Indigenous Australians can teach us a thing or two. They have the custom of regularly returning to country to reaffirm their identity and their connection with place. They do this by retelling the stories of their origins – stories reinforced by song and dance. Time and time again, throughout their lives, they gather to remind themselves of who they are and how they came to be.
Tell me: where do you go to hear the story of you?
It seems to me that many in the West are spiritual orphans. They don’t know who they are, where they come from, why they are or what their meaning is. The indigenous Pastor, Ray Minniecon, tell us in his article “Healing Country”, “Most non-indigenous peoples don’t know who they really are. And if they don’t know who they are, how can they connect to where they are?”[1] He laments this… because this lack of connection leads to a lack of respect for the land and its degradation for commercial gain.
The Western atheist, who sits in the middle of conforming media opinion, doesn’t know their story. And this is a pity, for as I’ve heard an indigenous Australian say: “If you don’t know your story, you are still a child.” Because spiritual orphans don’t know their origin, they have no identity. A woman punk rocker said in Gene Veith’s book, Postmodern Times: “I belong to the Blank Generation. I have no beliefs. I belong to no community, tradition or anything like that. I’m lost in this vast, vast world. I belong nowhere. I have absolutely no identity.“[2]
If you ask a Western atheist about their origins, they simply shrug and say they don’t know. When asked why the universe exists. Again they shrug and say that it has probably always existed – in defiance of all of human experience that tells us that everything is linear, i.e. everything has a beginning and an end. If you ask them what their meaning is, they might quote Nietzsche, Foucault or Sartre and say they have no meaning… and because they have no meaning or purpose, there is no such thing as morality… and they therefore allow dissolute living to slowly destroy them and those who are close to them.
Spiritual orphans have no ceremonies to point them back to the beginning – to tell them why they exist. You might argue that indigenous ceremonies exist, but this doesn’t mean that their dreamtime stories are true. They might to our Western ears simply be fanciful delusions conjured up to fill the vacuum of meaning and understanding. But now that we are enlightened and mature, we simply need to “suck it up” and live the reality of our meaninglessness as co-operatively as possible.
However, we need to realise that aboriginal thinking is not the wooden empiricist thinking of the West. It is metaphor and story. The stories may not have the ‘right’ science, but their main purpose is to acknowledge the truth of meaning, morality and connectedness – and the reality of a causative mind. As such, it is a pattern of belief that satisfies. If a Westerner asks if a story is true, it is seen as being crude. It is more important that a story has meaning… and that it be interesting.
The atheist’s thinking that there is no beginning, no meaning and no story might be defensible if the universe didn’t reek of precision and order… which nothing can cause other than “mind”. So, perhaps it is time to stop being a spiritual orphan and to seek that “Mind”… as that Mind has come seeking you as Jesus in order that you may know your story.
[1] Ray Minniecon Healing Country – Genesis 1 and 2, Tearfund https://www.tearfund.org.au/stories/healing-country(viewed 4th August, 2021).
[2] Gene Veith, Postmodern Times(Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 71.
