Words From The Edge

The tradesman who cleared six months of leaf litter from our roof gutters tells me that I’m living in a fire trap. Something that I already knew, but not what I wanted to hear. Living among gum trees is beautiful, but each year as summer begins to take hold, I wonder if this will be our year of the bushfire. Like the majority of residents I will live through the fire season with an undercurrent of fear, masked by bravado. When the CFA advises evacuation all the talk about memorabilia and favourite belongings being replaceable feels a bit hollow.

People like me who choose to live in Warrandyte, Wurundjeri land, are always a guest of that land.  Quirky, individualistic houses overshadowed by tall, skinny eucalypts are dotted through the ranges. Away from the Yarra River flats the soil is rocky and only offers its hospitality to plants that have always found a home there. There’s a whiff of otherness about it, an indifference to our need for safety and security, and it’s where I live.

What turns a house into a home? Maybe it’s the door – front, back, side door, even a two- night -stay hotel apartment door. Standing there, key in hand or ready to turn the knob, a split second, then step inside- and you’re home, somewhere you belong. I know it’s a cliché, but ‘there’s no place like home’. That is unless you can’t afford to buy or rent one. 

So what happens if you’re homeless? Sleeping in the car is no substitute, staying with a friend or relation can get difficult if it lasts too long, temporary lodging in a motel is impersonal. Children’s schooling is interrupted and jobs are lost. This is happening in our own country.

Turn on the news, any channel. Month after month we have seen houses in the Ukraine, houses that have sheltered families for generations, reduced to roofless wrecks, big city apartment blocks, home to young families in what were once fast-growing cities, tumbling after a rocket strike. Just this week thousands of families in the Gaza Strip were deliberately made homeless, whole families murdered in what they had once considered the safety of their home. So much suffering, so many lost children, thousands upon thousands of lives turned upside down – for what reasons?

As a nation we voted No in the referendum. I look back to the horror stories of our First Nation people who lost land, children and their dignity, everything that had been home to them for 60,000 years. We’ve made their land, our land, but at what cost to the original inhabitants and their successors.

Taking all this on board can lead to compassion fatigue. Jesus experienced it too. He sometimes took a break to re-charge his spiritual batteries, time to touch into God, a breathing space that gave him the energy to heal the sick and broken, to be a front man for those who yearned for justice.  So much need, so many places where the healing power of God is needed.  

After a one-night-too-many 7 pm News I looked up Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart to see what she had to say about compassion.  “Compassion is the daily practice of recognising and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”

Compassion expands the heart and recognises that each in our own way have known loss, loneliness, pain and sorrow, sometimes homelessness or home-sickness as well. Homilies and sermons, Gospel reflections and the media have done a good job, and by and large we are a compassionate country. We give money, time and energy to good causes, both in our own country and abroad.

Compassion is action in the face of suffering, or you may see it as religion with skin on.

Judith judith@judithscully.com.au

Words from the Edge has spent the last few months no, not travelling, but finishing off the book that I began writing in 2019. Hopefully it will be published sometime next year. Meanwhile, our world hasn’t stopped throwing out surprises and challenges, such as the upcoming referendum. It has stirred me into appreciating my years in the Northern Territory.  If you find something in A Kind of Dreaming that stirs you, please consider sharing it on your social media. 

When the British Government raised its flag on Australian soil and claimed it for their own they believed they had reached a godless land. But the country they took as their own was infused with a mysticism that was as wide as the land itself. 

God had written a sacred story across Australia with its crumpled brown earth, now and again rivers, eucalypts stretching green fingers into blue skies, Uluru’s red heart, ancient purple mountains, the criss-cross of songlines and a huge mandala of a coastline hugging it all together.

Country is the word of life for Australia’s First Nation people. For sixty five thousand years they have storied it into their culture, singing and dancing the way they experience it into songlines, language and movement. Miriam-Rose Ungunmeer-Baumann, an educator and artist who was born in the bush near Daly River in the Northern Territory of Australia, puts it this way: “ The identity we have with the land is sacred and unique . . .  I believe it is the greatest gift we can give our fellow Australians . In our language it is called dadirri. . .  it is something like what you call contemplation”.

My grandparents, and their parents before them, were farmers. Even though the farm house is long gone, in the scrapbook of my memory there is a house with a veranda, and beyond that an endless horizon tucking in vast, stretched-out wheat and barley paddocks and distant sand hills. On the rare occasions I revisit the site I am filled with a sense of home. It was like I belonged there, and all that went with that belonging is still inside me, even though I grew up in a big city.

 It explained the at-homeness of my young adult years spent teaching in remote areas of the Northern Territory. The faded out colours, the stillness, the space, the silence of that landscape seems to have merged into my DNA, moving me beyond everyday horizons and into the deeper spiritual dimensions of life.

There’s such a thing as the spirituality of the land and how we read it can draw out the mystic that hides inside each of us. It could be a camping spot high in a mountain range or a bush block beside a river, maybe a coastal town where sleep is backgrounded by a heard-but-not-seen ocean. You might love the spacious whiteness of fresh snow or the deep silence of the Nullarbor. Or something as everyday as walking the dog in a suburban park. There’s a mysticism there, something familiar but also hidden, possibly a tug back to a forgotten memory.

Morris West observed that “Aboriginal people have no temples, only places where the treasures of their Dreamtime memory are preserved in a special fashion. “They know what it is to be totally aware of the feel of a place; the sounds, the movement of the wind, the colours, the scents, the stories and emotions that surround it. They call it the Dreaming, alcheringa.”  

 Aboriginal mysticism seeks a oneness with the environment in a way that is distinctly theirs. But I’m a non-Aboriginal Australian and even though my religious and spiritual journey is set against the same backdrop it’s not underpinned by generations of the Dreaming.

Catholic priest and anthropologist Eugene Stockton says, “If you were born on this land, by Aboriginal belief you have pre-existed here, like them, from the timeless Dreaming. So on their reckoning, you have with them a common bond and common spiritual roots in this continent, although racial roots through your parents, lie elsewhere.’’

There is no question of us appropriating the Dreaming, but we can learn to read God from the landscape that calls us, gently scraping it layer by layer, as its deeper meaning shows itself. This, if you like, is our Dreaming.

Judith judith@judithscully.com.au