A Spiritual Search (by Kim Thoday)
The celebrated Australian novelist and Christian, Tim Winton, says of his faith journey, ” … I’m still an ambivalent church-goer of mongrel impulses. Part of me wants to kneel in a Gothic cathedral to pray in a cloud of incense. Another piece of me wants to burn that same edifice down and worship in someone’s home without all the fruit and aristocracy.” This is one of the most powerful and poignant expressions of post-Christian spirituality I have heard. Winton was being interviewed for the Australian Christian journal, ‘Zadok Perspectives’ (No 74 Autumn 2002). My experience of Christian ministry is that his personal insight cogently articulates the contemporary malaise amongst many people of faith in our postmodern environment. For white Australians, it likely also touches upon the historical problem of European ecclesial imports that have never truly taken root in our sunburnt soil. Hence, our “mongrel impulses” – the cacophony of echoes of anti-establishment strains of penal residues, utilitarian experiments, squattocracies, the waves of asylum seekers from potato famine, religious persecution and cold war politics and yet the paradoxical impulses to remain r/loyal subjects (to belong to something bigger than ourselves).
Since the colonisation of this land we have been a peoples caught between worlds. A peoples against the backdrop of an ancient land, only recently migrated. A peoples whose identity has been largely forged in the fighting of other peoples’ wars. And that identity of realism and loyalty is not all bad. But that tough, laconic response to harsh colonial life to a great extent suppressed deeper human emotions. Winton goes on to say: “I think our culture has swapped one form of denial for another … The contemporary response is consumerism, to buy and browse to muffle the same feeling, to bury oneself in luxury, to wallow in the paralysis of excess choices.” And so we continue to search for language and expressions of spiritual identity not only against the challenges of a recent colonial experiment but also with the currents of a global transition from the modern into the unchartered territory of the postmodern. We look for a spirituality that will meaningfully engage our stoic realism and offer a sense of belonging and symbiosis in an increasingly relativistic, competitive and fragmentary world. We search for a spirituality that resists “all the fruit and aristocracy” and yet a spirituality that is truly aboriginal, mystical, conscious of a deeply human impulse to “kneel” in the cathedral of our land, to live a life of gratitude, awe and cosmic identity, as Jesus did.
Grace and Peace,
Kim Thoday
Hewett Community Church of Christ, South Australia
The celebrated Australian novelist and Christian, Tim Winton, says of his faith journey, ” … I’m still an ambivalent church-goer of mongrel impulses. Part of me wants to kneel in a Gothic cathedral to pray in a cloud of incense. Another piece of me wants to burn that same edifice down and worship in someone’s home without all the fruit and aristocracy.” This is one of the most powerful and poignant expressions of post-Christian spirituality I have heard. Winton was being interviewed for the Australian Christian journal, ‘Zadok Perspectives’ (No 74 Autumn 2002). My experience of Christian ministry is that his personal insight cogently articulates the contemporary malaise amongst many people of faith in our postmodern environment. For white Australians, it likely also touches upon the historical problem of European ecclesial imports that have never truly taken root in our sunburnt soil. Hence, our “mongrel impulses” – the cacophony of echoes of anti-establishment strains of penal residues, utilitarian experiments, squattocracies, the waves of asylum seekers from potato famine, religious persecution and cold war politics and yet the paradoxical impulses to remain r/loyal subjects (to belong to something bigger than ourselves).
Since the colonisation of this land we have been a peoples caught between worlds. A peoples against the backdrop of an ancient land, only recently migrated. A peoples whose identity has been largely forged in the fighting of other peoples’ wars. And that identity of realism and loyalty is not all bad. But that tough, laconic response to harsh colonial life to a great extent suppressed deeper human emotions. Winton goes on to say: “I think our culture has swapped one form of denial for another … The contemporary response is consumerism, to buy and browse to muffle the same feeling, to bury oneself in luxury, to wallow in the paralysis of excess choices.” And so we continue to search for language and expressions of spiritual identity not only against the challenges of a recent colonial experiment but also with the currents of a global transition from the modern into the unchartered territory of the postmodern. We look for a spirituality that will meaningfully engage our stoic realism and offer a sense of belonging and symbiosis in an increasingly relativistic, competitive and fragmentary world. We search for a spirituality that resists “all the fruit and aristocracy” and yet a spirituality that is truly aboriginal, mystical, conscious of a deeply human impulse to “kneel” in the cathedral of our land, to live a life of gratitude, awe and cosmic identity, as Jesus did.
Grace and Peace,
Kim Thoday
Hewett Community Church of Christ, South Australia
Related Articles:
- PRAYER OF A HUMBLE SERVANT
- Solidarity in Weakness
- 25 LISTS OF EVERYTHING INTERESTING/IMPORTANT
- Braco’s Enchanting Gaze (what do you make of this?)
- God’s love (by Richard Rohr)
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.
Discussion
No comments for “A Spiritual Search”