Author: Tarella Spirituality

Midway through July, three years ago, I took a deep breath and began writing a book. I had just returned from an Australia wide gathering of catholic communicators, young women and men whose work of passing on the catholic story reminded me of my younger self.

I am one of the thousands who left religious life after V2. Some would say that we ‘lost our vocation’. Not so! We took with us the formation and education we had received in religious life and gave it a new focus in education, parish ministry and even liturgy.
Those years were unique and later generations will look back and analyse their importance and the effect they would have on the future of the Australian Catholic church.

I decided I would like to write my experience of those years.

That book, titled A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning is finally ready to be introduced to the world on August 26th. I’m sending you this invitation to its launch even though many who read Words from the Edge are scattered across Australia and even further.

I guess I just want to say, “Rejoice with me”, that it’s finished, that David Lovell Publications valued it enough to publish it, and I hope that in the near future you might buy a copy. More about that in a week or two.

And now– you’re invited to a book launch!

In late January 1958 I flew from Sydney to Darwin. It was my first ever flight, daylight and cloudless. The vast spaces that unrolled beneath me took my breath away. No mountain ranges, just countless brown ridges hinting at height and distance, occasionally the glint of a roof in a clump of trees and the meander of a river bed. I was a newly minted nun, teacher’s certificate in hand and onroute to the aboriginal settlement Wadye, then known as Port Keats and I had discovered the wonder and the seduction of Australian space.

That experience goes a long way to explain why I have called my book A Gentle Unfolding. The places and spaces of the Australian landscape are the backdrop of my life experience, and the vocabulary of landscape helps me to recognise how my personal story of place has shaped and given meaning to the way I relate to God.

I’m an ordinary woman, and appreciating my womanliness has led me to trust my feminine experience of God and how women live out that relationship. And while the creedal basics of my catholic faith haven’t changed, how I experience and live them has.

A Gentle Unfolding: Circling and Spiralling into Meaning is the story of a vocation that is twisted through with invitations and challenges that have nothing to do with set-aside lifestyles but everything to do with my God relationship.

A Gentle Unfolding: Circling and Spiralling into Meaning will be published 26th August 2018.