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A Westerner's
Preparation for Dialogue
Frank Fletcher msc
Father Frank Fletcher msc, Theol.D, longtime theologian
and seminary lecturer, after twelve years with the Aboriginal
Catholic Ministry of Sydney archdiocese, is in the process
of writing a book to be entitled Jesus and the Dreaming. Until
the book can he completed and, hopefully, published, Frank
is happy to share the first drafts of his chapters with Nelen
Yubu. We begin in this issue with his first chapter, 'Meeting
the Objections'. These days Frank lives at Chevalier Resource
Centre, Kensington, NSW.
Meeting the Objections (CHAPTER 1)
THE MERE SIGHT of the title Jesus and the Dreaming can bring
cannonades from opposing directions. The first cannonade,
and one I take with respectful seriousness, comes from Aborigines:
how dare you think you can speak for us concerning our most
sacred things. To which I reply: please believe me, I would
not dare to speak for you, nor would I dare to suggest I have
knowledge of your sacred mysteries. I do not dispute the right
of many activists, both black and white, to suspect from the
title that this could be a Christian attempt to take over
Aboriginal spirituality. That has been 'the form' of settler
Australians. They have already presumed to assimilate much
Aboriginal symbolism and art whilst still withholding any
treaty or agreement that would guarantee the distinct status
of Aboriginal people within the nation. On their track record
would Western Christians be any more trustworthy in their
dealing with Aboriginal spirituality?
In my early years of ministry among Aboriginal people, I
attended a meeting addressed by the Aboriginal leader, Rev.
Charles Harris. Charles was the instigator for and a keen
organiser of the great trek of 1988 which brought tens of
thousands of Aborigines to Sydney for the We Have Survived
March 1988 during the bi-centenary celebrations of European
'settlement'. He was also the founder of the Aboriginal Christian
Conference. The meeting addressed by Charles was in protest
against the government's attempt to repeal the Aboriginal
Land Rights Act in the state of New South Wales.
What I remember most from his address was just one sentence:
'The God of the Christian Churches has failed the Aboriginal
people.' Those words cut me to the bone. But let me add quickly,
Charles did not mean to attack Jesus. He went on almost immediately
to say: '...but we Aborigines have found Jesus for ourselves.'
I have wrestled with the pain of this issue in the years since.
I am convinced, from knowing Charles, that what he was attacking
was the Westerners' false representation of the Christian
God to the Aboriginal people, the Western presumption that
God was to be identified with their civilisation. To accept
the Christian God meant embracing the civilisation whose practitioners
had taken over the Aboriginal land.
I have dedicated this work to Rev. Charles Harris because
the project began from the shock of his words. I believe it
is important that from the start I make clear the paradoxical
nature of the Christian presence in the world. On the one
hand we Western Christians have felt called to give a responsible
witness to Christ's presence in the world. On the other hand,
in so far as we have tended to interpret this Jesus and the
Dreaming responsibility as superiority over others, then we
have given a distorted witness to Christ. This paradox can
he expressed in the terms identity and non-Identity: the Christian's
presence in the world is a unity of identity with Christ and
of non-identity with Christ.
Christians carry in sacred trust a care for the mysteries
of Christ and his Gospel. Where they do so authentically in
the world, their sign of Christ is an identity. On the other
hand, Christians are as exposed as other people to cultural
blindness and to the compromises of their social situation.
An example of this compromising blindness would be the long
toleration of the institution of slavery. Another example
would be the acceptance that the lands of Indigenous people
could lawfully be seized by Western nations.
Some will say that the expansionist Europeans brought Christian
missionaries with them. And many missionaries and other Christians
tried to protect the native peoples. But, to our shame, the
majority of Christians supported the policies whereby the
indigenous and their lands were subjugated. Of course, it
is often pointed out that most of these policies go back to
previous eras. Rev. Charles Harris saw the effects of these
policies still active in 1989. He cried out that Christians
who supported them did not reflect the face of Jesus. We can
take heart, however, from Charles' further words: 'We Aborigines
have found Jesus for ourselves.'
There is a continuing hope among Aboriginal Christians that
through their own eyes they will see Jesus as one who is in
kinship with them. Scholarship regarding the historical Jesus
of Nazareth supports the people's hope. Though his country
was under the dominion of Rome, Jesus did not consider himself
as belonging to European civilization. His culture and society
could not in any sense be called Western. Likewise, of course,
his culture was not Aboriginal. Jesus of Nazareth, however,
was an ancient man, a man of his land who reverenced the stories
of his ancestors. Aborigines notice Jesus' closeness to nature,
his frequent withdrawals to its solitude. They feel the resonance
of the land in his stories. They are stirred also by his willingness
to assert the integrity and justice of God against those who
had long controlled the social order for their own self-interest.
For these and other reasons they feel a kinship with Jesus.
Should their gentle assertion of this kinship dispossess
us Westerners? I believe that their kinship, by enabling us
to judge ourselves from the viewpoint of those whom our Western
culture has despised for more than two millennia, helps us
to become aware that we do not possess the totality of identity
with Christ. We have signalled much non-identity.
A Quartet of Voices
Besides the activists, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, whose
serious objections I have tried to take aboard, there is also
a quartet of non-Aboriginal voices who are either antagonistic
or inhospitable to this project. The antagonistic voices are
the Christian fundamentalists and those secular post-moderns
who are aggressive in their defense of pluralism.
To the fundamentalists, the title 'Jesus and the Dreaming'
would seem another sell-out of the true faith of our fathers.
For pluralistic post-moderns there are no certainties and
certainly none in religion! They make much of the damage done
to indigenous people by the misguided acts of naive missionaries
in the past. The inhospitable voices are those of the New
Age and of the modern mind-set. The New Agers are influenced
by post- modernism. They too believe that pluralism in religions
is how it must be: the various religions present differing
paths from which the New Agers can choose whatever is helpful
toward a self- development spirituality. Thus a person may
choose some elements from Aboriginal spirituality, some from
Christian spirituality. But there would be suspicion of anyone
seeking any intrinsic inter-relationship between the two.
Some New Agers, seeing our title, may hope it will be another
story of a white person (preferably American) who has been
initiated into the most occult secrets of a desert Aboriginal
tribe far from Western contact. If they expect anything like
that, this work (as I have stressed already) will be a disappointment.
No desert initiations. My time has been spent mainly with
the Aboriginal people of Sydney and with some wider connections
in New South Wales and other southern Australian states. These
Aboriginal people have lost a lot of their language, their
sacred stories and their ceremonies. But they are convinced
of the Aboriginality that still marks their consciousness;
many remain aware of the dreaming spirits within the land
and of their own belonging to the land. Further, they remember
the stories of what was done to their families. They know
they are sometimes referred to in Northern Australia as 'mixed
race', implying they are not truly Aborigines. They are the
Galileans of Aboriginal Australia: and Jesus was a Galilean.
In fact, these 'mixed race' are the most dispossessed of their
people, they constitute the majority of the Aborigines and
they provide most of their leaders. These are the people among
whom I have found wonderful friends. They know me as nothing
more than a 'gubbah' [1] theologian
struggling within my Western Christian tradition to face honestly
the issues that challenge Western Christians as a result of
our historical treatment of Aboriginal people.
The Modern Mentality
Finally we come to the modern mentality: this is the seed
bed of all the objections from the quartet of voices. The
inner dynamic of modernity and what makes it so inhospitable
to religion is made clear in the story of that pioneer of
modernity, Copernicus. Copernicus (b. 1473) himself was a
happy combination of scientist and Catholic priest. It is,
however, not so much the man himself we must focus on but
upon the cultural revolution he set in motion. This scientist
recognized that planet earth is not the fixed center of the
universe: it is just one of the bodies moving round the sun.
Thus he perceived that the movements of sun, moon and stars
are not in reality as they appear to us from our observations
on earth. How these things appear to us is the result of our
observing them from our moving positions on the moving earth.
This new understanding of perception brought a change In
how humans felt in the cosmos. This shift provided the impetus
and the passion of the modern mind-set. The Copernican revolution,
as it became accepted after Galileo, stirred Europeans against
any naive understanding that the universe was a cosy arrangement
set up by God to be a home for humans. Since religious traditions
had portrayed the Creator as the maker of their center stage
home, the Copernican awakening seemed to shake the foundations
of the religious traditions. Humans began to view themselves
as tiny creatures dwelling on a small planet in a vast and
impersonal universe. So the cultural attitude toward the earth
changed from spiritual enchantment to the material attitude
of practical exploration and utilization.
Darwin reinforced the displacement of the human from center
stage. Humans appeared to have emerged fortuitously from a
random flux within an evolutionary spiral. These scientific
attitudes had an effect upon poetry, music and sacred stories.
The Greeks and the medieval thinkers who built upon the Greek
heritage had implicitly accepted that there were a number
of ways of coming to meaning: the rational scientific was
just one; the aesthetic (poetry, music, stories) was another;
and the union of the aesthetic and the mystical (sacred stories
and ceremonies) still another. In the modern mentality, however,
tile status of the non-scientific was diminished. The moderns
affirmed that the cosmos is comprehensible by scientific reason
alone. The other approaches, if taken as serious answers to
world problems, were nonsense and dangerous. Thus the modern
mentality is inhospitable as much to the religion of Jesus
as to the Aboriginal dreaming with its ceremonies and stories.
Jesus and the Dreaming Philosophers added to this inhospitable
and disenchanted mentality by accepting as true the modern
Westerners' emerging feeling of the conscious self as autonomous.
Indeed, they went on to treat the individual conscious self
as quite separate from the world within which it dwells. They
viewed knowledge as a construction produced by the subjective
operations of consciousness. This 'turn to the subjective'
is at the root of the more recent shift from the technologically
optimistic modern to the skeptical post-modern. Philosophers
and artists have felt painfully the hubris of the Western
nations who presumed that their subjective constructions of
law, government and civilization were normatively right and
so were to be imposed upon others. These post-moderns perceived
that, in the Western nations, their technological supremacy
emboldened their will to power over others. So the post-moderns
were stirred with an ethical revulsion against the modern
certainties which, whilst supposedly neutral, were in fact
at the service of power.
Both the modern and the post-modern mentalities delight
to dig into what is behind Western institutions including
the Christian Church. Often Christians have found these critical
investigations much to the point. This situation of being
under critical examination, however, has had two sad effects
among Christians. Firstly, modernity's exaltation of reason
as the way of penetrating to true meaning skewed many Christians
in their attitude toward the Bible and sacred rites. They
began to insist that both Bible and sacred rites had to be
understood totally as historically based and their accounts
as true in a quite literal way. This position was dominant
in the Church till about mid-20th century. At that time some
acceptance was-given to scholarship which demonstrated that
the Bible was constituted by a variety of literary forms such
as the poetic, the dramatic, the mythic as well as the historical.
A tension, however, still remains.
A second position arose from the first. Many Christians
insisted there could he no compromises with modern or postmodern
investigations and their world-views. These believers have
taken a fiercely supernaturalist view in defending what they
regard as the fundamentals of Christian faith. Christianity
in its fundamentals is to be defended not only as historical
and literally true but it alone is true. 'There is no other
name under heaven by which we must be saved.' (Acts of the
Apostles, ch.4, verse 12). This is fundamentalism. It breeds
an intransigent mind. However, we can sympathize to some extent
with their fear that any compromise on the uniqueness of Christianity
might lead to a faith collapse.
In this work: we will be forced to take a stand against
the fundamentalist view that the Aboriginal dreaming is merely
a human invention or the paganism warned against in the Bible.
We will encounter fundamentalist objections again and again
as we proceed. It may help to emphasize from the beginning
that the Christian tradition affirms other religions. The
most eminent and contemporary statement on this matter was
that of Vatican Council 11 (1962-1965). The Declaration on
non-Christian Religions (Vatican Council 11 Documents, ed.
A Flannery, Collegeville 1977. 738-739) states: 'Throughout
history even to the present day there is found among the different
peoples an awareness of a hidden power which lies behind the
course of nature and the events of human life ... This awareness
and recognition results in a way of life that is imbued with
a deep religious sense.' A little later in the same section
it reads: 'The Catholic Church has a high regard for the manner
of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although
differing in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless
often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all.' Evident
in the background to the Vatican 11 statement is the long
cherished Hebrew and Christian belief in a primordial revelation
affecting all peoples from their beginnings (see j R Gelselmann,
Ue Meaning of Tradition, Burns and Oates, London, 1966. Chapter
11, 39-78). 8
Jesus and the Dreaming Following upon Vatican II the Church
set up processes of dialogue with other world religions and
more recently with the traditional or primal religions such
as the Aboriginal. This dialogue with primal religions has
stepped up in importance, especially in Africa. At the beginning
of the new millennium the redoubtable Pope John Paul 11 spoke
out on the urgency of dialogue between cultures and traditions
(World Day of Peace Message, January 1, 2001).
In the face of the widespread aggression of assimilationist
policies, the Pope saw dialogue as the only hope (World Day
section n.7). People do well to affirm their own culture but
they need also to recognize its limitations. Regarding limitations,
whilst acknowledging its extraordinary scientific and technological
achievements, he noted that within the West 'there is a deepening
human, spiritual and moral impoverishment'( n.9).
The cultural models of the West, therefore, have had a corrosive
impact on some other cultures. He mentioned particularly the
condition of cultural minorities dwelling within the context
of such dominant cultures (n.8). In all areas of concern the
Pope saw that an open dialogue between the differing religious
traditions should play a constructive role (n.16). Clarifying
Our Direction The urgency for dialogue, including that between
spiritual traditions, applies particularly in the case of
indigenous peoples living within Western societies such as
those in the Americas and Australasia. Dialogue would need
a significant body of members of the dominant culture (Australians
or Canadians etc.) who recognize the obligation to dialogue.
However, prior to dialogue we Westerners must take stock
of our readiness for dialogue. Why? Let me spell this out
clearly: the majority of Westerners lack the authenticity
necessary for this dialogue. We have little awareness of the
human, spiritual and moral impoverishment of the modern Western
culture and even less awareness of how it has possessed our
forebears and ourselves in our dealings with the indigenous.
Consequently mainstream Australia (or Canada etc.) harbours
a commonsense ideology of assimilation. It believes in giving
help to indigenous people: but it is help so that they will
fit in with the mainstream! No presentation of what the history
of assimilation has done, no evidence to show how the wounding
of a culture affects people, no cast studies of generations
of suffering can dent the ignorance of the assimilationist
commonsense.
I confess, too, that many Christians share this common sense
and are little concerned for what has been done to the spiritual
life of the indigenous. Few understand that a dialogue truly
sensitive to what has affected the Aboriginal spiritual world
would have to take in their whole encounter with our 'settler'
culture-and so would involve questions of our spiritual condition.
In short, we need preparation to find within ourselves, as
well as about ourselves, the truth of what has passed as our
spiritual attitudes in this land. We have to face the sickness
we moderns are and have been. If it is evident that this inner
preparation for dialogue is necessary, then the purpose of
this work will also be clear. It is not directly dialogue
with the indigenous. It is a Westerner's preparation for authentic
dialogue. That is the subtitle of this work. For us Christians,
the preparation for spiritual dialogue should include an approach
to the Word of God as mirrored within creation in the form
of Jesus of Nazareth, an ancient Galilean man with experience
to some degree akin to the indigenous tradition. Through this
approach we may be astonished to find that the primal people,
whom the West has disdained for more than two millennia, can
now help us moderns toward a more life- giving, Christian
spirituality.
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[1] A gubbah
is urban Aboriginal term for a white person
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