A new year

It’s a new year, summertime in Australia, time to slow down, find a shady spot and read a whodunit, and try to escape questions that I’d rather leave back in the year just gone:     

Why are my children so different one to the other?

Will the war in Ukraine come to an end soon?

What does 2023 hold for me and mine?

Will Covid ever go away?

Where is God in all this?

Some years have been unforgettable. I spent my working life as a woman in what was basically a world of religious males. As the years rolled on I realized that I wanted a voice in that world, a voice that spoke from a feminine perspective. I bought a computer, mastered the necessary skills and began writing. In 2010 my youngest brother offered to set me up with a website of my own. I registered it under the name Tarella Spirituality. Two months later I sent my first post out into the world.

Tarella was a farm on the edge of the Victorian Mallee country where my mother grew up. The vast paddocks that surrounded the house and drew a line across the horizon must have merged into my DNA, because writing pushes me to look beyond the everyday and ordinary and into the wide spiritual dimensions of life, looking for the sacred hidden there.

 I write about everyday things, the bits and pieces that litter my eight decades. I write as a woman, an Australian, a mother, a lay person, a catholic. I write, in language that is kitchen-table friendly and taps into familiar everyday experiences. I write to pick up where religious education classes or Sunday school left off, to fill the spaces where a lifetime of liturgy and homilies has got lost in religious terminology.   

Tarella lived on in that website until 2018. That year I posted my hundredth piece on Tarella Spirituality while gradually and painfully running in a new knee and publishing my book, A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning.

I was aware that whenever I wrote anything I was constantly questioning catholic doctrines and traditions that once I had taken on face value, now I was finding them neither life-giving nor relevant. Instead of being close to the religious centre of my life I had drifted out to the edges, in touch, but not real close either.

An opportunity presented itself and I closed Tarella Spirituality.com, replacing it with a new site, more appropriately  titled Words from the Edge.com.au.

These days as I write, I often look back to the certainty of the centre, to the communities where once I found comfort and meaning in the shared beliefs and practices and the words that linked them. And I miss all that. It was safe, something that an edge, and the untrodden space beyond it, can never be. It’s uncharted territory and there’s no GPS. But I’m finding that the silence there can free me to hear the core message of my religious faith in new, relevant and creative ways.

Thank you to those who have encouraged me to keep writing. And as there is a lot of space out there beyond the horizon, I’d be delighted to meet with you and other like-minded God-seekers as we share words from the edge.

Judith Scully judith@judithscully.com.au

A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning (Available online from major bookshops)