In this article, I have chosen to follow a broad
definition of "spirituality": "The divine is constantly revealed through
human experience and the world in which we live. Our spirituality comes out of our search
to appreciate and understand our existence. It changes and grows, includes our successes
and failures, our insights, the things we learn and those we forget. Spirituality includes
prayer and reflection but also the way we live every facet of our daily life."
Traditional Spirituality
At the beginning of the 1970s, eighty per cent of the population of Australia claimed
to belong, more or less, to one of the major Christian denominations: Anglicanism, Roman
Catholicism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. A survey of the values of Australian men and
women from all cities and country areas of the nation, conducted between 1983 and 1987,
has shown that 58% of Australians claimed to be religious persons, with only 4.5% claiming
to be atheists. In 1999, it seems very likely that these figures would not be as high. We
would also see, however, a marked increase of members in other traditional non-Christan
groups in the community, such as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and possibly Jews.
Traditional religions provide a firm shape for our beliefs and
practices, together with the support of a strong community of like-minded persons. I shall
illustrate this through reference to the first religious column in the Melbourne Age
newspaper for 1999. Significantly, the column was written not by a (male) Christian
minister, but by a young Muslim woman, Randa Abdel-Fattah, a 19-year old arts-law student
at Melbourne University and media liaison officer of the Islamic Council of Victoria.
She writes: "I came to understand my identity as a Muslim by
default. At a time when I was trying to come to terms with who I was, I had the double
chore of resisting stereotypes. To some people my being a Muslim meant I was either a
terrorist or an oppressed Muslim female who couldn’t speak English, form an opinion,
or work a remote control.
"Yet, rather than deny that I was a Muslim I was inspired by these
misconceptions to learn. I had been like an ant, carrying a load of confused identity. I
started to turn to Islam when I tired of the voices pushing me in strange directions. I
was tired of the voice of my peers, the voice of the media. I decided instead to listen to
the voice of God and Prophet Mohammad.
"I began to read the Koran, and Prophet Mohammad’s sayings
and discovered that rather than oppress me Islam celebrated my womanhood and liberated me
with a multitude of God-given rights – to financial independence, marital choice,
education, work, voting and many more. I found that Islam was to be my roadmap through
life. Until then, neither my friends, nor Madonna nor U2 had been enough to guide
me."
Randa’s article shows how Islam gave her a clear and confident
self-identity through the adoption of traditional religious teachings. It involves a
transformation of her understanding and experience of the world around her. It provides
her with an alternative to the confusion and materialism of the secular world, as conveyed
in particular through her friends and the mass media. We should note that it also provided
her with a confident perception of what it means to be a woman, in a way free of
stereotypes and the pressure to conform to other people’s expectations.
Randa concludes: "I’ve come to know myself as a young Muslim
woman ... and have found that my journey through spirituality has given me strength, pride
and independence in my celebration of my God-given rights and my acceptance of my
responsibilities towards God, others, and myself".
Here is a spirituality which is, to use McIntyre’s words,
"inherently mutual, communal, practical and oriented towards the God who makes self
known in this new pattern of life called (the religious community)"
Secular Spirituality
Not all of Australian religious experience has been like this, of course. The first
church building was not erected until 1793, five years after the arrival of the First
Fleet. It was soon burned to the ground and not replaced for many years. The first
permanent Catholic priests did not arrive until 1820. Section 116 of the 1901 Constitution
of the Commonwealth of Australia provides that: "the Commonwealth shall not make any
law for establishing any religion, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion,
and no religious tests shall be required for any office or public trust under the
Commonwealth". The law does not specifically protect religious freedom, and an
attempt to do so was decisively rejected at a Referendum in 1988. In the opinion of the
sociologist Hans Mol, the denominations have tended to divide society into opposing
factions (especially Catholics and Protestants for a long time).
A number of writers – including David Millikan, Veronica Brady and
more recently David Tacey – have argued that there is a widespread, if seldom spoken,
secular "myth" about the Australian landscape and destiny which may provide for
a different kind of spirituality.
This myth points to the land, "the vast and silent spiritual
heart" of the desert, which has frustrated all attempts to tame and settle it.
Compared to the ordered, benign, and apparently rational landscape of England, the
Australian landscape was harsh and cruel, indicative of a world in which God Himself was
seen as either arbitrary and vicious and/or completely beyond human control and
understanding. Such a one could only be regarded with indifference. We became, as Manning
Clark argued in his Boyer lectures, "fatalists, accepters, and sceptics about the
fruits of human endeavour". The "Australian understanding of failure"
taught that "no matter how hard a man might try he was bound to fail, that in
Australia the spirit of the place makes a man aware of his insignificance, of his
impatience ...".
The character produced by such a harsh environment is isolated,
inarticulate, unintellectual, and beaten, writes Millikan. He has a common touch and,
because he is every man’s mate, he has no respect for social or intellectual
achievement. In personal matters – sex, morality and religion – the immediate is
what matters. As examples of this typical Australian. Millikan (writing in the 1980s)
points to Paul Hogan, Norman Gunston and Ned Kelly. Veronica Brady also speaks of the
"great refusal" to face the land, which leads to an easy preference for security
and the attitudes of fear, boredom, repression, spiritual cowardice, and (potentially)
great violence.
Millikan’s book The Sunburnt Soul looks for an Australian
Jesus, with "an Australian iconoclasm and laconic humour". Brady is more
mystical. She argues in A Crucible of Prophets that one must accept the risk of
"love in the full sense", accept emotional intensity without withdrawing,
recognise the body and the life of the instincts, and commit oneself to another (human
and/or divine). If evil is "the consciousness of being at odds with some larger order
of things", then freedom comes from recognising one’s limitations, on the one
hand, but also through being able to situate oneself within "a mysterious, often
painful but always worshipful cosmos".
In 1999, we can recognise the Australian myth as cynical, heavily
masculine, and decidedly Anglo in its origins. Multiculturalism has challenged, if it has
not yet cracked, the simplicity of this view.
New Age Spirituality
The New Age is many things, many of them derived from overseas and available
commercially for personal consumption. Some features involve hard work, over a long period
of time, in the company of others; others do not. In what follows, I have limited myself
to one exponent, Deva Daricha, who is described in the magazine Conscious Living (Issue
47, December 1998/January 1999), as a "modern-day Shaman, visionary and
teacher".
Daricha describes shamanism as "the archaic religion. It was the
first way in which people started to follow the flow of spirit through nature. They were
trying to make sense of consciousness and of the enormous number of different levels or
dimensions or intersections that we can live across and how sometimes parts of
consciousness which aren’t normally in three dimensional space impinge upon us and
create the miraculous or the spectacular or the extraordinary or the synchronistic. Then
we move out of linear time into this completely different sort of synchronic time where
everything has meaning and everything is connected and where a touch and a prayer can
bring a miracle. When I look at the barrenness of a lot of ordinary life, it seems to me
that this is immensely relevant."
The statement is extraordinarily revealing and contains many
assumptions that are familiar to those who move, for example, within a theosophical
framework. The world consists of a number of layers. Nature is a pure realm of existence.
Spirit moves through each of these layers and is manifest as consciousness. History
unfolds in a straight line, has (in particular) a beginning somewhere at the beginning of
time. Ordinary life is barren and uninteresting; the aim of the spiritual person is to
break through into a dimension that is spectacular and extraordinary, where true meaning
can be found.
Daricha later describes his quest in this way: "Because I was
trying to find a path that was non-derivative, I couldn’t go into the other cultures
to try to find it. So to understand the movement of spirit through nature, I did that by
spending time alone in the bush and praying. I found that the time of just between
twilight and when dark falls there’s about ten minutes when there’s a subtle
breeze and that’s the change between the earth’s in-breath and out-breath. That
subtle breeze is the gap where you can talk to spirit in more profound ways than normal.
"I was living by myself in the bush in a green corrugated iron
shed and I’d go and stand out in a particular place and I’d pour out my
loneliness and my desire to be of service and my love to the clouds and to the trees and
to the mountains and to the earth and somehow out of that, things started coming back. At
times I’d start to enter a totally different zone where I’d ask a question and
the wind would blow the answer. The answer would arise in me spontaneously and so I
started to enter into this dialogue with nature ..."
Despite the apparent individuality of his progress, Daricha does refer
to a number of what might be called teachers who provided him with "initiation"
into these mysteries. Some were clearly human – Stan Groff and Osho Rajneesh. Others
were not. "I was in Mexico in 1976", he states, "at a place called San Juan
de Teo Tiwican where the largest pyramids on the planet are ...I’d been reading a bit
about Castaneda and all that stuff before I went to live in Mexico and suddenly I turned
around and there was an Aztec medicine man in full dress that no one else saw and I knew
I’d entered into the Shamanic world."
Some of what Daricha says about nature sounds like a positive
reinterpretation of the Australian myth. Daricha has had some embarrassing experiences
with aboriginal medicine men, it must be said, which are not referred to in the article.
He is, therefore, careful now in the present article, to seek to claim a form of shamanism
that is appropriate "for the white people in this country ". Nevertheless, he
does refer to a second initiation at Uluru. "In 1989", he says, "I got
initiated spontaneously by the spirit of Uluru into the mysteries of this country. I lay
on Uluru and said "Well here I am, give it to me". I almost died with the impact
of what ripped through me and had intense fever for nine days. I couldn’t walk for a
month after that and finally I realised that I’d ended up being encoded by this
incredible knowledge that came out of the spirit of this country and that if I opened my
mouth it would come out. So then I started to teach ..."
What Daricha teaches is an amazing mixture of traditions, something he
calls ‘Zen Tantric Shamanism". These may sound different, he admits, "but I
am only teaching the one thing. In the end it is all about how energy comes into form, how
its flow through form can become stuck, how to unstick it, which means transformation
occurs. I like a reasonable level of excitement in my life so if I do it in more than one
context it’s more mysterious than if I just kept on doing it in the same way."
Liberal Catholic Spirituality
I have described three Australian types of spirituality. At first sight the
differences between them seem to be vast. Traditional religion is formal, intellectually
integrated, ritually precise, and involves clear ideas of who we are and who others are.
The Australian myth seems secular, atheistic, and admirably bitter, the ethic of one who
survives with as much grace as can be mustered in an unpleasant world. The New Age is
spectacular, showy, eclectic, full of magic and spontaneous self-discovery in a world of
many layers and colours. It draws on a wide range of spiritual traditions and emphasises
personal experience as the only test of truth.
There are, however, some things that also bring these spiritualities
together. Together these similarities may add up to a broad "contemporary Australian
spirituality", whose principles unite the apparently very different
"spiritualities" which I have so far sketched.
Because these principles are so deeply embedded in our current
thinking, they must be taken into account if we are to understand how another type of
contemporary Australian spirituality – Liberal Catholicism – is a part of
today’s world.
