14th Sunday of Ordinary Time
On this first week in July the Church in Australia celebrates National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday. This annual celebration is an opportunity to acknowledge the contribution that Indigenous Australians make to our experience of the Transcendent and to faith in this ancient land. As Deacon Boniface Perdjert from Wadeye, in the Northern Territory, and who passed away last year, commented once
“Deep down, we Aborigines are religious people. We did not have many material goods, but we are rich with spiritual goods. It is this strong religious side that made us. It gave us our identity, our dignity, our self-assurance. My People existed here in Australia thousands of years before Abraham. In all that time, God was with my people. He worked through their culture. He was saving us despite human weakness. He was preparing us for the day we would see the features of Aborigines in His Son.”[1]
One of the most beautiful contributions that we have in recent times about the gift of aboriginal spirituality is the sense of deep listening. In southern Queensland, this is called dadirri, and some years ago an Aboriginal woman, Miram Rose Ungunmerr Baumann, expressed the meaning of this attitude. Dadirri – or deep listening – describes the processes of deep and respectful listening. It is not just an Aboriginal thing, as Miriam Rose points out, it is in everyone.
“Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’.
When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening.
In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.
My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness. My people today, recognise and experience in this quietness, the great Life-Giving Spirit, the Father of us all.
Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course – like the seasons.”
From our modern Western perspective, we struggle to wait, to be silent, to listen. We are always on the move, restless; and we tend to drown out the silence that envelopes us with a thousand and one distractions and relentless noise. And yet the sheer vastness of our land calls us constantly to go beyond this and to recover deep within us a capacity to be still and to listen.
How might we do this? We can do this very simply.
Reserve a space regularly for about 5 minutes, in the morning or evening. Go outside if you can. Simply sit and look at and listen to the earth and environment that surrounds you.
“Focus on something specific, such as a bird, a blade of grass, a clump of soil, cracked earth, a flower, bush or leaf, a cloud in the sky or a body of water, whatever you can see.
You can also let something find you, be it a leaf, the sound of a bird, the feel of the breeze, the light on a tree trunk. There’s no need to try, just wait a while.
Be still and silent and listen.”[2]
And so, we do not need a lengthy amount of time. All we require is the decision to stop for a moment.
As we cultivate such a perspective of living, what do we hear precisely? The Australian artist, Michael Leunig observes, “This particular quietness . . . might well include some ordinary natural noises: the small talk of birds, perhaps the sound of a spade digging in the garden of the house next door, or the sweeping of a broom on an unknown path – and it would be a very old quietness too: one into which many people and many creatures had come and gone for many, many years.”[3]
But in this “old quietness” we might hear something even more. In an Advent Homily many years ago, Pope Paul VI taught us what we hear is,
“First of all, echoes, tumultuous at the beginning, then placated, or our own conscience, or our own individual personality, which is unique, and never explored. And then it becomes itself the echo of another voice which can at last be distinguished, the voice of religious conscience, the voice of the Spirit of God, “who will guide you into all the truth (cf Jn 16:13) . . . we know that spiritual listening allows us, if God grants us the grace, to hear his voice, that voice of his which is immediately distinguished by the sweetness and strength, and the word of God: the God whom we then, as if by an instinctive impulse, begin to call within us, with eagerness to know and understand, with anguish and with confidence, with unusual emotion and with invading goodness: the God-Word, who has become our interior master.”
Our attentiveness is brought from outside to inside us. We become not just attentive to the sights and sounds around us, but also to the murmurs and whispers of our own heart. We become attentive to our own feelings, our own conflicts, our own ambiguity, our own deepest desires. We listen to the many different levels of our own experience, the ground of which is always the God who holds us and supports us, the One whom we have our being and our future.
Yes, if we were to stop for this moment then we might find the rest for our souls for which we so deeply long. Hopefully, the situation of the pandemic over the last months has taught us this – the value of stopping and listening. The challenge will be not to let this opportunity become suffocated as once again the demands of our life begin to encroach upon us. Let us take forward what we have learnt so that our lives become enriched by living in a more centred way.
[1] National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Catholic Council, “Praise to you, Lord of Heaven and Earth,” 6 July 2014.
[2] http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/education/deep-listening-dadirri
[3] Michael Leunig, “Introduction” in In the Water was the Fire. Poems by Mary Wickham (Richmond, Victoria: Spectrum Publications, 1995), ix.
