When John was the Anglican minister in South Sydney, and before I came to St George’s, Paddington, he invited me to facilitate some intensive study weeks for a group of Indigenous students who were associated with the Crossroads Fellowship in Redfern. They were doing distance courses through Nungalinya College in Darwin, and would come from different parts of NSW to do intensive weeks of study.
At my first meeting with them, during afternoon tea, I met Col, an artist from Mogo in southern NSW. We introduced ourselves and Col asked me how many children I had. I told him four, and he said, “Did you have any miscarriages?” I was taken a little by surprise at such a question at our first meeting, but I was able to tell him about my two miscarriages. And he listened intently. Later that night I was reflecting on the sacredness of that conversation. There was no embarrassment, just heart-to-heart sharing of our stories. I was stunned the next morning to find that Col had drawn a picture of a family of dolphins, obviously representing my family, with the two smallest members shaded much more darkly than the others, and floating towards the bottom. He had used my whiteboard markers and drawn the picture on an old sheet of gyprock that was resting against the wall of the room where we studied together. At the end of the week I asked the group if they minded if I took the picture home. They helped me load it into my car. I’ve had it framed and it has pride of place in our living room.
I used the word “sacred” in the above description, because that is how it felt to me. In some ways, Indigenous Australians can be said to experience the sacred “from below”. That is, their experience of the sacred comes from the earth rather than from heaven. The dove, representing the Holy Spirit in the Uniting Church’s emblem, seems to be coming from somewhere above. But my shaded dolphins are very much “below”. And they are something to be spoken about. Australians who came here from across the seas are reluctant to speak about the sacred, and someone has even suggested that such reluctance might be related to our embarrassment or shame about dispossessing Indigenous Australians who are so easily able to speak about their spirituality. That spirituality is linked to their place, to who they are and where they are. We have so much to learn from Indigenous Australians. I am hoping that some of them might write this column from time to time and explain to us how sacredness attaches to their stories and their feeling for the land in a way which many of us admire, even envy. Paddington is now in the circulation area of the SSH, so I look forward to the faith stories.
