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

'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.