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ABORIGINALITY
AND JESUS
Frank Fletcher msc
Making some bodily connections
Some Aborigines say that for them to belong to the Catholic
or any other church is to give up their Aboriginality. Church-going
Aborigines put the situation differently. They find that
Aboriginality and church tend to co-exist as separate realities.
In their communities the Aboriginal Catholics whom I know
join in all the activities of their community and are proud
to be Aboriginal. They also attend church sometimes and profess
themselves helped by it. However, they admit that the two
do not always co-exist well: on both sides there are disappointments.
Their pride in Aboriginality is humiliated by the social
problems in the communities. On the other hand Aboriginal
Catholics are often disappointed by the ceremonies, preaching
and fellowship they receive, not only from the patronising
attitude of some but also from the lack of the communal form
of spirituality they desire. In disappointment at the individualism
which infects everything in the west even spirituality, some
Aborigines seek in their traditional inheritance for the
communal spirituality they need.
Observing this turn to the inheritance, non-Aboriginal commentators
sometimes make the pronouncement that Aboriginal church-going
is only skin deep. If it were totally sincere they would
not seek spirituality anywhere else. This comment, I believe,
reflects mostly the alienation from the churches of those
commenting. One could say, in rebuttal, that the differences
of culture and of mind inevitably meant problems of communication.
More relevant, however, is the fact that Christian faith
at the parish level has hardly been proposed as open hospitably
to what is true and good in the Aboriginal inheritance. Consequently,
Christian faith does not appear to Aboriginal people as comfortably
theirs. So instead of criticising their inheritance or ignoring
it, Christians should acknowledge that the values of the
Aboriginal forebears live on deep down within them. Thus
both church and Aboriginal people might become aware of the
significance of the inheritance if Christian life is to grow
among the people.
To attain this awareness, it is helpful to identify the surprising
number of connections or of likenesses between Aboriginality
and the Christian faith tradition. The Aborigines seem to
be instinctively in touch with their Aboriginality. They
feel it particularly in their way of living together and
in the attitudes they have picked up from their families
and from others of their people. Thus it is more than a personal
or interpersonal quality: it is a communion which includes
harmony with their forebears.
For those who retain their culture to a degree intact, the
communion also includes the land and the ancestral figures
of their mythic stories. Speaking of those with the culture
may seem to put down those Aborigines, largely in the south,
much of whose culture has been lost. They are a mixture of
a number of peoples. We speak of them sometimes as people
of Aboriginal descent. As a Christian one cannot help recalling
the Galileans. They too were despised by others as not being
of pure Israel descent. But, as a Christian one remembers
that Jesus was a Galilean, as also, it seems, were his apostles.
Father John Leary msc, a missionary among the traditional
people of the Northern Territory for over fifty years, insists
that those of Aboriginal descent have much to offer concerning
Aboriginality. Whereas the traditional people have lived
long within the myths and ceremonies in an unquestioning
way, those of Aboriginal descent have reflected and questioned,
seeking to understand.
Let us return to the likenesses between Aboriginality and
Christian faith. Southern Aborigines believe their communion
with their forebears and with their inheritance marks them
with an inner belonging. There is, in this marking, a likeness
to the mark or character of baptism. It too imprints a belonging,
a belonging within the communion of Christ and his followers.
This inner marking of baptism takes on a deeper meaning if
one is awake to the ‘death’ symbolism in the
baptism ritual. The symbolism is more manifest if the baptism
is performed by immersion, a form of baptism to which the
Catholic Church has returned only since the 1960s. The body
of the person being baptised is wholly immersed in the water
three times in the name of the Trinity. The immersion is
facilitated if the person lets go of control and trusts in
what is being carried out in the rite. This letting go in
the immersion into and under the waters symbolises a willingness
to accept a call to ‘death.’ In the ritual the
community prays that the person will receive a fuller life
as a child of God after passing through the waters. The person
is then led out of the waters, anointed with an oil of royalty,
presented with a lighted candle (symbolising the light of
faith) and received with joy into the communion of Christians – but
only because the person has symbolically died with Christ
in the waters. Paul the Apostle was referring to baptism
when he wrote: If we have died with Christ, we believe we
shall also rise with him. (Epistle to the Romans chapter
6, 8).
This dying and rising of baptism also
bears a number of likenesses to an initiation ceremony and
myth we will now consider.
The initiation ceremony is called the Punj and has been practised
by the Murrinhpatha people of Wadeye, Northern Territory.
The myth stands independent of the ceremony, but there is
such a great deal in common we can treat them as linked.
I will begin by presenting an account of the myth as given
by Professor W E H Stanner, an eminent authority on Aboriginal
religion. I have abbreviated his account.1
The myth opens with adults and youngsters together near a
stretch of water. The adults decide they will go foraging
for honey. They leave the youngsters under the guardianship
of the Mother of All called Mutjinga: she is sleeping. She
wakes and tells the youngsters to bathe. She then attracts
them to her one by one, encourages each to rest, and then
swallows each one. When the adults return there is no sign
of the children; they call for them everywhere. The people
begin to suspect the Old Woman. Two of the warriors follow
her tracks through the waters. They catch her and one breaks
her neck with a club. At that point they notice her belly
is swollen. Slowly, holding her, they cut her open with a
stone knife. There, in her womb, the children are alive.
They pull them out one by one from her womb; they wash them,
dry them in the fire, paint them with ochre, put on their
foreheads the mark of the initiated and take them back to
the camp where they are received joyfully.
In the light of that myth let us now
consider a summary version of the Punj ceremony also as observed
by Professor Stanner.2 In this account the ceremony began when the youths to be
initiated were taken to an area in the bush quite unknown
to them. On arrival they found all the men of the tribe assembled.
They were then put into a tight circle and not allowed to
speak. Next day they were declared nameless and treated as
if no longer human. They were kept naked and referred to
as wild dog who would be soon swallowed alive by Mutjinga.
Naturally they became fearful of what that would mean. Later
they were smeared with blood from head to foot and made to
stand within the heat of the fire till the blood had dried.
Next day the atmosphere changed. It was revealed to the boys
that the blood on them was not Mutjinga’s blood but
had been taken from their male in-laws. Further, the eerie
sound which had been presented to them as the voice of Mutjinga
was in fact produced by an instrument called the bull-roarer.
Amid these revelations the boys were also given special teaching
by the old men.
On the following day the youngsters were once more covered
with blood. When this had dried on their bodies they were
given a genital covering, a headband, a necklace and a hair
belt. They were no longer to be called wild dog. In the camp
they sat with their backs to the women, taking up their position
with the men. A week passed before they were allowed to bathe.
Then their bodies were adorned with ochres and charcoal as
insignia of their higher life.
In the Oceania Monograph no.11, chapters I and II, Stanner
offered a commentary on the myth and the Punj. There he took
the bold position that the ritual of deliverance to a fuller
life through the death of Mutjinga showed a likeness to a
ritual of sacrifice. The Mother of All had to be sacrificed
so that the youngsters would attain the higher life. However,
Stanner made clear he was not identifying the death of Mutjinga
with Christ’s sacrificial death celebrated in Christian
sacraments. On the other hand, he believed that the amount
of likeness between the two was worthy of notice.
* * * * * * *
The religion of traditional Aborigines, we know, was not
and is not a unity. Among the varied tribes and song-lines
there
is a variety of symbols, myths and ceremonies. But these varied
religious forms resemble one another more than they do those
of any indigenous people outside Australia.3 It is beyond me
to do justice to this unity in diversity. Let me state again:
this work focuses on the de-tribalised southern Aboriginal
people especially those of eastern New South Wales.
As I have stated, these somewhat assimilated people have lost
most of their traditional initiation ceremonies. Moreover they
are well aware that they are not living the kind of lives their
traditional people lived. However, they treasure what memories
they have of their tribe, of the sacred sites and of stories.
Given that so much has been lost to them it is natural that
they also nourish themselves with what they learn of the Aboriginal
inheritance of other places. Listening to them I believe they
have a feeling for what initiation would mean in their situation
so different from the traditional world. I have found support
for this belief (namely that they have a feeling for what initiation
would mean in their situation) from discussions with a number
of those who have taken on tasks of service for their people.
Each looks back to a moment in his/her personal story. One
speaks of a near-death experience, being about to drift into
death but being drawn back upon hearing her grandfather playing
a didgeridoo; another speaks of a release from a long struggle
with alcoholism; another tells of long years seeking to get
her family re-united after their being taken from their grandmother
as very young children. In these and other ways a number have
been empowered to take on responsibility in the cause of their
people. What they went through was a passage to a fuller life,
a form of initiation adapted to their situation within a de-tribalised
and traumatised people.
Three Implications
There are at least three implications to be drawn from what
has been raised, implications valuable for this work. The First
Implication was perceived by Professor Stanner from his material
on the Punj and the Mutjinga myth. He phrased it this way:
something went wrong from the very beginning.4 The
primal Mother of All (whom later religious cultures would
likely have called
a goddess) acted in an unpredictable, destructive, evil manner.
The sense that something went wrong at the origins is present
also in the scriptures, both Hebrew and Christian – and
highlighted as most significant. For example, the Adam and
Eve stories were not the first stories written but they were
highlighted by being placed almost at the beginning of the
Bible, Genesis ch. 2. From the story of a Fall at the origines
it was understood that all later people have been carried in
the womb of Eve and so have taken the wrongful turn with Adam
and herself. That evil continued its onward growth within the
human story was indicated in Genesis chs. 3 – 11.
The early Christian church built upon the Hebrew sin of origin
performed by the Father and Mother of All, transforming that
myth by recognising Christ Jesus as the New Adam, the New Start,
but prepared before all ages. The New Adam, by his death, set
people of faith free from the perversion of the old origin.
Thus some would describe Christ’s crucified body as a
second womb through which people can be born again. The dead
body of Christ, then, has some likeness to the dead body of
Mutjinga. She was killed by a blow to the neck and her womb
was then cut open by the warrior’s stone knife. Jesus
was killed by crucifixion and his side was then opened by the
thrust of the Roman soldier’s spear. (Gospel of John,
ch. 19, 31-37). >From the opened womb of Mutjinga came forth
the bloodied but living children who had become capable of
a fuller, mystical life through surviving the ordeal of being
swallowed into the body of the Mother of All. From the violent
thrust into Christ’s side there gushed water and blood
as signs of the Spirit being poured out upon Mary and the beloved
disciple, two figures who symbolised the mystical life within
the early church. The blood and water also signified the mystical
ceremonies within which the new children of God would be nourished.
Of course there are differences between the Christ and the
Mutjinga stories. Because she had turned to evil she had to
be killed so as to save the children. In the Christ story there
is a divine irony that the Spirit was poured out upon God’s
children through an act of imperial violence.
The Second Implication arises
from the experience of comparing the likenesses between Gospel
scenes and myths. This comparing
is the core approach of Aboriginal Lutheran Pastor George Rosendale
of Far North Queensland. Pastor Rosendale was a key contributor
to the book Rainbow Spirit Theology, Towards an Australian
Aboriginal Theology by the Rainbow Spirit Elders. (Harper
Collins Religious, Melbourne 1999). He is a popular lecturer
at Wontulp
Bi Binya Aboriginal College, Cairns and (prior to retirement)
at Nungalinya Aboriginal College, Darwin.5 Rosendale states,
on the evidence of his ministry among his people, that, when
they compare the biblical stories with their inherited stories,
they are enabled to read or hear the biblical story with insight. Without
some comparison the biblical stories do not ‘connect’ for
most of the people. With the comparison Aborigines feel the
Gospel does not wish to ignore their experience and tradition.
The Third Implication concerns the human quality which
underlies both Aboriginality and Christian baptism. The
story of Mutjinga
and of the Crucified both have a bodiliness about them. The
children are taken together into the body of Mutjinga: in
baptism people are to be incorporated warmly into the
communion of
Christ. In short: there is a strong communal feeling in both.
Among southern Aboriginal people there is an emphasis on
the extended family and close relationships between certain
families.
This communal belonging of the Aboriginals, however, sets
them up for problems in schools and other white dominated
arenas:
they often find themselves shy and lonely when without other
Aboriginal people around.
What are these considerations leading towards?
I have written of these connections and implications so
as to open up basic areas of likeness and of difference.
The
first half of this work will seek to build up the connections
and
implications in the hope that southern Aboriginal people
may overcome feelings of not belonging in the church.
Christian faith is not an exclusively western religion.
In fact,
because of the practices of capitalism and its individualistic
mindset,
even religious people of the modern west have lost much
of their communal sense along with other instincts for
religion.
They could, however, learn how profoundly human religion
is.
Aboriginality could help them in their re-learning.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Stanner,
WEH, Oceania Monograph no.11. On Aboriginal Religion 40-42.
2. Stanner, Oceania Monograph no. 11 pp.4-10.
3. Kenneth Maddock, The Australian Aborigines: a portrait
of their society (2nd Ed. Melbourne, Penguin Books, 1982),
1-2.
4. Stanner, Oceania Monograph 11, 40.
5. Pastor Rosendale has synthesised much of his teaching in his article ‘Breaking
Open the Word for Aborigines,’ COMPASS, Spring 2003. (PO Box 229, Kensington
NSW), 3-7.
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