In the middle of the 1970’s Mark Raper S.J., then Director of the Jesuit “Asian Bureau”, asked me to write an article on the links between contemplation and social awareness/action. Mark could have supposed that I might know something about contemplation, though that would have been a somewhat doubtful assumption. It is true that I had, been living a completely enclosed `contemplative” life for twelve years, before the changes f Vatican II brought our contemplative, Eucharistic life back to earth and back to an earthed theology of Eucharist. I wanted to write the article. I knew that the Eucharist is broken bread for broken people but in my whole life I’d had very little, if any, direct contact with poor, broken, dispossessed and unjustly outcast people. I knew I needed to go somewhere beyond the walls that insulated our lives and limited our vision and understanding. But how could I do that? As I wondered I remembered something I’d heard about Redfern, in
One of my most vivid early memories is of a day which was like any other in the
On this particular day a woman arrived exhausted, as if from a long journey. She looked ill, tattered, torn, weak and hungry. I’ll call her “Mary”. Chris Smith and I went to look after her, thinking “cup of tea or something to start with”. She knew Chris, looked at her and, with some hesitation, said, “Sis, do you reckon I could have a bath?” We took her to the convent and upstairs to the bathroom which had a really large tub. We ran a lot of hot water, carefully undressed Mary and lowered her thin, black body into the bath. She was smiling as if all her dreams had come true. While we sponged her she kept reaching her arms out n the water as if to embrace it. Then she would cup her hands, fill them with water, slowly lift them over her head and let the sparkling shower fall all over her. All the time she was repeating a kind of chant “beautiful I water, lovely water, lovely warm water”.
As we continued to bathe this beautiful woman’s body I was overwhelmed by a sense that this was indeed the body of Christ in our hands. That moment taught me more than I could have learned in many years of contemplation. Daily contact, conversation, laughter, many tears and great sorrows shared with Aboriginal people in and around the St Vincent’s community have coloured and dictated my life, my thinking and my theology ever since.
One of the greatest teachers of theology was Harold, a homeless, aboriginal man who spent most of his time walking around the streets. Sometime after my first prolonged stay in
Fr Ted Kennedy’s ongoing, consistent teaching of Gospel values in relation to attitudes towards and care of Aboriginal and other poor people has formed, at
Through the years since the 1970’s many things have changed. The Convent has been demolished – (perhaps a sign of the times in which we live?) The Aboriginal Medical Centre has developed and expanded. The number of Aboriginal people in and around the Church has diminished but, wherever they may be, they know and we know that this is their place – a Sacred Site. So many Aboriginal people have died on this land and/or been buried from here that the Church the Presbytery and the land are forever sacred to them and also to us as a community.
In
One of the reasons why I love this community so much is that the telling of stories is given considerable space. Be they sublime, terrible, funny, shocking, sad or too long, every story is received and honoured. The liturgy enfolds the stories of the day – the personal and the communal. This can be demanding. At
When we are listening to the Sunday readings my eyes are sometimes drawn to the wall behind the reader. The paint is peeling off in curving ribbons, exposing another layer underneath. What could seem, at first sight, like neglect reminds me that there is always something more, something beneath the surface or behind appearances. Our Church building appears to be run-down, perhaps a bit like “Mary”, but just as there was something revealed in “Mary’s” worn out body there is more teaching in the poverty of the stone and the wood the paint and other simple decorations than might at first appear. Yes, some work needs to be done on the building but I hope it will remain simple, bare, minimalist, allowing for that other layer of history and meaning to be glimpsed, always there, just below the surface: – all the broken black bodies, the lost land the suffering, all the laughter, all the “broken” rights and “all the broken rites” – just below the surface and always in our consciousness.
The song is gone; the dance
is secret with the dancers in the earth,
the ritual useless, and the tribal story
lost in an alien land.
`Bona Ring” {Judith Wright, Collected Poems, Angus & Robertson 1994)
Oh yes, I did learn something from coming to Redfern all those years ago, something about the links between contemplation and social awareness/action. You can’t have one without the other, at least not in the Christian scheme of things.