Christopher Pearson, God's place in the dreaming, and blacks refusing to say sorry

(Above: brave Captain Cook's death at the hands of pagans, by George Carter 1791).

"Hooked on the net. Details on the ABC's website".

That was Robyn Williams spruiking for his science show this morning, which seems to offer a good format for other spruikers. 

Hooked on alcohol. Details at your local pub or bottle shop. Hooked on cigarettes. Details at your local tobacconist (if you can find one, maybe Woollies is still the best coffin nail supplier).

Hooked on commentariat columnists. Details in any publication owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Which is why we naturally turned to The Australian online - hooked as we are on the net - to peruse Christopher Pearson's offering in relation to indigenous folk in Questions over God's place in the Dreaming.

As usual with any negotiation, it's worthwhile to start with an ambit claim:

Christianity has always taught that its revelation was entire and whole and perfect.

Great. That's going to leave a lot of room to explore black notions of the dreaming and the dreamtime as a religious experience. I mean, like, you know, with the best will in the world, black folk, bugger off and listen to your revelatory betters.

But first let's cut to the heart of the chase, the soul of the problem.

Last  week the Uniting Church's 12th triennial assembly considered a report by its Aboriginal and Islander Christian congress. The report posed a series of highly contentious questions, but the congress used its special procedural privileges as an indigenous body to stifle the sort of free-flowing debate in which mainstream Christians at the assembly might have articulated some orthodox answers.

Well you can't expect blacks to contribute anything to theology, or religion for that matter, at least of an orthodox kind which doesn't involve singing and dancing and mumbo jumbo and talk of snakes and goannas and earth mothers and other yabber yabber:

The first question was: "What was God's purpose in preparing and speaking to the 'first people' of our nation over such a long period of time?" A traditionally minded theologian would readily agree that God is omnipresent but warn that his ways are unsearchable and his purposes in the great sweep of history are usually mysterious. Grave misgivings would also be registered over the presupposition that indigenous people had been "prepared" or "spoken to" over the millennia as part of a distinctive revelation that adds anything to Christianity.

Because however you cut it, the blacks weren't the Jews. Until the whites turned up, they were destined to hell fire, or whatever other theological destination might be devised - limbo or purgatory - to house them until prayers got them out of jail - it being a tad unfair, when you think about it, to send someone off to hell if you've neglected to send them a messenger explaining precisely how to avoid going there.

Thankfully, that's no longer a continuing problem, since the unruly masses in India and China and such parts have had their chance to hear the message, and if they've failed to take it up, well bugger it, off to hell with them. Now the blacks might think of forty thousand years without a messenger as a pretty rough oversight, but that's typical, expecting god to be sorry when they they don't know how to say sorry themselves.

The next question assumed what the first foreshadowed. "What cultural and spiritual insights can indigenous Christians potentially bring to today's Australian churches from their long history and a theology contained in their Dreaming?"

Huh? What insights can the blacks offer? Spirituality in the dreaming? Is this some kind of sick joke?

As recently as 20 years ago the confident answer would have been that the only important contribution Aborigines had to offer was a cultural one. They cherished the land, where some European farming and mining practices pillaged it. Although firestick farmers contributed to the desertification of the centre, at least the scale and the rate of the damage for which they were responsible were modest by comparison with the depredations of the post-settlement era.

Yep, that's right, the only insight the blacks could offer was how to turn the centre of Australia into a desert, and unfortunately we're following that cultural insight right now in other parts of Australia. And just remember an agricultural insight is pretty close to a cultural one (well cultural's in both words isn't it).

As to the kind of theology that might notionally be derived from pre-contact Australian religions, it's a mixed bag. The Torres Strait Islanders lived in villages and practised agriculture. Their world view made them markedly more susceptible to the arrival of missionaries and every year since July 1871 they've celebrated "the coming of the light". Some parts of the mainland, notably the southeast, had a father god or spirit figure but, as Thomas Aquinas put it, in the light of the new covenant "types and shadows have their ending". Elsewhere, nature and earth spirits predominated. Australian hunter-gatherer religions also relied on practices utterly abhorrent to Christianity, including sorcery and necromancy. The only contribution Dreaming theology has to offer is a negative example: what to avoid.

As opposed for example positive examples on what to accept. Like cannibalism - you know turning bread into flesh and wine into blood, and then having at it. That's why you have feast days. (I know others like to call it transubstantiation but I prefer the more apt term of cannibalism).

 Or exorcism - you know pummeling a young girl until the debbil spirits leave her, or she leaves this life. Whatever. And really great shows like Medium and Ghost Whisperer and Supernatural.

The last question was: "What would it mean for an Australian church to recognise these Australian spiritual roots as part of God's revelation and gift for this nation today?" An adequate answer would have to begin by noting Christianity has always taught that its revelation was entire and whole and perfect. The only antecedent spiritual roots it acknowledges are those of Judaism and the Old Testament. For an Australian church to recognise any others would be to water down the deposit of faith: a straying "after strange gods".

Ah yes, have we already said bugger off blacks? Well no harm in saying it again:

Anyone who observed the Uniting Church's performance during the Hindmarsh Island affair will have noticed how steadfastly it proclaimed the right of Aboriginal people to re-invent or fabricate elements of their mythology and traditions at will. Last week's assembly took the process a step further. Now its indigenous members are evidently at liberty not only to depict their own culture in a highly selective and self-serving way but to reinvent Christianity in the light of its imaginary Australian spiritual roots.

You see you heathen blacks for forty thousand years or so you lived in unredeemed primeval darkness. Sure you had a religion and a mythology but it was a total folly. A complete waste of time. No way would it get you into heaven, or even provide easy access to a host of virgins. Until the whites turned up you were just a bunch of primitive losers. Just be grateful you've been shown the light and the grog. Now how to dress that up in a polite way, with theological niceties and apt consideration of deep spiritual and mystical details:

The Aboriginal congress's shibboleth was a proposed preamble to the Uniting Church constitution, an instrument of reconciliation introducing the notion of a long-suffering "first people" and "second people from many lands" and the responsibility of the latter group for a history of invasion and dispossession. Some in the assembly pointed to a previous solemn gesture of reconciliation -- the celebration of the covenant in 1994 -- and questioned the wisdom of introducing such themes into a document intended to be an affirmation of unity. Others were disturbed by the lack of an adequate theological linking of Aboriginal perceptions of the numinous to the trinity and redemption through Christ. A few bolder delegates dismissed as inherently implausible the congress's claim that Christ added to, but did not change, indigenous spirituality.

Like you know how uppity can you blacks get when confronted with the hard truth of your own failing, and Christ's unfortunate ability to walk amongst you a couple of thousand years ago, due to lack of decent international aircraft. Sure he might have walked across the water, but he chose not to, because you weren't ready for the message, what with all the firestick burning stuff. And there's no way he could lurk in your heart in any general sense. Sure there's the business about the all knowing and that, but heck with all that smoke from your fire stick activity turning the place into a desert, he plumb overlooked you.

Which happily didn't happen in America because he left a batch of gold tablets there so that Joseph Smith could found the Latter Day Saints movement and give the world the Mormon Tabernacle choir. Now there's a theology with vision. And what did you come up with in comparison? Nada, zilch, nothing. A didgeridoo isn't a theology. Oops, did I offend someone in the back row?

Unaccustomed to any kind of dissent, the congress staged a walkout, announcing that "it was no longer a safe place to speak". When they returned the congress chairman, the Reverend Ken Sumner, told the assembly: "Our people have understood God for thousands of years" and rebuked them, saying "we struggle to understand God in you". It was a claim of moral superiority, tantamount to saying: How dare you question whether it's the same god?

Wow, those blacks are just so uppity. Talk about a claim of moral superiority, as if in any way it could trump the moral superiority of saying that Christianity is complete, whole, perfect, entire, and satisfactory, and the rest of you can bugger off.

But sadly Pearson wasn't there to deal with the troublemakers and his worst fears came to pass:

A procedural motion was then passed to decide on the adoption of the preamble "without any further discussion" and it was meekly adopted.

Meekly. Like a bunch of pussies! Wusses!

Sumner later remarked that "as Aboriginal people, we need freedom". He said non-Aboriginal people needed freedom too. "We've made some decisions today to help that, to set you free, so together we can be a free church." Then, as members of congress sang "Let there be love shared among us", there was "a ceremony of blessing in which every person in the room was touched with eucalyptus leaves".

Eucalpytus leaves!! Is this some kind of sick Australian joke. Talking about Christ and we get gum leaves. When we should have a sprig of rosemary for remembrance and a decent scattering of palm leaves, for the death of the one true church and theology.

But you know it's going to end in tears. Let me draw myself up to my full Charlton Heston height, and damn you, damn you all to hell with your modernist heresies and revisionista tendencies:

With the advent of the first and second peoples, under cover of consensus and respect for difference, strong differences of opinion are now discouraged. The old paternalism has been replaced by an inverted politically correct kind. It seems as though what's on offer is a new form of salvation: freedom from guilt through unconditional surrender to the demands of the collective suffering servant. The sinful church can find redemption through the virtue of the messianic victims. However, when the Aborigines have become the Uniting Church's saving remnant, traditional theologians will wonder what place it reserves for Christ.

But then what can you expect really. You just have to shake your head and mutter that it's the blacks, always the blacks. Such primitive folk and without any understanding of white ways - like, you know - of salvation and land takeovers and stealing children and pretending it never happened.

In considering the chasm between the traditional Aboriginal mindset and the Christian view of matters, it's helpful to remember some comments by Peter Sutton which I quoted in last week's column. He says, for example, that there's no word for "sorry" in the sense of self-accusing apology in any Aboriginal language. "The non-indigenous reconciliationist's desire to engage in self-blame must seem unreadable, or at least exotic, to many indigenous Australians. Blame in the classical Aboriginal scheme of things is consistently directed outwards to others, not inwards to the self." It is the same with other forms of penitence that are central to the practice of Christianity. " Remorse scarcely enters the picture, nor does conscience, nor does a feeling of guilt."

Oh to be a suffering, mortified Pearson,  confronted by such affronting paganism, philistinism and outrageous mockery of their betters. Without a shred of remorse or conscience or a feeling of guilt. It's all the blacks fault and they don't even know how to say they're sorry. Sorry for all the blaming and the whining and the moaning and the playing victim when dammit, it's all their fault. And they don't feel a shred of guilt for all the white suffering they cause! Not a single sorry, because they don't know how. It's not in their nature.

But you know it's funny, I thought it was John Howard who didn't know how to say sorry, along with Wilson Tuckey and the like, with a host of other commentariat commentators urging them on in their steadfast refusal. 

Does that mean this mob are incapable of penitence, such a central practice of Christianity? Thankfully hypocrisy, always a central part of any religion, never suffers from want of practice.

And if any of you think this whole piece might go somewhere towards explaining why mainstream Australia's relationship with aboriginal people is still a little delicate and at times problematic, you can take your modernist heresies and shove them into the darkness. 

It's purgatory for you, if not the tenth circle of hell, and if you keep on with it, they'll be booking a special place in the first ring ... Christopher will make sure of it.

(Below: Silverton church, located where the blacks helped create a desert, and the whites provided light in the darkness).