One Mob

Colossians 3:1-11

People have asked me how was my trip to Alice Springs? Did I like it? Was it a good experience? I am not sure how to answer. And when some words begin to form, I find them slipping away, not really wanting to be put out there for others to hear.

You see, I had heard a lot about the Centre, the desert, the people and the Aboriginal problem and it was different to what I saw. I watched tourists and  people on pilgrimages, seeking something from the country and the people in order to save themselves from them selves. I witnessed the harsh beauty of the landscape painted in red rock and carved on the faces of the people who lived there. When I am asked what was it like, I am not sure what people want me to say.

I listened to people wax romantically about the wisdom in the country, the dreaming and the ancient people who still live there, and find myself conflicted and challenged. I watched people worship this wisdom seeking absolution for the guilt of the past and fear that what they find will do little to change they way we, black and white, live with each other here.

The 7.30 report story on children in detention has created a stir but while the images are new, the story is not. This has been going on in our country for, the day the first white boat people arrived, was there at the day of Federation, experienced during my youth and I can share many a story from my years working on the streets of Kings Cross, Fortitude Valley in Brisbane and a range of prisons I visited as a Salvation Army Chaplain. No amount of commissions, inquiries or reports will change what is so deeply entrenched in the Australian psyche.

Stan Grant in an emotional powerful speech this week at the University of Sydney, a must read for everyone, makes it plain that bigotry and racism lies at the core of our country and without the honesty of such as a truth and reconciliation commission, as in South Africa, can we even begin to turn this around.

M K Turner, an Arrenta woman from Alice Springs speaks of Uteryea or the line or vein which runs through country and through people. Like  a vein it carries the essence describing the character and truth of country and people. It is in us and runs through us on and out to others, it defines and claims us and remains with us always. It changes brings us into relationship with others.

Paul in Colossians brings us solidly back to a similar truth. It is no longer about us but about the life of Christ that lives with in us. And because of this we are different to before.

David A. Sanchez writes: "I am inclined to read this Biblical passage as a response by the author to a community that was struggling with shifting ethnic, social, and cultural demographics where one group attempted to conserve and validate a perceived privileged position based on what they recognized to be normative, entrenched, and original." And so do I. Paul is attempting to bring about a cultural change that is already completed. By this I mean, when we encounter the resurrected Christ we are changed, now but not yet. It is now because it is the gift that occurs in the moment; it is not yet because it requires us to clothe ourselves in the life and example of Christ in the journey of relationships and experiences from now to forever. The fullness of that change only becomes real as we give life to it in our lived relationships. 

And here is where it gets complicated, a word that came up continually in Alice – what about….. the answer always was, it’s complicated. It’s complicated being a Christian because it is hard to stay with the countercultural expectations of living Christ's life in the world. It is so easy to move from inclusive love to hate, compassion to anger, generosity to scarcity and greed, and more. Paul is talking to a group of people who are needing to engage with a new world, a new way of being, with the inclusion in the community of people who are different, who they do not necessarily want there. They are struggling at the hardest place, the interaction between individuals, in the most difficult of places to do that, the church. 

It is here our expectations are at their highest. We expect those who are like us to behave in a certain way, to be the epitome of everything a Christian is meant to be. And they aren’t we react badly. We are let down, disappointed and may even use it as an excuse to leave. Yet we are shocked when others see us in a similar way. Paul cheekily finishes this passage with: “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” even the one who is different, difficult, who hurt you, who let you down, who is not you. A constant theme coming from the indigenous speakers was we are one. 

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, a Daly river woman writes: “Life is very hard for many of my people. Good and bad things came with the years of contact - and with the years following. People often absorbed the bad things and not the good. It was easier to do the bad things than to try a bit harder to achieve what we really hoped for… There are deep springs within each of us. Within this deep spring, which is the very Spirit of God, is a sound. The sound of Deep calling to Deep. The sound is the word of God - Jesus.” 

How much we need that word in our country now! The word Jesus dwelling deep within creation and creatures, country and people to reconcile firstly ourselves to ourselves, and then to others. Paul is right. Blame and guilt does little and only works if we recognise others as not us and abled to be manipulated and mistreated. We are one, we are connected, and we belong to each other. The uteryea runs through us and when we sit together in dadirri we discover the truth deep down flowing like a river – we are the same, we belong in this place, in this country as one mob. 

Without this word Jesus; fear, hate, anger and violence will continue to be the language we speak to each other and the resultant destruction of culture and country, the legacy we leave behind. Paul reminds us it is up to us, “you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.”

Without a fully reflective engagement with this word Jesus so that our veneer of respectability is torn open and our deepest prejudices and ideologies, our sin, is extinguished from our daily living in the light of this word Jesus then we will continue as we were before we encountered Him. No one can absolve us from Paul's injunction. It is our vocation, my vocation, your vocation and it begins today. Let's do it.      

  

Speaking from Exile

He was in his early teens. A fine looking young man struggling to find his way in a white world, often accused of crimes he had not committed, we worked together to overcome the injustices that came his way. When he was 10 he filled a bathtub with water, poured in a bottle of White King bleach, and climbed in. He wanted to be white like all the rest of the kids in his class. He was a young man in exile.

 

Sometime later I was working in the funeral industry and visited the mortuary at Mt Isa hospital. A man had been placed on the slab for forensic examination by the GMO; a blood stained white sheet covered his body.  Freezer doors weeping on one wall, a pile of torn decrepit clothes absent-mindedly flung on the untidy bench as a brief reminder of a life once occupied, and the half closed screen door, all spoke volumes about the place in which we stood. The man was an aboriginal person who had been sleeping on the highway, run over by an eighteen-wheel road train. While it might seem trivial to say his body was badly damaged, it is impossible to know just how much unless you had witnessed the results. Remarkably his face was unmarked.

 

Standing there, I  experienced being in the tomb with the dead Christ, standing on the edge watching as people performed the necessary routines. I knew I was witnessing a scene that would change my life forever. And it did.

 

I struggle to understand why people sleep rough on the road in the path of the ubiquitous semi-trailer. What sense of hope do these people have, or indeed, is hopelessness the only gift our society gives them?  Here was a human being who did not deserve to die in such a violent manner.  Here was someone who had at some time in his life dreamed dreams, held hopes, loved another and possibly fathered and raised children. Where had all that gone, and what part did the dominant culture of our society, including the church I am apart of, have in his decline? Here was the image of Christ crushed into death, not simply by the truck, but by the failure of society to engage and include him. He remained in exile.

 

Talking with the GMO I heard about indigenous teenage suicides. The method chosen spoke eloquently of the hopelessness experienced.  They simply tied something around their neck and on to a fence, sat-down and waited. What is our response or do we rationalize what happened as the life style choice of the individual? Exiled and disempowered.

 

I grew up in a town renown for its violence against local tribes. Visiting the library, reading newspaper cuttings and letters from the mid 1880’s to the early 1920’s, I realised the steps taken by my family to hide my grandmothers’ heritage was a strategy deemed necessary for survival.

 

My grandfather made my Uncle promise to keep my grandmothers indigenous heritage hidden. No one in my family speaks of it; her background is shrouded in mystery. There is only a mother who registered the birth some time later in a different town. No father is mentioned. She had the name of the family she was left with when the small aboriginal community from which Jimmy and Joey Governor, part-aboriginal men who killed 9 people during a fourteen week rampage in 1900, the year of federation, and who inspired the book and movie “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” came, were forcibly moved out west at the request of the white community. 

 

While it was our family secret, it wasn’t a secret to the locals. I grew up known as ‘Young Darkie’ or ‘Young Blackfella’; my friend, when angry, called me the son of a drunken bush black; another friends’ father told a group of classmates they could be friends with me but to remember where I came from. Bullying at school was never-ending.

 

My father lived in exile, caught between a world he knew and a world he never knew, growing more bitter and angry as the years went on. He acted out his violence through alcohol, directing it at anyone nearby, particularly his family and I as his eldest son. He was never able to reconcile within himself these two worlds even when he stopped drinking. It was bigger than him and his family. It was the internalised oppression of a people and country from which he was exiled.

These incidents are metaphors for the destruction of the primal spiritual essence of our people and symbolise the battle for the soul of our nation. Our people are suffering from the cumulative effect of internalised oppression giving rise to the situation we see in front of us. It will take imagination, humility and a drastic rethinking of our own lives and the way we find value and meaning in and for ourselves, and others before we will be able to reach out to those we continue to oppress. They, we, are living in exile.

 

Perhaps exile holds the key for the future. ‘Only when you are out of rhythm with the familiar do you begin to investigate and explore the possibilities. Exile is the place in which such an investigation not only can begin, but becomes necessary for both survival and renewal. It is the place where one is forced, as an individual and a community, to reflect on who or what is at the centre of one’s being.’ Both cultures are disconnected from their centre due to the violent history of our country, and in a very real sense, both black and white, are exiled from belonging. Homeless and exiled, the violence continues and can only find peace when we own such disconnection together.

Standing at the edges of the abyss, a place our country has teetered on for sometime, reveals both the emptiness and the fullness of our situation. Emptiness and fullness of place, time and country, language and symbolism, and myth and meaning in a land overflowing with mythic and creative possibilities as yet untapped. Both cultures have been reduced to a literal reading of the situation and are concentrating on solving practical and in your face problems – work, housing, education (all good things) but not that which will change the situation in the long term.

What will change our situation is the conversation from the edge, from exile. This is not a conversation for insiders on both sides, but for the outsiders, those whose voice isn’t heard in conventions, parliaments or peak body discussions. It is not about the pronouncements by high profile leaders or designated spokesmen and women. This is dialogue, the conversation between ordinary individuals, telling stories and sharing both knowledge and ignorance, informing pathways and possibilities. This conversation begins here with you and I, exploring experiences, questioning stereotypes, forming relationships and breaking down walls.

Thomas Merton suggests “The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept.” It is sometimes called Dadirri by indigenous people.  Inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. It is a 'tuning in' experience with the specific aim to come to a deeper understanding of the beauty of the other. 

It is listening and hearing, not just to what is said but what is not said, what is felt, what is hidden. This takes great imagination and risk. It takes time, and is not linear. It involves learning in depth, far removed from the head and the rational desire to solve problems.

It requires respect, the capacity to allow others to make the journey at their own pace and in ways we find uncomfortable and counter intuitive. It recognises others as our teachers and removes us from the responsibility of knowing everything. It recognises the reign of God as the companionship of empowerment and looks not for measurable results but fulfilled lives.

 

Merton, in writing to race activist Jim Forrest in the US in the 1960’s said; “Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”

Whatever we do in terms of reconciliation and engagement with indigenous people must keep this in mind. It is not about ideas or solutions, but people. Individuals of goodwill like you and I who are seeking a better world for all, can only do so in relationship with each other and those we share the future with. John Baxter, speaking at a NRW gathering said that reconciliation is relational – it happens between individual people, not cultures. For people driven by easy answers and quick solutions this maybe seen as doing nothing, wasting time and avoiding the problem.

It is the good news Jesus performed. He did little, he wasted time and, as far as the Zealots and others were concerned, he avoided the elephant in the room - the system. Yet he changed the world. We can do the same.  It can only happen through dadirri and communion, and it must begin tonight.