A Voice for Country: saying 'Yes' to Indigenous ecological wisdom

When I was a teenager, I would go for long contemplative walks in the bush that still surrounds the small town in which I was raised.  This was, and remains, punnilerpanna country even though most all of the punnilerpanna were killed during the frontier conflicts of the 1820s. So, when I was a teenager, even though I knew little of that specific history, I would talk to the ancestral spirits who dwelt in the landscape. ‘Hello, cousin Wallaby’, I would say, ‘how’s the grazing today?’ Or, ‘greetings, Auntie River Gum, getting enough water?’. And they would answer. Not in English, mind, nor even in the lost language of the punnilerpanna. But, if you had the ears to hear, if you had the heart of a contemplative, you could hear them acknowledge and affirm your presence: the appropriateness of your being there in the matrix of that dreaming. For when I came to the bush as a kid, I came not to harm or destroy, as the colonists had done, but simply to commune and to learn. That is what contemplation means, in this tradition. To bathe in the ancestral voices that are forever alive and flowing about you as you walked through sacred country.  But also to learn the way of country—especially its ethic of kinship, of mutual care and reciprocity—that her ways might be imitated and passed on to others.

'Ancestors II' by Sarrita King

For the voices of the dead punnilerpanna were alive in that landscape. The echoes of their sorrow at all that had befallen them in the 1820s, certainly. But there are strains, also, of a yet more ancient choir. A choir of creator-ancestors, the powerful hybid beings—partly human, partly animal—that formed the landscape and now speak from it with wisdom and instruction for anyone who will listen.  These ancestral choirs sing a song of lament concerning the way in which country has been wounded, even crucified, under the impact of European colonisation. But that is not all you will discern in their song. For they sing, also, of the perseverance of life through death; indeed, of the necessity of death and loss to the creation of new life. They sing about the power of compost, and of electricity, that quantum-level medium for both life and communication. They sing about not giving up, even when the chips are most definitely down in the more-than-human world, and life seems spent. 

Sadly, much of the public conversation about the Statement from the Heart and the Voice to Parliament has failed to listen to the song of country, to the cadences of this ancestral choir. Arguments about whose voices need to be heard (or not) in the national constitution and around Canberra very often seem to completely overlook the fact that a voice for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people implies a voice for country. For we are country’s custodians. We have managed and looked after this country for 5000 generations.  Country is not, and has never been, ‘wilderness’ as a European philosophy would imagine it. Country is not a human-free landscape where ‘nature’ grows wild and according to its own devices. Country is a place where human beings dwell in a symbiotic relationship with our feathered, furred, and scaled cousins. Country is our home, our dwelling place, our mother, father, sister and brother, our kin.  We therefore have a place within it and exercise a sacred vocation of responsibility for it. For country is the arena in which a radically reciprocal compassion is actualised. The dreaming lore that belongs to each particular patch of country and encoded, in songs and rituals handed down from elder to catechumen, are primarily about how to live sustainably, fruitfully, and compassionately within those places: country we are born to, country we carry in our hearts, country for whose flourishing we take responsibility, from the moment we are initiated to the day we die.  This is the way we lived in this country before colonists arrived. By practising a compassion that extended far beyond our human kin, embracing also rock and river and plant and animal in such a manner that country might flourish, not just for today, but for the 5000 generations to come.

What has happened in the last 235 years, however, has been catastrophic. The genocide visited upon Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been accompanied by an ecocide visited upon country. According to the Ecological Society of Australia, we lead the world when it comes to species extinction. Since the arrival of Europeans, over 100 species of animals and birds have become extinct and, as of 2019, 1790 species are listed as threatened with extinction. Major threats are invasive species (82% of species), ecosystem modification (74%), agriculture (57%), human disturbance (38%), and climate change (35%). Well-funded protected areas such state reserves and national parks certainly aid recovery, but 52% of species face threats outside protected areas. The Society estimates that Australia needs to invest $1.69 billion per year to recover threatened species through coordinated efforts across jurisdictions. The current level of investment is only $122 million per year, which means that Australia’s extinction crisis will only deepen in the decades to come.  

On the 18th of March this year, the ABC reported the discovery of a mass fish kill in the Darling River near Menindee in NSW's far west. The kill included several million bony bream, golden perch, silver perch and Murray cod. The overall volume of the kill completely eclipsed similar kills in 2018 and 2019 and was caused by low oxygen levels in the water after recent flooding, combined with atmospheric temperatures in the 40s (Celsius). Previous fish kills were apparently caused by drought and massive algae blooms. Menindee Local Aboriginal Land Council director Michelle Kelly is quoted as saying ‘the river is our lifeblood’,  but clearly that lifeblood is in deep trouble. Joy Becker, an associate professor with the University of Sydney, is quoted as saying that fish kill events could occur due to a sudden, severe or prolonged drop in water quality. "Ultimately, fish kill events happen because the quality of the environment cannot sustain fish life," she said. "Causes of fish kills can be environmental, chemical, or possibly related to infectious disease agents including opportunistic pathogens or a combination of all these factors."  Which is another way of saying that the mismanagement of country is to blame.  Barkandji elders have been saying so for decades, but their pleas have clearly fallen on deaf ears.  Signs of the ecocide that accompanies the genocide.

Similarly, with the management of bushlands, our mobs successfully used fire to farm both forests and grasslands for thousands of years. Using a range of techniques, now collectively known as cool-burning, we used fire to both mitigate against destructive, catastrophic, wildfires but also to cultivate food-plants that would provide for healthy and abundant populations of animals and birds.   Unfortunately, with the coming of European colonists, these lands have been mostly ‘cleared’ of both the people who knew this country best and the techniques we used to sustain its life. Fire-farming and loose-soil agriculture has been replaced by the mass-production of beef, lamb, wool and grain crops.  The importation of millions of cattle and sheep has resulted in the compaction of soil structures, with the consequence that water can no longer penetrate the soil substructure as it once did, and so it dries out and becomes less fertile.  Crop and herd farming has also massively reduced general biodiversity, with the twin consequence that, as many species of both plant and animal are already endangered or extinct, exponentially greater levels of extinction become all the more likely.  At the same time, surviving forests have been neglected as places that needed to be managed, with the consequence that bushfires of the catastrophic kind that we witnessed in late 2019/early 2020 are likely to occur more and more as the planet warms. Those fires destroyed over 19 million hectares of mainly forests and woodlands. In several places, the fires burned so hot that even the deep substructure of the soil was effected, bringing on a condition known as hydrophobia which prevents such soil from ever supporting the growth of plant life again.  The fires also killed well over a billion native animals,  a great many of which died because they could not find a way through the fences erected by pastoralists to keep their domestic animals from roaming. More signs of the ecocide that accompanies the genocide.

Certain parts of the bible talk about ecocide in terms of a 'defilement' of the land. Let’s consider just one small section at the end of Leviticus chapter 18 (vs 24-30), a chapter that appears, at first glance, to be primarily concerned with sex. Here it is, from the NRSV:

Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, for by all these practices the nations I am casting out before you have defiled themselves. Thus the land became defiled; and I punished it for its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you shall keep my statutes and my ordinances and commit none of these abominations, either the citizen or the alien who resides among you (for the inhabitants of the land, who were before you, committed all of these abominations, and the land became defiled); otherwise the land will vomit you out for defiling it, as it vomited out the nation that was before you. For whoever commits any of these abominations shall be cut off from their people. So keep my charge not to commit any of these abominations that were done before you, and not to defile yourselves by them: I am the LORD your God.

The ’defilement’ in the first line refers to sexual practices which are seen, by the editors of Leviticus, as fundamentally abusive. These include various forms of unfaithfulness to one’s marriage partner along with intra-family incest, each of which would accord, broadly, with our contemporary standards also. But the list of forbidden relations ends with a condemnation of what has been called ‘cultic sex’, that is, sexual relations which take place within a religious framework designed to guarantee the fertility of one’s land. This is a concept considerably more foreign to the modern imagination. In the ancient middle-east, you see, there existed forms of religion which posited a close symbolic connection between the human body, especially the fertile female body, and the fertile body of the land. You can find traces of it in any number of ancient sources, but also here in the bible. In this particular passage, the editors clearly assume that such a connection exists, even as they condemn the phenomenon of cultic sex. At the social level they are concerned that cultic sex is inherently abusive because the people who served as sexual partners at the shrines were invariably slaves who earned money for their owners. At the more complex symbolic level, they are concerned that abusing the bodies of cultic slaves is a metaphor for the abuse and misuse of the land.

For the land has agency in this passage. It is not just a thing that is without animus or life or intention. She is able to expel, to ‘vomit’ out from her body, any object or person that might threaten her life.  She is able to fight back against abuse.

Surely there is a parable here for those of us who stand at the edge of an environmental apocalypse. If the land is truly alive and has agency, as both the Hebrew and Indigenous imaginations would have it, then our continued abuse of country will have its consequences. There will come a time when we have so poisoned the well on which we depend that our own lives will be at risk. Country may well vomit us out, judging that our rapacious presence is ultimately a threat to her capacity for fecundity and renewal. 

There is a little-known appendix in the 2017 Report of the Referendum Council (which also gave us the Statement from the Heart and the roadmap known as ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’) entitled ‘Rom Watangu – the Law of the Land’. It was written by the late, great, Yolgnu elder, Dr Yunupingu. I’d like to read just one paragraph from that work:

There is always something wanted by someone who knows nothing of our land or its people. There is always someone who wants us to be like them, to give up our knowledge and our laws, or our land. There is always someone who wants to take something from us. I disapprove of that person, whoever he or she is. There is no other way for us. Our laws tell us how to live and lead in the proper way. Others will always seek to interrupt my thinking, but I will tell the difference between their ways and my laws, which are the only ones to live by. I am mindful of the continuing attempts to change all that is in us, and I know that it is not workable at all. It cannot work. We are covered by a law of another kind and that law is lasting and alive, the law of the land, rom watangu – my backbone.

Here the great man is speaking from the very heart of his Yolgnu culture and spirituality. His words remind us that any formal voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is always, already, a voice for country. For those of us who are Indigenous do not speak primarily for ourselves, and our own merely human interests. We speak for country—for its spectacular plethora of plants, animals, waterways, landcapes, heavenly bodies. We speak the wisdom we have seen and heard from walking in country, the wisdom whispered in our ears by the Old Ones, the ancestral creators who yet live and are one with its body. We speak of the necessity of caring for country, after the manner that country cares for us, so that we might continue to share a life of joy and abundance together.  We speak of the pain and the suffering of country under settler colonial management, and the need for a compassionate response from human beings so that country may be healed of its grievous wounds. 

In all this, First Peoples acknowledge that we are too few to accomplish this healing on own own. Especially when so many of our young people languish in schools and gaols and other institutions designed to draw the very life from one’s spirit. We recognise that healing must be the responsibility of everyone who now lives in these lands, whatever the legitimacy or illegitimacy of that presence historically or ethically.  But that is why the call to support a body which can offer a more substantial voice for our people is so centrally important. A voice for us, however conceived, is also a Voice for country. We are her voice, the voice of our mother earth. An invitation to say ‘Yes’ to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is also, therefore, an opportunity to say ‘yes’ to country and to exercise a commensurate compassion for country.  If you hear that voice at all, even faintly as a whispering in the trees or in your hearts, I beg you to take is seriously. To listen, to learn, and to act for our common future in this communion of being to which we all belong, whether we are aware of it or not.

Garry Worete Deverell

St Michael’s Uniting Church, Naarm/Melbourne,

October 10, 2023

'Wait without Hope': Contemplation and consumer society

In 'East Coker' (1940), the second of his Four Quartets, TS Eliot wrote this:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Here Eliot names what is essential, I believe, to the apprehension of genuine contemplatives, whether they be Christian or more anciently Aboriginal in their ontology or phenomenology of expression. What Eliot names here is the interruption, the breaking, the ending or even the impossibility, of everyday life. For everyday life is indeed broken, is it not? In the wake of modernity, with its autonomic production of desires which gobble up and consume not only our sacred souls but also the very earth itself, are we not broken? Are we not spent? Are we not dazed, hazed, bewildered and confused, and are we not desperately, rapaciously lonely? And is this not the case even for those of us who seek to transcend this condition through practices and rituals designed to calm and soothe our flagging spirits? Do we not hope desperately, and prematurely? Do we not love forcibly and possessively? Do we not trust, blindly, in whatever phantasm we have conjured up from the ruins of our creativity?

The one thing moderns do not do, ever, is to pause, to stop, to empty ourselves, to cease with that endless churning through of problems and solutions, all smoke and mirrors and digital shadows. We never command ourselves to be still in the night time of modernity - so that we may give ourselves over to unthinking, to unknowing, to a genuine hollowing out of every idea or ethic, whether good, bad or indifferent.  We do not call for an end to desire, which forever threatens to consume every object, or person, or affect of light or of landscape that wanders into our orbit.  Not even in meditation, as it is most commonly practiced. For, as Slavoj Zizek rightly intuits, much of the consumer meditation industry is about patching up the tired and the stressed and the broken so that we can reengage in the very forms of neoliberal work, family and entertainment that made us tired, stressed and broken in the first place. 

What we need is a different form of life, a more deeply interfused weave of being, a more visceral form of relationship with each other and with the cosmos.  What we need is to get outside of our neoliberal, differentiated selves. We need to get outside of the world we have created through the endless self-production of desire. What we need is to get out of our heads and our hearts in the direction of a radical openness to what the Aboriginal nations of this continent call, quite simply, 'country'. Country is, for we natives, both radically material and radically divine. It is the embodiment of the divine in pathways, waterways, skyways and the ritual songs that make them navigable. Country is, for us, a patterned network of reciprocal kinship with all living things: plants, animals, people, weather patterns and even rocks, which actually vibrate with ancestral presence. Each of us are born to a specific country, and there we belong. Country tells us who we are, to whom we belong, and what our part will be in the profound responsibility to care for country and its strong but fragile ecologies. For if we take our part in the communal vocation of caring for country, all of country will care for us. Crucially, this is not something we choose by virtue of our self-actualization as autonomous selves. It is simply given. It precedes and exceeds us. It gives us a unique and irreplaceable place in a patterned whole. 

In Aboriginal perspective, then, as much as in the Christian mysticism of Mr Eliot, the answer to our woes lies not within, but without: in country, or the givenness of things in themselves, rather than in what we would forge from them out of selves that look only to possess, to consume and to colonise.  To walk on country is not, therefore, simply to bathe oneself in the sensuality of occasional contact with the wonders of 'nature' - wonderfully healing though this experience can be in itself - but also to stop and to stay, to engage in a more sustained waiting, to observe how each thread of the tapestry depends on each other thread for its life and its purpose.  To wait long enough to see that life and death and life again are woven into the fabric of the bush, just as Christ and his paschal self-emptying are woven into the persistent creativity of the cosmos.

Which brings me, at the last, to the very next lines in Eliot's poem:

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony

Of death and birth.

Let us, like country itself, be contemplatives who are able to die to ourselves - to our hungry and self-serving desire for the phantasmic dreams of modernity - that we might be reborn to that more expansive self that is a deep and abiding kinship with all creation. 

Garry Worete Deverell

This brief talk was shared as part of a panel for the Contemplative Studies Centre (University of Melbourne) and the Australian Association for the Study of Religion, on November the 29th, 2022.

The better way

Texts: Amos 8.1-12; Psalm 52; Col 1.15-28; Luke 10.38-42

A few years ago I saw a film which I hesitate to recommend because it was depressing even by my own rather bleak standards.  Requiem for a Dream is about four adults—an aging mother and her son, his girlfriend and their best mate—who live in Coney Island, New York.  It is a film about the desperate blandness of their lives and the way they try to spice that blandness with artificial sweeteners, namely television, diet pills, and heroin.  It is about their thirst for trust, hope and love in relationships, and their utter failure to find it.  It is about the way in which drugs come to anesthetise the protagonists against the pain of their failure and, more tragically still, about how their drug-taking renders them incapable of actually recognising the presence of faith, hope or love when it is standing right in front of them.  Requiem for a Dream  is one of the saddest, bleakest films I have ever seen, and I wish to God that it were only fiction.  But it is not.  You know, and I know, that substance abuse is so common in modern, western societies, that there is barely a single household that has not been effected by it in some way or other.  Statistically, I would be on pretty firm ground in assuming that there are families in this very church who have experienced the hell of a son or a daughter, a mother or a father, stolen away by the demon bottle, or the demon syringe, or the demon slot-machine, or whatever.

Now, I am not an expert on addiction and its treatment, and would never claim to be.  I know very little about the biochemistry or social-psychology of how and why particular individuals lose their capacity to face life apart from the aid of their favourite drug.  Nevertheless, I would seek to make a contribution to the debate, a contribution which is specifically theological in perspective and is therefore, I would argue, exactly what is missing from the usual analysis.  In summary, my contribution would go something like this: (A) that the prevalence of substance abuse in modern western societies can be read as a sign and a symptom not of sick individuals or families, first of all, but of a more general malaise or sickness in Western culture as a whole; and that (B), this malaise or sickness, which afflicts us all in one way or another, may be understood as a deep, deep grieving, a grief attending the loss of a cosmic story which was able to tell us (1) who we are, (2) where, and to whom, we belong, and (3) how to live a life that is not only happy, but also good.  Let me repeat all that in case you missed it.   The wide-spread prevalence of substance abuse can be read as a sign and a symptom not of sick individuals and families, first of all, but of a sick culture, a culture that is grieving the loss of a cosmic story which was able to tell us (1) who we are, (2) where, and to whom, we belong, and (3) how to live lives that are happy and good.  

As I see it, our own cultural situation is not entirely different to that of Israel in the 8^th century BCE, at the time when the prophet Amos was preaching.  We live in a dog-eat-dog society where anyone is fair game because few of us know, or want to know, the answers to those three cosmic questions any more.  The strong exploit the weak because they no longer know, deep in their bones, that they are God’s handiwork, created for a communal sharing, with every other creature, of the bounty given us in creation.  The weak allow the strong to treat them so because they no longer believe, deep in their bones, that they belong not to the market or to the owner of the farm, but to each other, and to each other in a God who enfolds and dignifies us all.  And the very fact that there are those who are weak and those who are strong bears witness to a forgetting that one’s own happiness is tied up with the good one renders another, that the other has an ancient and primeval claim on me such that I can never be happy myself unless I also seek the good or happiness of the other.

I venture to suggest, therefore, that we are living (again) in that time of famine that Amos prophesied for Israel, a famine not of bread or water first of all, but a famine with regard to the word (or story) given us by God.  Each of us feels, do we not, a hunger and a thirst for something better—a better way, a better country, a better life?  Yet most of us, even many who call themselves Christians, wander through the wastelands of our society without finding that better something.  What we find, more often than not, is mere chimeras and dreams.  At first we are enamoured, attracted by a bright comeliness that seems novel or new.  But after only a short while we begin to realize that the newness we saw was nothing more than a pizzaz we longed for, a pizzazz  never really there in the thing itself, save only as a mirroring or reflecting-back of our own wish-fulfilment.  Let me suggest, therefore, that there is a rather simple reason why most of us never find what we are looking for:  that we lack a story which is able to tell us what we actually need, and therefore how to recognise what we need when it comes along.  If we don’t know what to look for, how shall we ever find it?  We live in a culture which has largely lost its capacity to know what it needs.  That is a great loss, and very painful loss.  It is a loss that can make you want to anesthetise yourself against the pain of being lost.  Everyone has their favourite drug.  For some it is endless hours of television, web-surfing or romance novels.  For others it is casual sex, or alcohol, or heroin.  Whatever your addiction, isn’t the motivation always the same, deep down?  Isn’t it to anesthetise yourself against the pain of not knowing who you are, to whom you belong, and how to live a life that is good and happy?

Well, what can the preacher say to a culture such as this?  How might the Christian theologian address the pain and the grief at the heart of it all?  My answer may not seem profound to you, it may sound far too simple.  Yet it is profound, I suspect, in its very simplicity.  What the preacher can do is nothing other than he or she has always done.  To tell the story of Christ, and to live as though this story were true for all creatures.  Let me repeat that, lest it seem too simple.  To tell the story of Christ, and to live as though this story were true for all creatures.

According to St. Paul, the story of Christ is not just one story amongst others one may choose from the smorgasboard on offer.  It is the meta-story, the one story is which all other stories find both their origin and their fulfilment.  The whole universe, he says, was created, and continues to unfold, within a material body which is cosmic in scale, and yet has a personal name:  Christ.  Christ, he says, is the larger and far more ultimate reality from which, and in which, the universe was created.  Christ, he says, is God in material form.  He is the universe, and yet he is much more than the universe.  For the universe is, in a sense, independent of God.  It moves according to a will other than God’s.  Very often, that will is the very contrary of what God intends.  And yet, even in that independent movement, the universe depends upon God for its very existence.  So God, in the materiality of Christ, seeks to reconcile the estranged independence of the universe with God’s own will and way.  By suffering the estrangement of the universe in Christ’s very real and human suffering on the cross, God establishes a way of reconciliation:  if we will give ourselves utterly to Christ, and trust ourselves to his way of living humanly toward God, then the ways of creature and creature will be rejoined.  Having emerged from God in the beginning we may, with all creatures, return to God through the creaturely Christ who is also the very humanity of God.  Though we are sinners, adrift in the consequences of our creaturely choices, God has not abandoned us.  The mystery of human existence, according to Paul, is that even when we are furthest from God, Christ has traversed the distance between us.  ‘Christ is in us’, and therefore there are legitimate grounds for a hope that we may enjoy a glorious future with and in God.

The great thing about this story is that is answers those three deeply human questions I referred to earlier.  It tells us who we are:  God’s creatures, free to be what we choose to be, even sinners who run from God’s purposes, and yet we are never beyond the reach of God because we share our material existence with that of Christ.  The story also tells us, therefore, to whom we belong.  We have our home in God, ultimately, because it is God, paradoxically, who guarantees our freedom from God.  We belong, also, to other people and to the whole creation, because it is Christ who knits us all together in a body of mutual interdependence and co-operation.  If one suffers, all suffers; if one rejoices, all rejoice.  Finally, Paul’s story tells us how to live good and happy lives.  By entrusting ourselves to the way of Christ, by refusing to privilege our own lives over that of our neighbours, we shall find a freedom to live deliberately, to be free from the compulsion to gain the world because we understand that the world is only gained by letting it be.  In Christ, after all, God gains the world back again, of its own free will, by letting it be other than Godself.

Now this stuff is dynamite, I reckon.  If we were to know and believe this story, and then live our lives as though it were true, the world would change.  It would be transformed.  We would no longer need to forever live in shock, or in grief, or in an addicted stupor.  We could live our lives as though they mattered.  As though they mattered to God.  Because we would know that they do matter to God.

But this is the catch, see.  The preacher may be telling the story, but that’s no guarantee that anyone is listening.  In the Christian tradition, there is only one preacher worthy of the name, and that is Christ.  By the Spirit he comes, in every new moment, to tell his story anew.  In his words are life, and health, and peace.  The words of this preacher are food and drink for the hungry soul, food and drink that are able to satisfy because they have a genuine substance, they are real in a way that the contrivances of ‘reality-tv’ would struggle to imagine!

Yet one must listen carefully to hear these words, if they are to do their healing.  You actually have to spend time with them.  There’s no point in rushing around like Martha in Luke’s story, thinking that you are serving the Lord just because you want to.  How do you know that you are serving the Lord unless you actually take the time to listen to what Jesus says?  That is the substance of prayer after all:  not talking to God, first of all, but listening for the word of the preacher, of Christ, as he comes to your stilled and silent soul in the gentle companionship of the Holy Spirit.  How will you know who you are, to whom you belong, and to what your life is ordained unless you devote serious time to a prayerful listening for the word of Christ in the word of Scripture?

Now, this preacher has come amongst you with only one real priority.  Not to set the church alight with the warm glow of his charismatic personality.  Not to start a whole heap of new mission activities, especially if they are really there to make us feel that we are relevant before the eyes of the watching world.  God forbid!  No, what I have come to do is simply this: to teach you how to pray, and to remind those of you who already know how to pray to return to it again.  For in prayer is our salvation, and the salvation of our world.  In prayer we shall hear and know and begin, finally, to live the truth of the gospel:  “Christ in us: the hope of glory”.