Reclaiming the Trinity as Kin: a thought experiment on Sorry Day

Texts: Psalm 29; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the tabling in Federal Parliament of the Bringing Them Home report, an enquiry of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from our families. The report found that the practice, which began in the earliest days of British colonisation, had persisted well into the 1990s and was specifically designed by the state to destroy the indigeneity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The report noted that children removed from their families were far less likely to speak their language and practise traditional culture. At the same time, they were far more likely to suffer the spiralling effects of childhood trauma. Unsurprisingly, if you try to remove the indigeneity from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander kids and superimpose a toxic form of whiteness in its stead, Indigenous kids grow up with a sense of spiritual homelessness. Cast adrift in a world which simultaneously denies our indigeneity but also loudly and publicly blames us for it, we invariably retreat into the large hole inside ourselves where our country, family and culture used to be. A very dark and lonely place, usually.

The removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids from our families was a cruel and hideous policy which, despite beautifully crafted apologies from church and state in the intervening years, continues unabated. The rates of child removal are arguably higher now, in 2024, than they have ever been. That is why ‘Sorry Day’, which is commemorated on this day each year, must continue to be commemorated. For it reminds the Australian community of both the damage done by past practices and the damage it continues to do.

Now, as it happens, today is also Trinity Sunday in the calendar of the Western Church. The Church that came to this country as part of the colonisation project. The Church that continues to enculturate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into its spirituality. The fact of this correlation creates an occasion when an Aboriginal preacher, like myself, might engage in something of a thought experiment. And the thought experiment goes something like this: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been removed from his Jewish family and placed in the ‘care’ of a non-semitic culture and society. Would Christianity even exist? Would its God, the God named in the bible as ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ even be thinkable? Now, I rarely answer my own questions with any degree of nuance, but here perhaps is a start.

You will have noted already, I hope, that the trinitarian dogma is irreducibly familial in its language. It speaks of the divine as a little kinship network, a family. The historical Jesus, who apparently lost his father, Joseph, well before he reached his maturity, called his God ‘abba’, one of the more intimate names for ‘father’ in Aramaic. For him, the divine was not simply the progenitor of all creation or, in that very general sense, the father who watched over the Jewish people. For Jesus, the divine was his father. One who cared for him and taught him how to be a responsible member of the community as all good Jewish dads did.

It follows then, or so the trinitarian dogma would have it, that since the ‘daddy’ of Jesus was divine, the creator or all heaven and earth, then Jesus himself, precisely as a son, also had to be divine. That is point of the birth narratives constructed by Matthew and Luke, is it not? Yes, the evangelists say, for all earthly intents and purposes Jesus was Joshua ben-Joseph, the son of Joseph. But at a more profound level, he was also the son of a divine ‘father’: not simply ‘created’ by divine power but ‘begotten’, conceived not by the passage of sperm into his mother Mary’s uterus, but by the action of the Holy Spirit.

This ‘Holy Spirit’ cannot, at one level, be imagined in familial terms at all. Neither male nor female in the basic grammatical constructions of New Testament Greek, the Spirit is variously described in the biblical texts as fire, as water, and as air or breath. None of these images are particularly familial. Not if you are a hurried reader, that is. Dwell a little longer, however, and you will pick up some connections with maternity and with mothering. Take the passage we read from John chapter 3, for example. Here Jesus tells Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council, that entering the region of the divine involves being born of water and spirit. The image here is multilayered. Water is both the amniotic fluid that protects a child until they are born, but also the amniotic fluid of the new birth in baptism, which has been placed in round, womb-like, fonts since the earliest of Christian centuries.

In the same passage, the children of God are said to be born of the breath or wind of God, a more literal translation of the Greek pneuma or ‘spirit’. Here the mysterious breath or wind takes on a decidedly maternal function. The Spirit gives birth to God’s children and then imprints them with a divine identity and vocation. In the passage we read from Romans 8, the children of God are only able to recognise God as their familial ‘father’ because the Spirit cries out a breathy ‘abba’, daddy, within them. Here the children are being led by the actions of Spirit who has given them birth and imprinted them with its own DNA. Just as a mother does with her children.

Of course, in Christian discourse, the Spirit is never simply female, in the gendered sense. Because the Spirit also carries the imprint of the Father and the Son. The texts very often name the Spirit the ‘Spirit of God’ or the ‘Spirit of Jesus’. In this sense, as the Uniting Church version of the Creed notes, the Spirit can be said to ‘proceed’ from the Father and the Son, with all their maleness. This means, in the end, that the Spirit is that dimension or experience of the divine which resists simple binary categories, especially if those categories are gendered, whist retaining a crucial role in the parenting of every single Christian child. The Spirit takes all that is nurturing in the being of God—whether that nurturing be imagined in masculine, feminine or more gender-neutral terms—and makes it real and active for you and I in the nursery that is the church.

So, let me now return to the question I asked a few minutes ago: where would Christianity be if Jesus had been kidnapped from his Jewish family and community, and placed in the ‘care’ of a far way, non-semitic culture? Where would the Christian understanding of the divine be? Would it be anything at all? Well, possibly not.

For the Christian experience of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is predicated upon the experience of a thoroughly semitic Jesus with the divine, an experience almost entirely derived from his formation as a Jewish child, raised in a Jewish home, according to the nurturing practices of his Jewish parents in their Jewish homeland and kinship networks. His experience of the divine as a nurturing family—male, female, and neither male nor female—draws deeply from the well of semitic culture and spirituality. Were Jesus removed from this environment as a young child, he may not have become the spiritual teacher who was able to imprint his followers with that experience and understanding. Were Jesus to have been kidnapped by an invading force, for example, and placed in a society where the divine was understood not as a nurturing family but as an emperor . . . well, Christianity may have ended up being an imperial religion of war and of conquest rather than a trinitarian religion of family, and of care, and of kinship.

But wait! Isn’t that precisely what happened with Constantine and with Charlemagne and with the colonising empires of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries? Did they not kidnap the kinship religion of Jesus and put it in prison? Did they not absorb it into a patriarchal and colonial religion of empire and of force that gave rise, in the end, to the practices of child removal that have so damaged the Indigenous children of Australia and many other places? Well yes, actually. Yes.

On this Sorry Day, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the faith and spirituality of Jesus, whose religion was deeply imbedded in a particularly semitic experience of family, of kinship, and of care. And perhaps we should remind ourselves, on this Trinity Sunday, that the dogma of the trinity is essentially about being part of a loving and caring family and the blessing of having one. And finally, perhaps, on this Sorry and Trinity Sunday, we should commit ourselves anew to practices of nurture which allow our Indigenous children to become who they are. Proud Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander kin.

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Garry Worete Deverell

Pitt Street Uniting Church, Warrane/Sydney, 

Sorry Day/ Trinity Sunday 2024

Apologies, Equivocations and Handwringing: Church Leaders at the Yoorrook Justice Commission

Full disclosure. I’m a trawloolway man from northern lutruwita/Tasmania who also happens to be an Anglican priest and theologian. That means that I came to today’s hearing at the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria with a certain amount of baggage, namely a long experience of churchly handwringing over their brutal history with Aboriginal people, my people.

That history, it seems, is not in dispute. Not, at least, by protestants. The Anglican and Uniting Church leaders who gave evidence at the commission—Bishops Blackwell and Treloar along with Moderator Fotheringham—agreed that their churches had willingly participated in the genocidal work of the state in the ‘missions’, ‘protection’ and ‘assimilation’ eras of the colonial project.  This work included the forced dislocation of mob from our lands, cultures and spiritualities, as well as the removal of our children and their use as indentured labour. At the same time, with the enabling cooperation of both the state and the Christian squatocracy, the churches received large grants of land stolen from Aboriginal nations. The church leaders also acknowledged that the consequences of this history for contemporary Aboriginal people were catastrophic across every social indicator of health and wellbeing.

Archbishop Comensoli, of the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, seemed more equivocal with this ownership of this history. He was at pains to point out that Catholics ran no missions in Victoria and had very little to do with the setting of Aboriginal policy at the level of colonial administration. Here he made a convenient and - in the wake of public enquiries into the sexual abuse of children - now familiar distinction between the Church acting as an institution and Catholics acting as private citizens. A distinction which means little when one considers that Catholics, like all Christians, tend to act as their churchly imaginations allow.  And the churchly imagination most dominantly at play in this country was, and remains, profoundly racist and deeply colonial. Even when Christian settlers intended to do good, they did evil instead. For their version of 'goodness' was deeply imbedded in habits of mind and heart that took black inferiority and the virtue of white Christian civilisation for granted. And, as we shall see, this is still the case.

So much for the truth of our shared history. Now to the handwringing. 

Under several lines of questioning from commissioners and from counsel assisting, the church leaders were invited to report on what their churches were doing about their intentional involvement in this attempted genocide. Were they owning their responsibility? We they handing back stolen land? Were they making reparation? Were they empowering Aboriginal people to heal, to grow and to determine our own futures? Well, not really. Proportionally speaking, the church leaders made it clear that they were doing barely anything at all when one considers the scale of ecclesial culpability for the damage. 

The Uniting Church is clearly the best of them, on the evidence presented at the hearing by Moderator Fotheringham. Nationally, and according to the terms of a 'covenant' between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of the Church, the Church has set up a semi-autonomous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘Congress’ which receives some funding from the church to run its own ministries. Some members of that Congress sit on decision-making bodies that belong to the church as a whole. The church redirects a small portion of property sales to the Congress, which also enjoys an annual budget which is administered by State-based Synods. Let the reader be aware, however, that the Congress in Victoria in effectively either dead or dysfunctional and that it is also struggling at the national level. The reasons for this are complex, but in the opinion of this writer they come down to a lack of concrete specificity in the so-called 'covenant' concerning the responsibilities the parties have towards each other. This means that the Church can get away with generating good PR about the virtue of its covenant in lieu of actually having a covenant. Having spent a views years reflecting on the nature of covenants as part of a doctoral project, I would suggest that effective covenants need to be local, concrete, realistic, goal-orientated, time-specific and outcome-measurable. The 'covenant' of the Uniting Church and its Congress is none of these things.

Turning now to the evidence of Archbishop Comensoli, the Catholic Church funds an Aboriginal Ministry which runs out of a property in Thornbury. This ministry, run by a single Aboriginal manager and a small number of loyal volunteers, acts statewide to educate the Church, along with its school and welfare arms, about Aboriginal ways. A key instrument for such education is the 'Fire Carriers' network, by which Aboriginal children are empowered to learn more about their culture and to share it with their schools and churches. The Church also funds a small number of scholarships for Aboriginal students who wish to study at Catholic schools through a fundraising project known as 'Opening Doors'.  The bishops of the church are also ‘considering’ longstanding requests from its National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council to include Indigenous people in both the design of church policy and the training of ministry leaders. Let the reader be aware, however, that the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry in Victoria is struggling at present. On the retirement of its last manager, the Church has not, to date, been able to recruit a replacement. And the volunteer base, which for many years was mostly composed of religious sisters, is now shrinking rapidly along with the religious congregations from which these volunteers were drawn. There are no visible plans to more substantially support the ministry by, for example, employing a team rather than just an individual. Or by supplying the team with a budget that is more adequate to their very onerous responsibilities across the entire State.  Additionally, when one looks at the national picture, the long-term aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholics towards a more substantial presence in the councils, theological colleges, welfare programs and holy orders of the Church still seem a very long way off.

Turning to the Anglicans, Bishops Blackwell and Treloar testified that the dioceses of Victoria have, between them, employed three Aboriginal priests to work with Aboriginal people in part-time roles. Two of these roles are in Gippsland, and the other is a newly created Province-wide role which remains a bit unclear with regard to focus and purpose, although the bishops disclosed that the role would be partly about the development of some kind of Aboriginal body for the Province. Bishop Blackwell disclosed that the diocese of Melbourne once sold a property to help fund the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anglican Council, which was created by the General Synod of the Church in 1989. The church is also ‘considering’, according to Bishop Blackwell, a 2018 proposal from the Anglican Council of the Anglican Province of Victoria to contribute 15% of all property sales to a mixture of local Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and Aboriginal ministries. Let the reader be aware, however, that with the possible exception of Gippsland and Bendigo, Aboriginal clergy have found it enormously difficult to gain any traction with diocesan leadership. Our invitation for the Church's senior leadership to consider 14 'aspirations' which would improve the lives of our people immeasurably (tabled in several forums during 2018) were met with silence, the effective sacking of a sitting Reconciliation Action Plan committee, and constant deferrals. Our attempts to keep the aspirations alive in the hearts and minds of the Church and its leaders have left us exhausted and disillusioned. It is clear that the Church has no concept of what justice for mob might look like, nor is it inclined to give it much thought.

So, to summarise the evidence given by these distinguished moral leaders at the Yoorrook Justice Commission, the Anglican, Catholic and Uniting churches feel very sad about what they have done to our people and are showing how much they care by throwing a few scraps, a few crumbs from their tables, the way of the small handful of Aboriginal people who remain members of their churches. 

The commissioners asked if the churches had ever contributed, directly, to the welfare or support of Aboriginal people beyond their churches by means of, for example, reparations paid to traditional owner groups or Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations. 'No', they had not.

To my mind, none of this is surprising. But it remains deeply and profoundly sad, to me, that organisations that claim to follow the Jesus of the gospels cannot find it in their heart to repent of their sins and to love their neighbour as they love themselves. For repentance is not only about naming the truth of one's misdeeds and saying 'sorry', It is about amendment of life, it is about doing all you can realistically do to undo the harms and heal the wounds that you have inflicted upon another. And loving one's neigbour involves far more than PR exercises or the sharing of leftovers from more important ventures. It is at the heart of the Christian vocation. It is about placing the neighbour at the centre of your world and inviting them to drink deeply from the very same wells of gracious provision which you, yourself, are privileged to enjoy.  The paradox, here, is that Aboriginal people - most of whom have nothing to do with the church anymore - are very often better at following Jesus than settlers are. Our own dreaming traditions teach us to share what we have with others, to pool resources, so that everyone may live both sustainably and equitably on the gift that is country.  And God knows we have done far more than our fair share of forgiving.

The Christian churches, in my long experience with them, very rarely get beyond ‘considering’ advice from mob about anything at all. Even the advice of their own Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander members. For the language of consideration is almost always code for disinterest, denial or indefinite deferral with regard to the claims of the Aboriginal neighbour. Often all three. Given the enormity of the damage done to our people by churches, this situation remains both ethically indefensible and a cause for continuing heartbreak and trauma. The crimes of the past are ugly as hell. But the refusal of the churches to adequately address the present consequences of that past are equally heinous. 

As far as I am aware, this is the first time the churches have agreed to offer evidence about their own abusive histories with mob before a public truth or justice commission.  It is well past time that their crimes, both past and present, were brought into the cold light of public scrutiny. At least that way, the churches might finally be called to account for both their actions and their lack of it.  I thank the commissioners for their work, and look forward to its bearing fruit in treaty.

This article was written on the same day as the hearing of the Yoorrook Justice Commission with the churches. May 1, 2024. A full recording of the hearing can be found here.