The following is an edited extract from an article that appeared in Eureka Street, April 1995, following Pope John Paul II's visit to Australia in January 1995.
In January I wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that the Papal Mass at Sydney's Randwick racecourse was the most significant religious event in this country in the past 200 years. It owed this significance to the inclusion of the Aboriginal smoking ceremony in the liturgy. This introduced a distinctive Australian spirituality in which reflection on the physical environment could lead Australians to a deeper understanding of who they are and what it means to live a moral life.
Brought together here were the barest threads of a spirituality in which the physical environment becomes available to Australians not merely to adorn their religious ceremonies, but to instruct their religious life. What I had in mind was that the bare threads of this spirituality needed to be woven together into a well-tailored garment through further theological reflection.
A spirituality of the land must be infused with a certain potency if it is to catch on and make a difference in the way people think and live. That means relating it much more clearly and closely to the everyday experience of ordinary Australians.
An obvious starting point for theologians and others who are interested is traditional Aboriginal spirituality. Given the realisation by anthropologists and comparative religionists of file sophistication of Aboriginal religious systems, and the antiquity of the Aboriginal experience of and attachment to this land, it would be unusual if traditional Aboriginal spirituality did not have something to offer the rest of us.
In fact, as Eugene Stockton's book The Aboriginal Gift: Spirituality for a Nation demonstrates, it has a good deal to offer. And given the Second Vatican Council's acknowledgement that the Catholic Church (indeed, Christianity generally) doesn't have all the answers, there is no reason to balk at examining what's on offer.
Stockton, an archaeologist and Catholic priest, has a timely caution, however, for the over-eager: 'Aboriginal influence on Australian spirituality (is) a challenge to look again, and more deeply, at our traditions, to re-emphasise elements in that tradition that are in tune with our time and place'.
The last thing non-Aborigines should entertain is the delusion that Aboriginal spirituality can mean the same thing to all people; the last thing that Aborigines need is another appropriation by members of the dominant culture of what is distinctively theirs.
For