"Walk your land ..."

AN INDIGENOUS CONTEMPLATION FOR THE 'SEASON OF CREATION'

The article below opens a new collection of prayers submitted by Indigenous authors, assembled by the Very Rev. Ken Gray, Secretary of the Anglican Communion Environment Network in time for the Season of Creation 1st September - 4th October 2025.

"Walk your land and your land will tell you what it needs" (Ron Loughrey) - a personal Reflection by his son, artist and vicar Glenn

"How does being Aboriginal speak into my understanding of the Mystery we name God? How does my understanding of the Christian tradition intersect with the Aboriginal understanding of the spiritual? Are they compatible or does one, the human (predominantly male) centric, top-down hierarchical Christian model trump the bottom up unity of all creatures in sync with earth as Mother of all?

The idea of an interventionist, all seeing all-powerful God who is on call to solve my problems is gone. So has the idea that Jesus died for my personal sins and that I have been made new in the bloody violence of the cross. This has been replaced by an understanding of the cross as a place where the incarnated God clasped hands with the deepest despair and cost of being a created being, a place where Mystery became fully open to humanity and humanity became fully open to Mystery. The resurrection is the natural outcome of this interplay, the event in which God demonstrates the fullness of mystery in the extravagance of imagination, hope and possibility.

Along with this has gone the anthropomorphic idea of human beings being the preferred option for the Creator of all that is and with it the idea that the ever-expanding world (universe) is of no interest to the one who created it. I have also discarded the idea that human beings are the pinnacles of creation because to believe so would curtail the dynamism of a living Mystery who, by definition, will continue to create. In this new cosmology I have left behind the idea of a heaven behind the clouds for if the universe is ever expanding and there are no boundaries, where can heaven be? And there are more.

This leads to an understanding of the unity of all creation that has been created by the one God, loved into being by the same Christ and companioned into fulfilment by the same Spirit. It means I and all creation belong to a communion of saints both human and non-human, animate and inanimate stretching back to the beginning of life on this planet, on through the wonder of evolution into a future no one can see. It also means I allow God to be God, a mystery being unable to be captured by the logic and rationality of my limited intellect and wisdom. And that's ok.

This is the wonder of the primal faith of the Judaic scriptures in which the mysterious transcendence of God is found above all and in all so as to animate all life for the beauty of the beyond. A quick read of the Psalms will fill us with wonder at the interconnection of humans, creation and God. Winds, oceans, trees, birds and animal all speak of and contain God. Humans hear God speaking in the lightning and the thunder, in the voices of animals and rocks and humanity is asked to care for and living in harmony with these without domination or destruction.

Aboriginal people have lived in such a way to listen deeply to the interconnectedness of all creation. Miriam Rose Ungermer-Bauman speaks of dadirri, deep listening unto deep, the Aboriginal capacity to sit in country, to hear what the country has to say and to live in tune with it. This is not a practice we can easily learn like mindfulness. This is a way of being learnt over eons by indigenous people to ensure they lived in respect with country and the Dreaming. It has a long history just as the Judaic understanding outlined in the Jewish scriptures of the presence of God in all things does. The Christian understanding of deep listening, contemplative living, also reaches back to the practice of Jesus who went away into the desert to listen to God and further back to the experiences of the patriarchs and others found in the scriptures.

In such a world the mystery we call God becomes greater than the Sunday School understanding of a man beyond the clouds. God is above and beyond creation while at the same time intimately connected and found present within all of creation. God is transcendently absent but immanently present and is so to and, in all things, equally. My journey has only just begun but in the words of my father, I will keep walking this land, listening a lot, speaking little and learning how to be in relation to the Mystery beyond Mystery who holds me and his held within me."

Paintings by Glenn Loughry. Top: Turning to the Heavens and Earth II, 'A Portrait Of The Artist As A Wiradjuri Man' and middle: 'Walking into Country (A Study)' and the cover image of the new Indigenous Author prayer collection'.

N.B In 2021, Glenn became the first Indigenous Canon in the 142-year history of St Paul's Cathedral, the Anglican church in Melbourne where some of his artwork has been installed in the form of glass panels for the cathedral entrance, depicting the traditional lands on which the cathedral stands.