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.
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.
