Communion in Country: an Aboriginal meditation on the paschal triduum

Introduction

Let me set the scene for what I want to say with a few historical remarks about the relationship between Christians and native peoples.

Historically, the settler colonial churches were the guardians of those of us who survived the frontier wars, especially in the east and south of the continent. With funding from the state, settler churches gathered us into missions and told us that our traditional way of life, our spirituality, was evil and that is needed to be replaced with their own, entirely white and British, way of life. In most places, not all, we were not presented with an option but only with an ultimatum. So, our experience of Christianity is largely that of whiteness, and a very violent form of whiteness at that. A whiteness that will happily destroy country, culture, family and a whole way of life for the sake of possessing the land and its wealth.  

The legacy of this missions-history is twofold. On the one hand, most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still tick a Christian box when we fill out the census documents. On the other hand, the vast majority of us—particularly in the east and south—are disinclined to ever step through a church door.  This is increasingly the case as our work on recovering culture, cosmology, and spirituality from the rubbish-bins of colonial history gathers pace.  This is increasingly the case as we recognise and name the continuing whiteness of ecclesial structures, leadership councils, and approaches to spiritual formation.

One of the many paradoxes in play here is that Aboriginal people generally have a lot of time for Jesus. As presented in the gospels, Jesus seems more invitational and genuinely helpful than your average Christian missionary. He seems willing to transgress the barriers of gender and race set by his society, treating women as worthy conversation-partners and even learning some theology from an indigenous woman. He also goes up against the religious and civic authorities where their policies are designed to hurt or marginalise the poorer and more vulnerable members of the community. He tells terrific stories about country in the parables and becomes country himself by dying and being reborn as the body of country and the spirit of loving community. Just as our ancestor-creators do.  So, we have time for Jesus, even as we abandon the settler churches in droves.

In what remains of our time, I’d like to share with you some of the ways in which I am seeking, ever so tentatively, to weave a new way of being Aboriginal and being Christian from this rubbish-heap of colonial experience. Amongst the discarded valuables are Aboriginal stories about the meaning of country and how to live and die in country with respect and a sense of kinship with all that is alive.  But there are also trinkets of discarded christology, traditions about Jesus that are often rehearsed in our churches, but rarely lived. To create a Christianity that our people can live with, a christianity that doesn’t require us to supress our cultural spirit and abuse our social bodies, I am seeking to work with both country and Christ to create a paschal Christology of country.  So come, walk with me through an Easter Triduum set in country.

Maundy Thursday

When it was evening, he came with the twelve. They took their places and were eating.

(Mark 14.17)

When Aboriginal people get together for a feed we share our joy and our sorrow. Joy can take many forms: funny and highly embellished stories about recent doings; fond stories of revered elders; still older stories about the ancestors who formed country and taught us how to live in it.  Sorrow is also present. The sorrow accompanying frequent illness, incarceration, and death, of family brokenness, betrayal and economic hardship. Stories of casual and not-so-casual racism at work or in public interactions.  There is also discussion of a problem-solving nature. What may the members of the community realistically hope for? How might whatever is hoped for be attained, how does one go about making it happen? The setting for the meal will be partly inside, and partly outside, depending on the weather. Some of the cooking will be done over a campfire, where everyone will eventually drift to continue the storytelling as the light fades.  The host of the meal will be a matriarch of the clan, or perhaps two or three of them. The men and younger woman will all have their roles to play, but it will be the matriarchs who manage the business and who are very much in charge.  You cross them at great peril!

Aboriginal meals are in many ways similar to the meal Jesus had with his disciples before he was arrested. It was, apparently, modelled on a Passover meal. The family of disciples gathered around and told stories. Old stories about the creation of the world, the sojourn of God’s people as slaves in Egypt and their escape under Miriam and Moses to a land of freedom. More recent stories, about the journey to Jerusalem from Galilee and all the happenings along the way. Fears were expressed about the future of their community in the face of political and religious opposition. And, even as a betrayer sneaks aways to do his dirty work, Jesus tells a new story about the way in which his own body will become like both the Passover bread and wine, which sustains the community on its journey to freedom, and the Passover lamb which is sacrificed to keep the homes of the faithful safe from the Angel of death. Jesus himself takes the role of both the manager of business and chief storyteller. In this, he is like our matriarchal women. But he also takes the role of the slave who washes his disciples’ feet and who, later in the evening, is quite literally taken by the temple authorities as a scapegoat for all their failings. The story therefore continues by torchlight, by fire, outside the house where the meal began.  And, later still, by fire outside the place where Jesus is being tortured.

How are we to weave an Aboriginal christology from these two meals, so different and yet so similar? Perhaps by drawing back a little to catch some of the bigger patterns and themes. First, that the exchange and consumption of food in meals performs both cosmic and community-forming functions. At the cosmic level, our need to eat is about the dependence all of us have on country, the biosphere, the environment in which we live. In Aboriginal cosmology, we literally eat our kin.  We take only what is needed from our environment, and we give thanks to the turtle, the bird, the kangaroo, the yam root or the fish who gives of its life that we might live. At the same time we promise that, when we die, our remains will also become the compost of life for whatever fruitful creature will spring from our bones. The eucharistic words of Jesus therefore make sense to us. He is making himself food for others. He is giving his life that so that what is dead may become both alive and fruitful.

The meal is also community forming. In Aboriginal culture, the exchange of food with one another also performs an exchange of joy and sorrow, of hope and the shattering of hope, of life and death and everything in between, with each other. The reciprocal exchange of these things in story-form binds us together in love and kinship. We literally imbibe each other—in body, mind and imagination—the more we gather to exchange the food we have taken from country. Shared meals are therefore country’s greatest tonic against the evils of neoliberal individualism and narcissism. We learn that we are part of each other’s dramas and stories, that we have parts to play—significant, important parts—in each other’s lives. We learn, also, that we are not alone, that we have kin. The food teaches us that we are kin with country. The people who share the food with us teach us that by imbibing country together we are made one body and mind and imagination in the service of country. For the dreaming stories of ancestor-creators that are told at meals teach us that country is bigger than any of us, that our purpose as kin is to live in and for country. For without her, for without her generous love, none of us would survive.  Christ at the last supper is like country for us. He is like an ancestor-creator who is an avatar or voice for country who passes down the sacred stories of old. He is bread and wine, who sustains us all and gathers us together to eat. He is the lamb who is sacrificed that we might live, and live in community. He is the servant who washes our feet to show us how to love one another. He is country. He tells us who he is, who we are, and what our responsibility towards one another looks like in practice.

That all of this takes place in close proximity to fire and to evening tells us that the exchange of lives through the meal is potentially transformative for everyone involved. For fire and evening have always borne witness to that liminal space between fixed abodes of being. Neither day nor night, twilight is a time between times when torches are lit and fires set. By that light we see, but not well, not well enough to be certain about what is changing. It is a time for stories of transformation, when people, landscapes and whole histories might change, become something other than what they are in full light of day.  In the gospel stories, the lighting of the torches signals the time when the disciples travel to Gethsemane where Jesus will become transformed from hero and teacher into scapegoat and martyr.  The fire outside the place where Jesus is tortured lights the scene where Peter, leader and arch-symbol of all the male followers, will be transformed from disciple and supporter into denier and betrayer.

Great and Holy Friday

‘. . . it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’

(Caiaphas in John 11.50)

In the ritual version of the Paschal triduum, it is the meal on Thursday evening and all that is said there by Jesus, that provides the interpretive key for what is to follow.  For, after the arrest, Jesus says very little. Apart from a few brief responses here and there, Jesus is mostly silent.  It is his actions, and those of the people around him, that speak most profoundly.  Here the meal from the night before starts to find its way into the social and economic world as well as the cosmos. I’ve spoken, already, about the centrality of death to eating. In this fundamentally anthropological and biological sense, meals are about things that are dead sustaining other things in life. Meals are about the way in which country dies in order that country may live. In Christian terms, Jesus of Nazareth dies in order that his dead body may give life to the new body of Christ which is community and cosmos. But now, in the events of Great and Holy Friday, we are invited to look at this death from another angle, to see it as the result of a great evil: the evil of empire.

Why did Jesus die? In social and political terms, the answer has to be ‘because he threatened the carefully balanced détente that existed between the temple aristocracy and the Roman invaders of Judea.’ The Romans had occupied both Galilee and Judea more than a century before. Imperial policy at the time of Jesus seemed to cultivate strong ties with chosen religious and civic elites, in this case, the aristocratic families connected with the temple priesthood and its bureaucracy.  These elites were cultivated as collaborators who could enforce the iron-fisted ‘peace of Rome’, but at one step removed. If they toed the line, keeping the more radical elements of the colonised population in check and the taxation system running smoothly, then they were rewarded with power and money. If not, as demonstrated in the uprising of 70 CE, then they and all they sought to govern could be crushed.

In the eyes of the ruling families, Jesus was seen as a potential unsettler of this delicate settlement. By his portrayal of God as lover and liberator of those populations which suffered most under the yolk of Rome (rather than as friend and legitimator of aristocratic policy) he attracted the attention of the Jerusalem bureaucracy. After a period of investigation which evidently involved interviewing both Jesus himself and many of his acquaintances, they decided he was a dangerous man who needed to die before he was able to stir the masses against the Roman ‘peace’.  So, they had him arrested at the festival, interrogated, tortured, and finally crucified with the permission of Pilate, the Roman procurator.

Now, what do Aboriginal people see when they look at the crucified Jesus? We see two things. First, we see a blackfella who attracted the attention of empire just by preaching a message about inclusive love. We see a teacher of Aboriginal lore who drew examples from country in the parables. We see a fella accused of heresy because his spiritual teachings very often critiqued those of the powerful elites. We see a fella who, by inspiring his impoverished countrypeople to endure and to look out for each other under the yolk of empire, became the scapegoat for that same Empire. The one on whom all its colonial sins were laid.

But we see something else as well. Because Jesus was hung from a tree and—in a sense became one with the that tree that had been cut down and fashioned into an instrument of torture—we also see country itself, cut down and crucified under the yoke of Empire. The meal had already suggested that Christ was country: co-extensive with the water, the bread, the wine and the meat that country provides from its own body. But now, as he is nailed to the tree, the analogy is extended to the way in which country itself has been crucified by colonial empires: raped, tortured and pillaged so that a few, a very few, can become unimaginably wealthy.  

Who can doubt that this is what has happened here, on Aboriginal land? Who can doubt that it is still happening? Who benefits from the destruction of our lands and waterways by mining companies, pastoral companies, forestry companies? It is not the land itself! Our rivers are dying. Our rainforests are drying out. Our ever-more compacted soil is turning to salt and to ash under the twin assaults of herd farming and wildfires. Our birds and animals become endangered or extinct at rates that outstrip any other place on earth. Colonisation, you see, is not only about genocide. It is also in the business of ecocide. Country is suffering, is being tortured, is being crucified on a scale that is no longer sustainable as part of the cycle of life. And as she dies, the community who depends on country for life and for sustenance, is scattered and loses its way.

Holy Saturday

On the sabbath day they rested, according to the commandment.

(Luke 23.56.b)

This is Luke’s summary of all that happened whilst Jesus rested in his tomb on the Jewish sabbath, what we now call ‘Holy Saturday’.  In some traditions, particularly those from the African north or orthodox east of the church, a whole theology has grown up around what it might mean both for Jesus to rest in the tomb and for the church to rest on Holy Saturday, beginning with the fact that the Greek hēsych-asan, here translated ‘rest’ (ἡσύχασαν), can also be translated ‘silence’ or ‘peace’.  

My own approach to the silence, or peace, or rest of Holy Saturday is informed by the concept of dadirri, as practiced and promulgated by N’ganji elder Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann. For her, dadirri is a deep listening. Not, it should be said, to Scripture, or the church, or even to the voice of God as it is mediated in a human heart. No, dadirri is a listening for the voice of the divine in country. In country.

Here one might talk of a reorientation of human listening towards the gifts that are given us in the rest, the silence, or the peace of country. For country is at peace when it is allowed to be itself, unmolested by thoughtless interventions from the white possessive that is colonial society. Country is at peace when its ecosystems are allowed to dance and to circumambulate in symbiotic communion. When birds are allowed to forage and to sing and to dive from the skies as birds are meant to do. When trees are allowed to send their roots into the damp substructure of the soil and send their branches out into the air and into the sun. When wombats are allowed to scurry this way and that, cleaning up roots, grasses and tubers, and leaving behind deposits of nutrient-rich poo, as wombats are meant to do. When alpine moss is allowed to grow slowly, oh so slowly, over hundreds of years, absorbing and transforming all the particulate matter and carbon dioxides that pollute the atmosphere. When snakes slither from water-hole to crevasse to a spot of sunbaking on a rocky outcrop, when they shed their skin to become more fully themselves. When they show us the way in which country transforms itself through death to become life in all its excessive fulness, over and over and over again.

Here, through a decision to attend to country—not just for an hour, or a day, but repeatedly and consistently over a lifetime of prayer—human beings might notice that country is able to show us what is truly divine. And more, how it is that the divine is at work in the world and in the cosmos. We might notice, for example, that land cannot be forever productive and fruitful. That is needs to rest, to recover, to be at sabbath from the endless uses that human beings would put it to. We might notice, through this dadirri of sustained attentiveness, that fruit needs to fall to the ground and die, that it needs to be buried in the soil. That fruit needs to be transformed by microbes, microscopic organisms that inhabit good soil, in order to become the seed for new life and new fruitfulness. 

This is what Aboriginal eyes seek when we look at country. This is what Aboriginal ear hears in the silence which is holy Saturday. First, that the buried body of God’s child must be transformed by the microbial work of the Holy Spirit, if it is to be reborn as another body. And second, that the snake-like transformations of death into life happen according to their own time and their own schedule. They cannot be hurried. They cannot be pushed along or quashed and repackaged into notions such as ‘timeliness’ or ‘convenience’. The work of the divine is slow. And, if we are to become wise human beings, in any meaningful sense, we might perhaps become slow as well.

The feast of the resurrection

While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognising him . . . then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he vanished from their sight.

(Luke 24.15-16, 31)

Easter Sunday is rightly called the principal feast day of the Christian church. And, if the gospels are to be believed, it is a feast that begins in the middle of the night when it is dark. Not at dawn, nor at noonday. In the middle of the night. That is when Christ was raised. The darkness signifies, it seems to me, a certain opacity concerning what the resurrection is, and where it can be located in time and space. Do you know that word ‘opacity’? It means ‘without transparency or translucence’; it can also mean ‘obscure, resistant to understanding or meaning’. When it is dark, it is difficult to see. And it is difficult to ‘see’ the resurrection of Christ. 

Let me remind you of a few puzzling features of the resurrection narratives as we have them in the gospels. First, they do not agree with each other in terms of narrative details. Who discovered the empty tomb first? Was it the men (as in Paul) or the women (as in the gospels). Who were the first witnesses of the newly resurrected Christ? Mary Magdalene (as in John)? Peter (as in Paul), or no-one at all (as in Mark?)  Who met the first arrivals at the tomb? Was it a young man (as in Mark), an angel (as in Matthew) or two men in dazzling white (as in Luke)?  Also, what did the resurrected Christ look like? Like Jesus of Nazareth? If that were so, surely Mary would have recognised him (in John’s account), or the disciples on the road to Emmaus (in Luke). But they don’t. He is somehow unrecognizable. Furthermore, in Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance, he actually disappears from sight the moment he is recognised. Indeed, several accounts have Jesus walking through closed doors or suddenly dematerialising. Which makes one wonder what kind of body this resurrection body must be. Certainly not like one that works like yours or mine!  Indeed, Pauline tradition shifts much of the language of a resurrected body of Christ away from the notion of an historical person with a genuinely fleshy, but rather unusual, body and towards the language of a social or cosmic body in which the presence and activity of Christ may be discerned, but rarely in the sense of individual, personal, presentation. Here the resurrected body of Christ becomes word and ritual, bread, wine, community, even cosmic kinship.

A few years ago I tried to capture some of this theology in a rather bad poem:

Christ is risen.
For and with the little ones,
the forgotten and abused ones,
the poor and the broken ones.
Christ is risen into mob,
into church,
into loving kindness.
Christ is risen into word and ceremony,
into ritual water,
bread and wine.
Christ is risen into country and waterway,
into air, earth, fire and water.
Christ is risen into nova, supernova and stardust.
Praise him.

What do Aboriginal people ‘see’ when they look on this opaque and rather elusive body of the resurrected Christ? What we see is another presentation of our ancestor-creators, figures from our dreaming stories who are at once only too human in their capacity to reason and to communicate, and yet are able to shape-shift into various animal forms or features of the land and seascape. Some even become heavenly bodies, like stars. There is a sense in which each of these ancestral figures, from whom we as humans are also descended, are individual avatars or presentations of country. They are the voice or face of country, the way in which country communicates. Secondarily, of course, they appear in story and ceremony. Just as Jesus does, in the three classic sacraments of word, baptism and eucharist. For us, then, Jesus is country. And especially, in this resurrection mode, the capacity of country for make life out of death. To pass through death, to life. And to communicate and transport that capacity for life to any place, person or situation.

It is also worth reflecting on the reappearance of fire at our vigils of the resurrection. The ‘new fire’ which the church lights at Easter, in the middle of night and before the dawn has arrived, riffs off the story of Peter’s reintegration into the community of Jesus at a beach on the Sea of Galilee in the gospel of John. The disciples are fishing when the resurrected Christ suddenly appears assist them. Afterwards, as they are eating, Jesus asks Peter, in a classically tripartite manner, if he loves him. Peter replies that he does. Three times. And each time he is given a new job or vocational responsibility: ‘feed my lambs’, ‘tend my sheep’, ‘feed my sheep’. Through this ritual, Peter is again transformed. His status as a denier and betrayer of Jesus is put aside and remade so that he is able to take up the leadership of the church community. The charcoal fire by the beach, at dawn, again symbolises a place of change and transformation.

In Aboriginal cultures, as we have seen, meals and storytelling are very often accompanied by campfire. But campfire also accompanies many of our traditional rituals of initiation, when boys and girls are transformed from catechumens into fully responsible members of the community. Last year, in far north Queensland, an elder was telling us of a time when she witnessed the newly initiated boys returning from their time on country learning the ancestral stories of the tribe. A great fire was lit on the beach, at twilight, to welcome them home as transformed people. As they emerged from the tree-line, all painted up with ancestral stories, the fire rose from its place on the beach and surrounded the new initiates. It danced between them, avatar of an ancestral spirit, binding them to their purpose and confirming them in a new identity and vocation.

Conclusion

So, three days. A walk through country and through the events of the Easter Triduum. Three moments of encounter and transformation with country and with Christ. I would finally describe this walking as a walk of communion with Christ and with country, as my very favourite saying of Jesus intimates:

Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there my servant will be also.

(John 12:24-26a)

Here Christ and country come together in intimate communion. They are not the same, but through the alchemy of poetry, they are shown to be related to each other in some deeply interfused way. Here Christ compares himself, and the way he will die, to the seed that falls into the ground and ceases to be. By that ceasing, by that death, it becomes fruitful. It becomes capable of living again, in a way that far exceeds its capability as a single seed. This is the lore of country, this is the Aboriginal way. Christ for us is therefore the voice of an ancestor-creator who teaches us the lore and invites us to participate in this living and dying and living again through an adherence to this lore. Following, in this sense, means mimesis: imitating. By imitating Christ we imitate country. By imitating country, we imitate Christ.

But what of that part which says we must not love our lives, we lose them; that we ought to hate our lives ‘in this world’ so that we can keep them for eternal life? This trawloolway man reads that as a warning against becoming culturally captive to the almighty ‘me’ that is part and parcel of the neoliberal culture, the social imaginary, of settler-colonial societies. ‘Me’ means that I am a single grain. ‘Me’ means that when I reach the end of my powers, I am very much alone and can go no further in what can be achieved or changed. ‘Me’ means that I can never be helped or share my rather grandiose sense of responsibility with anyone else. ‘We’, on the other hand, means seeing ourselves as a part of a larger kinship network that can be described as either the cosmic and social body or Christ or the matrix that is country. ‘We’ means that our single seeds are related to other seeds and what they are meant to do, so that if we act out of sense of communion with the whole, we can create a veritable forest, new lungs for country. ‘We’ means that when we die or reach the end of our powers, the power of the whole can take what we are and multiply our fruitfulness so that I become seed for more growth, compost for another harvest which, quite literally, feeds both community and planet. The narcissistic ‘I’ will kill us all. The cosmic and communal ‘We’ is better. ‘We’ can save and heal both our troubled communities and our suffering planet.

Garry Worete Deverell

This piece is based on talks given at conferences for the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (June 2023) and the Australian Ecumenical Council for Spiritual Direction (July 2024), as well as a seminar delivered at St Francis' College in May 2024. 

Lent and racism

It's Lent in the Christian churches, a time to reflect, become aware, and repent of our bad behaviour. To repent means to stop the bad behaviour and put in place systems and practices designed to prevent such behaviour from occuring again. Repentance also means doing what you can to restore and repair the broken relationships your bad bahaviour has left in its wake. Including, of course, making just reparation.

Repentance is not primarily a practice for individuals. It is a practice for institutions, corporations and communities.

At the corporate level, I would call on the churches to repent of their racist behaviour towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, racist behaviour that includes:

• Blak-cladding, that is, making your institution look mob-friendly on the outside, whilst remaining thoroughly racist on the inside. Examples of black-cladding in churches include adorning rooms, buildings, regions and projects with blakfella tropes, hanging Indigenous art, and holding multiple 'welcome' and 'acknowledgement' of country ceremonies. None of these things are bad in themselves. They become bad when they are designed to hide the fact that the organisation continues to discriminate against blakfellas: our bodies, our knowledges, and our cultures.

• Expecting blak people to work for casual rates, or for free. The vast majority of blak people who work for churches do not enjoy permanent, secure, employment in jobs that are ongoing. Most of us work for the church as volunteers or casuals, even if we are ordained and/or have recognised qualifications in theology and ministry. Why? Because we, and what we have to offer, are simply not valued. Not enough to employ us, anyway. If there is a whitefella or someone from a more recent immigrant group going for a proper job, it is they who will most likely get it. For mob are, quite literally, the last and the least in the church's colonial economy.

• expecting underpaid or volunteer blak people (out of the goodness of our hearts) to do the anti-racism work for the whole organisation. For racism is not something that dominant cultures (read 'white' cultures) give much thought to. And certainly not something they allocate time, energy or money to. For, by definition, racism does not affect dominant cultures. 'If it is not happening to me, then it is not happening'. Thus, when blak people complain about being ignored or mistreated, the default response is 'well, you do something about it'. Which is to entirely mis/place where the responsibility lies. It is to burden victim-survivors with the task of expiating the pertpetrator's sin.

• marginalising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges. Although blak people have a long experience with this country, an experience which gives us a unique and expert perspective on how to live the life of the spirit well in this place, that is apparently of little or no consequence for the dominant culture. The churches and their instutions continue to ignore and supress the fact of our spiritual seniority in this country and worship, instead, at the feet of Europe and North America. You cannot study blak knowledges at the churchly institutions where whitefellas study. You will rarely encounter blak teachers, preachers or liturgists, except for those who are brought in for one-off, entirely token, bits and pieces. Because what is important is whitefella knowledge. Everything else, especially the knowledge of mob, is entirely surplus to requirements.

All of these corporate behaviours do enormous damage to the bodies and spirits of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We are forever wounded. We hurt. We languish. Our health suffers. For each day we must rise to the struggle to be ourselves, even in this, our own country.

The remedies for these damaging behaviours are obvious, are they not? Change the heart, not just the outward appearance. Value blak people and what we can contribute. Employ and learn from us. Care for us. Work with us. Allow us be who we are in God. Just as Jesus would.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent 2025

The Pilgrimage of Prayer: Luke's Transfiguration

Texts:  Exodus 34.29-35; 2 Corinthians 3.12–4.2; Luke 9.28-36

This Wednesday the church enters the season of Lent.  The Ash Wednesday rite sets the tone for the season by calling the church to a time of prayer and reflection, inviting all who will to go on pilgrimage with Jesus to Jerusalem, the place of his suffering, his death and, ultimately, his resurrection.  The point of the pilgrimage is revealed in the passage immediately prior to the one we read from Luke this morning:  that in walking with Jesus to his death, we might experience our own death—the death of our most alienated selves—and be raised glorious new selves with Christ, selves able to experience the joy and peace of God’s freedom.  So today, immediately before the pilgrimage begins in earnest, we read a story from Luke’s gospel which may be taken as a key statement about the meaning of everything that will unfold from here on in, both for Jesus and for pilgrims like us.  It is the story of Jesus’ transfiguration before Peter, James and John.  It is a story that, if read carefully and with discernment, is able to shed a great deal of light on what the Christian pilgrimage is all about.  

The first lesson to be learnt from this story is in its first line: ‘Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray.’  Here we learn that pilgrimage is about going where Jesus goes, and doing what Jesus does.  Simple to say, but not so simple to do, hey?  A number of hurdles stand in the way.  The first is the fact that some of us may not, in fact, want to go with Jesus.  The text says that Jesus took the disciples with him, which implies that they were going and doing, not according to their own wills and desires, but according to Jesus’ will and desire.  It may be that some of us, even amongst those gathered here today, are not so keen to do that.  Some of us may have other plans—to do whatever it takes, for example, to secure the respect and admiration of family, church or society.  If these are your plans then, of course, going on pilgrimage with Jesus is not going to be an attractive option.  For Jesus would ask that you put such plans aside in favour of his own plan.  Jesus would ask that you be able to say, ‘not my will but yours.’ 

This is the good news, though: if you risk this way, you’ll find yourself in a better place than if you stick to your own plans.  Because our own plans tend to make us miserable, do they not?  Isn’t it true that, even for those of us who actually get what we want (not that many of us do), we often do so only to discover that what we want is not what we need?  That is the difference between God and ourselves, you see.  We are into smoke and mirrors, deceiving ourselves into thinking that what we want is what we need; but God is into truth, cutting through the advertising to what we really do need.  Being our maker, God has the inside running on these things, strangely enough!  So listen to what Jesus says, all you people who know what you want, or think you do.  ‘Those who want to save their lives will lose it, but those who forfeit their lives for my sake, will gain it.’ (Lk 9.24).  

That brings me to a second hurdle that often stops us from following Jesus.  The fact that it is very difficult to go where Jesus goes and do what Jesus does if you know very little about what kind of person Jesus is, and therefore the kinds of things Jesus is likely to do.  You may have seen the bumper-sticker, or read the paper-back emblazoned with the question “What would Jesus do?”  It’s a great question to ask yourself, but only if you happen to know a fair bit about Jesus already.  Now, unfortunately for some, knowledge of Jesus can’t be downloaded into your brain from the Net.  Nor can it be necessarily absorbed from books, in that slower, more old-fashioned, process called reading.  Don’t get me wrong, the main source of our knowledge about Jesus is, in fact, a book, a book called the New Testament.  And one can never pretend to be a follower of Jesus unless one is listening to the words of the New Testament on a very regular basis.  But there is more to knowledge of Jesus than reading about him.  There is also that personal communion with a living Jesus that is called, very simply in the Christian tradition, prayer.  Which brings me to the cusp of a second lesson from Luke.

The story says that Peter, James and John went with Jesus for a specific purpose, to pray.  So, pilgrimage is about being at prayer.  Now, prayer is not something we are able to do by ourselves, from our own resources as it were.  Note the story’s emphasis on the prayer of Jesus. Not once are the disciples themselves said to pray as independent agents of decision.  Rather, they are caught up in the prayer of Jesus, as he asks his Father for guidance about the journey ahead.  What the disciples then see and hear is a consequence of their own prayer, certainly.  Yet, that prayer is enabled and made possible by participating in the more vital prayer of Jesus, a wider and deeper prayer that is able to envelop and carry the disciples along, as it were, even to the very dwelling-place of God.  The prayer of the Christian, then, is not a reaching out to God from the depths of our own, native, apprehensions and resources but, rather, a participation in the priestly communion that Jesus already enjoys with his Father.  In him, and only in him, are we able to speak with God face-to-face.

From this, a number of other things flow.  First, that Christian prayer should be modelled after the prayer of Jesus.   Only by doing as Jesus does, do we learn how to pray as Christians rather than, say, rugged individuals.  Note that Jesus does not address the Father immediately and directly, but rather listens for the Father’s voice through a mediated engagement with the historic figures of Moses and Elijah, who, for Luke, represent the two most important strands of Jewish tradition—law and prophecy.  Now, hear what Luke is telling us here.  If you want to pray after the way of Jesus, he says, you must do as Jesus did.  Instead of addressing God directly, like rugged individuals do, because they imagine they already know what God will say, sit down and listen to what God has already spoken in the stories and traditions of the Jewish and Christian faiths.  Listen to the Scriptures, to the liturgy, and to the sayings of the saints and doctors of the church.  For God has spoken already, which means that we may never hope to discover a new word unless we seek it in the old word.  We shall discover how to question God, in other words, only by first allowing God to question us through the word already spoken to saints and apostles and prophets of old.  We shall find the answers to our questions by communing with the answers others have already found by praying as you are praying.

So let me return to the point I made earlier, that the pilgrimage of prayer is not simply about learning about God from books.  It is rather about communing with God through the face-to-face of human bodies, just as Jesus did with Moses and Elijah.  For in approaching a text or a liturgical symbol like the icon, we are really approaching not a mere object, but a living body or a community.  We sit down with that community’s struggle to live the faith in the midst of the trials of their place and time, so setting up an imaginative conversation with them, a conversation that is not so different to the conversation you may have with the brother or sister who sits next to you this morning.  The conversation is about the way in which God addresses the nitty-gritty details of our lives, the way in which God reaches out to show us how to live.  By staging that conversation, we learn (paradoxically) that God is not so very distant from us, that God is as alive and present in my own community as he was in theirs.  By listening to their stories, I discover that God addresses me in and through the ordinary human faces I encounter today.  So, finally, I learn that a communion with the presence of God is nothing like rugged individuals imagine it to be, some kind of mystical encounter with a disembodied spirit.  No, communion with God is exactly what Jesus is—the shining forth of a divine presence in, through, and as the lines of story and experience that mark a human face.  For Jews and Christians the face-to-face with God is at one and the same time a face-to-face with human beings—those who have gone before, as well as those who belong to my community right now.

And so we arrive at a third lesson about pilgrimage.  You will have noted that the disciples in the story began their journey not as individuals, but as a company.  Peter, James and John were regarded as the three pillars of the earliest Christian church.  Luke uses them to represent the church as a whole.  Therefore, we undertake the Lenten pilgrimage not only with Jesus, but with our brothers and sisters in faith.  Which is great, because things can get pretty scary along the way, and I don’t know about you, but when I get scared I feel kind’ve comforted that others are there with me, and may be just as perplexed as I am.

One way to realise the communal dimension of the pilgrimage is to join a small group in which you can explore the tradition with others, asking the questions that perplex you in a safe environment where no question is a dumb question, together looking to Jesus for strength and encouragement.  Small groups can be a place in which you share your struggles and experience the support and solidarity of others who struggle as well.  There are no experts in this form of church, only some who have lived the pilgrimage a little longer or a little more intentionally.  In small groups all are learners, and there is only one teacher: Christ.

Another way to share the pilgrimage with others is through the face-to-face of conversation with a spiritual guide or director.  Lent provides an opportunity to bite the bullet, to stop drifting about like a rudderless ship, and seek God’s guidance for the way to profit for your soul.  Some of you are wondering, no doubt, about jobs and careers.  Others are wondering about how you can best contribute to the ministry of Christ’s church.  Some are perhaps struggling with relationship issues, you know, 'should I stay or should I go?', 'should I let go or should I hold my ground?'  That kind of stuff.  Lent is an opportunity to take all that seriously, and make some serious progress.  A spiritual guide can help you do that, if you will let them.  They won’t have all the answers, but they can help you listen to the One who does have the answers.  I know it’s a little scary to bear your soul to another human being, especially someone who works for God.  But bearing one’s soul to another is really about becoming more honest with yourself, about facing the truth and letting God help you.  Your spiritual guide is there to help you to be honest with yourself.  But always with a view to helping you grow up into the recognition that you are loved and treasured by God, no matter what kind of shape you are in.  Being honest is the beginning of a pilgrimage to healing or transfiguration.  That brings me to the final lesson I wanted to speak about today.

When the disciples arrived with Jesus at the top of the mountain, they began to pray with him.  In the middle of their prayer, according to Luke, an amazing thing happened.  The appearance of Jesus face changed and his clothes became bright as lightening.  He became like Moses when he encountered God on Mt. Sinai.  He became a conduit or image for the divine glory.  In the Greek text, Luke actually says that while Jesus was praying, “the aspect of his face (prosopon) was changed (heteron) and his clothing became white as lightening.”  This means that his face was, literally, othered—that the glory of his divine self, usually hidden from human eyes, suddenly shone out through his human face, without at the same time making that face or humanity into something false, a mere mask or disguise for something more real.  Note that in Luke’s story, this event—usually called the ‘transfiguration’—has a particular purpose.  It shows the disciples, those who are about to join Jesus in his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that their journey shall not be in vain.  Yes, there will be very difficult times.  There will be misunderstanding and suffering, there will be the fracturing of the community of disciples, and there will even be torture and death.  But the transfiguration assures them that for all this, God will not abandon them.  God will be as present and active in all of this as he is in the human Christ they see before them.  His glory may be hidden, even to the point of feeling completely absent at times, but it is real and present nevertheless.  Out of death will come life, out of crucifixion will come resurrection, out of darkest night will spring the glory of resurrection.

The transfiguration is, you see, primarily a testimony to the possibility of transformation, a promise directed to any who would accompany Jesus to Jerusalem, as we intend to do during the season of Lent.  In the reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul assures his listeners that all who turn to face Jesus will witness a divine glory that can never, finally, be hidden.  Indeed, it is a glory that, like grace, spills out beyond the boundaries of its own containment, transforming and ‘glorifying’ those who so contemplate to the very core of their beings.  For the glory of Christ’s image is not simply an impression, like sunburn, left on our faces after a long exposure, but fading with time.  Rather, it is an image that spills out to takes residence in our very souls and spirits, radiating as if from the inside, changing us (as Paul says) from ‘glory into glory’ so that our human selves are ever so slowly absorbed into the body and soul of Christ himself.

That, my friends, is the glorious promise of the Lenten pilgrimage: that mere human beings, tossed and broken like small vessels on an angry sea, might nevertheless reach safe harbour.  The storm is the suffering and death of crucifixion, the loss of property and status and ego, the loss of our oh-so-human plans and desires.  But the safe harbour is Christ.  By preparing ourselves to die with him, we are raised and transfigured, new people with a new vocation.  In Christ, Paul tells us, we remain the human vessels that we are, yet we bear now, not our own plans and purposes, but God’s unfathomable ambition to make the whole world new in justice and peace.  In that is our glory.  In that is the reason for our pilgrimage.  So I encourage you this morning with the words of that ancient hymn from the book of Timothy (2.11-13):  “if you die with him, you shall also live with him; if you endure, you shall also reign with him; if we deny him, he shall also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.”  Have a blessed pilgrimage, one and all.

Garry Worete Deverell

First preached on Transfiguration Sunday, 2013, at South Yarra Community Baptist Church

Lent and Social Class

Too often the colonial churches—of which the Anglican Church is the paradigm example—preach a message that is addressed only to its middle- and professional-class members. Week after week I listen to sermons that do not seem to be addressed to me, or to many of my friends and colleagues. Over the years, this has meant that many of my friends and colleagues have simply left the church because they feel invisible.

The messages associated with Lent, the season we begin on Ash Wednesday, is no exception.

The monotonous middle-class refrain, ‘What will I give up for Lent?’, for example, is not a terribly helpful question if you happen to live in a world where there are few choices and little left to give up. Historically, Lent has often been used as a weapon against the most marginal and vulnerable people in our churches and societies. ‘Be content with what you have. Refrain from anger at your circumstances. Be hopeful. Trust in God’, etcetera, etcetera.

This is to entirely misunderstand the audience Jesus was addressing when he said ‘If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself, take us your cross, and follow me’. According to the synoptic gospels, this was addressed not to the poor, the marginalised, or the vulnerable, but to his inner circle of disciples, largely derived from the thriving merchant classes.

See, the poor already deny themselves to feed their children. The marginalised already have a cross, the cross they are nailed to outside the city in which the socially and economically ‘blessed’ live. And the vulnerable have lost so much that hope almost seems like heresy. Lent for the vulnerable is not about giving up anything. It is about pressing through despair to embrace, however tentatively, the possibility that life can get better. And that is the hardest discipline of all.

Once in a while it would be good to hear a message from the colonial churches that acknowledges that the marginalised are among us and part of us, not simply the ‘others’, the objects of churchly pity and charity. Just occasionally it would be good for the ppor and the broken to feel seen and heard, even if the churches really have no clue about how to help. 

Having no clue, after all, is part of the truth we are called to embrace as Christians, is it not? Before God we have no clue. None of us. We are all of us, princes of the church or objects of its thin version of charity, utterly and desperately in need of divine mercy. Lent is supposed to strip us all back to this. Our need of God, our need to be baptised, immersed, in God’s mercy. 

But Lent can only do that if the church will stop with its narcissistic obsessions and actually look and listen for what is happening to the last and least amongst us. To the stripping of all dignity by a cruel and heartless society. To the stealing of homes, habitats, and children. To the destruction of economic activity and the killing of those of us taken in custody by the ‘justice’ system. Only by seeing this, and really hearing what the vulnerable and excluded are saying, can we hope to meet the God we all need. The one who was crucified outside the city and rendered Godless because of his commitment to truthful witness. The one who rose from death to give his kingdom to the poor.

Garry Worete Deverell

Lent, 2022

The Bonds of Freedom: vows, sacraments and the formation of the Christian self (2008)

My doctoral thesis from Monash University was published as a monograph in 2008 by Paternoster Press. It is now available as a paperback with Wipf and Stock.

This book proposes that Christian worship is a key source for any theology seeking to understand the covenant between God and human beings in the Christian tradition. Through a detailed examination of phenomenological, biblical and theological sources, the author seeks to write a theology in which the selfhood of both God and human beings is seen as essentially 'vowed' or 'covenantal.' This claim is then explored through a detailed examination of Eucharistic worship, which is understood as a 'non-identical performance' of the covenant established between God and human beings in baptism. Here, then, is a theology that understands Christian worship not simply as 'form' or 'event' but, more radically, as a mutual act of promising and commitment between God and human beings.

A couple of positive reviews:

Dr. Deverell has made a strong contribution. Sacramentality and its relationship to covenant is a position which one rarely finds so fully and richly expressed in sacramental literature. The sacrament of the Eucharist has indeed included the Eucharist as covenant: the cup of the new covenant. But Dr. Deverell has made this covenantal idea central. The insights of this book can help theologians further develop the essential dimension of sacramental responsibility.

Kenan B. Osborne, Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology, Franciscan School of Theology

Garry Deverell has written an important book for students and scholars. He is a skilled exegete of postmodernism, biblical text and liturgical thought and practice. Anyone hoping to write in the future about baptism will have to consult what is found here.

Paul Sheppy, Fellow of the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, 

Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, UK

The book can be purchased from the publisher's website.

'Your Faith Has Healed You'

 Job 42.1-6, 10-17; Psalm 34; Hebrews 7.23-28; Mark 10.46-52

The key theme in today’s lectionary readings is that of passage or transformation.  Passage from a place—variously described—of ignorance, fear or blindness to a place of repentance, trust and the enlightened following of Christ. 

Over the past few weeks we have been reading about Job.  Here, at the very end of the book, God finally speaks up to cut through the ignorant speculations of Job’s advisors.  The response of Job to this rather spectacular intervention is recorded in the verses we read:

Who is it that obscures your counsel without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said ‘Listen now and I will question you, and you shall answer me’. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.

The passage traversed here by Job is not the classical Greek journey from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to ‘true’ knowledge. It is not that Job thought he knew about divine things, but then was shown some secret knowledge or mystery which gave him the key to understand what God was on about in a brand new way. Not at all. Job’s passage is from apparent knowledge, through ignorance, to repentance.  A crucial difference, that.  Not to ‘true’ knowledge but to repentance.  The point of this last chapter in Job is not that he has a beatific vision of God that unveils for him the meaning of everything, but that Job has a vision of God that uncovers precisely nothing, nada, nihil.  That is the paradox of this final vision.  God reveals Godself, certainly, Job is given to ‘see’ things that he had only heard about up until the moment in question, but the God so revealed is one who cannot be mapped, contained or domesticated within the strictures of human thinking or imagining. 

The ‘repentance’ of Job represents, therefore, an acknowledgement of this fact.  ‘My eyes have seen you . . . therefore I repent in dust and ashes’.  Dust and ashes is apparently all that remains of Job’s apparent knowledge and insight into God’s ways.  That Job’s fortunes are then immediately restored, and doubly so, should not therefore be read as some kind of reward for Job’s new-found insight, a classically Greek restoration of equilibrium because of the hard work of the hero in order to restore order from chaos. On the contrary, the restoration is a gift. It comes without antecedent or reason. It cannot be inferred or deduced from anything that comes before. It is sheer grace, the very opposite of that karmic worldview which is obsessed with buying the favour of the gods through the performances of virtue and knowledge. In Job, the abundance of the final restoration represents, by contrast, the sheer grace of the divine toward everyone who repents of such ambitions.

When we turn to the gospel text, a very similar rite of passage or transformation unfolds, a passage that may be characterised as the movement from karmic blindness to Christian discipleship.  The gospel stories are highly symbolic. They should not be read primarily as history in the modern sense, although they certain contain such history.  Thus, this story of a blind man encountered and healed by Jesus on the road from Jericho probably does have a historical core. But Mark takes this core and turns it into an occasion for preaching about the path one must take to become a true disciple of Jesus Christ. 

That this is so becomes clear when we consider the name of the blind man.  It is Bartimaeus—the ‘son’, Mark is careful to underline, of ‘Timaeus’.  Now Timaeus is not a semitic name, it is neither Aramaic nor Hebrew.  It is Roman.  So we know immediately that this man represents not the people of Israel, but another population of the lost, namely the Gentiles, citizens of the wider Roman empire which, at this time, is overwhelmingly karmic in the sense we have begun to describe. 

Furthermore, Timaeus is the common name of one of most influential philosophical treatises of the Roman world, a dialogue written by Plato in the 4^th century BCE.  It is an account, given in the voice of one ‘Timaeus’, of the making of the universe and of the gods by a master craftsman who purposes all to his own good pleasure.  The purpose of human life, according to this Timaeus, is to ascend through the pecking-order of created things at the conclusion of each earthly existence, being constantly reincarnated to a new station in the hierarchy of being according to how virtuous (or not) one has been in a former life.  Here the Roman universe again reveals itself as essentially karmic.  The apparently ‘good’, the industrious and the knowledgeable, are rewarded for their goodness, their industry and their knowledge. They are rewarded by ascending the ladder of being towards a form of divinity which is of their very own making.

That Mark is not particularly impressed with such ideas is clear from his story.  For here we find Bartimaeus, surely a ‘son’ or ‘disciple’ of Timaeus, in a very bad way! His careful following of the way of his philosophical father—the way of virtue, industry and knowledge—has not, in fact, led to enlightenment or a superior station in life, but only to ‘blindness’ and economic poverty.  In fact, he is a beggar who has reached, as it were, the very bottom of life’s barrel. And he has done so a very long way from where he thought he might be by now, living on the very margins of this barbaric town he must now call home, Jericho. 

Now it’s a funny place, the bottom of the barrel. It is a place where things can suddenly become very clear in a way that they have never been before.  It is the place where many an addict, for example, recognises that they have been kidding themselves, and will probably continue to kid themselves to death unless . . .  unless they get some help from somebody else, some other who can intervene on their behalf and give them a hand.  And that is exactly what this former disciple of Timaeus does.  Having recognised that the path of the self-made man has taken him nowhere fast, he cries out for help.  That Bartimaeus was very, very desperate is clear from his willingness to seek the help of one whom his philosophical masters would certainly have regarded as a complete ignoramus, a Philistine or Cretan even, namely the Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth.  ‘Son of David, have mercy on me’ he cries out, and not very timidly.  On the lips of the historical blind beggar, the term ‘Son of David’ would probably have meant little more than ‘hey, Jewish person’.  But in Mark’s story it takes on the character of a nascent step of faith towards a very new God.  It means ‘Hey Jesus, anointed one of God, Messiah, have mercy on me’.  There is a recognition, here, that the way of his philosophical master—the way of Timaeus—has come to nothing but blindness and poverty.  There is a recognition here, that Bartimaeus needs a rather different kind of God than that offered by the Roman philosophical tradition, a god who sits impervious in the distant heavens and waits for us to earn our way to his footstool.  He needs, instead, the God of Jews and Christians, a God who is gracious and loving, a saviour and healer who meets us where we are, in the midst of our troubles, and actually helps.  And so he cries out to Jesus time and time again, even when he is told by the frankly racist crowd to shut up.

What happens, of course, is that Jesus responds.  He ‘calls’ Bartimaeus to come.  This ‘calling’ is something that only the God of the Jews does. It is the way in which the God of the Jews creates his people Israel, his chosen people, his covenant people.  Not on the basis of their deserving industriousness, virtue or knowledge, but on the basis of God’s free choosing and grace.  So when Jesus ‘calls’ Bartimaeus, he is saying ‘come, be part of the community of God’s calling, the people who know God’s grace and favour, the people to whom God has given God’s very self.’  When Bartimaeus responds to the call by indeed coming to Jesus, Jesus immediately acts to heal him, to take away his karmic myopia and gift him with the chance to take a rather different route in life. 

It is important to note that the Greek word for ‘heal’ is the same as the Greek word for ‘save’.  Jesus heals the man of his disease, that is to say, but in so doing also ‘saves’ him from the karmic chains in which he is bound so that he can experience, for the very first time, that reality we call the ‘grace of God’, that is, God’s unmerited favour and love. Note, also, that Jesus tells the man that it is his ‘faith’ that has saved him.  ‘Faith’ mind you, not virtue or industriousness or knowledge.  For faith, in the Christian tradition is basically about trusting someone else with our lives, trusting Jesus the son of God.  It is the opposite of trusting in our own selves, in our own virtue, work or knowledge. It is about trusting that someone else’s virtue, work and knowledge—the virtue, work and knowledge of Jesus Christ—is able to save us. The story ends with the man following Jesus along the road to Jerusalem, an image of true discipleship if ever there was one.

Now, what are we to make of these stories today, in the midst of our own world?  Well, simply this, I suggest: that we are as likely as Job or Bartimaeus to be enslaved by the laws of karma so beloved by the author of the Timaeus. While the philosophy of the ancient world is rarely read anymore, its basic message nevertheless permeates our society at every level. Day by day, in popular culture or high culture, on the television or at the museum, we are bombarded by a philosophy that proclaims that our purpose in life is to ascend some kind of pecking-order, to better ourselves through virtue, industriousness and knowledge.  Some versions of this philosophy are purely materialistic, and measure the desired-for ascent in purely materialistic ways, like how prestigious your job is or how big a house or holiday your income will buy you. Other forms are more ‘spiritual’, explicitly proclaiming the potential divinisation of the human self through various paths of virtue, self-discipline or self-knowledge.  These range from the ‘neo-buddhist’ and the ‘new age’ through to versions of ‘Christianity’ which emphasise a need for human beings to save themselves.  This possibility was probably revived, ironically enough, with the subversion of Christianity by capitalism. When Max Weber toured northern Europe and America at the turning of the 20^th century, he noticed that it was the ‘protestant’ countries that were succeeding the most in economic terms.  He proposed that there was a ‘Protestant work ethic’ that made this possible.  Protestants worked harder than atheists or Catholics because they lived to work rather than working to live.  The irony here is that this ‘ethic’ is as far from the foundations of the reformed faith as one can get.  The reformers wanted to protest what they saw as a subversion of God’s grace in Catholic thought and practise, the tendency in medieval Catholicism to grant salvation only to those who were able to satisfy the church’s harsh conditions and demands.

The good news for us today is the same good news that revolutionised the ancient Roman world and gave rise to the Reformation.  That God does not treat us as we apparently deserve to be treated, that the favour of God is not conditional upon our capacity to be good, or industrious or knowledgeable.  That God simply loves us, and has acted to save us from our misguided attempts at saving ourselves in Jesus Christ.  For in Christ we can throw ourselves upon the mercy of God and find that God has accepted us and welcomed us into God’s family or commonwealth no matter what we have done or what we think we know.  I, at least, find that to be very good news indeed, not least because I feel that I am simply unable to ‘come up to scratch’ in ways that this society and culture can recognise as ‘successful’. Perhaps you do as well!  In the welcome and grace of God I feel that I am loved, accepted, and valued.  And I need that more than I can say.

Garry Worete Deverell

First preached at Monash Uniting Church on the 30th Sunday in ordinary time, 2012.

Killing the Indigenous: reflections on baptism in Warwick Thornton's 'The New Boy'

‘The New Boy’ is a 2023 film by Kaytetye man Warwick Thornton which explores the collision between white Catholic and Aboriginal spirituality. It does this through an exploration of various baptismal motifs such as that of a new birth and body, along with death and resurrection. In short, a captured Aboriginal boy seeks to incorporate Catholicism into his own spirituality, but is eventually, himself, incorporated by white Catholicism.

The ‘New Boy’ (Aswan Reid) is captured by police and brought to a remote orphanage run by nuns. He doesn’t speak English and is largely silent throughout the film. He refuses to wear a shirt and eat with cutlery. He hugs trees. He plays with baby snakes. These function as signs of his difference and his resistance to being incorporated in the white Catholic community.

The orphanage is run by Sr Eileen (Cate Blanchett), who assumed leadership extra-canonically when the parish priest died a year earlier. Sr Eileen is a complex character. Powerful yet vulnerable. Spiritually earnest and zealous for the boys’ education yet given to systematic lying and alcoholism. She symbolises a form of white Catholic feminism, assuming the authority of a white male priest yet without the protection of the white male church.

Sr Eileen’s subordinates are Sr Mum (Deborah Mailman) and George (Wayne Blair). Both ‘incorporated’ Aboriginal people who nevertheless keep up their resistance in small ways. Sr Mum is the cook and domestic servant. She apparently became a nun when her own children were taken from her. She is kind to the New Boy. George is a farm labourer who is glad to have work a long way from the centre of white society. He puts the children of the monastery to work but is disinclined to participate in church services. He is gruff and cold, but clearly cares.

The New Boy’s otherness is also seen in his ‘clever’ powers. He has a light with him, by which he heals a boy bitten by a snake and saves the life of another boy burned in fire. George recognises that the boy is ‘clever’, a practitioner of Aboriginal magic, and worries that word will get out and their remote peace will be destroyed. Sr Eileen seeks to interpret the New Boy’s healing powers as signs of saintliness.  It is her way of seeking to incorporate the boy into the white Catholic body.

The New Boy’s best attempt to incorporate Catholicism into his own spiritual frame comes when a large crucifix, made of wood, arrives at the monastery. Seeing the crucifix as a suffering being somehow connected to trees, the New Boy seeks to heal its wounds by taking some baby snakes and placing them before the crucifix. In many Aboriginal cultures, snakes are powerful ancestral beings able to heal and bring life to the dead. The snakes are killed by the worshippers, but one is made alive again by the New Boy and effects a transaction by which the wounds of the tree/Christ are connected to self-inflicted wounds on the hands of the New Boy.

Perhaps because there are not enough snakes involved in the magical exchange, the living being is not healed and the New Boy becomes unwell from his wounds. Sr Eileen interprets his wounds as stigmata and prays for his recovery. When the New Boy is well enough to walk again, Sr Eileen baptises him in the church and his wounds are apparently healed with baptismal water. The New Boy notices that the crucifix no longer communicates with him as a living being. And when he seeks to summon his light later the same day, it is extinguished. The New Boy begins to wear a shirt and, having lost his ‘spark’, apparently submits to white Catholic ways. Having sought to incorporate the white Catholic imagination into his own, he finds that it is he who is incorporated.

     Theological Reflection

At the heart of the film is a confrontation between two ways of imagining the world, each seeking to absorb or incorporate the other. Will native Aboriginal ways prevail, or the coloniality of the white Catholic body?

Historically, the white Catholic body prevailed. In this frame, the New Boy can be seen as an ‘innocent’, a saint, sent by God to bring hope and healing to this small, struggling, Christian orphanage. He is a Christ figure whose eventual baptism fulfills all righteousness and incorporates him fully into the body of the church. I am, however, part of a very small group of Aboriginal thinkers who are seeking to subvert this colonial logic in the field of theology by seeking to re-read white Christian interpretations within the more ancient frame of Aboriginal spirituality.

From this point of view, the crucifixion of Christ is not about God sending a messiah to save the world. It is about the suffering of country, and of Aboriginal community and culture, under colonial power.  For us, there is no ‘divinity’ other than ‘the dreaming’ and its embodiment in the cosmic community of country and kin.

In this perspective, the resurrection of Christ is not an intervention, extra nos, from a God beyond, but the innate capacity of country and kin to renew themselves, to be reborn from the compost of old bio-matter. This means a ritual washing in water is not, primarily,‘baptism’as an incorporation in the white Christian community. Water symbolises, for us, the lifeblood of country, distributed to the whole body of the land via the ‘veins’ of creeks, rivers and other waterways. For us, water rites dramatize a participation in the dying and rising of country itself, including country’s capacity to resist the power of coloniality for stealing, killing and destruction.

This capacity is beautifully illustrated in Glenn Loughrey’s painting ‘From the Depths, Life Rises’, where the colonial imagination is represented by squares, much like fields cultivated in the European manner. At one point there is a circle within a circle. This represents the capacity of country, and of mob, to resist the colonial imagination.

On this anniversary of the failed referendum, I simply note that this theological work is necessary because Australia remains a colony in which First Peoples, our culture and our spirituality, are still regarded as little more than a footnote in the 'great' theological narratives from Europe that have made modern Australia what it is.

Garry Worete Deverell

A short paper given at the Talanoa Oceania conference held at United Theological College, Paramatta, on April 5, 2024.