a sociological, individual and communal narrative identity functioning, helping to tell people who are owned by the stories and song lines and ceremonies of this country exactly who they are in respect of their total natural, social and spiritual environments. On yet another level it will have what we would call a �religious� functioning, tapping into the Dreaming and events in the Dreaming about journeys of Ancestors e.g. Rainbow Serpent or whatever which produced the lay of the land and determined the sociological and the individual and communal narrative identity constructive functioning of the land and how people can get to flourish in the context of that land. Not that the levels are separate: they are inextricably interwoven, one story, one pattern, it is we who make the separation.
Example 2: what anthropologists sometimes call totems, a spiritual relationship of a particular group of people with a particular kind of animal. Let us say, kangaroo people. This means we don't hunt or eat kangaroo meat, except on important ceremonial occasions. More importantly for the kangaroos and their joeys, our country gets to be a sanctuary or reserve for kangaroos, thus helping to ensure their survival and continued flourishing across the whole area. It also becomes another important identifier and connector in a network of connections and relations in this case reaching beyond even the language/intermarriage kinship group sometimes called the nation. And thus we have a spiritual relationship grounded in the Law and the Dreaming which has important ecological, psychological and sociological effects.
Example 3: marriage laws, right and wrong way marriages, always exogamous, sometimes very complicated. These laws, founded in the Dreaming, and adapted to the kind of country, are far from arbitrary and contribute to flourishing on a number of different levels. At one and the same time they stop inbreeding, strengthen and solidify extended family relationships across a wide area in a sophisticated manner, while seeing at the same time to the balanced appropriate care of country and its different creatures.
In terms of the theme of the Bangalore conference on harmony of cosmic, ethical and religious spheres: for all its historical fragility in the face of the threefold invasion of European diseases, European addictions and European settlers, this in its structural features seems or seemed in principle to represent almost the ultimate in integration and harmony of cosmic, ethical and religious orders. There is a harmony and integration of content, and of people into their total social, natural, spiritual and religious environment. This is matched by a harmony and integration of form: the artwork gives visual expression to the stories and the song lines which are reflected in the dancing and ceremonies and expressed in the way people live their lives in country, with each other and with the world of spirits, all founded in the Law and the Dreaming.
This is obviously a long way from where we are right now, wherever that may be. It is also at a greater or lesser distance from our First Nations people, caught, sometimes lost, at various places in the spectrum between the Dreaming and the Market (cf. Frank Brennan for this). Though in my limited experience and reading very often even in the cities retaining a strong sense of close and extended kinship beyond us Lebanese! And in many cases a connection to country. On the other hand it may serve as one exemplification of something like where all our cultures may have started out, and also a possible resource or resources provided for us by Elders past and present (and available in every public library) for getting back some of what we so obviously need.
A First Step: whether and in what way our Gift Spirituality (previous paper) might be able to help us receive this gift?
I think the first thing our Process Relational Spirituality of Life as Gift might do for us Latter Day Australians is to put us into the right place. It is important how we receive this: it may not be organic, our culture is beyond that. But not to appropriate this either as a consumer product, a spirituality off the shelf among all the other spiritualities, which is our master narrative default cultural attitude, let alone as an extension of our colonising stealing their soul and spirit having stolen their countries. This needs to be received as an important gift or a bundle of important gifts, which have been and are being given. In terms of another image sometimes used it needs to be conceived as a stream to be properly and fully received and embedded in the general culture and in our church culture, to the extent to which it is being given, which I among others have found very generous, with the appropriate acknowledgements and protocols. Though maybe as previously noted it will be mediated for most of us initially by people of our own who have been given and have received the gift (like Eugene Stockton or Frank Fletcher, or for someone coming from the Atherton Tablelands in north east Australia the Augustinian Rod Cameron).
Beyond this, I find the Process Relational conceptuality (see last edition) does help me also with the content.
Firstly there is a congeniality between traditional culture and the strongly relational character of what the Process Relational people propose, one is like a particular enfleshment of the other. Even in a received creatively adapted form, the inheritances from our First Australians are going to be a lot closer to what is proposed as the likely metaphysical structure of reality than is our individualistic consumerism, in Marjorie Suchocki's terms a much less shallow spirituality. Though Process conceptuality does make for a somewhat greater degree of creativity: I will come back to this.
Secondly, I find it useful to think of the Dreaming, stories, song lines, ceremonies, law as something like more or less successful clan-in-nation-in-country appropriations of the Divine Lure for the sake of integration into and overall flourishing within a particular social and natural environment. As has been noted a lot lately, there is enormous variation across the continent, but I think still maintaining a certain structural similarity or similarity of style, and in a lot of cases at least changing in a manner which is more or less coordinate with the changing environment.
Theologically speaking the Dreaming creation stories are not creatio ex nihilio of course (Genesis probably isn't that anyway). They are more like the transformation of amorphous landscape into meaningful country in which everyone and everything is given a place: see above (maybe there is something of this also in Genesis?). Traditional stories sometimes using the very same ancestral beings can also be used as a technique for passing on technologies across generations, for example technologies having to do with agriculture or aquaculture or the preparation of certain kinds of food or the proper use of fire, all important elements of integral ecological flourishing in particular environments. See Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu (Magabala Books, Broome, 2014) pp. 46-47, 56, 122-123, 142-144 for some examples. Getting introduced to the stories and song lines and ceremonies and law then becomes the counterpart of what we call education, more effective in context than much of what goes on under that title in our culture!
My personal perception would be that it might be a mistake to consider the ancestral beings as the counterpart of the Divine Mystery, in spite of their creative and law giving functions. I think the Divine Mystery breaks through rather in the numinousity, the sense of sacredness and awe, evoked in the telling of the stories about these beings and their doings, and singing of the song lines and the performance and involvement in the ceremonies and presence in the sacred places (I have experienced a little bit of this last). Perhaps also in the wonder of the integration being achieved by all of this. I think there is numinousity all over the place. Beyond this there might also be elements of the mystical, particularly in the processes by which the Dreaming got set up in the first place and by which the Dreaming gets to be adapted to changing circumstances with the help of certain kinds of people, people of high degree for example. Though, as has been noted, e.g. by Bruce Pascoe, there is a kind of democracy at work, high degree is high degree of what everyone potentially has, and everyone involved in passing on the stories plays a role.
Beyond this, I have had a go at using Process Relational conceptuality to make sense of the 'Every When' character of the Dreaming (W.E.H. Stanner). In its relationship to Time it is structurally similar to the Consequent Nature of God available to every concrescence in the particularised form of what they call Divine Initial Aims or the Divine Lure specific to that situation, also Every When.
This structure comes into play in respect also of what I am now going to talk about, my own personal experience and how I originally got to be interested in Aboriginal Spirituality.
My initial interest in Aboriginal culture and spirituality came out of my experience as a presider at Eucharist in Atherton Tablelands parishes coming to a certain point maybe five or six years ago. In the midst of the intensity of involvement in the mode of presider at liturgies in the parishes I found myself sometimes to be taken over, particularly but not only in the bigger liturgies, and my people noted it also and caught some of it. I used to think, Jesus said take this all of you and eat of it, take this all of you and drink of it. When we at the Lord's command take and eat, when we take and drink, we latter day disciples attach ourselves to that "you", and thereby get attached like the original disciples to the Saving Death the next day and the Resurrection and the Coming of the Spirit. But I soon came to think, this is too much activity on our part. I now think something more like: when we get involved in our Ceremony our Last Supper Dreaming takes us over and at the end of it churns us out as People of the Christian Last Supper Good Friday Easter Sunday Pentecost Sunday Dreaming, that is as Christians, sent out to glorify the Lord with our lives. Or something like this. I then transposed this structure to the Readings and the Deacon reading the Gospel, bringing our Gospel Dreaming into the present, and beyond that to what we were doing in the various seasons. Not this was the Word of the Lord, this is the Word of the Lord, not this was the Gospel of the Lord, this is the Gospel of the Lord. Why try to get back to the way we think people might have experienced Liturgy in the early centuries when we Australian Christians have a ready made conceptuality on our doorstep?
This requires only one change or reinterpretation in our theology, namely to think of the Ascension as not just the taking up of the physical Jesus into God but the taking into God of the whole Christ Event, which then gets to be an Every When possibility, something that can then come into presence and take us over when we do ceremony. For this to happen it helps that God is allowed to have a Consequent Nature, that bits of important history can be taken up into God and made available not just as past events.
There is a difference, but I think it is all to the good. We Christians are churned out not just as People of the Christian Dreaming founded in a certain story, but also as People of the Dream, people who long for and pray for and work for the Coming of the Kingdom. Dream here as previously also is as in Martin Luther King, the dreams of the prophets, God's dream for us and for and with our communities and for and with the natural world. Nor is it just a dream, it is a dream which lures us into itself. The Divine Lure in this sense doesn't just make a certain present possible, it lures us into a certain future. I say this is all to the good, because it means our reception of the Aboriginal Gift has maybe gotten to the point where we might have something to give back.