Contemporary
Australian Spirituality[1]
2018 (2011)
The writings of archaelogists and anthropologists lead us to believe that religious practice has been part of human experience since our metamorphosis into ‘human’. From analysis of the remains of ancient civilizations theories have been proposed about the beliefs that may have been part of the culture under discussion, and whether the beliefs had been consolidated into a formal religion.
Underlying this type of discussion is the assumption that religion, and its expression through ritual, is a social act; a consensual set of beliefs and public practices. Whereas traditional institutionalised religions are agreed social acts they are often accompanied by many unofficial individualised interpretations and private rituals, as well as alternative beliefs and practices.
In the late 20th century there was a resurgence of interest in alternative spiritualities such as neopaganism, neowitchcraft, goddess-worship, druidism, and various ecospiritualities.[2] Even within traditional religions such as Christianity believers were exploring new perspectives and interpretations, incorporating various cosmic, ecological, or feminist viewpoints into their theology and practice. Others still found these explorations limited and dated, and began searching for something more.
Some attempted to reinvent the traditions of ancient cultures using archaeological and anthropological writing. Others looked to the existing religions and belief systems and practices of the east. Others still revisited the perceived early beliefs of their own indigenous cultures, the ‘Australian Aborigines’ or ‘American Indians’, or Inuits of Canada. The danger inherent in this type of revisiting was that of ignoring the multiple variations and differences which existed between clans and tribes, and presenting discrete findings as if they were common to all.
At the same time there emerged two contradictory needs. One was an outcome of contemporary life, which was becoming increasingly individualistic as lifelong family and extended family units, longterm residence in the same community, and lifetime work in the one job and place were no longer the experience of many people. The trend towards individualism was fuelled by the popularity and influence of the internet and its accompanying online social networking and trade. The result being that people could experience an increasingly globalised worldview and lifestyle while functioning as freewheeling working and networking individuals within an environment of rapid change. Any workable spirituality would need to be personalised, transportable, and adaptable.
The other seemingly contradictory need was for a spirituality that spoke of place. This was seen in the rise of an ecological consciousness and the ‘sense of place’ writing, coming particularly from the United States and Australia during the same period. The religious aspect was addressed under headings such as deep ecology, ecospirituality and ecofeminist spirituality. The Department of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney was one of the few arenas in Australia where this trend was vigorously embraced and supported.
Yet the need to address ‘place’ has a longer history in Australia. From the eighteenth century on many white writers, visual artists and performers were already addressing place-specificity in their work.[3] Perhaps this was a colonialist need.
By the end of the twentieth century discussion of what constitutes an Australian spirituality became a focus of the Christian church, exemplified by the writing of Veronica Brady, Eugene Stockton and David Tacey, and conferences such as the 1992 conference, Creation Spirituality: A Celebration of the Australian Story, in which Brady and Stockton took part.[4] In Sydney, Pitt Street Uniting Church and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney, under Dr. Jim Tulip, were among a number of organisations beginning to incorporate an Australian consciousness into their Christian expression.
So, while the day to day experience of the developed world encouraged its citizens to have ‘no fixed address’ except online, other citizens were seeking and promoting a consciousness which was ‘place specific’; one which engaged with the world outside the box of cyberspace. What then are we to make of these changes and perceived needs at the beginning of the twenty first century? Is it possible to discuss religions and spiritualities which speak of person, time, and place in a new way? Is it also possible to do this without losing the real and imagined heritage from which they emerge? I’ll begin by offering the following summary and terminology around which the discussion will take place.
All religions have,
A Spiritual Ground: a set of beliefs about unseen forces and deities, who or what they are, and how they impact on material life; the life we know and experience.
A Spiritual Matrix: images, stories, songs, music, ritual, and all forms of artistic expression which symbolise, and communicate our understanding of and interaction with, the spiritual ground.
Both the spiritual ground and matrix have been, and continue to be, influenced and shaped by a number of indices.
- Who
we are: our humanity and
gender. BODY
- Our
relationship with the natural world.
NATURE
- Our
country/ies of origin and residence.
PLACE
- Our
historical, cultural and family story, including stories of select gurus
and enlightened beings. ANCESTORS
- Our relationship with the constructed world. CULTURE
Spiritual Ground
At the heart of any spiritual belief is a formulation of what is meant by ‘god’, ‘goddess’, ‘other’, ‘spirit’, ‘Be-ing’, or ? Some term the formulation a theology, or cosmology. Spiritual feminists engaged in this work tend to prefer the terms, spirituality or thealogy. But there are problems with all of these terms.[5] The terms are inevitably tied to a long tradition of debate and bias. This is why I offer the term Spiritual Ground as an alternative.
Spiritual Ground moves discussion of ‘divine’ beyond the strictures of traditional debate. It allows for the expression of an individual experience dependent on standpoint, gender, culture and creed. It opens up to acceptance, not division; unity, not dualism, multiplicity not ‘one truth’. It allows immanence: part of, connecting, and sustaining, all that is and can be imagined.[6] It addresses ‘mystery’, the ‘?’. Terms such as ‘energy’, ‘spirit’, ‘Be-ing’, ‘god’, ‘goddess’, ‘other’, ‘life force’, or ‘the numinous’ can be incorporated.
Spiritual Ground is coined to encapsulate the process of viewing, metaphoring, expressing, and explaining what might be. It is broad and freewheeling enough to encapsulate traditional debate as well as new ideas and imaginings.
Spiritual Matrix
I have coined the term Spiritual Matrix to refer to the ways in which humans express their experience of ‘other’; that is, via written texts, images, music, songs and rituals.
As the spiritual realm can only be explained through human agency the content of the expression must be through the material reality of everyday life. All traditional religions are tied to the country, culture, natural environment and historical period in which they have emerged. They carry the images, stories and cultural perspective of their birth. They are also tied to their author(s) and his/her particular knowledge and experience.
Because both the Spiritual Ground and the Spiritual Matrix are expressed through the human mind and experience, there are a number of biases at work which determine the gender, cultural and place context, and therefore the characters and content of the stories and texts. The same biases also the determine adaptability of the belief system. It is these influences which now need to be addressed.
• Body
One of the material expressions of spirit is the human body. Yet it cannot be assumed that individuals experience their bodies in the same way. Axes of difference, such as gender, race, class, culture, ethnicity, period of history, cultural background, sexual orientation, ableness, and age determine ‘who I am’ and ‘how I experience and understand who I am’.[7] So each person’s experience, understanding and expression of ‘spirit’ has the potential of being different as well.[8]
But what if all life is sacred, and each individual’s life is as sacred as the next? What if we took the Christian belief that we are ‘all made in the image of god’ literally? This would mean we all have the potential of being equally ‘holy’ and ‘enlightened’. Anyone of us could create our own spiritual ground and matrix, tell the story, write the poetry, compose the songs, and organise and lead the rituals. It would also mean that the concept of ‘god/dess’, or divinity, would need to incorporate ‘the dark side’ of our humanity.[9]
Such a spiritual ground would be broad enough to incorporate and be an expression of multiple genders, ethnicities, creeds, moralities and behaviours. The spiritual matrix would include stories, songs, poetry and rituals which would relate to a variety of bodies, genders, understanding, and experiences. Such a matrix could extend beyond individual experiences to family experiences, ancestral experiences, and those stories, songs and rituals centred on characters from our own cultural mix’s religions, mythologies and history.
This is the spiritual matrix which has come with all of us from countries of origin, has made an impact and is known. It would include the story of a family’s ‘first arrival’ in Australia: the story that has the potential to become a family’s foundation myth. Then there are the stories which explore a focal characters’ or guru’s spiritual journey.[10]
These stories are illustrative of embodied spirit at work and therefore the stories are the sacred myths and texts, with characters sacralised or demonised at the choice of the storyteller. In the twenty first century it should be possible for everybody to create their own embodied spirituality: to develop their own spiritual ground, and a matrix of poetry, songs, stories, dances and rituals which tell of and celebrate the mystery of their own, their family’s, and their ancestors’ lives, and to perform them in a sacred context.
• Nature
Another way in which the numinous has historically been seen to be present is in the form of the non-human natural environment. In those cultures where, and times when, the fecundity of the surrounding natural environment and its wildlife was essential for human survival, the goddesses, gods and religious practices imaged and mediated that reliance.
The rise of a market economy and city life brought changes in the way in which people perceived and experienced the world.[11] The tensions were different. An individual male-hero journey took precedence, and this time the hero was an anti-hero who, in Christianity, attempted to speak on behalf of the dispossessed. He was an itinerant preacher and no longer tied to nature, or place for that matter. Although he still included illustrations from the natural world they were selected to expound on human-god and human-human relationships.
Today, there is a growing body of literature which exposes the environmental devastation wrought by unthinking practices of individuals, communities, governments, and corporations.[12] The indications are that the natural environment is becoming increasingly unable to sustain the type of life the developed world has idealised. There is a perceived need for greater understanding of natural ecosystems and the human-nature connection, so that the devastation can be redressed. The debate has entered the political realm as opposing parties argue whether to take the research and writing seriously and therefore consider the implications for party policy.
Some argue that the real problem is a faulty religious paradigm.[13] As thealogian Carol Christ says, “I share the conviction that the crisis that threatens the destruction of the earth is not only social, political, economic, and technological, but is at root spiritual”[14] The new spiritualities and philosophies coming from Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology have begun to incorporate an ecological consciousness into their beliefs and practices, although there is critique of their perceived limited political agency.[15]
All political action springs from belief, and religion and religious practice cannot help but be political, as religious wars and conflicts testify. The feminist spirituality movement grew in response to a number of individual women who were questioning the status quo and searching for alternatives. Their actions carried political import which supported and influenced many other women beginning, or on, similar journeys. The political stance of Ecofeminism underpins Ecofeminist Spirituality. Arguing for a nature-centred spiritual ground and matrix is political in a climate that is driven by market practices which elevate monetary profit, and a technology which screens the user from anything outside itself.
If we are to take the warnings seriously we need to incorporate an understanding and awareness of the natural environment as part of our spiritual ground and matrix. At the very least we need to address the seasonal cycles and how they impact on the natural world in our own part of the country. There also needs to be an awareness of how our built environment and market paradigm impacts on the local natural environment, as well as the repercussions for the rest of the planet. Already this consciousness forms part of goddess-centred and pagan practice.
A contemporary spiritual ground should accommodate the knowledge that the scientists are telling us there are limits; that ’god’ is not limitless in relation to the environment and our longterm survival. A contemporary spiritual matrix should include stories and texts which address these issues, and incorporate the local natural world, its cycles and variety, into symbols, songs, poetry, dances and rituals.
• Place
The third influence on the development of traditional religion has been specificity of place. The spiritual ground and matrix of formal religions have emerged from particular places and times.[16] It is this place-specificity that has designated the sacred places and sites where followers gather or make pilgrimage.
In early religion it seems that natural sites, such as trees, groves, springs, mountains, were designated ‘sacred’ and stories were told of associated miraculous events and epiphanies. It was here that the believers came to worship, make requests of the deities, give thanks, receive healing, and gather for ritual. ‘Temples’ were in nature, or an open stone structure which allowed for interplay with natural forces. Once the human-centred religions took precedence the hero’s or enlightened one’s birthplace, deathplace and journey of teaching and influence became the focal sacred sites. Temples were enclosed and nature and place-in-nature were important no longer.
This separation of the human spiritual journey from nature meant that religions could travel easily with the travellers. It was no longer necessary to incorporate the native vegetation and animal life into the religion and its practice, or to come to terms with a differing environment. The new religions were about moral choices and ideals, and the human-god interaction. The sacred sites of the ‘enlightened one’s’ life remained in the ‘old country’, where believers would return, and still return, on pilgrimage. Place-in-nature was no longer important but the place and country of the religion’s founder was.
Sometimes stories of conquest absorbed older pagan sites and
stories, and represented them in the context of the new religion. New temple structures were built on the old
or established to create and mark additional sacred sites. On the whole,
however, as the human-centred religions moved the transportation to a new
environment, country, or culture was undertaken without losing the core
beliefs, stories, practices, sacred sites and calendrical cycles.
Yet if the religion is to survive and continue to be relevant in place and time, surely it needs to be able to adapt to new environments and to social change. Otherwise it is just a mind-game, which it might well be. The challenge for those choosing to be spiritually centred is to develop a spiritual ground and matrix which is place specific.
However, there are difficulties with the terms used in discussions of ‘place’.[17] It has been argued that terms such as ‘land’, ‘landscape’, ‘country’, ‘wilderness’ all carry colonialist imprints and it is, perhaps, impossible to find an English word without this association. In the context of Australia it is also impossible, and inappropriate, to ignore the long history of Indigenous presence and the spirituality which emerged from Aboriginal engagement with the land and all it contains.
Yet, can a Westerner draw from, or in some way imitate, indigenous beliefs and practices? Apart from the obvious problems of appropriation, misrepresentation, and romanticisation, there is also that of relevance. This complex issue is a long way from being resolved. However, because of increasing public access to Indigenous beliefs and practices through art, performance, and writing, even if much initial academic writing was by white anthropologists and religious, it is impossible not to be influenced in some way.[18]
John Cameron[19] defines ‘place writers’ as those who ‘make observations about themselves, society and the human condition as central to their writing as their acute descriptions of natural phenomena’. One way of engaging in the process of finding and deepening ‘sense of place’ is by focussing on ancestral journeys and establishing sacred sites which speak of those journeys and the history of those places.[20] As with ‘nature’, the focus on place becomes a focus on Australia.
By situating the spiritual ground and matrix in the Australian context, the gaze turns to the particular ecology of the Australian built and natural environment. Where are the sacred sites in our living area, working area, recreation area? What stories can be told. Where were our moments of magic, of epiphany? Where can we go for pilgrimage, and why? Historically religious poetry has celebrated the divine in nature. How can our cities and its technology be similarly expressed? Where do we find ‘god/dess’ in cyberspace?[21]
A contemporary spiritual ground should be able to accommodate a divine which is an expression of life in the Australian cityscape just as easily as the country town, the bush and the desert. A place aware spiritual matrix needs to contain stories, songs and rituals which celebrate our own and our family’s sacred sites, ‘enlightened’ journeys and moments of epiphany as well as those of our ancestors and other saints. Sacred sites should incorporate those in this land as well as in countries of origin and any land we end up in on our travels.
· Ancestors
Gurus, ‘enlightened ones’ and saints are the ancestors supported
and revered by traditional religions like Christianity, and their stories are
used as life exemplars. Yet there are
other religions and belief systems which elevate ancestral family members or
significant citizens, and why not?
Probably there are any number of incidences in any singular life that
could be similarly highlighted and retold for moral effect and teaching.
This is an extension of the argument begun in Body. Here, as there, the spiritual ground would be informed by the characters selected and deified. The spiritual matrix might include stories or songs about moral choices such as good, evil, love, hate, anger, greed, self sacrifice, self determination, and the consequences of those choices. It may also include stories of social cohesion or division. The characters in these stories become exemplars for behaviour that is open to moral and ethical judgement informed by the current social mores.
The story of a family’s ‘first arrival’ is a meaningful starting point for such an exercise. By locating the story in place and time, with the knowledge of ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘where’ and ‘why’, while at the same time acknowledging and speaking of the consequences of their arrival and its historical context, the story has the potential to become an appropriate foundation ancestor myth for the family.
· Culture
The last area of influence in the creation of a spiritual ground and matrix addressed here is culture. There is so much which encultures us: our gender, natural environment, place of residence, families and their history, partners and their families and history, our religions, and friends.
It seems that the indigenous use of ‘culture’ embraces this interrelationship. As Michael Dodson, explains[22],
There is another dimension that invests the land with meanings and significance - that transforms land and environment into landscape, and into “country”... That other dimension is culture. Culture is what enables us to conceive of land and environment in terms that are different to conventional European notions... To us indigenous peoples all landscapes are cultural.
The story of our culture is not only of the human journey, but also of the land, of nature and of sacred places and sites, and of ancestors. It is this past and present heritage that adds to the cultural mix of influences that make us who we are.
The heritage from which I have emerged is one of being ‘White’,
which implies a North-European cultural background; of being ‘First Fleet
Australian’ which carries a history of colonisation and longterm place-context
specificity, while acknowledging the 40,000-60,000 year existence of Indigenous
cultural life; of being ‘ex-Christian’
which opens the perspective to include pre- and post- Christian beliefs and
practices; of being ‘woman’ which
implies a particular set of experiences which is further qualified by a
singular ‘a’; and, of living at the beginning of the 21st century’ which
contextualises the matrix in time.[23]
Yet there is more. My
father grew up in Indonesia and brought to Australia the food, languages
(English, Dutch, Indonesian), superstitions and beliefs of his youth.
Add to this, like many others of my generation, I live in an
increasingly multicultural part of Sydney, travel overseas outside of Europe,
am involved in African drumming, Qi Gong and Tai Chi, and have easy access,
through books, internet and television, to information about other cultures,
their religions and lifestyle.
So, while I am conscious of my Eurocentricity I can, if I choose,
cut, paste, recreate and reinvent. And
while much of my cultural background is known and is embedded in history, I am
still alive and influenced by the world in which I live. So culturally I am in a process of constant
change.
It is possible, therefore, to devise a spiritual ground which is open to multiple and changing expressions of spirit, or divinity: a spiritual ground of my own invention and one influenced by the imaging of my own and other culture’s religions and beliefs. The spiritual matrix of such a ground would include images, stories, texts, songs, music and ritual from multiple cultural backgrounds, including my own. It would be open to and inclusive of those religious expressions from my own and other cultures which have significance for me.
Of course this is already occurring to some extent as Christians become Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus, or vice versa, by choice or intermarriage. There are also the large numbers of people exploring other alternatives, as already mentioned at the beginning of this paper, or involved in practices such as yoga or tai chi.
In Centre of the Storm my project was to form a spiritual ground and matrix which addressed the issues of body, nature, place, ancestors and culture from a consciously Eurocentric standpoint.[24] It was an attempt to unravel and define my particular heritage and its impact on my spiritual beliefs and practices. Since then I have gradually absorbed images and practices from other cultures’ belief systems and religions which are relevant to me.
I know that my interpretation of the image or practice may or may not be as the religion originally intended, or as it is practiced in its birthplace. But, is that really important? I am not of that culture. I am not tied the culture’s mores and expectations. I have not taken on ‘the religion’. Someone at some stage created the image or practice because it had meaning for them. I have responded to that creation and used it in my own way and recreated it for my own purpose and evolving religious ground and matrix. In this way it continues to have life and meaning. I hope this is interpreted as a sign of respect.
Conclusion
So what is the shape and substance of a spirituality relevant to twenty-first century Australia? In my view it is one which is adaptable and in constant change. It is eclectic, where the global absorbs the local and local absorbs the global. As such it is an expression of the belief that all peoples and all nations have an equal understanding of ‘truth’, ‘spiritual truth’ and ‘divinity’.
In such a spirituality each person takes it upon themselves to devise a spiritual ground and matrix that is relevant to their own body and experience; one which engages with nature and the local environment; one in which the action moves between the past and present, the city and natural environment in an attempt to engage with the differences while establishing a spirituality of place. It is broad and flexible enough to absorb or leave behind beliefs, images and stories as needed to accommodate the changing person, environment, place and cultural context.
The process also creates one family’s, and one person’s sacred stories and sacred sites.[25] It is more than just a feeling of being ‘at home’. It includes knowledge of ancestors, place, and their histories, and has association with the importance of respect for nature, place and our own and others' cultural beliefs and practices in that place.
The spiritual ground and matrix which emerges from this eclecticism is also an expression of trust in ourselves. A statement that we are all able, if so inclined, to devise a spirituality which is deeply meaningful and relevant in the Australia of the twenty first century.
[1] A version of this paper has been uploaded on Academia. Written in 2011 and updated in 2018 it is an extension of my thesis. I had not yet reached the stage of acknowledging that I am a newcomer to this country, that I needed to view my life here from that standpoint and begin to listen to and learn from those whose spiritual heritage reaches back 60,000 =/- years. That work has just begun.
[2] Although
a number of these movements claim continuity from prehistoric or pre-Christian
times, the current evidence points to their being 20th century
reinterpretations and reinventions of perceived ancient practices (Adler, M. Drawing
Down the Moon.
[3] Spender,
D. Writing
a New World, Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers.
[4] Brady,
V. Caught
in the Draught. Pymble, NSW, Angus
& Robertson, 1994. Stockton, E. The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation.
[5] Spiritual
feminists such as Melissa Raphael have addressed this issue and the inferred
inclusions and exclusions of language. (Raphael, M. Thealogy
and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal
Reconstruction of Female Sacrality.
[6] I
have consciously omitted ‘transcendence’ as it assumes an existence ‘outside’. Outside of what? It is the view of this author that the
universe ‘is’, and all that is is intrinsic to everything else. So in spite of my argument for inclusivity I
have chosen to exclude. That is my
choice. Others may include if they wish.
[7] How
much of this is determined by biology, how much is a learned and acted social
imposition, and how much the determinants influence each other, continues to be
researched and debated, and that debate is not entered into here.
[8] Women’s writing from both inside and
outside the Christian church has critiqued the masculine bias of most religious
writing, sacred text and ritual practice.
[9] This is one area which religions
like Christianity have great difficulty in accommodating, except to relegate to
the arena of Satan and Hell. However, if
‘origin’ is unity not duality what does that mean for our spiritual
ground? Other religions or belief
systems like Taoism seem to image the perceived duality as unity. I had already begun addressing this issue in
an article titled, ‘Many Parts, One Body’ for the National Outlook, 16, 2, April 1994.
[10] How
much these characters and stories are based on historical fact and how much is
fiction continues to be debated.
[11]
Assyriologist
and Sumerologist, Tikva Frymer-Kensky presents a comprehensive analysis of this
transformation (Frymer-Kensky, T. In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women,
Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. The Free Press,
[12]
Ecofeminism, particularly, targets the global capitalist economic system
colonising the world, and makes links with the positioning of, and impacts on,
women and nature. (Salleh, A. Ecofeminism as Politics: nature, Marx and
the postmodern. Zed Books, London
1997}
[13] Devall,
B. & Sessions, G. Deep
Ecology. Peregrine Smith Books, Salt
Lake City, UT, 1985.
[14] Plaskow,
J. & Christ, C. P. Weaving the Visions, New Patterns In
Feminist Spirituality.
[15] Salleh,
A. ibid., pp. 4,5.
[16]
Of course this was already being argued by
anthropologists like Durkheim almost one hundred years ago. (Durkheim, E. The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
[17] Maie,
A. Confronting the limits of language
for exploring a spirituality of ‘place’.
Ecopolitics. 1. 4:54-58, 2002.
[18] op.
cit.
[19] Cameron,
J. Sense of Place: Book
[20] I
am wondering if this step is dependent on having an ancestral heritage in the
land? In subsequent discussion with
others who are first generation Australians or short-term residents, ‘sense of
place’, and the need for an ‘Australian-centred’ spirituality, did not seem to
be relevant.
[21] Wertheim,
M. The
Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of
Space from Dante to The Internet.
Sydney, Doubleday, 1999.
[22] Dodson,
M. 1996. Indigenous peoples, social
justice and rights to the environment.
In Ecopolitics IX Conference
Papers and resolutions. Northern
Land Council, Casuarina, NT.
[23]
For a more considered deconstruction refer Maie, A., Implications of a Search for an Australian Feminist
Spirituality.
[24] The four performance-rituals, Midwinter/Beginnings, Spring/Arrival,
Summer/The Fire of The Sun/Survival and Autumn/Return, formed the spiritual
matrix of my evolving spiritual ground (Centre
of the Storm). The conflations in
the series of performance-rituals and in the evolving spiritual ground is
addressed in the thesis.
[25] This
does not imply that there were no sacred stories and sites before this arrival,
or that the earlier stories and sites are irrelevant. Rather, it is hoped that the new stories and
sites can be added to the body of Australian tradition and spirituality.
