Women Journeying with Spirit Editors: Deidre Michell and Jude Noble Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 1 Acknowledgements In addition to all of the women whose stories are included in this volume, we would also like to thank Kylie Doherty, Tracey Phillips and Lorelei Siegloff with whom conversations have contributed in some way to the formulation and outcome of the project. We would also like to thank Mary Clutterbuck for catering for that first gathering of writers, and for patiently waiting while we discussed the project during social gatherings. Deidre’s family – Tony, Casey & Jemma – were unwaveringly enthusiastic and supportive of the project and our thanks go to them for that. We would also like to thank Stephen Matthews at Ginninderra Press for his contributions to the final product, as well as the women at Sophia for their graciousness in providing a place for its public unveiling. Introduction Male priests and child sexual abuse equals front page news. Women’s conversations about spirituality do not. Yet we are typical of many Australian women (Australian born, recent migrants, and permanent residents) whose conversation turn fairly frequently to the topic of spirituality. Our conversations began whilst studying theology at the Adelaide College of Divinity (ACD) where we met while undertaking Bachelor of Theology Degrees at Flinders University in South Australia. This Degree focuses on Christian theology but neither of us fitted into the Christian mould and so that study was directed more toward growing our individual selves rather than cementing a faith. Given this, it’s not surprising we became good friends and we have continued our wide ranging conversations about the world’s multiplicity of religious traditions and spirituality/healing modalities long past our association with the ACD. This anthology of women’s spiritual journeys arose from our conversations. We share a passion for listening to the hidden voices of women in our society, particularly those women who are rarely invited to speak in public about their spirituality, and so we decided to invite women we knew to write about their personal exploration of Spirit in a broader context than traditional Christianity. It was a diverse group that finally met together to share a meal, and it quickly became apparent that most shared a dream of one day seeing their stories published. Since this is a fairly formidable ambition for most of us, the collaborative anthology approach has enabled those of us who would not normally have considered publication to share our stories with a broader audience. What began as a dream has become concrete in this small volume. Although significant effort was made to broaden the cultural and racial mix of contributors it is not surprising that the predominance of contributors is from a Anglo background. Whilst this bias was not deliberate it does reflect the privileging that access to education and literacy Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 2 provides within Australia and the narrow cross-section of contributors provides a snapshot of the results of early migrant history within this country. In this book every woman’s journey is a reflection of her unique spirit, and yet each woman has identified the very strong threads that bind together spirituality with everyday life. In no story is spirituality something external or additional to the mundane, to reality, and so rather than this being a volume of mystic visions or transfiguring illuminations, it conveys a search for meaning amid the often considerable challenges of personal experiences. Sometimes one woman’s personal experiences run parallel to another woman’s experiences for a while, and so we chose to loosely structure the arrangement of stories around these shared experiences. In the words of Luce Iragaray, for women to “become what we are...[means] to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfillment.”1 Deidre contextualises Irigaray’s exhortation within her own life and sets the stage for the other stories of “growth and fulfilment,” of women seeking out their own goals. In Putting Down Roots Deidre reflects on her journey of confronting and growing through the pain of a difficult childhood, and of the place of spirituality in this healing journey. Amanda Gargula’s delightful and engagingly colloquial style follows. She, too, experienced out of home ‘care’ as a child and in 9Clouds journeys with her memories to a place of acceptance and selfrespect. Ann Tregenza’s story provides an interesting contrast to those of Deidre and Amanda. She is the elder in our collection at age 74, and in Grounded in Grace describes a life lived richly. Ann’s autobiographical account is interspersed with poetry and describes her personal and professional development, long interest in spirituality and religion, and culminates with her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Our Kiwi contributor with dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship is Mary Clutterbuck. In The Warp and Weft of My Life Mary’s gently told story of childhood trauma reveals a strong will and a courageous and respectful approach to the circumstances out of which she has woven a mantle of healing. Deb Johnstone’s poetic A Journey of Faith and Falling parallels Mary’s experience of incest and trauma. Also born in New Zealand, Deb’s resilient spirit comes to the fore in this account of her journey toward Wicca. Italian born Mary Ceravolo is another recent migrant to Australia. In Under the Shade of the Hazelnut Tree she includes cameos of her grandmother and mother which add depth to Mary’s story of travels around Italy following in her mother footsteps as a child. It wasn’t until she came to Australia that Mary began her own spiritual quest and yet she is still able to reach back into a rich tradition of woman centred spirituality. Meredith Joy’s conversational style provides a balance to the previous poetic contributions. In Finding My Own Light we find that Meredith, too, has been on a quest for find her own spiritual path, stepping out from Christianity as a young woman who never quite fitted into the mainstream. 1 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 63-72 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 3 Dawn Colsey's story, A New Career At The Age of 67, brings us back to Christianity as the preferred path for some women. Dawn’s inclusive Anglican informed Christianity reveals an openness not only to other faith traditions, but also to other possibilities in life no matter what her age. Lyn Rose‘s story is also one that begins in Christianity, as she was much involved in her church for almost half of the 20th century. In From Mass To Meditation, however, Lyn tells of change as her gradual opening to other spiritualties sees her practicing healing modalities which often sit outside mainstream Christianity. Randah Wassef is our youngest contributor. She, too, found difficulty remaining within her family’s religious tradition. In Leaving Religion Behind Randah brings a politicised lens to her life in Sydney, and her radicalised perspective provides a contrast to the more measured pace of previous contributors. Lynne Sinclair-Wood's considerable creativity is delightfully revealed in word and art in Images on a Spiritual Journey. Lynn explores through painting her reconnection with an indigenous Celtic Spirituality and a coming to terms with the place of this in the Australian landscape. Judith Haine's journey has also been towards her indigeniety, and also via feminism and the Goddess movement. In A Fairie Path to Eco-Feminist Spirituality Judith speaks of an early delight in exploring other realms and a current grounding in an earth based spirituality. Jude Noble’s contribution rounds out the collection and brings us back to Luce Irigaray’s assertion that women need to seek and set their own goals. In Confessions of a Failed Pastor Jude reconciles her early explorations in Christianity with the need to understand herself as a woman searching for meaning while living in a shallow culture that values conformity over diversity. Included in Jude’s search has been engagement with a wide variety of religious traditions, as well as healing and spiritual modalities. Not all the women who gathered together at that first meeting stayed with the project and we picked up a few more along the way, but what has remained consistently exciting and inspiring has been the willingness of women to offer an open window on their lives through narrative, poetry and art. It is our hope that other women will be inspired to collect their stories together, no matter what the topic, and in turn inspire others. Deidre Michell & Jude Noble Adelaide May 2010 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 4 Putting Down Roots Deidre Michell 11th August 1989. On the second occasion I went to see Wayne, he gave me a wonderful gift. He read me a story he had written about a mushroom. The mushroom had a rough time growing; it didn’t have perfect growing conditions, but was trodden on and abused. The mushroom blamed itself for its difficulties in growing. It thought it was to blame, it didn’t know any better. But with strength and courage it grew and grew until it burst through the ground. Then it rested. Then it grew and grew and grew. I had tears in my eyes as Wayne read this to me. I could relate very well to that mushroom. Wayne also read me a story about a friend of his who was going to try hot air ballooning. She was scared but very excited. She had to learn how to throw the sandbags overboard, taking great care not to throw them hurriedly or too many at once. Once she had done this she could then enjoy the lightness, peace and pleasure of floating in the sky. When I heard this I knew that was what I wanted for myself. The feelings of lightness, of peace, of happiness. When I reflect back on the above from the vantage point of twenty years on, I realise that my spiritual journey has always been about those dual notions of growing up and through difficulties I was born into, and created for myself later, and the quest for freedom. ****** I have had two significant and long term relationships with men during my adult life and, curiously, both of these men were connected to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Church in Adelaide. The first man, the father of my adult daughter, had a mother and aunt who went to the church and Peter often went to the Sunday School, at least until he was 16 or so. During the time I was in a relationship with Peter, however, for 14 years from the age of 19, I hardly ever spoke with him about this experience. I had become an atheist when I was around 9 or 10 years of age and was quite aggressive in my insistence that atheism was the only valid path for everyone. When conversations began about God I wouldn’t listen to Peter talk at all about his beliefs nor about his experiences with the religion either as a child or as an adult; instead I’d start talking about my beliefs in no god. I feel rather sad about that arrogant youthfulness now, it meant I missed out on so much learning. What was his experience like of the Sunday School? How did Mary Baker Eddy’s beliefs help his mother and aunt, particularly since they were in many ways non-conforming women? Did the church support the women in their non-conformity? Peter’s mum was a single mother during the 1950’s, a period of public disapprobation of single mothers amidst escalating concern for the rise of ‘juvenile delinquents.’ Peter’s aunt was a single woman, also a social anomaly in the 1950’s, a career woman who, in her seventies, did not consider herself old but was still a dynamic, active woman caring for her sister and greatly interested in her local community. What I regard as my first spiritual experience occurred two weeks prior to leaving Peter. My daughter was five, it was about a month before Christmas and I had been struggling for two Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 5 years with whether I wanted to stay in the relationship or not. I was standing in the hallway looking into the bedroom where Peter was sleeping and this voice clearly said to me, “you’re going to leave him.” It didn’t sound like my voice or a thought arising from within my mind, but it did seem utterly the right thing to do even though it made no practical financial sense. I was gone in two weeks. From the time I left my life changed dramatically although not always in pleasant ways; in fact it became more difficult as I ended up leaving a long term, secure and very well paid job twelve months after I left Peter. From a period of stability I entered a time of tumult, physically, emotionally, financially, mentally and spiritually. Yes, spiritually, as I went almost overnight from being an atheist to become interested in spirituality, spending much time and money investing in an assortment of New Age modalities including Reiki, rebirthing and past life regressions. I also became rather involved with the writing of Louise Hay,2 analysing myself and my friends according to her list of psychosomatic physical disorders. And then I met my husband. What would be the chances? The man I married in January 1991 had also gone to the Christian Science Sunday School. Being a bit younger, Tony didn’t remember Peter, but Tony’s older sister did and Tony’s father remembered Peter’s mother and aunt although they weren’t close. I’m always a bit flummoxed when I remember the connection both men have to this small, 19th century woman-founded American church. Knowing my interest in spirituality Tony gave me a copy of Eddy’s book Science & Health shortly after we met. I found out later it’s what Christian Scientists do; they offer Science & Health because they experience a sense of well being from it and want to share that with others. It was some months before I opened the book but when I came inside after having spent hours reading out on the back lawn, I looked into the mirror as I washed my hands and discovered that my face was translucent, radiant, glowing. I don’t remember what prompted me to read Science & Health that summer; perhaps it was Tony telling me how people had been healed by reading it. I was certainly in need of healing, as I’d had a breakdown in October of 1990. Since leaving Peter less than two years previously I had been plunged into grief for the first time, moved house twice, changed jobs, been sick countless times, tried to care for my young daughter on my own, made some silly financial decisions which had quite a devastating impact, and finally I stopped, burnt out, worn down, sad, depressed, despairing that my life would ever be the success I wanted it to be. It can’t have been an easy time for my new husband. I had gone from, appearing to be anyway, a confident, dynamic woman who occasionally gave public speeches at the Festival Theatre for a personal development organisation to a crumpled, never get out of bed mess. From Barbie Doll to Rag Doll overnight. Desperate, I contacted the Christian Science practitioner he suggested. I went to church but didn’t feel I fitted in well with the congregation. I tried to read the bible but found it incomprehensible. What I did enjoy was reading the church magazines where people talked about how they put Eddy’s ideas into practice and changed their lives. God, that’s what I wanted, I wanted to change my life. 2 See, for example, You Can Heal Your Life, Hay House, 1984 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 6 By then I had begun to trust myself, my intuition, and I knew if I waited long enough an answer would come to me. And it did. The answer was to reorient my life, to give up what had become unsatisfying work and instead go to university and have more children. According to Luce Irigaray, as women our goals have been determined for us, but if we are to “become what we are...to refuse to allow parts of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfillment,” then we must have goals we have determined. 3 With the study of Christian Science I could begin to see different possibilities for myself, a different way to identify myself rather than as foster kid, wife, failure, mother, or as poor. I too could be divine. When I think back now, that was my healing, a reorientation, the beginning of a journey toward carving out a life for myself that had meaning, a journey to finding out who I was. There was nothing magical about it though, instead the next ten years were some of the most challenging of my life as my husband and I raised 3 children on Austudy as he too was to make the decision to go to university and become a social worker. ********** 16th March 1992 I’m rebelling like crazy about the above [definitions of patience, meekness, submissiveness, docility, humility, gentleness]. I don’t want to be docile, like a dog. I don’t want to be easily put upon, obedient, modest. But as Tony pointed [out], who am I being submissive to? Much of my confusion comes from my original concept of God as being [super]human and from my feminist repulsion of submissiveness to men who throughout history seem to have been placed nearer to God than women. There is a sense of inevitability about travelling along the Christian Science path for a while. Not only were there former Christian Scientists Peter and Tony in my life, but I worked for 10 years for an American multinational corporation which actively promoted the idea of developing the potential of their employees. Some of my managers saw qualities in me I couldn’t see for myself and I was encouraged to do a number of courses. Two memorable ones were Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” and much later, Lou Tice’s “New Age Thinking.” Both of these men, and Louise Hay, have roots back to Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century. According to Eddy, humanity reflects the Divine; humanity is the image and likeness of a gender inclusive God. Not only did this mean equality of the sexes and races, it primarily meant for her that humanity reflects divine health and holiness.4 From 1866, the paramount reality for Eddy was the one she had experienced ecstatically and which marked a decided change in her. No longer was the mundane world as solid as previously; instead ultimate reality, the “sacred canopy” beyond the temporal world, grounded her experience, and the “truth of that reality is what [she] was inspired to express in Science & Health.”5 This 3 Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 63-72 4 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1994(1910), p.518 5 Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative. New York: Doubleday, 1979, pp.41-42, Gillian Gill. Mary Baker Eddy. Reading, Massachusetts: Merloyd Lawrence, 1998, p. 209. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 7 reality she came to call “Science” (following Phineas Quimby)6 which is synonymous with the “kingdom of heaven” of the Christian tradition. That the material or mundane world is illusory is at the core of Eddy’s religious doctrines and healing practice. Instead, creation is wholly comprised of God, Spirit. God is All-inall, the very substance of the universe and humanity is the reflection of this perfection. All else, commonly interpreted as the material or physical world, is an illusion composed of an assortment of beliefs based on an understanding of life confined by the limitations of the substance commonly called “matter.”7 At the heart of Eddy’s doctrine, then, is the notion of the insubstantial nature of matter, an idea with particular implications for women. Instead of women continuing to be associated with “matter as opposed to form” and therefore “dedicated to Evil,”8 women are no longer associated with matter or evil at all, but are, being spiritual, firmly on the side of the sacred. I certainly didn’t feel sacred but I did feel impelled to continue studying Eddy’s ideas. I had no idea what she was on about back then, but what I experienced when I read her book and the church magazines was hope, peace, a sense of lightness and freedom. Occasionally I had a glimpse of a different reality, too, one that was harmonious, awesome, breathtaking, and during which I felt at one with everyone and everything around me. One of the earliest difficulties I had was with the concept of God. Even though I had decided at a quite young age to become an atheist I still had an image in mind of the ‘old man in the sky’ god. This god was a combination of the ancient father God, El, a major deity of the Canaanite people, and YHWH of the Hebrew tradition9 and which had been transmitted to the West via the Old Testament or Christian Scriptures. (I may have been playing chess down the back of the class during Religious Instruction, but clearly I had learned more than I intended to). Mary Baker Eddy retained the idea of a Father God but, influenced by the Victorian era’s elevation of the role of mothering, the gender politics of that era and her memories of her own loving mother, Eddy incorporated the metaphor Mother into her deity, while also insisting this deity was non-anthropomorphic. Eddy’s Father-Mother God, which I interpreted literally rather than metaphorically, gradually became for me both a divine horizon10 Error! Reference source not found.and a nurturing presence. This presence, my divine Mother, opened my suppurating psychic wounds and I bathed them with my tears while being held and comforted by Her. ******** 29th March 1993. I miss my mother. Why did she leave me, didn’t she love me? I would love to feel the tender, gentle, nurturing love of my mother. No wonder I have to get sick in order to feel entitled to be looked after. I need my mother & I grieve for the loss of her...Its not fair that I should have to learn 6 Phineas Quimby (1802-1866) had begun studying mesmerism in 1938 but gradually developed his own theory of the psychosomatic roots of all disease. His work was to influence Mary Baker Eddy in a number of ways, see or example, Gillian Gill, p.27. 7 Caroline Fraser,. God's Perfect Child. Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999, p.158. 8 Simone de Beauvoir,. The Second Sex. Translated by H.M. Parshley. London: Picador Classics, 1988, p. 112. Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Christianity." In Women in World Religions, edited by Avind Sharma,. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987, 207-23 10 Irigaray, 1993, p.63 9 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 8 how to mother myself now, when I’m 37 years old. It still hurts, the pain of being neglected, physically by parents #1, emotionally by parents #2. Its no wonder I’m so drawn to parenting books. I have to learn from scratch how to parent myself, how to parent my children...I feel very sad. Its so important to me that I do a better job with my children. So its useful to me at the moment to examine myself including my aches & pains. Thats when I find out quite a lot about myself. How does this sort of examination fit with CS [Christian Science]? Do I now shift my thought to God for healing? How do I go about feeling good & safe with God when I’m feeling so sad? I think I’ll go & lay down briefly. Connecting with frozen grief had begun after I left Peter and has continued for years. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever end, the depths of it are impenetrable. At the same time, what I experience as I connect with yet deeper aspects of this grief work is a sense of becoming a stronger, more grounded woman. The love, the support of my divine Parent in this work has allowed parts of me which had remained locked in childhood pain to grow up, to become free, not only of pain, but of conditioning which restricted rather than encouraged flourishing. In the beginning, though, I spent hours studying and pondering, trying to work out what it meant for God to be my Parent since my experience of parents meant I had been abandoned, neglected, abused. If I couldn’t trust my parents to love and care for me, why would I trust this divine Parent? I wanted to, but it seemed too good to be true, so I didn’t, not completely anyway, yet I kept on trying to. My persistence was fuelled by my experience of another reality, by what I understood to be God, a profound love I would encounter at times, a love that both enfolded me and flowed out from me, but which I couldn’t wholly trust to be there always. I could only hope. I also struggled when Eddy used other, gender-neutral names for God: Principle, Love, Spirit, Mind, Soul, Truth, and Life. At various times each of these names for God have resonated with me, they have each pointed to different qualities I tried to incorporate into myself. For example, if I reflected Love, then I must be loving, if I reflected Principle then integrity must be an intrinsic part of my being, if I reflected Mind, I must be intelligent, and if I reflected Life then I was energetic and vital. I didn’t believe I was inherently loving, principled, intelligent and dynamic, but the infinite possibilities of becoming so were glorious. And occasionally I would indeed have glimpses of myself as such and be thrilled at the transformation taking place. “Is this really me?” I would wonder, “Could this really be true of me?” *********** 9th September 1994. This is why it is so important for me to use my hands at the moment – to create, to sew, to bake. My hands are constantly in use & the more I use them the better I feel...The more I create with my own hands, the better I feel about myself. When I’m down, I don’t sew... Ironically, doing needlework became a meditative activity for me during the busy-ness of those years raising young children. Ironic because when I was 8 or 9 and we were compelled to do needlework in gender-segregated classes, I hated it. I remember the red and white gingham fabric, the white cross stitches I added painstakingly to that fabric, and my resentment of sitting there quietly with the girls while the boys were outside having much more fun, running around. When I was about 10, my male teacher was so frustrated with my protestations of feminist thoughts – “why were the boys allowed to be outside picking up Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 9 rubbish” (we all knew they were running amok and having fun) “while we girls had to stay inside sitting quietly” I asked loudly. My teacher came over and shook me violently. I was immensely humiliated. I don’t remember if I told my foster parents, but it was one of those moments I still remember vividly, and it was the humiliation I remember most intensely. No one was more surprised than me to find myself of an evening taking up needlework and spending hours threading, concentrating, constructing. My version of needlework is very much ‘paint by numbers,’ but I’ve loved the process, mostly loved the result, enough to frame and hang them, but primarily I’ve loved the process whereby my mind, forced to concentrate, and my body forced to be still apart from my fingers really, would gradually slow down until I came to a point where I felt fantastic – relaxed, expansive, relieved, high even, very much as I feel at the end of a walk after I’ve been moving fast, I suddenly realise I feel fantastic. It was very important for me to do something practical, useful, just sitting still and meditating was anathema to me, particularly when I had young children. I early decided that sitting meditation was an invention of men who had time and resources whereby they could afford to spend time sitting in meditation! Through my needlework, sewing, baking, gardening and caring for children, as well as via the Women’s Studies topics I took for my BA at Adelaide University, and the time I spent with Mary Baker Eddy, I gradually felt connected to women around me and across the centuries and began to value their contributions. I’ve always been very much a ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ person and when I left home there was no way I wanted to do any of the things my foster mother had done, I didn’t want to be like her. Of course, the Women’s Movement at the time was encouraging women out of the house as well and, in the process, often belittling the work of the ‘housewife’ and I joined in the chorus of this when I was working full time. While I often felt conflicted between the intellectual disdain I had for ‘home duties’ and the visceral pleasure I derived from caring for my family and engaging in all this ‘traditional’ women’s work, it was a time of healing for me. It was as if in the in process of nurturing and parenting my children I came home to myself, began to resolve and dissolve my own ‘mother’ issues and learned how to nurture and parent myself, although it was many years before home was to become for me “the dearest spot on earth.”11 ********** 29th March 1998 I do try more & more to look @ myself honestly. Sometimes I find this exceedingly difficult to do, sometimes I’m horrified at what I find. In the beginning I was disappointed to find out how human I am. I’m getting used to this now. But one thing that’s bothering me still is how critical & judgmental of others I am. One of the perennially puzzling features of my experience with Christian Science has been the contrast between those glimpses of a reality which was wholly glorious, peaceful and loving with the experience of being at times angry, sad, critical, and judgmental. I could go from feeling expansive and carefree to ranting and raving like a woman under siege. And just as I was learning about being the reflection of an unlimited, unbounded Divinity I was also being driven to explore the idea of setting and asserting boundaries, of understanding my own limits, where I began and ended, where others started. My experience of my foster mother 11 Eddy, 1994, p.58 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 10 had been one of enmeshment and it was a matter of prising myself apart from her, something I could often only do as I became aware of how much like her I had indeed become. Even though I’d identified as an atheist from a young age, I’d clearly imbibed notions of what it meant to be a spiritual person and being grief stricken, as well as at times enraged at the injustice of past happenings, did not fit the image I had in mind. Paradoxically, I would have conformed more to this image of a spiritual person prior to my encounter with Christian Science because, though an atheist, I was then a passive, placid individual who rarely expressed annoyance let alone anger and full blown rage. My experience in the Christian Science community compounded this notion that in order to be a ‘spiritual’ person, to be a ‘good Christian Scientist’ and successful in healing, one was always happy and smiling. Those church magazines I loved to read sent out a clear, unambiguous message that anger, sadness, despair and grief were ‘false character traits;’ the path to eternal health and harmony was in the giving up or overcoming of ‘negative’ emotions. Our model was Mary Baker Eddy and the church construction of her was hagiographic; she was portrayed as manifesting saintly serenity and untiring activity with an infinitely patient and loving nature. So often I felt like a failure because, try as I might, I would continue to swing between the extremes of ecstasy, during which phase I was easy going, placid, and available to others, and times of withdrawal or impassioned outbursts of frustration and resentment that so much of my life was in service to my family. ************ 27th January 2000. At some stage I want to look up what Eddy says about anger. I have the feeling from hanging out with CSs[Christian Scientists] that anger is a bad thing. My experience tells me otherwise. My experience tells me that anger is not bad, it is what I do with it that has the potential for destruction/constructive activity. Rage has pulled me out of depression many times. If Eddy also came from a position that anger/passion were inherently wrong, then this may explain why she suddenly exploded into rage, and did things like pull Calvin Frye’s etc. All the while I was a part of the Christian Science community I felt conflicted and deeply ashamed because I could not consistently conform to their image of a ‘good Christian Scientist.’ On the one hand the church position was that these feelings represented flaws in my character, yet on the other hand my own experience (which I fluctuate between embracing and denying) of anger, grief and even despair was that these were not ‘negative’ emotions at all. Anger had many times been a friend, propelling me into action, insisting I make changes in my life, that I stand up for myself, that I stop letting others define who I was and what I wanted for my life. I had come to know anger as Beverly Harrison says, as “a feeling-signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups or to the world around us.”12 Writhing in pain, sobbing from deep hurt, made me feel alive too, connected to the deepest parts of myself as well as to others; I became more empathic, more caring. Even despair had its uses as I would go deep within myself for long periods, but re-emerge, stronger, different, transformed, much as Miriam Greenspan13 describes, as I was to find out many years and considerable to-ing and fro-ing on the issue later. Beverley Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” p220 See Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions, Boston and London: Shambhala Publications, 2003, pp 117-164 12 13 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 11 It took years of painful soul searching and voluminous quantities of reading to resolve this conflict in myself. In the end the answer came, not from Christian Science, but from women I met who encouraged me to trust my feelings, writers like Miriam Greenspan who had a healthy respect for these ‘dark’ emotions, and two practitioners of Zen Buddhism. Both of these latter women, one a Vietnamese born Australian and the other an American writer, Darlene Cohen, suggested that accepting all feelings was the most healing approach, accepting that I am human. What I have subsequently observed is that as I have become more accepting of myself, all of myself, even those bits that continue to horrify me when they pop into my awareness, I become more accepting of others. I love the experience of being on a spiritual high, of being loving, generous, happy. But in the long run I have found denying my other feelings, those popularly known as ‘negative’ ones, more damaging than healing and this is one of the primary reasons for me no longer continuing to identify as a Christian Scientist. Had anyone in the tradition been able to explain to me, as Eckhart Tolle14 has done, that when deep pain has been activated it “needs to be transmuted through acceptance combined with the light of [my] presence” rather than dismissed or denied, perhaps I would have continued in it as there are certainly a number of other aspects about the tradition I love. *********** 18th October 2001 Also spent the morning in ‘superior’ mode – mental conversation with ...................She & I are the same, she is my mirror. What irritates me is her attitude of superiority over others, me and ..............in particular. But I carry on much the same, except that its in my head, being an introvert. The same with .........[we] are alike as well – again the difference is that being an introvert most of my conversations about others remain a secret. Oh what a hypocrite am I. One of the challenges of the Christian Science tradition is to cease judging others and instead to begin to look at people from a spiritual perspective. For me this means to have in mind for others the same sort of possibilities as I had begun to see for myself, for they too, of course, were the reflection of the Divine. While this is a favourite aspect of the tradition for me, I find it one of the most difficult to practice consistently. Usually I become mesmerised by physical conditions that are difficult to look beyond, or by behaviour I don’t like or is difficult to be around, like someone having a tantrum. And then I end up feeling like a failure because I’ve wanted to be a healer for years. *************** 11th June 2002 I have far too many doubts to think I have even a little knowledge of God. And I don’t feel as I understand God @ all. Yet last night I was convinced that Divine Love was responsible for healing me of fever & pain & hurt. As Penny Hansen and other scholars have pointed out, “physical healing has always been integral to Christian Science:”15 physical healing is its unique feature. For Christian Scientists, turning away from the evidence of physical discord, including debilitating pain, and identifying themselves as spiritual rather than as material, has been an important part of the healing process since the 19th century. On a number of occasions over the years, I, too, 14 Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2004, p.79 Penny Hansen, "Woman's Hour: Feminist Implications of Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science Movement." PhD, University of California, 1981, p. 135 15 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 12 have been able to turn away from a physical problem, contemplate the divine, and, usually gradually, healing has occurred. The greatest challenge I’ve faced as a ‘healer’ was when my youngest daughter, Jemma, at only 8 months old, was diagnosed with chronic asthma. I was in a bit of a state at the time, not only because of the intense fear I felt for my daughter’s safety, but also because of the stress I was under as I juggled full time paid work, university study, and primary care responsibility for our 3 children, and because of the internal conflict I experienced as we used medical drugs to help her. Up until this time I’d not used medical intervention at all for a number of years. This was not only because it was proscribed in Christian Science, but also because of prior negative experiences with the profession before becoming involved with the church. Since a number of calls to Christian Science practitioners had brought no relief to our suffering baby, though, we called in the medicos, bought the requisite drugs and equipment and began to administer them several times a day.16 Again I felt like a failure. I’d been quite sure from that first day I read Science & Health that what I wanted to do with my life was be a healer, and yet I couldn’t help my baby. During the next winter Jemma’s asthma got worse, triggered by seasonal colds and coughs, and unrelieved by medication. When the doctor said he needed to increase the range of medication to include steroids I decided enough was enough. With Tony’s support and that of a local Christian Science practitioner, I reduced my paid work load and increased the time I spent with Jemma and in studying Christian Science. Many times I was very frightened, but I would see her struggling for breath and mentally turn away to affirm her untarnished, unlaboured spiritual origin and presence. I continued this for more than 12 months until one day Tony and I realized that Jem hadn’t had an asthma attack in a long time. Moreover, we couldn’t actually even remember the last time she’d had one! This experience was such a strong affirmation for the efficacy of Christian Science treatment that I undertook a course of instruction with a teacher which qualified me to hang out my own shingle as a practitioner. Occasionally I did identify publically as a Christian Science practitioner but my path continued along the road of study because I felt impelled to take up a degree in Theology through Flinders University. ************* My study, as study does, broadened my outlook on religion and spirituality immensely. Because I continued to identify as a Christian Scientist while doing my undergraduate degree in theology I wouldn’t have recorded the following thought in my journal – it would have seemed too disloyal. What I learned during my studies was that Eddy’s book was only one “key to the Scriptures.” For some reason I’d gotten the impression it was the only key, but I discovered it was possible to read the bible from a number of perspectives, including a feminist one, my favourite. It was a number of years later before I read Caroline Fraser’s book, God's Perfect Child. Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church which includes stories of children suffering in the religion because their parents avoided medical intervention. This was a book that left an indelible mark on my psyche and affected the way I came to think about the freedom of choice everyone should have in their quests for health and happiness. 16 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 13 I also discovered that I could have an experience of ultimate reality, of immense peace and wonder, in a variety of settings and via a variety of mediums. For example, often when I was studying a biblical passage I would soar, not on the words per se, but on the meaning of the text given the historical context in which it was written. When I attended Catholic and Anglican Church services, usually because a friend was being ordained, again I was astonished to find that a sense of clarity, purity and peace would descend on me and I would leave the service feeling refreshed and not a little in awe of what had taken place. I even found out other Christians were and had been interested in healing so I chose to investigate the differences between Christian Science healing and mainstream Christian healing for my Honours project. While I was often offended by Christians telling me that Christian Scientists ‘were not really Christian,’ it was during my time doing theology that I came to the conclusion that I was not a Christian, nor had I ever been. My focus was always on the ideas of Mary Baker Eddy, seldom on those of Jesus, and my experience of the Divine never involved him. As time went by and I came to understand that seemingly everybody in the 19th century had claimed their discoveries and methods as ‘Scientific’ and that Eddy’s use of this word was synonymous with the ‘kingdom of heaven’ of the Christian tradition, it too had no appeal for me. Repeated faith crises accompanied these discoveries, painful times of trying to work out what did, what could have meaning for me anymore. ************ 7th October 2004 I need to write & write & sort out some of my feelings and thoughts. I’m astonished at the honesty and frankness in my old journals. I’m honest about a range of very difficult feelings – of intense pain, fear, anger, rage, jealousy, resentment, unwillingness to give up old resentments and grudges because they serve me in some way, discomfort with my body, inferiority because we didn’t have anything much, superiority because I was smart. Pouring out my thoughts and feelings in my journal allowed room for new ideas to emerge, for me it is a preeminent therapeutic process. It wasn’t until 2000 that I began to write for publication, and then only intermittently. As much as I’ve often declared “I want to be a writer” I didn’t think I had anything to say that would be of interest to anyone. The thrill of seeing my name in print, of knowing that someone was interested in my thoughts and ideas, was nothing short of miraculous and a most marvellous boost to my self confidence. It has taken me more than 8 years since that first publication to actually identify as a writer, though, and there were times during the last stages of writing up my PhD when I despaired of ever writing well again. ************ 25th February 2007 What was it last night I read that brought me a measure of peace & comfort? I was reading Joel Goldsmith’s book “Man was not born to cry” p.37. “Where the presence of God reveals itself, God does not create that harmony or liberty, nor does God bring it: God is it. The presence of God is peace, health & safety; the presence of God is food & clothing & raiment. God does not give us these things; God is these; & in the silence, God manifests as the very life of our being, as the very light under our feet, as the very presence that goes before us...” Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 14 During the course of doing my PhD research I discovered that back in the 19 th century there were a number of Christian Scientists who had theological and practical reasons for disagreeing with some of Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas. Many of these people had become part of the New Thought movement, an alliance formed in 1914 and comprising a disparate assortment of groups interested in the way thinking shapes our reality, including our experience of physical health. One of the 20th century leaders in this movement, Joel Goldsmith, became a favourite with me during 2007.17 I had been going through a very bad patch that year, and the preceding one, and Goldsmith’s writing became a daily tonic I would imbibe. I would start my day by spending an hour retyping a number of his books; I needed to translate his androcentric biases into my own more inclusive language. I also excluded from my ‘translation’ all the bits on the bible because I wasn’t having a bar of the bible by then, as well as material I adamantly disagreed with. After an hour or so of writing I would be in a good space. I would have come out of the pits of anxiety and despair enough to begin work on my PhD thesis for the day. Then I would sit quietly, go within and ask for guidance and the words would start coming. When I got stuck I repeated the process, and the words would start flowing again. I found I could write this way for about four hours a day, and that’s how I finished my PhD project – after someone close to me had attempted suicide, after I found out a friend had been sexually assaulted, after having gone through intensive counselling for child sexual abuse, after I’d been through a period of feeling isolated within my own family, after I thought I’d never get this PhD project finished because in many ways it signalled the beginning of the end – the end of identifying myself as a foster kid – and the beginning of a new life as an academic, whether or not I had a full time job. I knew if I could finish my PhD, I could probably do anything. So that’s what I would do and it got me through. *********** 28th August 2007. I had no idea I was so angry until I started working spiritually. I had no idea I was so jealous of what others have. I had no idea I was so pre-occupied with my appearance...I had no idea of the hatred that is within me until this weekend. I had no idea of how harsh and cruel I can be. I had no idea of how weak I can be. I didn’t know anything about myself at all really until I started working spiritually. But there have been times when I have not wanted to read Goldsmith in order to help pull me through a bad patch and I still have difficulty working out why that is. One time was when I, feeling isolated and alone, and with my PhD finished and waiting for it to be marked, and with no work to be getting on with, and with my relationship with my husband in tatters, I didn’t read Goldsmith or anyone. Instead, I sat in my feelings of despair and rage until that rage came bursting out of me and then, thoroughly disgusted with my behaviour and with myself, I turned that violent and intense anger against myself and attempted suicide. I never thought I’d do that; I never thought I’d have the courage. In many ways it was a positive action, though, because I finally had some comprehension of the despair my loved one must have felt twelve months before. And my family members became more gentle and kind too, and that was the most tremendously healing thing – the gentleness and kindness. 17 Marianne Williamson and Louise Hay were also leaders in the New Thought movement late in the 20 th century. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 15 ************ 13th February 2008 Goodness, I feel so alive & well & happy today, transformed! I’m sure that has to do with all the crying I did yesterday. Even if .....doesn’t respond immediately, or ever, I know now I can get through this. Perhaps I have moved to a place of acceptance...I do have a choice about how I’m going to feel – as long as I’m not reacting – in which case I need to accept that I’m still unconscious about some areas of my life situation & the impact of them on me. Gradually I did get back into my spirituality reading, but it was months before I read Goldsmith, and then very slowly. What was going on here? Why did I not want to leave these intense, difficult, uncomfortable, crazy making feelings behind and transcend to that place of calm and serenity I love? I realised I no longer totally trusted that exultant feeling I get from reading Joel Goldsmith or Mary Baker Eddy. The gap between bliss and despair became so huge I disappeared into the abyss, I didn’t know who I was anymore, and I didn’t know where God was either. I was also frightened that in that exultant space I was likely to forgive and forget all manner of things that I didn’t really think should be forgiven and forgotten, like the assault of my friend for instance. What has been helpful recently is to appreciate that this gap in experience is not unusual. According to Karen Armstrong, Muhammed’s life, more than 1300 years ago, “represented a constant dialogue between transcendent reality and the violent, puzzling and disturbing happenings of the mundane world.” By going within himself he was able to come up with inspired solutions to the problems he was confronted with.18 It’s a good tip that one, to go within to find the solutions to our problems, and I’m confident now this formed part of Mary Baker Eddy’s method and message. Had the church been less prescriptive the message may have been easier to detect. ********** I’ve learned a few things over the years. If we are to be of any use to others we need to know who we are, hence it’s important to learn where our boundaries are but also be prepared to shift them out as we grow. Peace at any price is not worth it, whereas vigorous debate is healthy and invigorating. People need to be accepted for who they are and where they are on their journey through life, but behaviour and ideas should be subjected to ongoing critical analysis. To be authentic we need to embrace our humanity before we attempt to transcend it. And healing can be found in a multitude of ways: reading/listening to others’ stories, expressing oneself, being listened to, being accepted, unconditionally loved and supported by family and friends, as well as spending time in the presence of inspiring individuals. **************** 5th February 2009 I feel so much more integrated these days, different, calmer, happier, more grounded and confident, while at the same time less certain. Less certain about absolutely everything, actually, that’s how I feel, even about who will go with me into the next stage of my journey. Will Mary Baker Eddy? Had I been a contemporary student of hers I expect she would have denounced me for my current interest in all religions. Still, I have a lingering fondness for her and I love many of her ideas. So many now seem very much part of daily life anyway. What about Joel Goldsmith? Most days I carry one of his books around with me, in case I’m held up somewhere and want to read or feel 18 Karen Armstrong (2001). Muhammad: a biography of the Prophet. London: Phoenix, p. 21 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 16 uplifted, yet I’ve not actually dipped into the book for some time. I don’t feel ready to leave either of these spiritual mentors behind, and I continue to think that the Christian Science/New Thought traditions are inspiring. Probably what I will do is add to my collection of mentors, but perhaps I won’t accede to any of them the authority in my life I once did. Perhaps its time for me to be the authority in my own life. At its core my spiritual journey has been a growing into mySelf. 19 There are some aspects of my life which have a linear progression to them, like my studies for example, from basic undergraduate degree to PhD, or like my children progressing through school and into university, or upgrading our home as we could afford it, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. As well as the linear aspects there are a few central concerns and as I review my journal entries over the years I see that I circle around these core elements endlessly – finding ways of expressing myself, working out the place of emotions in spiritual life, the movement between the conditioned and the unconditioned, discovering that we’re all the same even though each of us is individual and unique, we all of us have the seeds of violence and harmony in us, as Thich Nhat Hanh has observed. When I’m at my most neurotic I am quite literally running around in circles, and there are many journal entries where I talk about this, of being so fraught, sometimes with so many choices I can’t decide what to do. Sometimes I spin out of control with anger, rage, grief, frustration, anxiety. But all the while I have been moving in a wider and deepening circle until I’ve arrived at a place where I see that I’ve been putting down deeper and deeper roots into life. And in this we still resemble plants. We climb toward God and remain in [Her], without killing the mother earth where our roots lie, without denying the sky either. Rooted in the earth, fed by rain and spring waters, we grow and flourish in the air, thanks to the light from the sky, the warmth of the sun. 20 I need these roots for balance and stability as I continue to grow into increasing freedom, freedom to be mySelf. About Deidre Michell Deidre Michell, Ph.D., is a theologian living and working as an academic in Adelaide, South Australia. She has degrees from the University of Adelaide and Flinders University of South Australia, and in 2009 her PhD thesis, Christian Science: Women, Healing and the Church, was published by University Press of America. Deidre can be contacted via email drdeemichell@bigpond.com Mary Daly has been my inspiration to write ‘mySelf’ in this way to signify the me who is striving for selfactualisation, for freedom from patriarchal ideas of how I should be a woman in the world. See The Church and the Second Sex. With the Feminist Postchristian Introduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985 p.XII. 20 Irigaray, 1993, p.69 19 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 17 9 CLOUDS Amanda Gargula I have an obsession with counting the tiles when I’m on the toilet. I count the sheets of paper too. Well I did when I was a kid anyway. Maybe I had a constipation problem? Every toilet has tiles; I remember one toilet that had tiles on the floor and the walls had been painted to the floor! So I sat in the silence of the toilet and counted what was on the floor. Not very spiritual? When I count, and I got very good at it, I can count and not even know I am doing it. It’s almost hypnotic for me. It may have started when I was very young living in the children’s home at Morialta. Not an especially pleasing place to be for me. I had made the mistake of wetting the bed one night and from then on I had to sleep with a mackintosh as we called it, a sheet of rubber, under the thin cold sheet. Every night was cold, even the summer nights. My sister says when there’s no love its cold all around. We had to make our beds each morning with the hospital corners folded correctly and tucked in or the bedding was pulled up and you had to remake it. It’s quite crushing for a little person to have that happen. Imagine standing proudly next to a bed that you made thinking what a good job and then boom! They were called Dorm Inspections and they were brutal, especially for new people. It seemed I lived only to survive the next day. What was I doing here and why was this happening to me? I decided very early on that asking questions about my life was a futile task. The pain from not receiving a satisfactory answer was too great to bear and there was no one to discuss my feelings with. Lost lonely abandoned and angry. I taught myself not to cry; I remember forcing myself not to feel the agony of being left all alone. No wonder I started drinking and smoking at 8 years of age. Yes, my siblings were placed in the home but we were separated to different wings due to the age differences, except for my sister that is. But I would not put this burden on to my sister as we were in the same boat. Yet we were in a ‘lucky’ dorm apparently as our House Mother Miss Pegg was lovely and owned a budgie. We were envied by the others. I know I had an angel watching over me. I know this because she revealed herself to me; she gave me dreams of the future which I did not understand back then. She showed me my life; she showed me there was a reason to be happy. I believe my happiness now is some sort of karmic payment for sticking at life when I was young. Suicide had often visited my mind as a young child despite the fact that I never thought of the word suicide till I was a teenager. To me it was to run away and never be heard or seen again. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t have food as I would not need food or shelter. I was not calling my dreams visions from angels as I do now, how could I have understood what was being shown to me? I believed my visions were showing me as the adult not as the child. For example, there was one dream in which a kindly looking woman sat at a desk with a machine used for numbers. She was showing a little girl of about 7 or 8 what she was doing and helping her to understand the numbers she was calculating. When I was almost 14 years old I was introduced to a woman who used a specialised adding machine and at that time I thought the machine in my dream was one of those. I now know it to be a computer. The little girl is my step daughter and the woman in my dream was me. My office before it was remodelled looked like the one in my dream; my dream had materialised. What extra proof would I need to believe in divine intervention? Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 18 On the hills of the home in Morialta I would sometimes lay down with the sun beating down on my face and count the clouds or seek out the faces in faraway places. When I shut my eyes I would see swirly dotted patterns in red and blue and white. As it got to that point I knew I wasn’t far off soaring into the sky to fly the afternoon away. I have attempted this as an adult but find I am just not as relaxed as I think I am. I can see the swirly patterns but soaring off into the wild blue yonder seems unattainable. I still see the animal and human faces and the odd landscape and I do enjoy pointing these out to my children and seeing if they too can see the images. I prayed hard and I prayed each and every night. We had to pray kneeling at the side of our beds in Morialta, no matter what the weather, and we were not to pray sitting on our beds. We all prayed to a god I didn’t believe in. Though how my angel fitted in with this god never got a thought from me. I prayed for big boobs. Not just ordinary big boobs, big boobs that others would envy. Where did that come from? Hell I was 6 years old when I started praying for my mammeries! Next on the prayer list was Blonde hair. Was that original! I thought so and I believed that I just wasn’t praying hard enough since my chest stayed flat and my hair was brown! Funny that because I didn’t consciously believe in god; I just believed that eternal damnation and hell was for all bad people and that’s where I was going to end up, for sure. That’s what the pastor told his congregation. The congregation at Norton Summit was full of adults, you know, the kind you had to obey. Even at Sunday school there would be the kind-hearted adults telling the stories about how you would be going to hell. Krikey, I even touched that place which was reserved for grownups. There was no hope for this little sinner. If god had made heaven and earth, human and animal then that was a pretty heavily ‘proof’ weighted argument as to why I was going to hell for my 6 and 7 year old sins. I hadn’t even been loved yet. I half heartedly prayed for the others in my dorm too. Why would I pray hard for them when I thought my life was a futile existence? Wendy was the retarded one. That is what I referred to her as, and I did not just imagine that word, I learnt it from someone. She wore a back brace. I am not too sure how that made her retarded. Poor darling. We gave her curry! I was very frightened of her because she was so nasty to other people. Who could blame her? Wendy was a strawberry blonde and I loved the colour. I never remember her praying. Bending over the bed to pray with a brace such as Wendy wore was a task too hard for her. That cumbersome brace went from the back of her neck to around about her coccyx, maybe just below it. She had to wear that back brace because she didn’t pray and it seemed to me she probably never had, I should know because we shared a room for 2 years. Hell I was 6 and had lived through my parents abandoning me and being used and abused. I was tough and I did know a thing or two or four. But not love. My sister and I were going to hell. Hell was pretty close for me. Maybe I would finally get some warmth in my soul. When my sister and I left Morialta my angel fell from my conscious thoughts for a good long while. I lived with the ‘fact’ that I was going to hell so there was no hope for me and maybe if I tried to be good I would go to a medium type of hell. Only when I was finally released from this living hell though. For a couple of years after Morialta we lived with my father and attended regular Sunday service and Sunday school. I proudly stood next to my dad and sang every hymn with all of Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 19 my energy; I reverberated with joy every time I sang. No one could ruin my little world now I was with my good Christian dad. Hell was getting further away. Surely I was making up for my past sins. I was now loved and I knew and felt it. My father was quite a religious person. He began singing in church when he was much younger and was sometimes asked to sing at weddings. I later discovered that our family on my father’s side, the only family I know, were and still are devout Lutherans. I was not to travel that path. Nor were any of my siblings. At home we prayed before our Sunday lunches and on ‘special’ occasions we prayed after lunch. Though what those special occasions were all about I was not privy to, it was more often than Easter that is for sure. Maybe I just never asked or it was expected that I knew. Maybe I didn’t need to know. When my sister and I were older we discovered the drawer in the dining table which held Dad’s prayer bible. There was a cutlery draw which we knew about and used when we helped Mrs Kennedy make the table ready for our meals. Now I find myself drawn to tables with draws in the side. I love to look inside the drawer even in a new table. The prayers after lunch were especially long and I had difficulty sitting still. So I used to count. We had tiles above the wood stove in the kitchen. Sometimes I would count the number of times god’s name was mentioned or hell or thankful, any word which took my fancy or fixation at the time. Didn’t my father pray hard enough? Clearly I wasn’t praying hard enough because my sister and I were kidnapped in the middle of the night. It was 10pm on a school week night and I was 9 years old. My father arrived home after the Pub had closed and we were all gone. Why was I again being wrenched from the arms of someone who loves me? Why had god hidden his face? How come I did not think about my father’s pain or was it intertwined? Was it me who was hiding my face from god? How would I ever know? I was only a child. My sister’s new family were Born Again Christians or Born Agains, that’s how I would always refer to them. They had been born again into a new Christian faith and my eldest brother had lived with that family for 2 or so years before my sister went there. I hated them all with such a passion the hatred almost had a life of its own. They were all liars and BS artists in my eyes. One of them is currently doing his 2nd stint in Yatala for paedophilia. That group of Born Agains who ran the Bethesda Christian Centre also ran youth camps. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be invited with my sister and brother to one of the camps in the hills. I was desperate to connect with my older brother and I couldn’t understand why they split the boys away from the girls. Or why we weren’t allowed to know what the boys were doing. At the camp I was strongly encouraged to attend little workshops where you could go and receive the spirit, speak in tongues and be like the other group members. I nearly did it in public. Speak gobbledegook that is. I was seconds from spitting out some foreign language that made me feel really weird inside. Everyone in my group was encouraging me to spit it out. I was so self conscious yet at the same time I was really trying hard, almost breaking into a sweat, to perform for the group. I really could have spat out any old crap with an accent and passed it off, so long as I kept my eyes shut! It would have been great to have them all conned into it. But I was a good girl and no matter what I thought I couldn’t be mean or deceitful. At least it was a sunny day. I am always mindful of the sun as a gift. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 20 The group leader led 5 of us on a little walk. We sat and talked about their ideals, and beliefs, Jesus’ love and their style of religion. By the time that was over I was completely confused and full of self doubt. I thought after a Christian youth retreat I would return to Orana healed of my pain, and having spent some time with my big brother Pete. I was uncomfortable and agitated reflecting on what I had seen and felt that weekend and the whole experience cemented my hatred of this style of Christianity. I didn’t even get to spend any time with my brother. From then on I believed Religion was far from my heart. It would be a few years yet till I learned titbits about Buddha’s teachings. As I continued to occasionally mix with my brother and sister, the Bethesda crowd, which they were so heavily mixed up with, did have an influence. Instinctively I used to mentally wrap myself in a blanket of protection. I continually wondered why my brother was so distant; I ached for him and his recognition of me. To this day I have not experienced this from any sibling. Perhaps that’s when the flagon swigging started. At nights when I couldn’t sleep I would go to the kitchen and carefully pull the dishwasher away from the cupboards. Then I would gently ease the cupboard door open, reach in for the neck of the flagon, and quietly screw the lid off and glug down a few hearty mouthfuls. Then I’d return to my bedroom and fall asleep peacefully. I was about 13 by then. Later I lived in a Catholic Cottage home and attended mass each Sunday and ate fish every Friday. The only love I experienced from living under this influence was Rock Mass on a Saturday night at the Cathedral in Wakefield street Adelaide. Sr. Janet Mead’s voice took my breath away and I loved to sing really loud. My feeling was that everyone around me was singing loud, it continually gave me goosebumps and when we left Rock Mass I was exhilarated. In spite of everything, singing the Lord’s Prayer usually gives me goose bumps even now. Hell and Sinning were still the main pressure message of going to church which impacted me. Being bored came in second. I couldn’t go to confession and confess my sins as I was not baptised into the Catholic faith nor was I confirmed, so I had to watch as everyone filed past while going to receive the sacraments. If I think about it God has had a real hold on me in this life. When the Catholic Office was experiencing difficulties obtaining House Parents for Orana I was placed in a “cottage” that was being run by nuns. It was close to the tram line in or near Goodwood and I used the tram to get to school. It was an intensely unhappy period for me and I remember extremely little of my time with them. I am unable to recall any names. This is somewhat disconcerting for me as I have a reasonable memory in relation to my childhood. The intensity of the grief I felt at that time was so strong I am able to recall the sorrow I felt. It was similar to the abandonment I felt as a 5 year old when I was first left in the hall at Morialta. I must have attended Mass with the nuns but I don’t remember. We must have shared meals, I must have had jobs. There were jobs wherever you stayed even if it was for a weekend and you’d never met the people you were housed with before. Perhaps it was so sad that I banished these memories to the nether regions of my mind. The replacements for Orana were found and I returned but not for long. Unfortunately it worked out I was unsuitable for their vision of how this cottage home would now be run. There may have been some promises (and I was not a part of those promises) made by the Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 21 Catholic Welfare Office. Or maybe I had so many difficult behaviours she couldn’t cope with her job. After an unhappy stint of co-existing together and the House Mother admitting that I was not part of the package extended to her, I was offered alternative living arrangements. Robyn, my catholic social worker, drove us to a girl’s dormitory style Nun Administered and Operated home in the suburb of Skye, a leafy suburb in the Adelaide foot hills. The trip was made at night; possibly I was being shielded from an ugly side of this place by only visiting it at night time. The rules and routines were discussed in the interview conducted after a short wait upon our arrival. We shared a meal soon after that imposition. As Robyn and I sat in silence through the meal, looking around at the trestle tables of high school girls all checking us out, I thought how strange it was we were not seated at a table with others. Was this some weird type of Christian Catholic ritual? I was extremely depressed at having to be housed there. I could not imagine living in rooms separated by wardrobes and the curtain style partitions, getting up at the crack of dawn to pray together. Prayer was a prerequisite when arriving home from school and before bed. Prayer 3 times daily! I would not allow myself to imagine how I could possibly fit in with this regime and as far as my education went, which school I would be forced to go to. I did not want to live in such a rigorous religious way. I tolerated Mass and I enjoyed fish on Fridays but having to rise for Prayer early and for that to be the last thing I was to do at night, I could not stand the thought. Religion I believed was the route of all the evils and mayhem in my life so far. When my father died I cried long and I cried hard. It took me around 3 years to find my way out of the heavy grief and come to my ‘here and now’ senses. In this time of mourning I couldn’t consciously step on an ant and kill it. I thought God was punishing me for being bad and I had been really bad so there was a lot of pain to come. It was right out there that ‘he’ had taken my dad from me and condemned me to never have an adult conversation with him. During this grief I had vivid dreams of my angel taking me away. I was desperate to leave the pain behind me. I also had dramatic dreams of my father and the relationship we had. Those few things I remembered were to be memories I have always cherished. It was strange but I also I had recollections I had thought were lost. How does one remember happenings once thought lost from a trauma filled childhood? Had my angel opened my mind for me to consider memories from long ago? Had the many long nights of crying till my eyes were red raw and bloated like a goldfish given me some clarity? At that time I was living in a hostel run by a Nun. Some of us called her Mother, although she had been known to me as Sister Patricia. She was so gentle with me and I was so grateful that later on when I tried to contact her to thank her for her input into shaping my life I was distressed to find that she had already passed. I was only comforted by the thought that she would now know the truth. One belief I have is that when one dies they are then awake to all the truths of the world. I am not sure how I came to this belief but I feel certain it is correct. I entered a long phase of drugs and alcohol and not one thought remained of god during this time. Several years passed and I went interstate. Only when I moved to Victoria and hooked up with two beautiful ladies would I truly embrace a type of conscious living awareness. I did not have any contact with people who attended church regularly until I met a man who I later had a child to. His mother Margaret attended Christ the King Church almost daily. I was now mixed up with more Catholics. What was I doing? At least now I had the presence of mind to question what was going on around me in respect to religion. Why would someone go to church every day? Had she made a promise to her dying husband Jock? Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 22 Jennifer, my neighbour in a block of 2 storey flats in Thornbury, and Sally, a work companion, had a huge impact on my life in my 20s. I love them both dearly. Sally introduced me to the Hari Krishna’s. My first introduction was the restaurant these wonderful people ran and shared with the public. We ate there several times and I came to eat with them about every 4-6 weeks. I fell in love with the wholesome aura that emanated from all I noticed there. I believed the ambience was created just for me. Ego! Unfortunately I did not like the Hari life style. The hairstyle was not much chop either. I had hair halfway down my back and I treated my hair like my trophy, almost my identity. I was not giving that up for any one person or way of life, although living in a commune of some sort had a real appeal for me. I filled my flat with plants and read about the Franklin dam project. I was totally enthralled by the way some of the protesters lived and how they stood up for their beliefs. It got me thinking about the strength of belief. I was still very close minded and not receptive to changing my outlook on religion though but I had started to form my own ideals and was exploring faith in forms other than Catholicism and Lutheranism. I had started to live life. I was in my mid twenties and was really enjoying people. I was genuinely interested in what made them operate so I continually asked about their lives and beliefs, what they did for a living and where they thought they would end up when elderly. A lot of people found this to be too much of an intrusion and I gradually had to learn how to read some body language. People were much more receptive to answering intrusive questions if they believed that you had a genuine interest in their wellbeing.. I came upon a biorhythm calculator and hand book which had been written by a man who used dice to make all his every day decisions including toileting. I tried this style of living and loving for a few days but decided that too much trouble could come of it. One of my bosses, Frank Mummie, discussed the book with me and we decided to try some decision making which made me feel very foolish. I guess it didn’t help that it was Christmas and we had been drinking at work. I then tried this type of decision making with a neighbour who was a senior accountant for one of the large municipalities in Melbourne. He was unaware of what I was doing so therefore I believed it to be ok. Thankfully no one was hurt and we remained friendly throughout the rest of his tenancy in the block. I stayed in my Thornbury flat for 6 years. At that time in my life it was the longest I had been at any address. My tally by the time I was 21 years old was 22 different addresses. Next door to the accountant lived Karidah who was a Malaysian student. She was sharing with a boy called Anthony, and their flat was underneath mine. Karidah was studying to become a Doctor. I learned some now long forgotten cooking tricks from her like not to cook garlic and ginger in the same dish and only use the white part of the spring onion, or was it the green, no matter. The best included that her culture practices a kind and considerate style of living. I grieved when she returned home to live the life her parents had planned for her. Jenn lived two doors up and we were sharing a similar style of thinking which I had not yet acknowledged consciously. She talked often of astral travel and fleeting moments of life on another plane, these were her dream times; she was sharing with me a most intimate insight into her beliefs and thoughts. I wanted to believe that ghosts were real and not haunting and full of mischief. Jenn awakened my spirituality by continually questioning me and my decisions and beliefs. She inspired me to continually question and improve my way of living and thinking. This got me thinking about who I was and what path my spiritual life was on. It Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 23 was a fairly uncomfortable situation for me as Spirituality in my life to this point had been tilted mainly to the negative. There were signs which I had ignored but now I began to question and analyse. I have always been a slow deep thinker. I questioned the decisions which affected those around me and queried what I would do if consequences were difficult for me to handle. My memories, left in another state, were being bought back to conscious awareness. I had to deal with the mixture of emotions and conflict it caused me to feel. I guess it made me deal with how I was feeling about my so called sins as a child. I had to deal with the anger I felt that adults would intentionally make me be so scared of life. That recognition in itself was a revelation for me. Where did the drive for people to do this come from? I was an easy target as I had already learned to keep the un-keep-able secrets that only children are asked to keep. I understand that people who’ve had a hard life are sometimes stuck in a cycle of behaviours and inflicting pain and misery into a child’s life is as easy as buttering a piece of toast for these particular individuals. Could you imagine being bought up with various teams of nasty adults? Adults who called themselves Christians and ‘god fearing’. These same adults took me to church and put me through Sunday school. Told me the only way to salvation was to be a good Christian. Did being a good Christian mean that I too had to abuse and stand over, molest and frighten others? I had no choice and such was the era that you did not dare to question the decisions being made for you. So I had a breakthrough in recognising this trait. I love children and always knew I’d make a great parent. I wanted 6 children and I was never going to make the same cock-up’s the adults in my life had made and I was going to reproduce some mighty fine adults for the world to love and appreciate. I was never going to lie to my kids; even a simple lie like telling them Easter bunny was leaving the chocolate eggs for them was to be out of bounds. Of course I hadn’t had those hormones surging through my body like they do when you’ve just given birth. My great comfort at this time was that I was finally in a safe environment. I was interstate and there was no way those monsters could get to me, I couldn’t bump into them nor have to drive through their suburb and be reminded of the atrocities all over again. I could visit the memories safely, questioning and reasoning out my feelings and how they affected my beliefs about spirituality. I was becoming cranky about the fact that I had questions and didn’t know where to turn to find more answers. I was not a brave daring person, I was someone dealing with anxiety and a somewhat fucked up attitude. I saw myself as someone just getting by.. The catalyst for these revelations was in seeing the way my eldest brother treated his step child, his second wife’s 1st child. I could never fully understand why my brother left his beautiful 3 children and kind and generous wife behind, that was until a decade later he disclosed his tortured childhood to me. How could I have understood how conflicting the pastor paedophile would be for him? I had a fortunate lucky childhood compared with his and he left the church and all the sanctimonious adults and paedophiles behind. This was more ammunition against god for me. Thankfully I was opening up to exploring different religions. Ones I was feeling sure did not require you to hand over a third of all your wages and insist, to be a good Christian, you had to gather in groups, pray together, for this is the only true way to be a good Christian. These sort of requirements fuelled my hatred of gathering groups of bible bashing, god fearing LIARS! I knew they were liars because I had firsthand knowledge of how deceitful they were. “Who?” I used to ask myself, “had any right to say their religion was the right one and only their style led to heaven and eternal life.” I have never studied the Bible and I have no Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 24 desire to. Nothing would be so tedious for me as to study the Bible. I did have a good look through when I started to prepare for my wedding. That was enough. One thought which has puzzled me is how can a Lutheran or Methodist have a different Easter than a Greek Orthodox? Why are the Orthodox’s so special? Which biblical calendar are they using and why is it so different to others. Does everyone know about this? Now if the older religions can’t get it right then who is to say that it isn’t just a fabulously concocted story for the easily led millions of fickle humans on this plane? I couldn’t question my soon to be mother in law. I could not allow myself to make her have this conversation with me. Fani was a gentle and considerate Macedonian and her husband Peter was the same. They didn’t worship in groups every Sunday but they did go to worship for all the special occasions and reminder masses. fsMy thinking was that since they were so kind and were related to a generation of people who were here long ago, their religion is close to the truth. But because my thought process was so mixed and I had been having such difficulty working through all the information I decided to forget about it and concentrate on me and my happiness. I subconsciously decided to be egocentric. After Tullie was born I was sent a dream with a vision about who I would spend a great deal of my life with. I saw his hair and his body, I saw the blue shirt and the trousers, the curly, brown hair and muscular frame. The puzzling point for me was that the vision was given in the house I was in at that point. I truly loved that house as in it I felt free and true. It had a very cleansing clean vibration about it. Unfortunately it has fallen into a darker side now. It is not looked after and the gardens are not tended with the love I gave them. It looks unhappy from the outside and the feeling I get is that it is being held hostage. A little like I feel now. I’m living in a house my beautiful husband bought for his ex partner and their family. When I met my husband I felt a little differently toward him than I did most other single men. He was a bit weird and a bit wonderful. He has a kind gentle manner but arms and buns of steel. My god how did I find this bloke, he was strangely familiar which made me comfortable and let my guard down. I could tell him everything and there was this niggling tugging I felt when I wasn’t with him. I can’t adequately describe that feeling. This nagging feeling was the only reason I continued to see him. I admitted that he had gotten under my skin and started to grow. So there was no turning back. We had some massive hurdles to overcome, some we didn’t even know we would have and all the while my religious beliefs were never discussed and his weren’t either. If my angel wasn’t there every step of the way I am sure I would have broken down and turned my back on what is turning out to be the ride of a lifetime. As it happens he is a catholic and so is my son’s biological father, therefore it went without saying that we would send our children to a catholic school. The community spirit fostered there was a big draw card as the school had fewer than 600 students when we first enrolled.. The children attend mass weekly and there are many special functions, sometimes 2 per school term. We say we are a catholic family but really it is only remnants from our childhood which drives this. We need a strong stable base for our children and this religious based community will be a great stepping stone for them to launch their life on. I have been able to look past my negative experiences with the catholic community as I have seen that it is the individuals driving the system who let it down, not the actual religion itself. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 25 Our interpretations of how god wants us to live or how we reconcile our life for the good of all is only ever up to each and every individual so we don’t force religion on our children but encourage them to question what they’re being taught. I encourage them to look for answers to their questions. One of our sons says that God was made up to keep kids from being naughty. It is a fantastic lesson for me and I am still exploring my beliefs. I will never stop learning about faith and exploring how it makes me feel and continuing to grow from these learnings. There is always someone out there to show me how wrong I am about some belief and make me question a thought pattern. I believe in creation itself. What we put in. we get back. If we treat anyone or any living thing poorly then we can expect as much back. As far as one person or being as ‘the creator’ I don’t think this is correct. But I do, however, respect everyone’s right to believe whatever truth makes them happy. Barbara Millicent Roberts aka Barbie aka A. Gargula P.S Barbie has blond hair and big mammaries. About Amanda Gargula Amanda lives in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia, with her husband, Steven, and her 13-year-old son who has Asperger Syndrome. Steve’s 3 children currently reside full time with Amanda and Steve too. Amanda is studying at UniSA in their Foundation Studies program, and all up, has a very full life. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 26 Grounded in Grace Ann Tregenza It’s the 19th of December 2008 and I’ve decided at 10 in the morning to begin recording my story about spirituality and meaning in my life. I am 74 and have had a life of variety, with a guiding light showing me the way and which I’ve learned to trust after going off the track sometimes. I’m sitting here in my studio, which was the old garage. I thought why have a little car in a big space with clutter that I didn’t need, so it’s been transformed. Now it’s a pleasant room with big unpainted beams in the ceiling, sloping roof either end, glass frontage, sliding doors, a view of a lovely gum tree on the opposite side of the road, bright nasturtiums along the side fence and rose bushes to the right of the driveway. I’ve been back here in the old family home for about 20 years. I came here originally when I was 18, then after four years of study, went off on my odyssey. I came back eventually, looked after my parents and inherited the house. I have changed some things in the house and garden; my mother and I designed the white painted brick L-shaped bungalow and a cousin was the architect. I’m very fond of it. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, a Jesuit mystic from the 1600s, wrote Abandonment through Divine Providence. I read it recently and knew he was expressing in words better than I could have what I thought was my truth, what I’d come to, - becoming at one with the mysterious yet ordinary divinity, wholeness. I hope I have a long life. I enjoy life. I’ve revelled in it. I’ve had some wonderful experiences, some of them amazingly synchronistic which have helped me on my way towards where I am now, some of them difficult, one or two tragic, but all of which I can now give thanks for. The Early Years I was born in my parents’ bed in the high school headmaster’s house at Port Lincoln on October 12, 1934 at 2.30pm. I was 8.5 pounds. I gave a tremendous yell when the doctor slapped my bottom. Perhaps I got a slightly rebellious streak from that, who knows. My mother had a midwife helping her during a longish labour. She was Sister Tan, a devout Christian and leader in the Baptist church. She stayed with us for about six weeks. I was told that my father rushed over to the school saying, “It’s a girl, it’s a girl”. They wanted a girl because they had my brother nearly four years previously. Sister Tan sat down at the piano immediately after the successful birth, played hymns and prayed and gave thanks. That was my beginning. I still have the bowl with painted roses on it in which I was first bathed. It’s in the kitchen up on a cupboard. After Sister Tan left, there was Gertie, a young woman who stayed for a couple of years. She was engaged to someone in the town of Port Lincoln, a devout Christian in the Catholic Church. She had a lot to do with me, probably more than my mother. She Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 27 played with me and took me out in the pram. My mother said she adored me. I have photos of Gertie and I certainly look very happy. Then my father was appointed to Renmark High School when I was only 2. I think the severance from Gertie would have upset me. My mother had been an art teacher and did some paintings of the country around Port Lincoln while she had Gertie as housekeeper. Things weren’t easy at Renmark. It was an agricultural high school of 40 acres with sheep which were sometimes attacked by wild dogs (my father had a pistol he would fire into the air), two Clydesdales, which seemed enormous to me, vineyards, orchards and pigs which sometimes got out and rummaged in the garden destroying everything. It was interesting fun for my brother and I. We would lay on the wire grape drying racks during the hot summer, sometimes making up arguments for fun. There were lots of snakes because there were irrigation channels. My narrative poem called Growing up in the Galvanised Bush, which is contained in my book of poetry ‘Shapes of Meaning,’ describes how I felt about that 7 year period. During the time at Renmark, my brother had infectious nephritis of both kidneys. Another boy had died in his class from it. He was almost 12 but he was not allowed to get out of bed for about six months. There were no antibiotics. My mother nursed him; I wasn’t allowed to go in the room. I would have been about 8. During that time my father had a breakdown or burn-out. It may have had something to do with the Second World War starting as he’d been to the first and didn’t want to be in the killing fields again. He had been a sergeant in the medical section when the armistice was signed, then got Asian flu. Most of his battalion got it, and some died. My father had to go away for treatment and recovery for over six months. My mother and I were alone, several miles from town, looking after everything on weekends. Sometimes the sheep would be attacked. One of my jobs was to bang saucepan lids together to frighten the crows away from the lambs because they’d peck out the eyes. I remember my mother saying many years later that she’d been too much of a socialite and hadn’t given enough attention to the spiritual side of things. I was her after school helper. Sometimes I felt angry because I wasn’t allowed to stay in the town and play a little bit longer, or go over the road to play with Minyon whose parents had a vineyard - except occasionally. Every night my mother played hymns on the piano. We said prayers together for the males of the family to get better. We prayed for my grandmother too. She was staying with us when she fell and broke her hip but she never left hospital. She was about 83 when she died. My mother and I entered the spiritual in a Christian way. One night my mother had an experience which changed her life; it was when she felt she couldn’t stand any more, she’d reached the end of her tether. While she was saying a desperate prayer for strength, she felt a presence with her and a hand on her shoulder, a comforting, steadying hand and presence. There was no person there. That was the turning point for her. I was into my 10th year when father came back much better and my brother was able to get up because his urine was clear. From then on my father had to live quietly without much stress. I was told not to argue with him or stress him, which I found very difficult for the rest of my life because as I got older I wanted to have some questions answered, but he was always evasive. Probably just couldn’t cope with it. I don’t think my brother could either. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 28 My father was given another promotion and moved to Nuriootpa High School and we once again lived on 40 acres of scrub, playing fields, orchards and vineyards. After primary school I went on to high school at Nuriootpa with father as the Headmaster. I suppose I was a bit tense not knowing how things were going to go. It didn’t seem to worry my brother so much; he flourished with sport and academia whereas I shrank back a bit although I did flourish sports wise. I was elected by the students; captain of the first year softball, captain of Barossa House, and prefect and I was second girl in scholastic results. My friend Myra, whom I first met at Nuriootpa Primary School in grade five, was always ahead of me in mathematics. We became very good friends and we still are. We had a lot of interesting talks and arguments but we never fell out with one another. We laughed a lot. She came from a strict Lutheran family, very disciplined. I used to cycle around to her place and ask permission from her father for her to come and be with me for Saturday afternoon. We’d get on our bikes and ride around, looking for mushrooms and go to the café and football matches and play tennis etc., until I was 16 and my family went to the city. A Young Woman When it came to choosing a career, something as a reliable source of income, I chose a healing profession. Although I gained a Leaving bursary and a Commonwealth Scholarship and could have been accepted to Medicine, I chose Physiotherapy for its natural ways of healing. Physiotherapy was gaining in popularity, particularly because of the polio epidemic where it was proving to be the most efficacious treatment using heat, massage, baths, splinting and exercise. Anatomy, Physiology, Histology were subjects I excelled at in the Physio course. I was awed by the intelligent intricate workings of the body. I graduated from Physiotherapy having studied singing part-time as well. I moved up to a sheep station in the Flinders Ranges as a companion-help for months. There I watched the great wedged tail eagles soaring with their large wings, inspired by them and by the book of Isaiah in the Bible. In my final year of studies and for another year, I’d often felt achy all over. A doctor thought some of us working with active polio cases had caught a mild dose of polio. I did develop a few mild muscle weaknesses in back, shoulder muscles and hands. After I left the sheep station, I started to get fairly intense pains on my right side. I was rushed into hospital as an appendix was about to burst. The infected appendix had been suppurating for months, which accounted for the pain I got under my right ribs and the inability to take deep breaths because of adhesions attached to the diaphragm. So that’s one reason I couldn’t consider the proposals of marriage I received, I was not feeling right. I think my family thought I was neurotic with wanting to lie down often, not feeling so well. I even went to a specialist physician, but he thought perhaps I was just suffering from some broken relationship. He did authorise an x-ray of my chest because that’s where I was getting the pains, in the lower part but he didn’t think of subhepatic appendicitis (below the liver), didn’t explore enough. It was the local GP here at Glenelg, the one who had brought me into the world at Port Lincoln, whom I went to in an emergency because of the severe pain who immediately gave me a barium meal and I was rushed off for an operation. It was nearly a catastrophe. I then went to Sydney by boat. That was the beginning of my worldly odyssey. I thought I was meant to go and see the world - know what it was. I hadn’t been christened and I wasn’t in a church. I think I had one foot in the world and one foot out of the world. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 29 In Sydney I did locums here and there for two years. At one point I didn’t have a job so I pawned my pearls, but I later got a job and got them back. I was seduced by a man, who was younger than I and worked in a milk bar on Circular Quay. He was charming and sweet with a big smile and he said he’d been observing me and he thought I’d be a “good girl” for him. He was Greek and had a little flat in Paddington with pictures of his family all around. He was saving up to bring his family across to Australia. Anyway, it was with him that I lost my virginity. He wore protection but I knew nothing about what would happen next. He was a bit shocked because he thought I was a woman of the world. I was 23. I felt a kind of liberation and then loneliness. I’d been put in a taxi and sent back to Mosman where I was living over Sydney Harbour in a big house in Mosman with three other women. (One of them was the cousin of someone I later married, the only man I have married). So then I felt the longing for more than just that, the longing for belonging with caring and closeness; without realising it, for a commitment. Just before I left home, my mother had made the motion of washing her hands and saying, “I wash my hands of you. Don’t let us down will you?” So I couldn’t confide in them. I think I could have with my father but he was the one who kept quiet when I was talking and yes, in his quiet way he was probably quite good with the students in academic matters, but... I then got a Physiotherapy job in Canada, working for the Canadian Arthritis and Rheumatism Society in British Colombia. I was sent up to Prince George in the middle of British Columbia for almost a year. The countryside was quite stunning in a dramatic mountainous way. I had to drive about 175 miles every week to little towns. It was a big responsibility for someone of my age. I was 25 and was given a great big car, a Chevrolet Biscayne. I’m not tall, 5’3” so the seat had to be built up for me. Occasionally I saw a moose, the beavers building their dams; once a lynx at the side of the road, a couple of bears, and a cougar. After Canada I got a job in Greece with a shipping family as a temporary governess. They had a huge house outside Athens with a swimming pool, gymnasium, a church and staff of six for a family of four. I looked after the two little children. The family were nice to me; regarding me as a friend. I went to parties with them which were an eye opener into the lives of very wealthy Greeks. I only had one day off a week but on that day I enjoyed the sights, the sounds, spicy smells, the old Turkish quarters, the parks, and the Parthenon, the ancient temple of Athena, Goddess of Learning. After that job, I was a conversational teacher of English in a Greek boarding school for a year. I saw the job in an advertisement on the back of the Athens News. But it was a long way from the city and only one day off wasn’t enough. Then also from the paper, I was lucky to be chosen as a tutor in a wealthy family. I taught English to a boy of 10 for two hours a day in an apartment four storeys up in the embassy area of Athens for two years. I boarded rent-free, had a suite and maid service. It was a wonderful job. I loved being living in Greece. I started learning Greek, particularly popular songs - lovely soulful, sensual music with words from some of the best poets. I asked Greeks to write the words in my exercise book and then I learned the words and sung them. Sometimes I wrote poetry too, such as this one, the first I wrote in Greece, sitting in an Athenian taverna feeling content and peaceful, happy. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 30 Olives and Retsina To eat olives, spiced meats, to sip yellow resin wine with green vines above; To talk of love and life, slip bits to the cats under the table, Is to live care-free for an hour or two in an old taverna, while the sun drops and shadows pattern the red-check cloth we sip the hot sweet blackness of Greek coffee in companionable silence. Throughout that time in Greece, which was just under four years, I often went into Greek Orthodox church buildings, admiring the art of the Byzantine era. Looking up at the ceiling, I could see the Pantocrator (the law giver), Jesus, with a strong brown face, black hair and beard unlike the rather insipid looking European medieval Jesus with pale skin and long wispy fair hair I was familiar with Members of the British embassy, plus a few visitors and residents, made up the congregation of St Pauls, the little Anglican church where I went occasionally. The clergyman had a Master of Arts degree from Oxford, was English and had a Russian wife. I had a few talks with the clergyman and so he knew I was searching, hadn’t been baptised, had read of different religions and philosophies and was moved by CS Lewis’ writings. My first Greek island visit was to Hydra during school holidays. I spent two months there. It was cheap living, simple, good food. I mixed with other young people: school teachers, a psychologist, a singer, two architectural students. We weren’t drinking much alcohol or taking drugs. We enjoyed the natural pleasures of swimming, talking and singing. I boarded about 300 steps up from the wharf in a family home. I had a big barn like room and I’d hire a donkey to go up and down.. I also enjoyed staying on the island of Mykonos. Here there were many little church buildings built by families on rocky outcrops or up country lanes and also uniquely designed houses, usually white washed with colourful woodwork. I’d be walking along on a cobbled stone path and often a woman from a balcony or in front of her house would call out, “Come in and have a coffee and cake.” There was wonderful hospitality then in the sixties. One day while I was on the Island of Mykonos and without understanding why, I felt compelled to go back to Athens and to St Pauls for a sprinkling baptism. The clergyman said that the Bishop of Southwark was visiting after he’d been to Israel and he’d have water from the River Jordan. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 31 Romance During my stay in Greece I had developed an attraction for a South Indian man whom I met at the cafeteria of the YWCA in Athens. He was from a priestly class Brahmin family and Hindu cultural background and had won a coveted scholarship from the Indian Government to do his Masters in Architecture in Greece. We’d both observed each other for a while. He had an air of quiet confidence about him, was good looking in a classical, dark skinned way. He said later that I must have been an Indian in a past life because I wasn’t like Western women, that I had an inner sort of quiet spirituality about me. We used to meet on a certain street corner on a Friday night. Off we’d go to a tea house overlooking the Mediterranean, just below the Parthenon, a beautiful place with pergolas covered with trellises of vines, flowers and open air tables. Then to our favourite taverna and after out somewhere to a film, a play or just wander around and usually end up going through the Botanic Gardens quite late. We were very respectful with one another. He was studying the city squares in Athens. I was writing some poetry, teaching English, sketching. Then after some months, I visited the little flat he had, in a high position beneath Mt Lycabettus. It had a view overlooking the Mediterranean. The result of our liaison can be better said in a long poem I wrote: ‘Loss’. I bowed to my Indian idol ‘we shouldn’t wake up the tiger’, he said was it the summer heat meeting after separation ignorance nobody had taught us warned us once couldn’t hurt he said. ‘Don’t worry I know how to stop’. Power surged the current too strong I waited two months for blood to come. ‘there’s something you can do’ he urged. My idol fell, we moved into hell I couldn’t approach the rector busy serving the embassy flock honouring the English Queen I went past the busy back rooms heard of a kind gynaecologist a friend went with me and left it took one day, one night at the clinic alone in a rented room, too much blood, pain. Back home I hid my shame, tears, pain showed interesting, kind slides, sold my paintings kept busy, dying inside. I found a priest, repented, received absolution. Years later I told my parents ‘you poor little thing’ my mother said. ‘I’m glad you did it dear. Wouldn’t it have been awful for us, Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 32 for Dad in his position’. My father said nothing. Much later, alone with his daughter, he said, ‘I wish I could have helped you’. My mother had said before I left home ‘don’t let us down, will you?’. This was a terrible shock, the beginning of a slow turn around and I think, although I didn’t know it then, stepping onto the path towards Catholicism. I went to India a few years later, visiting most areas in three months. I could see how Krishna behaved there when we spent some time together. He always walked ahead of me, never letting me catch up. I saw how everything in his life was determined by tradition. His mother tried to get me to become Hindu. I wore a couple of saris, had my long hair bound up and back. I could see the religiosity of people in India - from the superstitious to the more enlightened philosophy of Gandhi. If I had married him I would have lived in an apartment for employees of the Atomic Energy Commission. Krishna had designed some of their buildings. Next door were some terrible slum ghettos so it would have been very difficult for me. Central Australia And so I went back to Adelaide in 1964. I was sad coming back to Australia on the ‘Patris’, a Greek ship carrying migrants from Greece where I took classes of basic English in the two to three weeks of the boat trip. Then I asked the Holy One, my guide, what to do next? It came to me that I didn’t know anything about the Aborigines of Australia, the first Australians, so I thought I should know something about them. I was still a member of the Physiotherapy Association but I had been having some back trouble so I put off the Physio work for awhile. I saw in the Australian Physiotherapy Association journal that there was a job available at Alice Springs Hospital. Because I felt destiny calling I applied and got the job. I was in Alice Springs for a couple of years. I was the only physiotherapist in Central Australia; it was a busy, full time job, with most of my patients Aborigines. I went in the Flying Doctor plane to settlements and joined in sport and other social activities in the town. It was a very small town, only about 5,000 people in the area. The only book I could find about Aboriginal culture was called The Aborigine by Professor Elkin - a very big book and I learned quite a lot. I wrote a long verse drama called Japara’s Defeat, in my collection Shapes of Meaning. I sent it off to the ABC and they produced it on Quality Street, in 1967, the year the Aborigines gained their citizenship. Apparently letters were written to the ABC about my play from all over Australia, asking for it to be done again. It was effectively produced with sound effects including corroboree music and the little Flying Doctor plane. The ABC Film Department were all set to go to Alice Springs and film it, but at the last minute, it was refused by the government. I did mention the restrictions of Aboriginal people on reserves, being fed with soupy stew, tea and sugar and flour every day and having no citizenship rights. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 33 Then I went to Cairns in North Queensland to recuperate after getting Hepatitis A, which went through the Alice Springs Hospital. I spent six months in a caravan and established a few friendships. I went back there every year for a few winters. India - Krishna In 1972, I went to back India and met up with Krishna. I still wasn’t a member of a church or regular church goer although I read the Bible sometimes but in India I attended some Yogic meetings, visited temples. Krishna wouldn’t talk with me about Christianity. He, like so many Indians, was rather bitter about British domination and indoctrination of many into Christianity. I visited Nepal, staying at Kathmandu and journeying to near Mt Everest. Krishna and his mother said that he had refused arranged marriages because of me. Despite what had happened, we still had a strong attachment to each other - very strange. I wanted to see the south of India, where he came from. I flew from Bombay, by myself, to Mysoer, and then Bangalore. From there I was just about to catch a plane to Trivandrum and meet up with him there when there was a plane strike. As I was going back from the airport in a taxi, we passed a Christian Church. I hadn’t been to a Christian Church for a long time. So I asked the taxi driver to put me down and I got out and went into this Presbyterian church. I sat through the service and shared a light lunch afterwards. It was winter time and there was a little fire going. I told my story to the clergyman and his wife who were very friendly, lovely people. They said they had met in India in their 30’s doing missionary work. They asked me to stay with them until the strike was over, which I did. As I said, I wasn’t sure what to do, whether to stay in India, take a job I knew was available, consider marrying - I would be a Christian acknowledging some of the Hindu ways. (In Benares, I had been shocked at not being allowed to go into the Holiest Hindu sacred temple, which Krishna went into. He had to do a ceremony for his family but I was left outside. A holy man passed and put some white stuff on my brow. The cows were allowed in). The Presbyterian clergyman and his wife said prayers for me, saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll pray for you to make the right decision”. Taking their advice, when I went to Trivandrum I sought out a fellow who had been a top Government official, a practising Hindu, who had a vision of Jesus when he was unwell with a bad skin disease. He saw and felt a presence which he knew to be the Christ, Jesus. This man honoured Hinduism but embraced the Christian ways with his family and gave talks throughout India. The family trusted they would get enough money to live on when he gave up his Government pay to talk about Christ as the way, the truth and the life. He gave me little pamphlets which told of the Hindu way (he wasn’t judgmental about it in a derogatory way) and how it could lead to Christ. But when Krishna came to meet me at their house, he wouldn’t come through the front gate. From here I went to Cochin in Kerala with Krishna because this is where his family lived. I still hadn’t made a decision. The Presbyterians said not to worry and so I didn’t. In the hotel we had a room with a balcony and could look out over the sea. I’d been with Krishna to a Hindu temple, which was on a little nearby island. That same morning I said, “I can hear the bells of a Christian Church nearby. I want to go there”. He wouldn’t go with me so I walked through a very poor area of little stone and clay huts to a big Catholic Church building. I was standing in front of a statue of Mary when I prayed a very earnest prayer to know what to do. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 34 Back at the hotel Krishna was standing on the balcony. He said, “Look at this”. It was a clear sky, lovely morning with just a thin strip of mist or smoke on the horizon and no clouds. It was as if someone was painting with a huge brush, bringing it up into the sky in the shape of a small elephant. Krishna’s family name was Ganapathy, meaning Lord of the Hosts, known and worshipped as Ganesh, the fat half elephant, half man popular god symbol whose statue is seen everywhere in Indian temples. Krishna was a spiritual person, believing in a power beyond what we can see even though not strictly religious. Because the elephant is an emblem of India he said, “I think you’re meant to stay in India”. As I stood there amazed the image faded away, leaving a clear blue sky and a thin strip of grey haze on the horizon. He went inside, but as I remained on the balcony, puzzled, it was as if the huge paint brush swept the mist, bit by bit, into a much bigger image, this time of a kangaroo. I was staggered me and called out to Krishna to come and see it. The arms of the huge upright kangaroo were pointing towards Australia. The image stayed there for longer than the elephant had and eventually Krishna said, “I really think you’re meant to go back to Australia. I think that’s what the message is, acknowledging India as being part of your life journey.” I agreed. He admitted later that he could foresee serious difficulties in me staying. His mother and family would have been praying to their God Shiva. The Christians in Trivandrum would be praying to Jesus. So from Madras I returned to Adelaide, Australia. A few months later Krishna came to Australia hoping to get a job but there was a building slump. His mother became gravely ill so he had to go back at once, especially as he was the oldest son. He said he would marry me in a Christian Church here in Adelaide. I felt this would be a desperate move, ensuring that he could come back, so it wasn’t completely honest and given deep enough consideration by him. That was the end of our story. New Beginnings - Richard During my 20s I had visited the home of one of my flatmates in Sydney, a sheep property out of Armidale. On the mantelpiece in the sitting room I had seen a photo of a young man, her cousin, and was very drawn to it. I was in my middle 30’s when I finally met the man. The father of my friend had died and I was staying with her and her sisters. Richard came along to help them out. He hadn’t married and was about 10 years older than me. I first saw him in person from a distance, on top of a truck load of hay forking it out,. Later I met him at church, a little Anglican church where his cousin took me. I remember us looking at one another nearly the whole time. I noticed his leg was shaking slightly and he was holding his arm in a slightly unnatural way. After the service we went to a little café where I showed him a recently completely poem called “The Circle”. He understood it immediately. I had a red Fiat sports car then and years later he remembered with a chuckle what I was wearing and how I tore off in the sports car after that first meeting. Two years of writing letters and then we married in an Anglican church. We both said we weren’t sure whether it would work because we’d had very different lives, but there was definitely something very powerful between us in a different way from the Indian and I. I Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 35 certainly admired Richard’s pluck, his complete lack of self pity, the way he would not acknowledge he was partially handicapped. We lived on a fine wool merino sheep property with a few head of cattle in a big, old wooden farm house on the side of a hill with a large verandah around half of it. We were very poor. I sold the red sports car and bought a simple little Daihatsu Handivan, which was quite useful for running about the property. Richard and I parted for a few months while some family financial matters were sorted out. I filled in as the Obstetric Physio at Flinders Medical Centre and lived in a small flat on the grounds there. I went to have a rest one afternoon and as I was coming out of a light nap, it was if the words of Psalm 101 were written in white on my mind, like an inner direction. I looked that Psalm up in my Bible, which I hadn’t read for some time. I was amazed as it is not a well known Psalm, I couldn’t remember ever reading it or hearing it before and yet the advice was just what I needed. I returned home to live with my parents after that. There in my little room at my family home I knelt down, asking for guidance. Richard had to sell the property - he had a huge debt I hadn’t known about. We still loved each other but with counselling we could see our problems as unresolvable. I decided to go to Innisfail in North Queensland for a holiday. I had worked there before as a physio and I’d made some friends. Father Pearce O Mahoney I met Father Pearce O’Mahoney after a boating accident which resulted in a fractured ankle. My friend Bob offered me his boat to live on while my ankle healed. After a week of confinement and although friends came by often bringing me food, I was feeling rather frustrated and bored. I thought of the nice priest Bob had earlier introduced me to and wrote to him at the Catholic Presbytery saying “I’d like to see you. Could you please enlighten me about the book of Job in the bible?” I’d heard of the patience of Job and I had read briefly about the catastrophes that happened to him, one after the other, but didn’t fully understand the significance of it. Some days later I was again feeling frustrated and fed up and so I turned the radio on. Normally there was nothing on the radio except rock music, but this time I heard the words: “Our hearts are restless O God until they find their rest in thee.” I broke down and sobbed as I felt the truth of it. I’d accidentally switched on to a play, being broadcast during a Catholic program called By the Way, about the life of St Augustine of Hippo who had lived in North Africa in 400AD. I listened to the play all the way through and was still a bit tearful at the end because I was really caught by it. When I looked outside, there coming across the gangplank toward me was the grey haired priest I written to dressed in shorts, long socks, sandals, open necked shirt, little peaked cap and with a little gold cross on his shirt collar. He looked cheerful and sprightly. Pearce Bernard O’Mahoney told me that just after he’d read my letter the priests opened their divine office book, and saw that the reading for that day and many days to come was from the book of Job. Amazing! As someone who was used to seeking God’s will and doing it, he felt it was God’s will for him to come to me and lend me the book of the divine office with Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 36 the commentaries on Job. I told him about the play I’d just been listening to and about how it moved me. He said, “Amazing grace, I’m Friar of the Order of St Augustine”. So began a wonderful relationship, arranged by Divinity I’m sure. Friar Pearce Bernard O’Mahoney visited me when he could. I never felt pressured to join the Catholic Church or any church for that matter. Instead, he found out what my interests were, and brought me books to suit those interests - historical novels and poetry - and liquorice allsorts to satisfy my craving for these. When my foot was almost healed, I managed a Women’s Shelter for his church for a while. That was a bit terrifying because women were escaping from violent husbands, and sometimes there’d be a rattling of the big padlock on the front door. One woman, a tourist, had had her car torched when she went for a walk. She ended up with the police bringing her there. I was fortunate to have the company of Pearce so often. I didn’t know much about the Catholic Church but from him I found out about the rosary and other things. He also invited me to church functions, and a special highlight was a feast day for Augustine and for his mother Monica. I had arguments against the Catholic Church too, such as Luther’s objections that he’d nailed on the church door at Wittenberg. And why can’t priests marry? Pearce never argued - he was just quiet. He said sometimes he’d walk out of a talk by a Bishop if he didn’t agree with what was being said. When my bone was healed, my joints were stiff, so he took me out on the golf course, because he was a golfer and bit by bit I was able to play golf. Finally he gave me all he owned which was an oak rosary from Ireland. It wasn’t easy for me to say goodbye and when I came home back to Adelaide and was in my little room in my family home again, I shed quite a few tears. I remember my mother asking me what was the matter and I told her as much as I felt I could. “Oh” she said, “I wouldn’t trust a Catholic priest”. She, like many outside the church, seemed to have biased opinions about the Catholic Church without knowing much about it. Pearce and I respected and honoured each other. I understood spiritual love for a man for the first time and gave thanks for it. He passed on at 82 in Ireland. Back home I met a Jungian analyst at the Jung Society meetings and began a series of sessions with her, mainly to do with the dreams I had. It was a wonderful discovery for me knowing what was inside me. My dreams seem to start with baby dreams and progress from there. During this time I felt some unity of self I’d not experienced before. The Later Years Dear father was falling down at night. He was nearing 90. After three years at home looking after him and mother too frail to help, father went willingly to a nursing home. After a couple of years my mother wanted to be near him, so she went into a hostel suite at the same Retirement Village. I then took some patients here at home. Father died in 1990, almost 93, still communicating, and mother in ’92, nearly 90, also communicating. My mother up to the end was delighted with simple things, particularly nature. I remember when Haley’s Comet was passing over; we had to get up at about 2am to Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 37 see it. She said, “I’ll be ready. Just come over”. And so I went over to the hostel and picked her up and we drove up Ocean Boulevard to the top of the hill and we saw it. We enjoyed each other’s company in her last two years more than we ever had. She died in her sleep. Spirituality and the Catholic Church One thing that really helped me look after them and cope with it all was the fact that eventually, in 1988, I took a step into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil ceremony. Leading up to that were a couple of years of talks with Monsignor Aitken, who was at St Xavier’s Cathedral at the time. Also significant was a Prayer Group at St Joseph’s Catholic Church’s Activity Centre here at Brighton on a Wednesday evening. Joining a circle of people holding hands when praying, offering ourselves to the Holy Spirit to strengthen and heal with simple prayers and songs, some requests, some testimonies, helped me so much. I would come home afterwards completely renewed, even though it was about 10pm and I’d gone out exhausted from my caring responsibilities. And then somebody who belonged to this Prayer Group asked me to go with her to the visit of Pope Paul II when he came to Adelaide. I said, “Well I’m not Catholic”. It didn’t seem to worry her but it worried me a bit. I rang the Church office and told of this invitation to Monsignor Aitken who said to me, “Well God wouldn’t mind, he would be pleased and we wouldn’t stop you, so go and join in, partake,” which I did. I was very pleased to be part of the whole thing. There were about 200,000 people there in Victoria Park Racecourse. I can’t explain the mystery of the compulsion to actually join the church, but I knew I had to. Before the final ceremony of commitment, there were further weeks of preparation of being presented at the altar about five times, by my sponsors, two of them. I suppose it was to make sure I really meant what I intended to do, to be a part of the church. My sponsors were two women. One, Pauline Hilliard, I’d met at a health seminar and we’d become friends. The other one was a Dominican nun, Sister Margaret Cain, with Masters Degrees in Psychology and Theology. I’d had many talks with her. The big evening came for a full baptism and confirmation at the Easter vigil, a ceremony to bless water for sprinkling and distribution as a symbol of purification and the lighting of candles, representing the light of Christ’s love. Sister Margaret held the candle which was given to me as the light of Christ and Pauline put the white satin cloak over my dress as the covering of the Holy Spirit. And then we sat down in the front row of the congregation. It was like climbing Everest, getting to the top and then the elation, the relief at reaching the top and it is indescribable how I felt - as if the burden of life and death lifted off me. Later I told my mother. She looked at me with what seemed like black eyes and said, “I fear as if I’ve lost you dear.” And my father said, “As long as you keep an open mind.” But as time went on and as I looked after them so lovingly, they could see a change for the better in me, and after a while my mother said, “You’re like God to me”. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 38 The Present This morning, during my time of meditation/contemplation, I had a strong feeling of awe, wonder, delight and gratitude. I looked at my legs, my strong hands, my body and marvelled at the workings of it going on and on; the blood vessels, blood pumped around the body, nerves etc, enabling me to sit here and then enjoy a good breakfast, and on with the day. I thought of the sadness, indignity, shock and horror of war, the destruction of millions and millions of marvellous lives. I can give thanks for everything now - difficulties, hurts, accidents, car crashes, being mugged and assaulted, bashed, falls, misunderstandings, my own silliness and errors etc. Through them I am learning patience, humility, forgiveness, more understanding of myself and others, and the development of goodwill despite everything. I’ve done a couple of personality typologies. One, the Jungian Myers-Briggs, told me that I’m slightly more extroverted than introverted, slightly more intuitive than sensate, more feeling than thinking and more perceptive than judgmental. The other typology was the enneagram, developed by the Sufi’s and taught by a Dominican nun, a Psychologist and Theologian, who was one of my sponsors into the church. There are nine types. My type was number 7, the good time self, the party self, the self that doesn’t want to face up to or dwell on pain and negativity. I’ve travelled a lot and I’ve liked variety and that type does. But to get a full rounded personality, we need to go to the opposite type and that is the number 5, which I have been trying for years to get into - the meditative, still interior self. I laugh a lot more now, at myself mostly. I remember a time when I couldn’t - I was trying too hard to be this or that to please, to fit in. In the early period of my life, I was not nearly as content as I am now. Older age can be enjoyed if we can let go of things that are hurting us and others. I wrote a personal story called ‘Resurrection’ which I finished on Mothers Day 11th May 2008 at the age of 73. It’s about a positive, healing experience, discovering the dolls. Resurrection When I was very small, my Mother took me to visit Father Christmas in the Magic Cave of John Martin’s store. While I was looking at the large rocking horse and other things, I think my Mother must have told him she had bought a very expensive golden-haired doll for me because as soon as he sat me on his lap, he said, “I suppose you would like a beautiful golden-haired doll for Christmas?” I hadn’t heard of the art of submissive politeness, so I said what I thought. “No I don’t. I want a trumpet”. Father Christmas stroked his incredibly white beard and said nothing. Then as he put me off his lap, he said, ‘I’ll see what I can do”. I didn’t get a trumpet for Christmas; I got a very expensive golden-haired doll dressed in a green woollen frock. My Mother told me that she came from Canada and was very Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 39 expensive. I showed no appreciation of the gift which she said Father Christmas had brought me during the night. “What name will you give him dear?” my Mother smilingly asked, trying to get me involved. I couldn’t think of any name because I didn’t want the doll whose eyelids with long brown eyelashes had closed over cornflour-blue eyes as Mother laid her down. “You name her. I can’t think of anything”. “Fiona then. It’s Scottish like your ancestors”. “Alright”. As I had an older brother who wanted me to build bridges, play cops and robbers, swing on the willow branches, then let go over the slippery muddy bank into the creek, and because I quite liked the excitement of these active gamers, riding my little three-wheeled tricycle, and trying to climb trees, I had little time for Fiona and the fat little stuffed koala I named Koly. I decided to marry them off and let them enjoy conjugal bliss in a big bottom drawer. My brother agreed to be the priest and he even volunteered to make a top hat out of cardboard painted black. My Mother, thinking I had at last taken an interest in Fiona, said she would make a little black suit for Koly and a veil for Fiona. The wedding was a success. I took the married pair into my room, sitting them on the chest of drawers for a while and then settling them in the big bottom drawer. I grew up and left home, living overseas for many years, eventually marrying late, not having children. After both my parents died when ninety and ninety-three, I decided to give half the furniture which I had inherited to my brother. One of the items was a large hand-carved chest. I opened the top for the first time and saw a lot of blankets which I took out. Underneath them on the bottom was a dismembered naked Fiona. The elastic holding her together had perished. Only now as I write am I aware why this scene horrified and saddened me so much, and caused me to sob and shed some tears. It wasn’t just because I had neglected this sweet child, I now Know that it was because when I was a young woman in a foreign land I had a termination of an early pregnancy. Not having had any sex education, I was naïve and gullible, believing that a charming handsome Indian with his avowed wisdom and expertise in yoga would do as he promised, be careful. He wasn’t. After the shock of an unwanted pregnancy, without support from him and without the confidence to tell my parents, I did what I felt I had to. Not so long ago I dared to watch a film graphically describing what happens in an abortion. It was shown by a female Catholic doctor. I nearly fainted and went out of the room. There were several of us out there. I reverently, lovingly picked Fiona up, holding her gently as I cried. She was taken to a dolls hospital where the owner carefully put her together again. She dressed her beautifully in white frilly underwear, pretty red and white dress and bonnet, little laced white shoes and white socks. She offered me a big price for her as she is a rarity, made by hand with meticulous care. Because she had been so sheltered, there isn’t a scratch or mark on her. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 40 She’s about a third of a metre high with a soft blemish on her cheeks, little mouth parted a bit showing pearly white teeth. Fingers and toes are perfectly created. She’s been made with an unknown firm material. I have named this sweet little creature at last. Her name is Annette because she reminds me of someone I know who was lost and is now found. Annette has companions of the sad Spanish clown called Payaso, a cuddly moose called Boffin, a tastefully dressed rag doll called Sophie and dressed in bright warm red and yellow wool, a confident female the maker called Ann, all given to me over the last few years as gifts of gratitude for help given or empathy. As I write this, Annette has pride of place seated on my French antique bed, leaning against the carved walnut head. As I have been a widow for the last few years, although I have international home stay visitors now and then, my dolls have become more important to me. I hug them and speak to them. They take it in turns to be on certain chairs in the sitting room and bedrooms. Sometimes my international boarders take one to bed with them. The most precious of all is Annette. About Ann Tregenza Ann is a retired physiotherapist. She graduated with a Diploma in Physiotherapy from the University of Adelaide in 1956 and has practiced her profession for more than 30 years, working in Adelaide as well as interstate and overseas. Ann has long been interested in art, music, writing and poetry. She studied singing part time at the Elder Conservatorium of Music for 4 years while gaining her Diploma in Physiotherapy, and in 1968 she won a scholarship for Young Writers awarded by the Fellowship of Australian Writers. This was followed up in 1972 with a Special Projects Grant she was awarded from the Australian Literature Board to work on a novel and a collection of poetry. During her lifetime Ann has presented many talks and some 60 poems on ABC national and regional radio. She has also published articles and poems in newspapers and literary journals as well as a collection of poems as a book, Shapes of Meaning, in 2005. The story of her time living in rural NSW after she married Richard Bigg in 1975 was published in 2007 and called Diary of Drought, but no drought in the heart: 8 months in the life of a graziers wife. Ann has had two other books published: a novel, Orestes – from Greece to Australia in 2004, Now I’m 64: a journal in 2002, and Older Women Folk Dancing (her Master’s Thesis) in 2001. She’s currently working on Now I’m 74, a journal. Ann has also sold about 50 works of art both privately and at exhibitions. These include paintings in oil, water colour, ink and wash, and pastels. In the last 15 or so years Ann has used a holistic approach to healthy aging which has included music and folk dance. This led her to research the use of folk dance in the area of preventive health and in 1997 she completed her Masters in Health Science at the University of South Australia. Ann’s life is best described when she says “the four activities of my work in healing, music and dance, art and writing have complemented each other throughout my life.” Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 41 The Warp and Weft of My Life Mary Clutterbuck My story, what makes it unique? There seems nothing exceptional or special about the journey that I have made. My childhood and adolescence were spent as the youngest of five children from a white working class family. We had many skeletons in the family closet, the worst of these being the Maori blood that our heritage contained. This was a forbidden, never to be spoken of subject. My Maori heritage and my reconnection with it is an important part of my life story, but it is a story that stands alone, a proud story, that deserves to be told for its own merit. For this reason i will not explore it here. Life was nothing out of the ordinary; my father was a pillar of the community to all intents and purposes, at least in the public eye. The violence and diverse patterns of abuse remained hidden behind the veneer of respectability. He had a false respectability about him to which we all paid homage. This pseudo-respectability was not only commonplace in our world but was tacitly condoned by families, workplaces and communities alike. I remember as a young teen approaching the dean of my year at school for help. I spent what seemed like forever, tearfully pouring out my soul and explaining the awful acts of shame that my father had subjected me to; only to have her help me by getting a school board member and local town councillor to ask my father if the story I had told was true or not. My father denied the accusations and not only did he punish me, but so did the headmistress for lying and trying to bring scandal and shame on my family. This was when my sense of distrust in those who said they were “there to help” was cemented. I can remember making a clear decision that “figures of authority and support” were definitely not trustworthy and should be regarded with contempt and suspicion. My mother, on the other hand, was the caring, attentive, diligent, subservient and obedient wife and mother that she was expected to be. So much so, that like many children, I slowly came to believe that it was my role to protect her from the horror that surrounded her. This protective attitude also extended to my sibling’s and any other individual who ventured into the environment I claimed as mine. I had from a young age shown talent for bringing calm where there was none and a listening ear and wisdom that did not seem to fit my years. I had always intuitively known how and when to comfort others and when a touch on the arm, a hug or just merely bringing my presence into a situation were needed to diffuse a moment of ill health, misery or danger. Regrettably, I also had an unhealthy tendency to use negative behaviours and anger to create situational diversions and pandemonium within the family. This resulted in me bringing the wrath of my father on myself and providing a point of safety in the lives of my siblings and my mother, releasing them from the risk of the impending violence. Though these were memorable events in my life they were not moments of highlight but of necessity; it was that I believed I needed to act or some irrevocable wrong or harm would occur to those I dared to love. Whilst I was growing up, as is true for all of us, I gained my first learning’s about people, life in general and my purpose and place in this world. I learned what tyranny was, what it was Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 42 to love and lose that which you loved, that secrets were for keeping but that there were exceptions to this rule, that no matter what you shouldn’t breach the trust that someone had placed in you and much much more. The most important thing I learned though was that I was worthwhile and no one, no matter what they did to me or said about me could change that. It is during this time that I begin to make my journey my own. In these years I ceased to be the youngest child in a family of five and began to be myself. These years contained the times when the seeds were sown that would enable me to grow into the woman I one day would be. So my early years passed and my first steps to discovering a sense of my individual sense of spirit and spirituality were taken. I had learnt that in life a balance is not achieved by equal amounts of what we perceive as positive or negative occurring but that an iota of goodness can erase an amazing amount of harm. Life is in reality a fine score of music in which the chords, the cadence and the musician are all required to give the score its balance. The music requires both the bass and the treble and life needs both the up-side and the down-side for us to truly experience it. I am reminded of this lesson as I recall that the protracted periods of time when I perceived my father as an evil tyrant were rapidly erased by the fleeting moments of gentleness and goodness. These were encompassed in the wisdom he shared with me on all manner of things, the knowledge he imparted about nature and all its wonders, the opportunities he gave me to experience the symphony and the ballet, the times he made me laugh and the chances he gave me to experience so many things that were good and fun and unique. I will never forget the first time he held a shell to my ear so I could hear the sea – it was magical. To this day I remember the excitement, wonder and awe I felt when he took me to see “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” at the movie theatre in central Auckland. At 15, I was pregnant and miserable and ran from home as quickly as I possibly could without attracting an unwanted retrieval by my father. I battled to balance the exhilaration of my freedom with the guilt that I felt at leaving my mother to the mercies of the man she had married. I repressed the guilt I felt by burying myself in the love I now shared with my lover and gloried in the opportunity I had been given to safely express and explore my sexuality without fear of recrimination. She loved me and supported me through the blackest moments in my pregnancy and during the delivery of my daughter, who she sadly never got to watch grow to be the beautiful woman that she has become today. Unfortunately this happy interlude was to be short lived, Gill was diagnosed with breast cancer 16 months after we began our relationship and died 13 months and 11 days later. The anger and the grief I felt consumed me, I could not believe that she had purported to love me and then she had left me. I felt both cheated and betrayed. I wanted to know why God had done this to me. What right did God have to take away the first really good thing in my life? It was this that made me begin to question and wonder about whether there was something more meaningful than the world that we could see and touch. With my sense of spirituality in its infancy and the zeal of youth driving me I proceeded to spend the years of my late teens drifting in and out of the world of Christianity. I spent time within many denominational groups and have been baptised more times than I care to count. Each denomination believing that only they had the appropriate path to a right and full relationship with God and our personal spirituality. I grew increasingly restless and cynical. My anger and fury at the judgmental attitudes I met and the self-righteous notions I encountered were creating a deep sense of disillusionment and frustration within me. Slowly I withdrew from a world that Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 43 seemed to have held so much promise, but had delivered so little. I began to search within myself, to try to hear what the voice within me was saying. I longed for a place where I belonged, somewhere I fitted and some safety in which I could discover a sense of the spiritual. I was seeking spiritual meaning for my life and a sense of what that would mean on a personal level. I had discovered that my spirituality was linked to me and only me and that it was not dependent on the dictated notions of others. I was sure that my sexuality did not preclude me from a sense of the spiritual, no matter what the powers within the Christian church might say. The one thing I knew for sure about myself was that I could heal and that when I was healing others I felt closest to my sense of the spiritual. It was armed with this knowledge that I entered the world of nursing. It offered a chance to hone my skills and to explore further the way in which healing could facilitate the body’s innate drive toward wellness. I felt exhilarated as I watched those I cared for get well and go home to their lives. I was struck by how powerful a thing the mind is, amazed that in the end it really does have life and death in its grip. This was brought home to me most effectively by one of the patients I cared for in the renal ward. He was well and had been biopsied the day before. That morning he was informed that the biopsy had been unfavourable and that he had renal cancer, but it was an early diagnosis and he should do very well following surgery for the removal of the tumour. He took the news thoughtfully and rang his wife, saying goodbye as he hung up. Two hours later, this perfectly healthy gentleman was pronounced dead. He had simply lost his desire to live and using the power of his mind had willed himself to death. In healing others, I too had begun to heal and that I felt an increasing awareness of the need for me to move forward. I had finally learned to know myself well enough to know that everything was not all right and that there had to be a deeper purpose than simply living, making the best fist of existing we could and then dying. I began to explore and challenge all my long held beliefs. For some time I had believed that I was not going to find the personal spiritual meaning I sought by pursuing the Christian concept of a patriarchal and punitive God who was unreachable and untouchable. I had had a father who offered those things and that was not a positive experience. I was searching for a personal depth of experience, a spirit power that was a part of me and the world that I experienced and was a part of. A sense of spirit that expanded to be all inclusive, for I had long felt that people had an overinflated sense of their value in the greater scheme of things and that spirituality was broader than humanity. I delved into Paganism, Wiccan, Geomancy, Animism and many other options and nothing ever seemed to quite fit. During this search my father died and much to my chagrin I was thrown into complete turmoil. I had not expected to be so heartbroken. This man had made my life a living hell at times and yet the depth of love and grief I felt was astounding. I was confused and overwhelmed. I had not expected it to be like this, I had said goodbye to him long ago. Months before I had forgiven him and myself and allowed myself to move on – why should this grief run so deep? I didn’t understand and the emotions and memories that were surfacing made it even worse. The struggle lasted a long time and I felt irritated that it was interrupting my life as much as it was. It took many months of having my soul bare and raw before I reached the point of realising that there are some things that you just cannot manage alone and that for this portion of the journey I was going to have to seek the help of others. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 44 This was a huge challenge to me as I still harboured a mistrust of almost anyone except myself. It was quite some years later that I came out the other end of the maze I had entered but now that I have I am able to be happy that my father allowed me the opportunity to discover a very real knowledge of spirit and the spiritual within me. To appreciate that spirituality is not some abstract concept that is out there. Nor was I going to find my personal spiritual peace in pleading with some God who expects me to jump through hoops and admit that I am an imperfect human. In his death, he allowed the flood gates to open and I was able to explore that which is me. It was here that I discovered that there is the spiritual in everything ad that every day I move amongst the spiritual and am part of all that is spirit. I realised that my spiritual path is an evolving path and I will continue always to travel along it. There are times at which I will pause and enjoy the place I am at but it will not end, even when I leave life this time. I have learned to love again, to laugh, to be happy and sad, that it is okay to be angry and afraid and many other things. Most of all though my journey has taught me to appreciate all things, that everything has something very worthwhile to offer and to be content. About Mary Clutterbuck Dr Mary Clutterbuck was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and that land continues to both underpin her values and nurture her spirit. She has had a rich and diverse background in the health industry over the past 30 years, working in many nursing and midwifery roles, before returning to university to do her medical training, which she became disillusioned with and so redirected her studies to train as a chiropractor in Australia, at Macquarie University, NSW. Subsequently she has specialised in paediatric chiropractic care and diversified into the fields of acupuncture and naturopathy. Mary’s spiritual journey has been moulded and deepened by her Maori heritage as well as her personal story. Mary can be contacted at totalbodywellness@live.com.au Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 45 A Journey of Faith and Falling Deb Johnstone As a child I knew God: I met him. He came to our place every Friday night, him and his wife. (OK so it wasn’t god, it was the couple who studied the bible with my mum…..) While she studied, I got to sit and read books with strange pictures, pictures depicting Babylon the Great, the huge statue in Daniels Dream with head of gold and feet of clay and strange beasts rising out of the ocean. I learnt that God had a name. I learnt that he also had a son. I liked Jesus. He liked the little children. Jehovah on the other hand was a little on the mean side, what with all the revenge and stuff. I hated having to dress up and sit still in those long and boring congregational meetings; 5 hours a week. But I came to love God. I learnt how to pray. God was there for me, especially on those dark nights, alone with the night terrors where I was too scared to walk the length of the hall to my mums’ bedroom. (Besides, you had to walk past the bathroom window and the way mum had dressed the window, it looked like two demented eyes that I rarely dared to pass.) I also loved fairies. When friends stayed over, I would lay for hours in the dark telling them stories of the fairies and their realm. And I loved witches. At school I was always the witch in the games we played. I wasn’t afraid of them, they were not evil, and somehow they were familiar and even comforting. Even then, though totally unaware, I was re-integrating the Goddess into this life. Talk about madwomen though, the local bully must’ve thought I was well and truly nuts. My brother and I were caught on the street corner on our way home from running an errand for mum, and there we were, face to face with the young devil himself. I told him one of God’s angels was standing right behind him (huge he was) and that he’d better leave us alone or he’d get it. I believed it! So did he: because in looking behind, he gave us time to run for it. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 46 My love for God continued to grow and deepen. I defended my faith to the hilt. At 13 I was elected to represent my class in an intra-school debate. My topic?....”Diary of an unborn child”…a speech on how wrong abortion was. (Ironic really, as in years to come I was to abort twice in my life. Where was God then?) I ran a close second in that debate….beaten only by a fellow student with the potential to become a great comedian. Then my body started to change. Hormones raged, and I began to wonder how I could be worthy of the love of the Almighty while my lowly body became beastlike. I earnestly prayed, begging him to calm the storm within, to remove this monthly stain that was womanhood. He wasn’t listening. I began to doubt that he was there, that he cared. I discovered the hypocrisy in the men that were appointed by Him as overseers of his congregation, and in doing so began to lose my sense of faith. During this time I began also to lose my sense of self. Not that my self was in anyway defined, I was still seeking my mothers approval and falling short in so many ways it was nearly impossible to have a sense of self. Depression set in and my moods changed erratically so that I no longer even really wanted to live. Then these ‘men of God’ questioned my virginity. I was shocked that they could even consider that I would do such a thing. Sexual relations were for the sanctity of marriage and while my faith was dwindling, my morals were not. As I said, I began to see God through the actions of these men and God was surely dying! I left my hometown in New Zealand and travelled to Australia to meet my estranged father at the age of 16. I had not known him as a father and yet I loved him and I felt loved for the first time. I felt as if I truly belonged. He was charismatic, charming and so seductive. The beast within was allowed to roar and I felt a wildness, an abandoned freedom, through the carnal knowledge he taught. (I shoved the guilt deep inside, into a tightly knit ball that only later in life would unravel to nearly destroy me.) I was in love, in love with being loved, but love just the same. And so the Heretic came to life. Why heretic? Because I was the holder of an unorthodox opinion, let alone an unorthodox love and life. It wasn’t long before I realised it wasn’t love I was feeling. It was security. I came to know that I had abandonment issues and the life I was living, also promoted identity issues. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 47 We moved around a lot. His work was transitory. I never had the opportunity to make friends. Not that I wanted to. The heretic was ashamed. It was becoming harder and harder to seal up the guilt, it persisted in unravelling. It was during this shameful period in my life that the irony of my school debate came to fruition. I was anaesthetised, bleeding and broken. I tried to find comfort in God. I couldn’t find Him. Heaven was so far removed from the hell I was in. Besides, repentance required confession and I was in no fit state for that kind of mental and emotional strength just yet. At 21 I escaped….into the arms of the first man who asked me to marry. Marriage was sanctified by God. Now I could ask him for help and receive not only forgiveness but a filling of the empty void that is called spirituality. Yet still God avoided me. Instead my body was filled with the bruises of what my husband called love. I had nothing to lose, so I left, sick of the beatings. I was becoming stronger. I was beginning to recognise this thing called self. My strength came from the wall I surrounded myself with. Inside I trembled, lost and frightened while to all outward appearances I was an aloof tower of strength, or so I was told. I lived alone for a time, in between flitting from one man to another. Sex had become love. But love was a transitory thing, wearing off after the first few months of sexual frenzy, leaving me empty and angry. During this time I came into contact with the ‘psychic realm’. An acquaintance introduced me to ‘astral travel’. Through the use of breathing techniques, and a little cannabis, I caught a glimpse of the spirit world. It was terrifying! My childhood beliefs had me convinced I was in touch with the demonic forces that Satan himself governed. The very first time I actually left my body, fear had me crashing back into it at a frightening speed. The rushing sound, like that of a jet engine had me petrified into paralysed stillness for hours, ears straining to confirm I was alone. Life took on some semblance of normality as I immersed myself into my work and the pending arrival of my unborn child. I was prepared to face life alone as a single mother. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 48 I was sick of men and their lies, their using me for self-gratification. I turned to this thing called ‘spirit’ that so many were speaking of. The laws of Karma, threefold and reincarnation took precedence in my mind. Meditation became a daily practice, yet fear of the demonic hordes still plagued me. At the end of my 1st trimester, I sought the advice of a psychic. She told me I would soon meet the man who would provide me and my unborn daughter with a home and a family, a place of refuge. She was right. Shortly before I married, I decided it was once again time to find God. This spirituality labelled ‘New Age’ hadn’t proven to satisfy. I returned to my childhood faith only to be disfellowshipped because I was living in sin. It wasn’t good enough that I would be married in a few short months; I was shunned all in the name of God and the cleanliness of His congregation. Determined to return to God, I endured the leprosy of silence. Meanwhile I was married and began to carry the first of my son’s. A few months after his arrival, I was reinstated into the Congregation and those that had shunned me now welcomed me with open arms and the love that Jesus spoke of that would identify those who were supposedly his followers. Did I find God? No I found I fell short of His requirements, my meeting attendance was poor….I mean come on….one mum two kids and an unbelieving husband…of course it wasn’t going to be on par with those families who worshipped united. Of course the hours I spent in the door to door preaching work were a pittance in comparison to theirs…and so in my failing to reach, let alone maintain the requirements of a congregation; I failed to find God. God was still male, He was still a Father. I wandered away from God yet again, discontent in my failure to find Him, discontent in what seemed to be offered in His service. We moved back to Adelaide instead. Adelaide offered me family; in-law’s, but family just the same. I was a stay at home mum now, and really not content to be so. I was lonely. We had our family, our ‘pigeon pair’ but the Universe had other ideas for me. I was pregnant yet again. While it was not part of ‘the plan’ my husband and I had made, we welcomed this unexpected child into our lives and hearts. He was a big baby, so different from my others, happy and content. Determined to fulfil my spiritual need, I prayed one night to God and offered him my newborn child. “Please God, forgive me and guide me and I will teach this child of you…..” It seemed that He listened. I entered into the folds of yet another congregation, a congregation where tolerance and concern reigned. I was given assistance from the ‘sisters’, encouragement from the ‘brothers’ and made to feel like part of God’s family. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 49 Meanwhile, I endured my husband’s disapproval at my choice of religion. My religious friends were discouraged from visiting, unless during the hours of 9-5. I understood his angst and so I complied. (The victim in me was still continuing to surrender to the will of another…) Then came the shock of our lives; the pending arrival of our fourth child. It had only been several months earlier that we had received the ‘all clear’ from vasectomy results. I remember clearly, waking one morning and feeling oh so familiar…booking into see the doctor because this just couldn’t be so…..but it was. I cried, sobbing convulsively. I didn’t need another child. Abortion wasn’t an option; this child would not be born a monster, genetically deformed. And so, I gave birth, losing sight of God, as I strained to bring into the world another one of his children. It was all too much. I became the ‘madwoman’. I mean really mad….not just offbeat as I normally was….I was admitted into a psychiatric ward after attempting to kill myself and my children. (You didn’t think I was going to leave them to their own defences in this godforsaken world did you?) I was signed up for electro-convulsive therapy. A slight headache was the expected side effect I was told. Bullshit, a freight train had run over my head and I was left alone in a darkened room with a couple of Panadol to recover. I can’t remember how many times I submitted to this…..too many I think. For 12 weeks I was shut away from the world, surrounded by the less fortunate of society. My ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ came to visit but even they were at a loss as to how to deal with mental illness and so they eventually stopped coming. I was secretly relieved….I was no longer a ‘nice’ person; no longer ‘acceptable’ in my own eyes let alone the eyes of His people. I was in and out of psychiatrist’s offices and psychiatric wards for two years. It was one hell of a journey. Do you know what I discovered? I discovered that the jewels of humanity are to be found in the darkened, drug induced hallways of these institutions…. And I found myself….a small shadow with a tiny spark of humanity. That wonderful, hope inspired spirit…I caught a glimpse of it. I had gotten so used to looking into my reflected eyes and seeing emptiness. I had befriended the sorrow within me, the incredible loneliness that comes from disconnection of spirit, and yet here, in the middle of a group of seriously disturbed people, I came to see me: the real me. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 50 Just a glimpse but enough to give me hope that I was not lost, that I could be found, that maybe, God could love me. But I never did return to God, at least not the God of my childhood faith. What I found was a Goddess… How did I find her? How did I escape the bonds of depression and anxiety? How did I survive and grow? The first step was in challenging my internal beliefs…the persistent voices that told me I was unclean, worthless, and ugly. I remember when being admitted into the psyche ward, being petrified at being locked in with all the ‘loonies’. But I came to see them for what they truly were…wonderful sparks of humanity confined within the tortuous prisons of their minds, confined because society could not accept them. I learnt to challenge my own beliefs; after all, this one had been proven false so how many more were there. In changing my inner ‘self-talk’…I began to release the bonds of depression. I began a journey of self-discovery….. The first rede of Wicca is ‘to know thyself’ and although I never knew this at the time I took my first step, it was however an innate knowing that this was what I must do in order to grow and blossom into the woman I knew I could be. The process was at times arduous and painful, frantic and erratic…like a pendulum swinging wildly…that at times was, and still is me…. It took 6 years to come to the knowledge that I am not all good and not all bad, but that I am both… And, in seeking to find myself I read and read anything I could get my hands on… And, in doing so I discovered Wicca…. I discovered a Goddess who recognised this shadow aspect of me…a goddess who not only accepted it but encouraged its exploration. For many years I had been consumed with the destination and disregarded the journey….Goddess taught me to enjoy the journey…to revel in life and to continue to grow and learn of myself. She didn’t ‘lord’ it over me, she didn’t shun my sexuality. Instead she celebrated my womanhood, recognised my ‘shadow within’, encouraged growth through life and love and through this experience we call humanity. She set me free, she answered an oh so familiar call deep within. She let me dance naked under her lunar glory, revelling in the rhythm of life. I found my true calling within ritual, within the womb of her earth, riding the breezes, communing with the elements. I discovered I am witch. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 51 I discovered I am ‘Woman’….. and in that discovery I learnt that women I had earlier avoided because of their intuition and inner knowing weren’t condemning me for my past, but were rather condemning me for the denial of my womanhood. I reached out, beginning to seek their company and in connecting discovered the warmth, the strength and the power that is “Woman”. With that discovery came the realisation that I am a healer, a healer of hearts. I learned Reiki, as most of us do. It came easy, I had practiced it all my life, and I just never knew it. Herbal lore, earth magic, crystals and the realms I had loved as a child now had meaning, purpose and reality. I discovered that through forgiveness and the understanding of human nature and its inherent ‘shadows’ that I could heal not only others but myself also. Forgiveness is not easy and it is not a ‘once off’ process…it is a continual process of reevaluation, condemning and forgiving… a lifelong process that affords growth and connection…. (For me it is not the forgiveness of the bible…. I am human…how can I ever hope to attain such high ideals?.... For me it is an ‘acceptance’ and a ‘coming to terms’ and an ‘understanding’ of the sins committed against me in order to move on from them or live with them…either way…as I said…it is a continual process.) Goddess has taught me connection…. I am not a lonely individual afloat within the sea of humanity…. I am a part of the sea…the earth…the universe… and the pulse of love flows through me…. And I now seek to be connected in all that I do…. no longer hiding in the shadows of shame…no longer spending useless energy in building the walls of self-protection…no longer denying…. The Goddess gave me what I had sought all my life, she gave me belonging. She gave me love and through the eyes of those that I now allow to love me; I am learning to love myself, more and more each day. She continues to teach, guide and protect, as do those She lovingly brings into my life. My fear of demons?.....Gone, with the realisation that my demons are within and that I have the power to expel them…and expel them I do…because I am a Goddess, I am a Madwoman, I am a Heretic and I am a Healer. And here I am five years later, having gone through a period of referring to God as “Prime Creator”, I now find myself more often using the name God again. Why? Perhaps I’m finally learning of my own ‘authority’ and that it depends not on the men around me but on myself as ‘woman’. Defining God as male no longer bothers me. My ‘faith’ is eclectic; evolving from my life experiences. And is not that the way of life: to evolve and grow? Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 52 I have learnt to trust myself; to put faith in the person I am becoming; to recognise that ‘spark of divinity’ within me and to believe that “the universe is unfolding as it should” despite my doubts and fears. I will journey the path of self-knowledge; continuing to fall along the way. I will ride the spiral of spirituality around and around, gathering and evolving as I go! Blessed Be. About Deb Johnstone Debra Johnstone lives with her family in Adelaide and currently works within the Aged Care Industry. She is also a Diversional and Alternative Therapist, a published author and a professional counsellor. Debra has an on-line counselling service and can be contacted at www.taletimetherapy.com. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 53 Under the shade of the hazelnut tree Mary Ceravolo She was the most beautiful girl of the town, the third of four girls of a second marriage. A statuesque beauty with a medium frame, long black hair, dark olive skin; large dark grey eyes with long curly lashes; assertive, elegant and proud. She was a free thinker too. Attractive, wanted, loved, yet she never married. At a young age she was abandoned by her future husband, rejected by her family and lost her name and honour. In her sorrow, with a child in her belly and starving for love and food, she went to live by herself, and by means of hard work she built her own house up on a hill. There she became her own “God,” going by her own beliefs, working with the force of nature, using anything and everything to reach high goals. Not that she was illiterate; on the contrary, she knew how to do arithmetic, to read and write, and she knew how to manage a small business, working each day with great energy. For good or bad, she was working in her own way, the only way she knew, with her creative mind and colourful personality. She also needed affection and money to manage her little family affairs and so, pushed by waves of passion, she became the most loved one. Loved by the most prominent people of the southern land, she rejected many and she chose only few, accordingly to her heart and logic. Sexual assault and physical violence were everyday occurrences in a world where men used to dominate. Starvation, poverty and loneliness were the lot of many women, victims of tyranny and constant suffering. Only a few women were able to rebel, my great mother being one of them. She came from a matriarchal lineage and, regardless of her situation, she made sure she was always present to herself, never losing her focus on her life’s goal. Proud and strong she was, only time was her enemy. Time was passing by and with little children to feed, she was working hard on her dry land, picking oranges and olives, cultivating a variety of spices and herbs, when suddenly she was chosen to work under the patron of her town, a certain unmarried good looking and well known Baron. It was a romantic, beautiful, love affair. My mother was born and she grew up healthy and joyfully. She was, like her mother before her, attractive and magnetic and people of her village nicknamed her “the daughter of the Saracen woman.” She was shining and splendid as the sun, with a large brilliant smiling face, lips red as cherries, long curly black hair, dark skin, petit in frame, with Mediterranean soft curves, cunning and sharp temperament, with a thirst for knowledge and spirituality, a sense of justice and goodness; she was very clever and never shy: a daughter of the Sun indeed. My mother, born out of wedlock, grew up without knowing her father but this didn’t interfere with her happiness until the day she was meant to marry a police man. It was then she found out that no policeman was to marry a woman of uncertain origin or fatherless. So my mother’s wedding dress ended up in the fire and her dream love story ended with sorrow. The stress gave her a nervous breakdown; broken hearted and with her immune system low, she developed typhoid fever. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 54 Although she was given only a few days to live she became, as they say in her little town, “miracolata”: miracle of the Virgin Mary. This occurred after so many “Padre Nostro” and so many “Ave Maria” that she was resurrected from her bed and, once able to stand up on her feet, she fled to the north of Italy in search of a new beginning. She never recovered completely from her past, though. After her emotional trauma she became extremely delicate both emotionally and physically, and developed many ailments. She also became maniacally religious. Mortified and humiliated by her mother’s lifestyle and forever in search of cleanness and purity, the sacredness of the body became her most intimate goal. Everything she did or did not was related to the holiness of her beliefs and of religious observances. My mother was like no one else in her family. She had a generous personality and was too attractive to live in the North of Italy by herself. She needed to get married as soon as possible to give her family a good name and reputation. She married my father soon after she arrived in Northern Italy. My darling father was one of five “supplicants” her older brother presented to her one evening in early spring. She chose my father because he was good looking, with long eye lashes, clean, very well dressed, good manners and quite well educated. There was only one little problem, he was an atheist! Well, this is a different story and I should dedicate an entire chapter solely to this strange relationship… I was born a few years into their marriage. I’m not too sure why the high self above had chosen for me to be born into this family, nor is it clear to me why, while I was still in my mother’s womb, I felt like I did not want to be born and so I spent extra time in my mother’s belly, risking my life and hers. Nor am I sure why there was so much fuss around me when I did finally emerge. I was as dark as the night, bluish coloured, small and frightened. They could have let me be and go as quickly as I had come, but doctors and specialists of many sorts decided to keep me alive. Well, this is me: I do not look like a typical little Italian girl at all! People around me said I looked like a little Egyptian-Indian girl, nothing like my father, but nothing like my mother either. I was always a very active creative little girl, into everything so much my mother thought I was possessed by demons or that I was the creation of some strange magical spell. I was like a honey bee buzzing everywhere, a magnet as everything would come near me too. I was surrounded by strange creatures and curious people. I was free and shining like a little star, full of awareness of the people around me, with a clear mind and a sense of beauty. Nothing like my mother was expecting to have. I used to look far away, lose track of time and space and enter into the gates of a fascinating city. I could talk to animals and unseen creatures, and foretell the future through dreams and images in a glass of clear water. My mother, scared of this unusual child, took me to receive blessings from the local church priest; she was a strictly observant roman catholic. The poor priest used to clean my little innocent soul with holy water and a few Psalms, which did not help to resolve the many strange things that used to happen around me. I have lived a very difficult childhood, forever lost in my mother’s quest for spiritual truth. No one quench conquer her thirst; nothing could soothe her soul. Dressed up as Saint Anthony or St. Gerard, naked bare feet on stones, I have walked up and down from carved Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 55 volcanic churches with rough steps and musty walls. I have lit so many candles and investigated the sky above, searching for the childlike angels I used to see on the ceiling of the most gold resplendent cathedrals of Italy. I followed my mother into her religious folly. We used to move frequently from one city to another, from North to South, from West to East. Up and down from the boot of a Mediterranean land. She was much too concerned about her own affairs to realise that I was her constant observer, that I was questioning the wind and the trees, that I was able to read a big book at the age of 5, and that I was the victim of racial and sexual abuse at the nunnery house where she used to take me during her working hours. But after my last terrible racial experience, which took place at this child care centre devoted to St. Anthony, my mother, pulling me by my hands with dresses and cords of St Anthony in her left arm, lit a fire and, throwing our Saint dresses into the flames, she promised me that from that day on she would never dress up or make me wear any saint dresses, not even if she needed to make a special promise. If no saint and no nuns devoted to a special saint were able to protect children from pain and suffering, then no saints from that day would be her guide and she would be devoted only to God. When I was 6 we moved to the city of Rome, but we stayed only for 7 months. To my horror my primary school was also run by nuns, and the nasty type at that! I was terrified and every new morning going to school was like going to the cave of the dragon. It is unjust to speak ill of all nuns, some of them were lovely and devoted to church and to God. But until I reached quite a mature age I met only those who did not have the best religious interests at heart, those who did not know love and so, unfortunately, they did not know how to show compassion and unconditional love. Fortunately we spent only a very little time in Rome, quickly moving back to a little city in the north of Italy, in the province of Como. It was autumn with its yellow and brown colours and deep blue sky when we arrived at the court of Via Carducci. Everything was new and full of possibilities. I lived in the Court for 7 years, and in my eyes, everything was absolutely beautiful. An elderly lady, Agnese, came to welcome us on the day we arrived; she had a lovely smiling face, long grey hair rounded up on the back of her head and large blue eyes. The court was populated with only a few men and many ladies. Agnese was my favourite, she toldl me stories and read me books, she taught me the language of birds, she opened up a strange magical wardrobe, a fantastic place to visit, and she told me about mother Goddess and writing wisdom. She also used to tell me anecdotes to learn morality, justice, sapience and love, above all she used to talk to me like a fairy, invite me into her garden of knowledge, medicine, herbs and flowers. Her daughter Mariuccia, used to talk to me about men, love and the intricate way of poetry, life, death and spirituality. Maria was the spiritual healer, Antonia the shaman and priestess. Graziella was the youngest and most attractive and she showed me the way of silk. She would take me every day into the room of “il baco da seta” where every single thread of silk was like shining gold in the dark room. Silk: strong and splendid, no other material like it, so precious to my eye. Graziella taught me cleanlinness and beauty; she spoke about Aphrodite and her sacred love. She gave me singing, laugh and lightness. Antonia was taller and stronger. With her I spent much time in the forest and the fields, collecting mushrooms, chestnuts, healing herbs and berries. She taught me silence and persistence. I have learned to listen to the birds, to be Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 56 able to distinguish them by their own sound. I loved the forest, I still do prefer forest, mountains, lakes and natural rives to city or beaches. Sandra was also unmarried, like Graziella and Mariuccia. Fully devoted to her caring role and social work, she is the one who showed me the way of unconditional love, and above all the psychological understanding of elderly people. When I was 7, after a quite long training having found out that I was attentive and had a craving for learning as well as a natural inclination for healing and caring, she taught me to give injections, to take blood pressure and to give medication to her elderly parents. In this way I could be a help not only to her family but for the entire Court in case she was not around, for example, when she was spending night hours in the local hospital. Sandra’s parents were quite advanced in their age, but they were fully alert and happy to be surrounded by people. In exchange for my caring love, Anita, Sandra’s mother, taught me with loving patience, persistence and logic. She was fragile, but her mind was strong and sharp. She used to teach me to read the flames of fire when wood was burning in the large chimney during the long silent winter afternoon. I could describe precisely to her everything I could see in the red and gold hot light: horrible, distorted or beautiful and fantastic creatures with sparkling voices they used to talk to me and request I relay their message to Anita. Anita was partially blind. At first I was scared to talk to the flaming images but she used to smile, softly and pleasantly encouraging me to trust and to listen. She addressed the flames as the Salamander people did. She died with Alzheimers only a few years after. In the summer time Graziella and I use to lie down under the hazelnut trees located in the back of the Court garden and talk about anything and everything. One afternoon, when I was 11 years old, she began in a whispering voice to tell me many secrets, secrets which were to be kept inside and never revealed to anyone unless they were part of the sisterhood. When she had finished, she broke off a little branch of the hazelnut tree and she passed it to me with a gentle smile, saying that the Great Lady was sufficiently happy with me. I don’t think I have understood everything she was saying to me that afternoon. I only remember that it was a Friday afternoon past 3.00pm and my mother was getting anxious to see me back in the house as I needed to look after my little sister while my mother went to work. Mariuccia, every Thursday night and every Saturday afternoon, would pick me up to accompany her to the Christian school, to learn about the church, God and the saints. She was a high school teacher, teaching religion and philosophy. Every Sunday morning and every special religious day she would take me to the Cathedral and after to the cemetery. I helped her clean the tombs and change the flower water. In the garden of silence, I spent many long hours with only her voice and my eternal question asking as she spoke to me about resurrection and reincarnation. She imprinted my mind with formulas and rituals, catholic doctrine and dogmas with a touch of mysticism, magic and poetry. I couldn’t tell my mother much about what I was learning, despite her tormenting me to share what happened during our long walks to cemetery and churches. The little I could tell she did not believe anyway, in her eyes I was a “ciarlatana” of extreme fantasy “fantasticherie,” like imaginary fairy tales created from a child’s strange and distorted fantasy, impossible to be true. I wanted many times to tell her the truth about many things, but she would never listen. She would always listen to my dreams though even if at the end she would say: go away child! Send this evil thought and images away or God will punish you! Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 57 One night I had a terrible dream. I dreamt that a big dog attacked the back of Agnese and pulled her down to the ground, breaking her leg. Her leg was bleeding so profusely she died. Waking up from the nightmare, I ran next door to make sure that my Agnese was healthy and alive. As I told her my story, she looked at me with big open eyes, and then, caressing my hands, she said: “my dear child, if this is the time to go, we will see. You must not worry too much about my health, I’m still young and energetic and I will not go so soon. But I promise you if ever it will happen, I will come back to you. Now you must go back to your home, it is Sunday, and Sunday is for family, not for an old lady like me.” I used to help Agnese feed her 3 big Labrador dogs every day after school. She would prepare a mix of bread, rice, vegetables, milk and mince meat in a big bucket and feed them at the back of the warehouse every day at 4.00pm. I lived in a business residence, where silk and other raw materials were produced. The North of Italy at that time produced massive quantities of cotton and silk together with hazelnuts and spices. Dogs were needed to protect us from unwanted visitors. All three dogs were female, and they knew Agnese and me very well, they would not trust or accept anyone else. On this particular Sunday I ran off home as Agnese had said I was to do and she went off to feed the dogs. But as she turned to go towards the gate, one of the young and bigger dogs attacked her right shoulder, pulling her down to the floor, denting her leg with teeth marks and leaving her with deep open bleeding wounds. Sunday afternoon not many people were around, a few might be having a siesta, and others like me and my family went to visit relatives. An older brother of Agnese, hearing her cry and the loud barking of the other dogs, ran towards the back gate of the warehouse to find Agnese covered with mud, blood and with not much energy left. At 4.30pm, coming back from my afternoon visit and seeing cars near the front house, I went to see if Agnese was okay. She was lying down on her sofa, pail as death, cold and sweating. I ran towards her, and with trembling hands I caressed her face and in a soft voice I asked what on earth had happened. Smiling a little she looked at me in the face and said: “I should have taken note of the message, I should have taken more note of the message. It is done now, and I have no time. Promise me you will be fine, please come back at 7.00pm.” My head was spinning and I was frightened! Oh my god! My dream! My dream had become reality. I should have stayed home and helped out with the dog food, I should never have left! I left Agnese’s home in a state of shock, told my mother but she did not say anything. Instead she went to visit Agnese and came back shortly after to tell me the old lady was fine, that the doctors had given her a pain killer and some antibiotics and had pronounced she would be up and about in a few days. Comforted by this positive news, I had my dinner and, running a little late, was back next door by 7.30pm as I had promised. The door was open, a little candle next to the sofa was lit up, there were many small candles all around the room actually, and everything looked so much out of space and out of time. Mariuccia was praying in a corner of the room, but she did hear me come in. I went near Agnese, who appeared to be asleep, but there was no movement on her body, no breathing, no moving of her palpebrae, not any other gestures. For the second time that day I went into Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 58 shock, crying out for help, shaking severely, looking around, beside myself. I felt as if a strange aura was all around Agnese’s body, like a luminescent light. She did not look like she was dead, it was not possible, was not possible. Mariuccia, disturbed by a knock at the door, left the corner where she was hidden and praying nonsense words. Calmly she lit more candles, then, as if nothing had happened, she passed by me and opened the door. In a flick of moment the room became full of people, talking to each other, whispering some strange notions, all going one by one to pay homage to Agnese. Where on earth did all these elderly women come from? Who were they? I do not recall being taken me away from Agnese. I could only hear voices, too many voices, too many people around, I felt dizzy, and I felt sick. Agnese had decided to depart at 7.00pm, she could not wait any longer, and I felt responsible for her death. My dream did not save her. I thought it was me who killed her and so I passed out in the arm of who knows, to find myself lying on the sofa at my home with my mother nursing me, caressing my face with a wet cloth. She looked at me in a sad way, her tearful face was swollen and puffed, her eyes red like fire. She promised me that it was nobody’s fault and that the dog was found to be sick and blind, she did not recognise Agnese and this is why she attacked her. Unfortunately the dog had rabies and the veterinarian put her down. So my heart was lacerated by the pain of two losses. One week after this event I had a special dream. In my dream I received a visit from Agnese who, dressed in a white robe, reached for my hand and with a gentle smile looked down at me, speaking very softly. Quickly I started sobbing, asking for forgiveness because I did not make in time at 7.00pm, but she stopped my irrational talking by making me see a beautiful garden. She made me promise to water the flowers every day even if it was winter and there was snow and no flowers apparent in the garden; I should keep my promise till the end of this life time. I solemnly promised without knowing the real meaning of what she was saying. In truth, it was my mother who used to look after the garden full of flowers and I helped her out until we left the place. But Agnese made me promise and, to make me believe that she was real and my dreams were just perfect and that I should look into them more frequently, she showed me the front of my door. Under a window at that time was a few metres long flowerbed which went all around the house, full of green grass and little daisies. She said: “look my dear, look clear in the grass, what do you see”? “I see green, with little daisy flower not fully open.” “Look closer, look closer, I know you will like one, find it, you will find it.” In my dream I did look closer into the grass and I picked up a clover, 4 leaves, they were very difficult to find around our garden. I jumped with happiness and woke up. At 7.00am I ran down the granite stairs to the first floor while still in my pyjamas. Everybody was in bed, it was Sunday again. I looked into the flowerbed, and quickly found not just one clover but a few! I bowed with reverence and thanks towards the Sun and happily I went inside, closing the door behind me. I rushed to my bedroom to show my sister what I had found. I shared the clovers with her, and I keep a few of them in my bible next to my bed. I still have them. The Court House was full of many strange rooms. It was an L shape, with 3 floors: downstairs were all the living rooms for 5 families, so 5 doors, and upstairs on the 1 st floor were 7 rooms plus one that no one should ever open because it was unsafe and full of Ghosts. The 2nd floor had as many bedrooms as the 1st floor but only a few were used. This 2nd floor Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 59 was the most interesting one, because some of the rooms were used for the “baco da seta” silkworms and one of them for breeding special interest birds, all kept in special cages. Since Agnese died, I was the one to help Mariuccia look after the dogs and the birds. The birds were unusually happy, singing and lamenting at the same time. Every day we would spend an hour cleaning and feeding them, and looking after the hatchlings. Only during that hour were the birds able to receive some sunlight from the open window otherwise they would live in the dark, covered with a dark cloth and with the window closed. I never understood the reason behind all this ritual practice. But I do remember that if by any chance one of the birds would die, all the other birds would stop singing for quite some time, and every time new birds would come to life, the room sounded like the carousing of strange creatures. While everything at home was very beautiful, so powerful and magic, I had a very difficult time in school. Being the victim of racism and bulling I needed to create a sacred space where I felt protected and no one could break my trust. The little forest behind the big Courtyard became my realm, were only my little sister could come and then only after a few tests and big promises; having found her trustworthy I granted permission. My mother was quite comfortable around this all women, she trusted them and gave them the key of the house. These were perfect Christian women, strong catholics, devoted to Holy Mary and the church. Poor mother, she knew very little of their double life and real identity. I was indeed trained in the catholic way, but only for the sake of it and for the beauty of the religious art and rituals, but in reality I was initiated to the way of the Goddess, with the so called White ladies, the little fairy of the North of Italy. But I had to say goodbye to them one evening many years ago. I was only 13 years old when my family decided to move to one of the beautiful and famous hill city castles of Rome. I knew this time was for a long time. This was to be a change in many respects but I followed my mother’s way without any arguments as I was a very obedient daughter out of both fear and devotion. A new city, a new religion. Although I embraced the way of rigidity, severity and intolerance of the new religion, it did not hurt my natural inclination to nature, life, spirituality and goodness. I have used this experience, which in many ways was traumatic, as if it was a school of learning, where I could read books, and search for the truth within the sacredness of holy words. As time went by, however, and all that was familiar was left behind, the entire magic and mystical world became my enemy and my sin. I became tormented in the fire of my soul, divided between my real self and the self that I had created for the good of others and from fear of an unknown and vengeful God. Despite my best efforts, for my mother more than ever I was the witch, the ‘strega’ who was never a child. I was too much of everything and so I needed to study more and more to become perfect and to be accepted by the Priest-Elderly and by the only God. In my heart of hearts, though, I did not believe in everything that was compulsory to study and this need of truth lead me into trouble. I started to question, to do research, to observe the environment and think deeply about every single doctrine and belief within the religion. What scorn was heaped upon me! In time I became sick inside, troubled with the rules and silly regulations imposed on everyone. I could not cope with the hypocritical tutors of the church and I could not cope with the fact that everyone was so perfectly good outside but so viciously degenerated inside! Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 60 Who could I talk to? A woman, a child of the inferior race, daring to question the validity of the theology? Was I the only one? Was my beauty evil? Were my tongue and my voice that of a fallen angel? Was I a woman of so many talents in contact with good or evil? Was I unclean? For all the men who used to turn their heads to look at me while I was walking or just sitting, was I responsible for their dirty thoughts? Was I a daughter of sin? No longer so obedient, no longer pretending to be something that I was not. In my prayers I was addressing the father of the above, calling him by his name and questioning my fate. Why My Gentle father, why was I so different from other girls of my age? Why could I see behind what was apparent? Why were my dreams so clear and so prophetic? Why was everything so natural called evil and sinful? Why give me so much to take so much away in the end? I could not understand. I was living in denial, but gradually becoming conscious of my so called “dark side,” although I could not express it in any verbal communication. Instead I wrote poetry, an art form I was accustomed to from an early age. In my search for the light, at the age of 20 I encountered a great writer, a poet, and he became my mentor. With him I developed my sense of femininity and the art of seduction. I also gained a deep understanding of human emotional needs and my experience of pain sharpened at times to the point where it was quite overwhelming. I became more assertive in my artwork and much more constructive in my poetry and lyrics. The Poet was there to support my growth, instilling in me knowledge, poetry and mysticism, yet never imposing anything. Since the day we arrived in Rome I devoted my life to the study of ageing. Now, with many years of experience in the ageing sector, it is obvious why I chose this work. I wanted to give back to the wise ones of my childhood, to share some of my love and compassion and help where I can, to thank them for the most beautiful gifts I received in my early age, gifts of knowledge and unconditional love. My interests were very much in art, psychology and anthropology. I was young and full of life, wanting to explore every single corner of the globe. I could have chosen to close myself in a small room and never come out of it considering the pain I had experienced in many forms, and I did suffer from time to time, I did become emotionally unbalanced from occasionally. This is really only a fragment of my story as I have chosen to recount just a few significant aspects of my spiritual journey, leaving out sorrow, abuse, fear and desolation, a life full of tragedy. Sometimes this has been out of respect for my parents and other people I care about. I really believe, however, that no spiritual journey is possible, no inner searching or awakening of any sort is possible without physical-emotional pain. I do not completely understand the reason for suffering, but it is important to know that we repay a debt which has not necessarily been imposed on us in this life. In my life it has been important to make time and space for reaching out to nature. When I was living in Italy I spent more than three months each year living in beautiful Tuscany enriching my inner self. This side of Italy was my sanctuary and I was free to fly with body and mind, writing, painting and playing. I married when I was 18 years old and I had my first child at 19. My three beautiful children are the sparkling light in my life, the cause of my joy. I really had quite a full life, working part time with small children, exhibiting paintings around Rome, and writing poetry. And yet something was always missing. My previous religious experience was no longer sufficient to Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 61 quench my thirst for knowledge and my artwork reflected my spiritually tormented inner woman. I met many politicians, many people with religious authority, many spiritual men, but no one could adequately answer my questions. All of a sudden my husband left me to come back to live in Australia, leaving me by myself with two of my children. In the middle of my artistic career, I left everything behind to reunite with my husband, totally ignorant about what was to come. Although it was exceptionally painful leaving my family and friends I was eager to embark on this new experience. With no language, absolutely no knowledge of this new country and no experience of cultural diversity, I arrived one horrible hot muggy summer’s day only 13 days before my 23rd birthday. My real spiritual quest is related to my arrival in Australia on the 5th of December 1991. My trip to Australia was a traumatic one. What I have experienced is very similar to many other women before me, those who have chosen to begin a new life in this idyllic country. That which was billed as the ‘Promised Land’ was not so much so…and many other women like me needed to endure a complete transformation. Some women never came out of depression, others just got along, and others are said to have died of sorrow. Everything was unfamiliar and so different from what I knew. Taste and smell became more acute. The aroma of food was drenched with eucalyptus and it tasted strange, dry and salty. Vision was open, grandiose and without space. Everything had a beginning but not an end, there was a never ending sparkle of colour, and the sky was so close I felt I could almost touch it. All my senses were working overtime and my mind was trying to cope with this infinite emptiness and with the sense of nothingness in my soul. Nothingness. Silence. Space. Detachment. A foreign place, an unknown, strange, heavy vibration. I was scared and melancholic. My artwork changed aspect and form. I did keep myself quite busy, not wanting to fall into the deep sea of tears. I studied, worked, exhibited and lived an apparently normal life. In truth, my life never was and never has been, nor will it ever be, a simple one. For 11 years I cried every single day, detesting myself and the way I was living. I was acting, pretending to live, but dead inside like a desert. I felt tormented in both my body and my mind, continually searching for a reason to stay alive. I felt completely alone, with no familiar contacts, no way out, detached from religion, separating myself also from superstitious beliefs and destructive friendships. The death of a fellow poet and dear friend plunged me into even deeper despair. For 3 months the state of mental inertia I was in seemed to deplete me of air and energy; impossible to explain with conventional words. I let myself go into a deep silence, rejecting any form of thoughts, food, love, familiar things. Walking around like a zombie with the only everyday preoccupation being my children’s health. Detachment was my only medicine. I wanted to go back, but go back where? Where? Everything did stop then, everything, even pain… In the end it was “pain” which became my saviour. The human body is not simple machinery, and in a moment of self destruction some place within this dark stagnant ocean my soul was crying out to survive in this lifetime with this my body. One morning a voice out of space, maybe it was that of an angel or a spiritual being, came to my rescue. I thought then I was close to being psychotic and this possibility shook my inner person and rescued me from the darkness of self destruction. Pain resurfaced, and I came back once again to life. In search of Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 62 a reason for living, I embarked on a journey of self rediscovery. Tired of professional doctors I made my body become a book, learning from it all that is needed to know to come out from a vicious circle of self pity. Self tutoring in medical science or past learning in psychology was not sufficient. I went into formal Australian education and I have since become acquainted with many medical fields, both traditional and untraditional. Energy fields, vibrational medicine, homeopathy, life force and healing, NLP and spiritual development became the way of living more than just learning a profession. The discovery of a rare genetic disorder did not stop me from this renewed desire for life I experienced since my “coming back” from the dark night of the soul. I made many mistakes. I did go up 5 steps at once just to come back 4 steps soon after. Every time I fell off the stairs, though, I’d get up and try again, with consciousness and a sense of understanding. I called it “experience”. No pain, no mistakes, no learning. Life does not give us exams, or books to study. Our inner self and our body should become our real book and life should be the table and chair of our spiritual school. No spiritual development can take place without self knowledge and self discovery. No life experience can become valuable if we do not value the gift of life given to our self. We can not talk about love if we do not become love itself. Unconditional love is not a simple thing, it requires compassion, forgiveness, intelligence, knowledge, unselfishness, responsibility and analytical work. Unconditional love is giving without expecting anything in return or at least that is what people say. In reality, no love, no action can be done without a reaction. We can’t expect unconditional love in return but certainly I can say that the “higher self” will give much more in exchange…this really depends on our sense of gratitude and our balanced way of living and seeing life. We are not just human or just spiritual beings; we are spiritual creatures having a human experience. We should be very grateful just knowing that we are alive and experiencing life itself with all its complexity. Do I belong to any church? Do I belong to any school? Do I need to? It is imprinted into our genetic spiritual self the need for expanding and belonging to a greater and loving family, so it is natural that many of us if not everyone looks for the perfect religion, or for the perfect spiritual path. Everything is perfect while it is valuable and good to us. Once we no longer need it we can fly away. No one should impose anything on us, especially those called spiritual guides or masters; no one should call themself gifted because we all are special in one way or another. Where to go? Can I trust? Everyone has different needs and experiences and consequently we will attract our family according to our inner soul personality, needs, vibrational state and karmic work. This is what I believe today. If I close my eyes, I know I can fly high. If I want to incarnate the Goddess energy I can, if I want to become the wind that caresses the trees I can, if I want to become the horse which runs freely in the green field I can, if I want to become the drop of rain I can also become an ocean. I can be anything and everything, because I’m part of a bigger picture. Although I’m a little grain of sand in the big cosmos I’m also part of the cosmos and without many other little grains of sand, like you and I, life would not be. We are each other, everything is in us, everything is part of a majestic Good creation, and I’m proud to be part of it. ……………………… Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 63 I’ve come to realise that just doing this writing is a huge step into a much greater self realisation. It was not easy, it is not easy, and buckets of tears and laughter accompany this short inner evaluation. Courage is essential; courage is needed not as much to expose yourself to other people’s judgement or criticism, but to search deep into the closed book of your life. Everyone wants to talk about themself, which is quite normal and easy to do, but the difficulty comes once you put yourself under scrutiny. To trace back to the beginning of the spiritual journey rather than just recounting life experiences, trauma, love, life and death is complex because every life experience is connected to the spiritual experience also. I want to be part of a great design. I want to learn all I can in this life, so that I may be able to do better for the next one without repeating myself. I want to be an inspiration for other women to come out the labyrinth of self destruction and self denial. I’m not alone, you are not alone women! Self realisation is not a sugar lolly; it is hard work and often painful. I have encountered many spiritual masters, teachers and schools alike, many religions, many esoteric and mystical ways…some have given me insight and inspiration, others have just wasted my time, some have taken me by the hand for a little while, others have given me great gifts. Any experience or people we meet on our journey can become our greatest teacher, even when they make us suffer, or give pain. ………………….. I can only say to you, do not let go, do not stop in the corner of a forgotten church. Become assertive, become the master of yourself. No life is ordinary, and when you lack a skill ask the God above, the Goddess, the Sky, the Water, the Wind, you or your own Inner Self to provide you with guidance. Touch the cord of your inner harp, play the sound of your own wands, it does not matter if it is made of hazelnut tree wood or eucalyptus or it is just your imagination. Become your own architect, your own artist, your own life design. ………………………………. It is with gratitude that I conclude this task, gratitude to those who have been my greatest teachers, my lovely wise women of before and those of today, those who have been in my way, like insidious flies, those who, unaware, have given me insight and those who have caused me pain. Forgive me God of my heart and Mother of my way if I have made another cry. I repent of my unjust criticism, for my wrong judgements. I pray to you, Mother of all mothers, to give me strength to cope with all that will come my way. Please give me health to support the poor, the frail, those in search of you and those who do not know love. Make me clean once and for all. I kneel submitting myself to my beloved Sun and my beloved Moon bathing my soul in the salty sea water with the earth on my bones, hair in my breath, fire of life in my heart. I stretch my arms to the never ending sky, and to those who for eternity are guiding women and men alike towards the inner light. I’m living in the present, never forgetting the past, reviewing each single activity and each single moment, so that its fragrance will never be lost. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 64 The awakening of the inner self takes more than just having a pomegranate in our left hand. You have to taste each single little juicy red seed with the patience of a little bird. So I have become patient and I have put myself under scrutiny so that each drop of red ruby juice will last longer into my veins. I can sing a song again, because I’m alive. With love Mary Ceravolo © 2008 About Mary Ceravolo Mary is a single mother who currently lives with her youngest daughter who is 15. She has 2 adult children as well who are 24 and 21 years of age. Mary was born in Bosisio Parini, Como, Italy in 1966; her parents were Calabrians who had settled in the North. Her interests are art, literature, poetry, women’s heath and well being, women’s spirituality, alternative medicine, religious and esoteric studies. Mary’s painting met with early success in 1990 and she has also won numerous prizes and received critical acclaim both in Italy and in Australia. She now exhibits her work at the Bonsai art studio and the Nexus Gallery in Adelaide, The Italian Festival at Norwood S.A., East/West MAC, and at the John Harvey Gallery in Salisbury. Mary’s poetry started to appear in the journal Nuovo Paese in 1996. In 2002 she was awarded a grant from the Council for the Arts and Cultural Development of S.A to have a selection of her works translated and published as Memore Giostra –Roundabout of Memories ( translated by Dr. Isobel Grave). Memore Giostra traces Mary’s spiritual journey from infancy to adulthood through works that are mostly contemporaneous with events, but occasionally retrospective. The following publications have also featured Mary’s poems : Alitra, Poetrix, Muse,The New England Review, Southerly, Alias, I clandestine, Filef Publication, Micropress, Spindrift, Idiom , Convivio and many others. Mary has also been awarded several prizes from ALIAS, she was awarded and commended by the Literary competition of the “Faglehawit Dahlia and Art Festival”, she won The Apollo Award, and first prize of the Toscana competition “Giosuè Carducci” 2008. One of her poems was set to music by Jan and Lee Cocks and is part of the CD entitled “Words Of Love” that was launched in 1999. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 65 Finding my own light Meredith Joy Ever since I was a child, I felt like I didn't really belong. I'm not sure what it was, it just felt like I was somehow on a different vibe than most. It wasn't totally evident to me until I was in my late teens and my interests really began to take hold, and I realised that my interests and those of my friends' were quite different indeed. I often wondered the big questions… Who am I? Why am I here? What is life for? Who or what is God really? Instead of thinking about boys, cars, weddings and careers. I looked around at the world and found it full of contradictions, lies, deceit. It was like 2 worlds were overlapping…one in which we played a part and we chose what we showed to each other, and the other one where we buried the feelings and truth where no-one could see them. None of it made sense. I remember that I wasn't a very good player and got myself into trouble because I'd say what I thought and I'd get admonished for it. I found myself in a deep depression growing up because I just didn't understand how to play this game of life. I felt like I was supposed to know the rules when I just didn't. I was brought up Catholic, and had to go to church every Sunday. I felt like I didn't know who this God was. Mum couldn't answer any questions that I had. She told me that you just believed, went to church and you be good - then, you'd be sure to go to heaven. I was so confused. One minute God was a loving God, and the next minute He was a God to be feared. I wasn't sure who it was that would judge what it was that was good or bad, but I was often reminded that He could see and hear all that I did and said, no matter where I was, so I'd better watch out! I grew up with such a sense of self-loathing, guilt and simply not being good enough. Nothing I learnt from my mother or from church gave me a sense that God loved me. By 15, I totally refused to go to church anymore. I got myself into the wrong crowd, and by 17, I was smoking dope and drinking. Why would I care? I was going to hell anyway, so I may as well enjoy the ride. I hit the absolute rock bottom when I was 19. I knew there must be something more, but I felt powerless to find out what it was. My life didn't reflect who I thought I was, and I didn't know how to bring both into alignment. I took a lot of sleeping pills and pain killers one night and prayed that I didn't wake up. Well…I did wake up - to the sound of a ringing phone in an empty house. It was enough to rouse me and I ended up vomiting for the rest of the day, purging all that medication. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 66 Something within me that day realised that there was a reason I was still here and that I had no choice but to pull myself back together. So I did. Slowly but surely, I got myself back on track. I got a new job, learnt new things and I slowly let go of the old bunch of people that I was hanging out with. It wasn't an overnight transformation by any means. There were no angel visitations or white light visions. I am sure there were many helping me in the unseen, but as far as I was concerned, I pulled myself up and out on my own. It had to be that way. I had to find my strength. I had to find my light. I came across a book- Life Between Life by Dr. Raymond Moody. This was a book that was like a beacon to me. It really helped me to know, that there really was more than this physical 3 dimensional existence and that on some level, I already knew it. Finally, something that was proof to me that I wasn't crazy! At 21, a myriad of meetings and groups presented themselves through odd ways. I ended up going to these gatherings and learning about things such as spirit guides - those unseen beings that help guide our lives. I met clairvoyants and mediums - those who could communicate with 'the dead' and the 'unseen' world. I was hooked and one day whilst reading the classifieds, I found an ad about a past-life workshop. It was a 2 day thing and it cost a lot of money. Still, I had an overwhelming urge to ring and book in. Amazingly, the money appeared through extra hours at work, and I attended.I learnt that past lives connect many people over and over again, through a succession of lifetimes to perfect their love for each other. Intense feelings of love, and often hate, are what bring people together over and over again. We all interchange our roles and connections-mother and son, to husband and wife, to brother and sister, to best friends. We also change from males to females and experience all the races and colours. If everyone knew these things, there would not be any racism. Why would we hate another race if we knew we too, had been there? I would think that this knowledge would only serve to bring compassion and a sense of unity. Around this time, I also started going to a spiritualist church where I found many othersmainly elderly people-that were interested in this stuff too. I was often the youngest in groups such as this. Twenty-one was a pivotal age for me when many transformations occurred. I started feeling a bit more comfortable in my own skin. I liked the magical and mystical world of spirit. I learnt a little about my soul. Life was finally starting to feel better for me. I also met a man whom I would eventually become engaged to and marry. He wasn't into all this new-found spiritual 'stuff', but I soon had him educated. My biggest concern was my friends and family. They didn't want to know about anything that I was learning. I so desperately wanted to share all this new knowledge, but no-one was interested. I soon learnt not to talk about it to any of them, but felt a bit jaded, because this was something that was a huge part of who I was becoming. That was a hard lesson to learn because I wanted to be able to be myself, yet I still wasn't quite sure who I was and no-one seemed to want to support me in finding out. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 67 In the next couple of years, I went from strength to strength in my quest for knowledge with the support of my husband-to-be. We moved to Queensland, got married and had our first son. We stayed there for 2 years, but came back to Adelaide when the baby was 4 months old. Soon, I was pregnant again with our next son. I didn't have a lot of time or opportunity to continue my spiritual endeavours, though I did still read as many books as I could. Spiritual books gave me a connection to what I felt and knew within my heart, to be truth. My husband grew distant and no longer wanted to share on a spiritual level. To him, it wasn't important…to me, it was everything. In 1996, our daughter was born. We didn't have a lot of money, and things were very tight. I lost myself totally-as mothers' often do whilst bringing up a young family and trying to make ends meet. Our daughter began having seizures when she was 1 and by the time she was 18 months, she'd been put on anti-epileptic medication. About 2 months after she turned 2, the marriage was beyond repair and we separated. For me, and everyone concerned, it was a good thing, tho' not everyone would agree. During the early days of our separation, I found myself having more time and energy for myself and my spiritual pursuits. I began meditating more regularly and I was introduced to Reiki - a form of hands-on-healing. Previously, I had learnt some spiritual healing, but Reiki really interested me and I found that I had quite a gift for working with energy. This was a time for really getting to know myself, and as I did, I began to learn what God's love was all about. It wasn't conditional. It wasn't only there for me if I was good, or if I earned it - God's love was there for me regardless of who I thought I was, or who anyone else thought I was. God's love was available to me every second of the day, unconditionally, no matter what. That is an amazing realization to have. With that realization, came the realization that God's love is also available to everyone else, unconditionally too - even if I sometimes didn't think so! I felt that part of my mission in this lifetime, is to help others understand that and to learn how to love myself and others, the way God loves me. I was attuned to Reiki 1 and 2 and could feel the energy moving through me and out of my hands into whomever my hands were touching. It was an odd sensation, and I learned to 'read' the energy coming through me as well as the energy around myself and my clients.I found that I could 'pick up' the energy of guides and angelic beings, as well as the energy of deceased loved ones. Often when I work on clients, deceased relatives and long lost friends pop in to make themselves known. It is quite humbling to be the conduit responsible for reuniting people this way. I feel very blessed to be able to work like this. I did become a divorced woman. What a sense of strength it brought me! Finally, I was able to begin living who I am, instead of living who I thought I should be for those around me. It wasn't easy, but I had to really get to know who it was that I am. What were the things I wanted for me? Where did I want my life to go? My children and my husband were always my first concern before, but now, I had to make myself the number one priority. I learnt through my own inner healing that I had to be first so that I was always in a state of being able to be there for others. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 68 As I began to heal and let go of old conditioning, I began to lose friends and I felt quite distant from many of those I'd held close previously.I felt like I was changing - and I was, quite dramatically, and not everyone liked it. It was sometimes scary, but I found myself in the midst of more like-minded people, and new friends were made. Quite often, when one goes through a healing time, there are many things one needs to shed - and that sometimes includes people, possessions, jobs, where they live etc. A time of transformation - inside and out. I now have a healing practice. I lead meditation/psychic development groups. I love to share my experiences and my knowledge of how to connect with spirit. I teach Reiki and help to bring like-minded people together to share and learn. My life has often been hard, especially on an emotional level. Not many people end up living a life of healing. To heal, one must let go of fear. To let go of fear, one must first acknowledge that fear. Then one must be willing to let that fear go. This can be very difficult, as one has no idea what lies ahead when one lets go of what they've always known. Some of these fears have been a part of ones' life for many, many lifetimes. I have found, that when I have let go of a fear, what replaces that fear is another shred of self-love. Letting go of fear, is allowing God to come more fully into one’s life. About Meredith Joy Meredith is a sole parent of 3 children, who, through diversity and a whole lot of soul searching has found some meaning in life. With a unique way of looking at the world and the people in it, Meredith has managed to come to peace with 'God' as she understands 'God' to be - that special spark within, known and understood, or not. The spark that lives within each of us; it is that spark that unites us, as One. Meredith’s journey is far from over. In many ways, it is just beginning. She is excited and at the same time, filled with fear. The journey must continue...the journey of Meredith Joy... Meredith can be contacted via email, merejo@iprimus.com.au Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 69 A new career at the age of 67 Dawn Colsey Where I am on the journey at this time Come with me into my house. In one corner of the sitting room you will see a round table covered in a crochet cloth, an exquisite piece of work made by my late mother. I love to use it as a tribute to her. I keep the table set up as a “home altar,” to use a term from a feminist spiritual writer to whom I shall refer later. On the table are some significant objects. I place them there because they are precious to me as symbols of my spirituality, and as talking points if visitors choose to notice them. There is a beautiful, solid candle in bright blue, vivid red, and with a white Cross and thin black swirls on one side, leading to a spiral formed from the words “Come, Holy Spirit,” with a white dove on the spiral. At the base are the words “God says Yes to Dawn.” What a strong affirmation of what I am doing just now. What a counterbalance to what seems foolishness to some, and to me at times. The candle was crafted by Sister Jenene of the Benedictine community at Jamberoo, New South Wales, and was the gift of a dear male friend for my Formation Year - formation for the ordained ministry. There is also a “Rainbow Jesus” card, to indicate my inclusive views on human sexuality, an icon triptych, which may be the way for me to show my grandchildren a good representation of Christ, and a beautiful glass paperweight showing the rose window of York Minster, the gift of my friend and neighbour. Among the flowers from my garden, and another gift of candles from the Study Group which I facilitate at my local church, are two photos: Susan Sullivan, smiling at me from the cover of her funeral liturgy book, and a significant figure in my spiritual growth; and a photo taken by my son of the now deceased Henry Cat, my companion of eleven years. He is smiling blissfully as he pushes his head up into my caressing hand. I am glad to have him there, since he can no longer share my couch for a cuddle, though I do not accept that a creature who gave and received so much love ceases utterly to be when his furry body dies. As you entered this room, you passed an icon of Christ, with his hand raised in blessing. It is from the Greek Orthodox monastery at Meteora, from among my widespread travels, and is framed with enamelled peacocks and flowers. When I had the privileged task of caring for my first-born grandchild, Eleanor Claire, she would point to the icon and imitate the first syllable of “Jees-us,” with a smile of familiarity. If I left “my story” at this point, you would already have the essence of what is important to me in my spirituality: acknowledging what is real to me in the Christian tradition from a particular denomination, but with a broader emphasis which embraces other denominations, and other world faiths; the value and encouragement of friends; the precious gift of grandchildren, and honouring the influence of those who have been part of my journey. In my study, which is also a place for prayer, and more private than the room we are in, are other symbolic figures and cards - an, as usual, rather idealised Mary, a serene White Tara from our art gallery, three cards with images of a Christa figure, and some natural shells and pebbles. I must mention poetry, the reading and the writing of it, as important in my prayer life. Below, you will find a quotation from Mary Oliver, an American poet of the same age as I am, which links prayer and the natural world in poetry as self-expression to the divine and from the divine. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 70 An account of my spiritual development As the child of a lapsed Roman Catholic father and a searching, non-conformist mother, I was baptised at the age of five into the Anglican Church when my mother was drawn into church life by a deaconess (a dated title) at St Augustine’s, Unley. As a young child, I woke each day with a sense of excitement that anything could happen, that the world was a marvellous place. I loved Sunday school, and was an attentive pupil, but longed to go to “real church” and sing in the choir. Fr Frank Weston embodied God for me, ruling R.I. classes with a stern voice and waves of his walking stick. It was important to be good, not lie, not steal. (I tried out both - a child has to learn whether parents mean what they say - and was punished). In church, I loved singing the hymns and anthems but found the service of Holy Communion rather long and boring until I was confirmed by Bishop Robin at the age of eleven after thorough preparation by Fr Weston. The white dress and veil and laying on of hands did not feel miraculous, but I believed that I had taken on my baptism vows for myself, and received God’s grace to learn and grow in the faith. My little sister and I worked as sacristans and attended church regularly, even the 7am weekday Holy Communions. My mother embodied gentleness, patience and encouragement in being a faithful child. I was close to my father, and longed to understand his life with his first wife, whom he loved and who died suddenly. But he was not spiritually inclined and life was hard for him, finding he had produced a family of two little daughters in his late fifties. As a young teenager I became a trained Sunday School teacher and continued that work throughout high school and university. I prayed regularly, without a real experience of the presence of God, until introduced to AngloCatholic liturgy with its appeal to the senses, and the richness of language and symbolism. In contrast, I clearly remember the Billy Graham Crusade, and resisting the compelling call to “go forward” for Jesus, telling myself and the youth group I was with that I had made my commitment to Christ at my Confirmation, and to respond now would be to deny that. Conversion In my first year at the University of Adelaide, I had a true “conversion” experience. It came as a realisation that the Gospel is true, and that Jesus Christ is alive among us, when through the Anglican Society, I encountered intelligent Anglican men and women, from many different faculties, whose faith was real. We said the daily offices together, had a weekly Corporate Communion, and explored our faith in lively discussion together and with, or in contrast with, SCM and EU. In my first few years of teaching I eagerly taught Religious Instruction to Anglican students at Marion High School. I was always aware of the need for prayer in my life, whether working or when I travelled overseas with friends, for example for the first time with Barbara Walter and Jill Waite, and in forming relationships. The promptings of the Spirit I have also been aware of the work of the Holy Spirit in guiding the course of my life, especially at moments of transition. The first was when I needed to defy my father and insist that I did the academic stream at high school, instead of the more practical and job-oriented commercial course. I wanted to go to university and be a teacher. I felt impelled to make this stand. Then, when Roger and I met and fell in love, I knew it was the right time to enter into the experience of marriage and children, and, as a bonus, extensive travel, a wonderful, Godgiven time of 23 years. Separation was a heart-breaking experience, not initiated by me, but “to love is to risk loss,” and I felt held by God in safety while going through that long-drawnout time. I learnt much about compassion for people, and a greater understanding about relationships and about awareness of the way people’s needs change. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 71 The broadening of my spirituality; study of theology; translation task I can now see my involvement with Sophia, the ecumenical women’s centre of Dominican foundation, as Spirit-guided, thanks to the invitation of a close friend who could see my need to share my experience of grief and find a wider spirituality. Through Sophia, I realised that I was not alone in the trauma of separation, that many women and men go through the breakdown of marriage or other forms of trauma in relationships. At courses such as the Enneagram, and exploring world myths such as that of Demeter and Persephone, or the Gospel of Mark from a feminist viewpoint, my patriarchal concept of the world and the church was forever changed. I pay a sincere tribute to the late Margaret Cain O P, and the late Susan Sullivan O P, and to Bernadette Kiley O P and to the late Anne Roder, Anglican scholar and teacher of theology, for their life-giving work to women. Through Sophia I encountered feminist theology and liberation theology, and understood the possibility of imaging God in terms that do not exclude women’s nature and experience. I continue today to study courses there, and this year I am in a group reading theology by women in Asia, Africa, USA and India. I owe a debt of gratitude here especially to Angela Moloney O P, for her encouragement to women in these studies, and to me as one of the facilitators of women in theology and biblical studies. At our annual Festival of Feminist Theology and Biblical Studies, we invite local women to give presentations, and they have included some of my teachers from the Adelaide College of Divinity and Flinders University, namely Dr Anna Grant-Henderson and Dr Marie Turner in Old Testament, and Dr Vicky Balabanski and Dr Bernadette Kiley in New Testament. Dr Deidre Michell, Jude Noble, Robyn Cadwallader and Frances Passingham have also contributed as organisers and presenters, together with friends such as Rebecca Maxwell and Stef Rositis. I thank them for their passionate contributions. To Jenny Wightman I owe the debt of giving time to creative liturgy writing, the fruit of which can be seen at www.sophia.org.au, and for showing, from her love of the land, that death is the nurturer of new life. Occasionally we have been able to invite an international visitor as presenter. Carol P. Christ is one woman whose thinking has greatly attracted me. I have always felt drawn to the Process theology of A N Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne and more recently Charles Birch. In She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World, Carol Christ writes of how she found their work liberating from what Hartshorne and now she terms “Six theological mistakes” - that God, as envisaged in male, patriarchal, conservative terms, is “absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable,” and is “of unsympathetic goodness” - yet God loves, and is affected by what happens in the world; that God is omnipotent and omniscient - then how do we have free will, if God is all-controlling? that “immortality is a career path after death;” but our life is here and now, and we know little, except in insights of Paul, and in the metaphors of the Book of Revelation, of the eternal life we have already entered into; and that revelation is infallible. If we believe in revelation at all, and I certainly do in my own life, then we may see revelation in world faiths and in human experience. Since this paper is not a theological treatise, I have given only the briefest refutation of these “mistakes,” named by Hartshorne and taken up by C P Christ (pages 32-43) - who has renounced Christianity, but whose thinking has been liberating to my concepts of a loving, life-giving God, who allows natural processes in the world, and in human beings, who weeps with our sadness and rejoices at our joy, and who moves us in prayer and is affected by our praying to bring about our wholeness. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 72 Group study, at Sophia and at St Barnabas’ College, led me to give my heart and soul in undertaking the Bachelor of Theology at Flinders and the ACD, prompted by the Rev’d Prue O’ Donovan, who urged me to do “the real thing.” I truly loved the contact with academic teachers such as Dr Alan Cadwallader and Dr Phillip Tolliday and Roman Catholic and Uniting Church teachers and fellow students, and the rigour of study, and I am proud of and grateful for the high standards I achieved. This, after teaching French and English at Walford Anglican School for Girls for 20 years! My present task, of translating two books by a French Dominican ethicist at the International Centre for Space Studies in Paris, is a most fulfilling one, bringing together the two areas of study which have delighted and challenged me French language, from my first degree in Honours French at Adelaide University in the years 1959-1962, with the late beloved Professor James Cornell, and theology at Flinders from 1998-2002. Retreats and spiritual direction But by far the most profound influence on my spiritual development has been going on directed retreats and quiet days of reflection organised and led by Fr Philip Carter of the Julian Centre for Spirituality. Each year since 2003 I have been on retreat at Sevenhill and found that giving four days to stillness, prayer, contemplative activities like reading, writing and walking, and having time to speak with a spiritual director, has deepened my prayer life. This has helped me get a sense of proportion about where my life is going, and how God surprises us in the possibilities God puts before us in saying, “Choose life! Choose what is life-giving!” Time once a month with a woman spiritual director has sustained me and kept me alert to what is happening in my prayer life. I have become familiar with Ignatian and Benedictine spirituality (I stayed at New Norcia in July for my holiday), and I love lectio divina and prayer through attentiveness to the natural world. I see my love of creative writing, especially of poetry, as part of my spiritual development. Often I pray through writing, letting God lead me. Reading poetry, looking at art, listening to music and being in the natural world are all ways which help me have an awareness of and prayer with God. “I am a woman sixty years old and of no special courage. Everyday - a little conversation with God, or his envoy the tall pine, or the grass-swimming cricket.” Mary Oliver, “Work,” from The Leaf and the Cloud, p.9. Da Capo Press, 2000 A recent adaptation of Mary Oliver’s choice of “God’s envoy” for me was “Seduction rose, opening her first flower of spring, or the honey-eater, alighting for dew-sipping on my drought-conscious succulents.” When I write poetry, it is enabled by moving into a space of attentiveness, of heightened awareness, which is very much like prayer, and sometimes becomes prayer. Two examples, which I shall attach, are what I wrote on John Coburn’s painting “Ace II” in the Art Gallery of South Australia. Knowing his later representations of the Tree of Life, and the Jewish menorah, I see an unfurled trefoil of the Ace of Clubs, in his green and red hard-line work. Only when sharing the poem with friends did I see it opening out to embrace world faith concepts. In an older poem, “Ah God,” I enter into Mary Magdalene’s experience of God’s anguish at the world, and her experience of Christ’s resurrection. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 73 My understanding of the nature of the ordained ministry in the Anglican Church In many ways I have served God and my fellow Christians as a faithful lay person at different stages of my life, and especially in the last twenty years or so. I have performed many “tasks” for my parish and the diocese, as listed in my application to attend the Ordination Selection Conference. I have tried to live as a Christian, to be a Christian. I now seek to deepen the way I live spiritually, and to be enabled to perform the different tasks which a priestly ministry includes, particularly the administration of the sacraments. For I see those two aspects, the going more deeply inward, and the sacramental ministry, as key to ordained priestly ministry, and I rejoice that in our church, women share that role with men. You can tell that I am thinking towards priesthood, but as far as the diaconate in concerned, I would say that outreach to the community, to church- and to non-church people, is a major task for the deacon, in place of the celebrating of the sacraments. Recently I had the pleasure of being with our first-consecrated woman bishop, Kay Goldsworthy of Perth, when she presided and preached in Adelaide for the first time. It was good to hear her pass on a child’s comment about her gold mitre at her consecration: “Look, daddy, a pirate hat!” but, she added, bishops are with us not to steal but to pass on whatever is treasure. Lay or ordained ministry From my experience as a longstanding church member, and from my reading of Being a Priest Today and Being a Deacon Today, during this Discernment and Formation year, I see the ordained woman or man as having the privilege of serving God in many ways identical with lay ministry: being faithful in private prayer and Bible reading, and at public worship; using one’s gifts to serve the life of the church and possibly to enhance worship; serving the community by visiting, and witnessing to the faith from who we are in whatever work or social, sporting or other groups we belong to. I see the ordained person as being identified in doing these tasks, in being this person - through the grace given by God at ordination for this being and this performing - through being known, having the title and role of deacon or priest - and when appropriate through the manner of dressing as deacon or priest, formally, or with the “badge” of the Cross. The diaconate My experience of the nature of the diaconate has been largely through the work of the woman deacon who served in my parish for the last 20 years or so before she was ordained priest. Fifteen of those years were with a priest who did not believe in the ordination of women. He had “inherited” her as a, then, distinctive deacon, non-stipendiary, and made considerable demands on her time and talents. She was expected to be present at every celebration of the Eucharist, often as liturgical assistant and sometimes as preacher, and at a set number of daily offices, all of which he said in the church. She took Home Communions to the sick and frail aged, led a study group, prepared candidates for Confirmation, and supported home groups and the social activities of the parish. Our woman deacon was the first and closest exemplar that I had of a woman in ordained ministry. In many ways she brought the sense of “team ministry” to life, complementing the traditionalism of the priest with her woman’s gifts of a different understanding of people more intuitive, perhaps - a different voice and style in reading and preaching, and a more sociable attitude towards people, and a more flexible attitude towards making pastoral services accessible to people. She really contributed well to the survival of our parish when quite rigid traditionalism of a conservative, high-church man did not on the whole reach Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 74 people on the margins or bring life to the wavering and easily alienated. I am not writing this to uphold women’s ministry over men’s; we were providentially lucky to have a deacon who could work without a stipend, and who embodied the serving and supportive role which is that of the deacon. I mention the qualities of the male priest not to denigrate him - he was faithful and unflinching in his service - but to put my experience of our deacon in its context. Deacons in the Liturgy opened my eyes to the role of deacons in a large parish, with the need for reaching out and gathering in; or in the liturgical acts of a huge church or cathedral where the deacon, or several of them, have specific parts to play in a major Eucharistic celebration. My understanding of priesthood The person ordained as priest incorporates all that a lay person is and all that she has been as a deacon, with the changes of emphasis that I have mentioned as far as outreach and servanthood go. I see her as the one who makes available the place, and space, and time for people to worship, with a particular responsibility for Eucharistic worship and the other six sacraments of our church, and able to delegate aspects of that work to the deacon or liturgical assistants. The priest is also responsible for creating an atmosphere in which worship can happen, in which the Divine presence can be for us, and can act, and that may mean simply having the oversight of liturgy planning, with choice of music, décor, symbolism and so on, much of which may be in the hands of the lay persons or deacon. The woman priest may add touches of her own, with the beauty of a focus-point, much loved at Sophia, enhancing the season or theme of the day. She will preach and teach the faith, and make sure that the Word is proclaimed in an all-inclusive way. I have a strong sense that the priest leads a gathered community which offers worship of God, including praise, confession, thanksgiving and intercession on behalf of others who are not present - those who cannot or choose not to come, and those who are ignorant of the need as well. I am especially aware of this “on behalf of” aspect at any weekday Eucharist when the numbers may be small. We have the privilege of being aware of the needs and thanksgivings of the world and offering them for others as well as ourselves. The priest has the duty to be “holy” and to attract people to the faith by her Christ-like nature, as does every Christian, but with the expectation that in her role people will seek her out for pastoral advice and counselling. She will give it, if able, and will be aware of appropriate agencies for referral on where necessary. She will give leadership of the parish according to her gifts, and encourage those with complementary gifts and talents to use them. She will be responsible to the Diocese and parish for the overall management of the parish, supported by the parish council including treasurer, secretary and wardens. She will be responsible to the bishop for the “cure of souls,” a great treasure placed in her care, as the Ordinal says. The considerations and motives that have led me to offer myself for the work of the ordained ministry Closely linked with my spiritual development and my study of theology has been an increasing awareness of and admiration for people in ordained ministry. As soon as I finished my BTh in 2002, I was given a lot of recognition for my studies. I was asked to join a Theology Reflection Group on the future of the church in the Diocese, nominated for Diocesan Council and later for the Council of St Columba College. On the suggestion of my New Testament teacher, I joined the Council of Christians and Jews, and have been their secretary ever since. I embrace the concept of God’s revelation in the world’s religions. In August 2004 to my surprise I was invited to be a panel member of the Ministry Advisory Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 75 Conference. It was a privileged and humbling task to hold the lives of people in our hands, to a large extent, by what we discerned of God’s and the Church’s vocation for them. Exciting for those who were accepted, and devastating for one in particular among those who were refused. Since Bishop Garry Wetherill was also on the panel, I soon had more insight into the concept of local priest. I clearly remember discussing this concept, of a person in a local community being discerned by that community as someone who could, with ordination, serve them as their priest, with members of our Monday Study Group. It is a group where we share with a great deal of trust. Immediately several of the people present said, “You could be that for us!” I was surprised, excited, and if I protested it was not vehemently. The thought certainly lingered with me, but I was not ready to embrace it. I remember that the Rev’d Prue O’Donovan commented at about the same time that the idea of local priests could serve the Diocese of Adelaide well. I continued to experience the ministry of various priests in and beyond my own parish, and felt drawn to attend the weekday celebrations of the Eucharist at St Aidan’s, Payneham where the Rev’d Cathy Thomson was rector. On retreat, I remember speaking with my director of my “envy” of women in priesthood. He rightly challenged me! My feeling was really of acknowledgement of their being set apart for a special role: the enabling of sacramental worship. Several times in the study group people repeated their call of “You could be that for us.” The idea did not go away. An undeniable call at last In about September 2007 I had an “initiating” experience which I shall never forget. (Why can I not pinpoint the date exactly? We cannot stay with “mountaintop” moments. I was still fearful/in awe of the possibility). I woke one morning and my mind was filled with a clear thought, “I WANT YOU TO BE A PRIEST.” It was not my own voice or thought. It was not a voice at all. It was not a dream. I was awake. It was, I believe with all my heart, God telling me clearly what to do with the next years of my life. Before Advent, at our parish Thursday Eucharist, our priest the Rev’d Tim Sherwell gave a brief reflection on vocation: that it comes from deep desire, in stillness, from a prayerful approach; that it demands reliance on God, and living with imperfection. His words spoke so strongly to me that I went straight to him and said so, and told him of my recent conviction about ordination. His questions confirmed what was happening to me: Have you been struck by a recent Bible reading? -Yes, the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears, anointing him for burial, and how he recognised her service to him. Is there a text which keeps coming to you? -Yes. ‘Hail, favoured one, the Lord is with you!’ Have you had any affirmation of this calling from other people? -Yes, from at least three women in the study group. Do you have a feeling of relief and freedom at making this known? -Oh yes - and of the courage to do so, at last - and of excitement and trepidation at the steps this will entail. There followed the telling my family and some close friends and the Parish Council, and lots of prayer. The Archbishop’s Advent quiet day for lay leaders fed strongly into my thinking and praying processes, even from his choice of poems and readings about where we are on our journey, with terms such as exodus, transition, stability. A letter from Tim to the Archbishop followed, and at length an interview. I remember Archbishop Jeffrey Driver’s prayer for me on “the mystery of priesthood”. By mid-March this year I had joined the Formation group at St Barnabas’ College, with mostly much younger candidates - rather like Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 76 being pregnant at 31years old, in an ante-natal class of 18 year olds, in the town of Renmark where our children were born. May I birth a healthy new career! My chance to serve as a priest “How shall this be, seeing that I” …am 67 years old? If my vocation is crystallising into priesthood for my local co-operating parish with its three centres and too much work for one person, our priest, I see these factors: I have been “freed,” though not at my initiative, from a marriage that would have made pursuing this path almost impossible; by living carefully, frugally perhaps, I can support myself while working for my parish which could not otherwise support me, for perhaps the next seven years; I live within 15 minutes of each of the three churches, and own my house and car; my family supports me, though the degree of interest and enthusiasm for what I am doing varies. Here I need to say strongly that working without pay, and in a support role, and therefore part-time, is a consideration for me, as I have four grandchildren of five or under and a new one to be born early in 2009, and the time, interest and energy I can give to them and my children, their parents, matter very much to me. I am involved in their spiritual life, especially with one of the two families, and hope to deepen that connection. I see myself able to support our present priest-in-charge in team leadership, preaching and teaching, pastoral work and, especially, I would hope, in leading worship including celebrating the Eucharist and taking pastoral services. As well, as at my “home base” of St Edward’s, Kensington Garden’s, I love visiting and preaching at the other two centres of St Paul’s, Montacute and St John’s, Norton Summit, helping to enable worship there and being welcomed by the people. If and when our priest moves on, I would provide continuity for the congregations until a new priest could be appointed - though to manage the work of the three centres alone with my present limited experience would be a big ask just yet. As a last word about my motivation, I must say that I love God and his fallible church, I know Jesus as my friend and brother, I feel imbued with his Spirit, and I have developed love, understanding and compassion for a wide range of people from a life of service within and outside the Church. If ordained, I will continue “with joy and dedication” by God’s grace. An update to my journey: January 2010 As I write, after a year of joint Discernment and Formation in 2008, and then another year of Formation in 2009, I can report with great joy that I was ordained to the diaconate on 31st October, 2009. My license is for our local cooperating parishes, where I have now had good experiences in frequent preaching and leading worship, pastoral visiting, continuing to teach in the study group, and gaining a lot of insight into the daily life and commitment of anyone in ordained ministry. My first conducting of a funeral will happen within a week. I feel the responsibility of being so intimately involved in people's lives, and also the sustaining grace of God which gives me the confidence needed to take such a lead. I look forward in hope to being ordained priest before the end of 2010. Dawn Colsey 30th January 2010. NB: This chapter is an adaptation of Dawn’s paper for the Ordination Selection Conference of the Anglican Church, Diocese of Adelaide, October 2008, with an emphasis on feminist and womanly influences. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 77 About Dawn Colsey Dawn Colsey was born in 1941 in Unley and lived in that area during her childhood. She attended Unley High School and then went on to obtain a BA (Hons French) from the University of Adelaide and Diploma in Education from Adelaide Teachers College. Dawn has taught at various schools in South Australia - Marion High 1963-65, Pt Augusta High 1968-70, and Walford Anglican School for Girls, 1978-1997. She has also had several sojourns travelling and living overseas with friends, with her husband Roger, and with her 2 children when they went to India, Middle East, Europe, and the UK. Dawn’s interest in writing poetry begin in 1989 and she’s had some success at Friendly Street and in various publications and competitions. She has also translated several works from the French (including in 2008 Baptising the Moon: Theology and the Conquest of Space. (Jacques Arnould, La Lune dans le Benitier, Conquete spatiale et theologie, ATF Press) and into French (in 2009 God vs. Darwin: Will the Creationists triumph over Science? (Jacques Arnould, Dieu versus Darwin: Les Creationnistes vont-ils triompher sur la science? ATF Press). In 1996 Dawn began theology at Flinders University and the Adelaide College of Divinity, and on 31st October 2009 was ordained to the Diaconate of the Anglican Church by Assistant Bishop Stephen Pickard at Norton Summit. She is now working as Honorary Deacon in the parish. Dawn can be contacted via email: dawncolsey@iprimus.com.au Books referred to Brown, Rosalind, Being a Deacon Today, Canterbury Press, UK, 2002 Brown, Rosalind and Cocksworth, Christopher, Being a Priest Today, Canterbury Press, UK, 2002. Christ, Carol P., She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World, N Y, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Oliver, Mary, The Leaf and the Cloud, “Work,” p. 9, USA, Da Capo Press, 2000. Plater, Ormonde, Deacons in the Liturgy, Pennsylvania, Morehouse, 2001(?) Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 78 From Mass to Meditation Lyn Rose I was born the fourth child in a family of eight children to parents who were strong practicing Catholics. My initiation began with being baptised at just a few weeks old. I was raised in a home where the norm was going to Sunday Mass and also often going to Mass on weekdays as well, praying the Rosary daily and saying morning and night prayers. I embraced these rituals as a child and they became very important in my life. When I was around eight or nine I frequently got up around 6.30am and walked to Church for the 7am weekday Mass. My parents and my siblings would usually go too but even if no one else went, I would go alone. As this was prior to Vatican II, Mass was said in Latin and I did not understand very much, however, the repetition, the symbolism and the mystery of it all captured my heart. As a child I would often con my sister and two of my younger brothers into playing 'Mass'. I would get a cup and some cordial and a piece of bread and would set up an altar. I would always play the priest so would say some prayers, bless the bread and wine and then distribute ‘Holy Communion’. As a family we recited the Rosary before leaving the dinner table each night. I can still recall the excitement, pride and how very grown up I felt the first time I was able to be the leader. At first I was quite serious and slow in reciting the prayers, but that didn’t last long as I got a few swift kicks under the table from my older brothers and knew I was being told to hurry it along!! My schooling was in Catholic schools so my understanding of God and the rules and regulations laid down by the Church were enhanced daily with religion lessons, attending church services and doing good deeds at school, home and in the community. My family upbringing and my education led me to believe that I needed to be good, to try to always do the right thing and to give of myself and my belongings to others so that I could earn God’s love. This belief was enhanced by having to go to Confession every week and confessing my sins, expressing my unworthiness and imploring God for forgiveness. Doing the right thing became embedded in my psyche often to the detriment of my health and well being throughout my life. I grew up believing that priests and nuns were holier than everyone else and, therefore, more loved by God, so I decided at a very young age to be a nun (being a female the priesthood was not an option!). For the last three years of my high school education I lived at St Joseph’s Juniorate at Aldgate. This was a boarding school for young girls to introduce them to the life of a nun and then at the end of their schooling be encouraged to enter religious life. After the first few weeks of adjustment to an institutional lifestyle, I settled into the routine of attending morning Mass, saying the Rosary together daily, attending school, cleaning duties and recreation time. We seldom watched television and did not read newspapers. Although at Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 79 first I conformed to the way of life, in time I spoke out against some of the rules and regulations. Being a nun means taking a vow of obedience so questioning authority was not tolerated. I could not stay silent, though, if I felt there were injustices being done which often put me at odds with the nuns. Due to the limited connection to the world I did not develop much socially or emotionally. However, during those three years I was drawn deeper and deeper into my relationship with God. I loved the times of prayer, saying the Rosary and most of all, being able to attend Mass daily. I also spent a great deal of time in the Chapel in quiet contemplation and prayer. I also started to learn the value of spending time in silence .Each night at 9.00pm the great silence began and continued until after breakfast the next morning. And, on the first Sunday of the month, the time of silence continued until 3.00pm. I was always known as a chatterbox and yet I did not find being silent difficult and, in fact, I looked forward to it. There was one nun who lived at the Juniorate whose work commitments were not related to the students but who would sit with anyone who sought her out. She was a great listener, encourager and helped me to make some sense of what I was experiencing in my prayer. However, during my first year there we were stopped from talking to her (I think the other nuns were jealous of the time we spent with her). We were told to speak with the nuns who were in charge of us instead but their lack of structure in helping us to reflect on our lives, and their superiority, left me lacking any confidence in sharing my intimate thoughts and struggles with them. So I was left to try to make sense of it all alone. At the end of my schooling I made the decision that I did not want to enter the Sisters of St Joseph. I felt drawn to look at another order and I returned home. On my last day the Sister in charge told my mother that they had tried to make a lady of me but had failed and that I was too happy to be a nun! This gave me the message that the essence of me was inadequate and that I was not suitable, worthy or good enough and therefore a failure to myself, my family and to God. Consequently, I did not pursue entering another order as God had obviously not chosen me! After I started work I joined the Young Christian Workers (YCW), a very active social justice group in the Adelaide diocese. We met regularly and reflected on the Gospel to gain a deeper understanding of Jesus’ ministry in the world. This helped us to challenge any injustices in the workplace. Meetings were attended by a priest and in one discussion I raised the possibility that perhaps Jesus had been in love with Mary Magdalene. I was almost excommunicated for my blasphemy - how could Jesus, the Son of God ever be intimate with a woman! This experience, together with the emphasis on Mary’s virginity that had been taught to me throughout my life, left me feeling that intimacy was somehow not valued in God’s eyes and the only true way to purity and holiness was to live a celibate life as a priest or nun. However, in 1973 at the age of 20 I was married to a man who was also brought up with similar Catholic values. We met while members of YCW. When we were first married we lived in Port Augusta and went through a short period of rebelling against the Church. Soon though, we found we missed the community aspect and returned to attending Mass on a regular basis, actively participating in some of the Church’s activities. After five years of marriage our lives changed dramatically – for the better – as our first child, a daughter, was Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 80 born and over the next five years, we had two more beautiful daughters. Having children opened my eyes to the wonder and awe of co-creating with God and I was finally able to explore and reflect on my nagging, persistent thoughts of inadequacy. I was able to let go of the ‘if onlys’ – if only I was quieter or if only I was more balanced or if only I was holier – and embrace the fact that we are all equal in the eyes of God and that I did not have to be a nun to be loved unconditionally by God! On becoming a mum I gave up paid employment and this meant I was able to once again attend Mass during the week on occasion and I became involved in Lenten discussion groups, a Rosary group and a singing group. The Church community was the main part of our lives as the majority of our friendships were formed with other Catholics. In 1981 we moved back to Adelaide and after a year bought a house and settled in St Mary’s Parish where we lived for about eight years. This was a significant time for me as I became friends with some very passionate, forward thinking Catholics and many a discussion was held in regard to the Church’s teachings. I became involved in a women’s group which, among other things, spoke out about the exclusion of women in the decision making within the Church. During this time I continued to be very involved in Parish life including being a member of the Parish Pastoral Council, setting up the Passionist Family Groups, care groups, liturgy groups and playgroups. My daughters went to the Parish Catholic School and I was also involved with various groups within the school. So, once again, my life and my network of friends were closely associated with my Church. A very good friend of mine in the parish nominated me for a course conducted by the Archdiocese to develop leadership among the laity. It was a two year course that we attended one night per week. I was introduced to a variety of subjects including theology, sociology, scripture studies, moral ethics, and pastoral care. We were divided into small groups of about 8 people and one week we attended lectures and on the alternate week we would reflect on our lives and discuss what we had learnt from the previous week’s lecture. I found this course opened my eyes to a new world of discovery and self-development. I gradually returned to the workforce and when the girls were all at school I obtained a part time position working at the Catholic Church Office. This gave me an insight into the management and politics of the Church and when I decided to leave I had this strong sense of needing to find my soul again! While I was working at the Church Office I was invited to be a member of the Diocesan Commission for Ecumenism, a Catholic body that explored ways to connect with other Christian churches and to find ways we could work together. During my childhood it had been a sin to enter into another Christian church even if it was for the wedding of a family member or friend. However, Vatican II in the 1960s challenged the Church to rethink some of its practices and it paved the way for open dialogue with other Christian churches. During this time my family moved to Seaford and we became a part of the Seaford Ecumenical Mission. I felt really honoured to be a part of, and witness five Christian churches, together with government agencies, building a joint centre so that we could work and worship under the one roof. This was a time of not only planning together, but also praying and socialising together and I was challenged and encouraged to be open and tolerant to difference while still embracing my own beliefs. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 81 While living at Seaford I began to study part time in the Bachelor of Ministry at the Adelaide College of Divinity which took me over 10 years to complete. These studies challenged my faith and it was a time of deep questioning and searching which made me realise that I could no longer accept what I had been told with blind obedience but rather, that I had a responsibility to myself to explore deeper, to question, to challenge and to be always open to new ideas, new ways and new understandings. When I was a young mum I felt the need to explore my personal relationship with God further. I first attended a silent, guided weekend retreat which led me into meeting with a Spiritual Director on a regular basis to reflect on and develop my relationship with God. I continued receiving direction on a regular basis and undertook weekend, 5 day or 8 day silent retreats as often as possible (usually every 1-2 years). This also led me to train as a Spiritual Director so I put my studies for the Bachelor of Ministry on hold for a year while I underwent the study and practice of being a Director. This led me to walk alongside others in a one-toone situation to help them explore their own relationship with their God. Walking with others challenged me to reflect on my own life and relationship with God as others’ questioning and searching often reflected my own journey. When I was about half way through my degree I was appointed a Pastoral Associate. This meant working alongside the Parish Priest to address the pastoral needs of parishioners. It was not easy at first as a nun previously held this position and it was difficult for some of the people to see a layperson in this role. However, after spending time listening to and sharing people’s stories I was soon accepted into the role. I felt very honoured to share and celebrate the joys and sorrows of the lives of so many people. During the three years that I was in this position, the Parish Priest retired and I was appointed the Director of the Parish. This required me to co-ordinate the running of the Parish but a priest came each weekend to say the masses and to attend to any other sacramental needs. I used this experience as a case study for one of the subjects I was studying at the time and was amazed at the positive response I received from a questionnaire I had written about the role. In particular, I was surprised with the number who commented that they would be happy for me to be ordained! Of course, it also challenged me to accept for myself that if the Church’s teachings were different, I too would have loved to have been a priest. In July 2001 my life took a significant turn as my husband decided to leave our marriage after 28 years together. Of course as a Catholic I had grown up with the belief that marriage is sacred and till death do us part. I had to admit, however, that we had grown apart and that if we were both going to be who we needed to be, we had to let each other go our own ways. Two days later I started a new position as Catholic Chaplain at Flinders University. How could a good Catholic woman and one who is a Chaplain be divorced? At first this did not enter my head as my husband’s decision did not change who I was as a person but it became an issue when I was questioned by some members of the Church whether I was now worthy enough to undertake this role. This was another opportunity for me to explore even further the impact of the Church’s teaching and that I needed to search my own heart and to weigh up the compassionate response alongside the law. The fact that I allowed people’s comments to affect me surprised me. I did not have difficulty finding the compassionate response when others were sharing their issues but when it came to my own personal story I found myself Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 82 falling back into the old behaviour of seeing everything with blind faith, questioning again whether God still loved me and struggling with the sense that once again I had failed. The three years spent as a Chaplain was a great deepening of my spirituality. It began at an exciting time as the Chaplaincy Team was working towards and later developed the Multifaith Chaplaincy Team. Working with people from various faith traditions and sharing an office with Pagan and Buddhist Chaplains meant there were many hours of in-depth discussion, listening to each other and being challenged to explain our own beliefs. I learnt to accept that we are all on different journeys in this life and that there is no right or wrong way and that each person’s beliefs are to be respected and valued. The box I had put God so neatly into not only had the lid opened but also the sides ripped apart as my relationship with God deepened and strengthened. I left chaplaincy as I was struggling with so much of the Catholic teaching and finding more and more that the rules were at odds with the reality of people’s lives and I was having trouble finding a compassionate, loving God. I went to work in another Catholic run agency that I believed reflected the compassionate God I had grown to embrace. Instead I experienced and witnessed verbal and emotional abuse to the point that I not only felt shattered personally, but it was the decider for me to walk away from the Church which had been my life. Around this time my daughter experienced a Reiki healing and encouraged me to do the same. I was so moved by the healing I received and the connection I felt with my God that I then spent the next year learning Reiki and became a Reiki practitioner. I grew up learning that Jesus taught us to ask and we shall receive and to practise what he practised which included laying on of hands and healing. This is exactly what I do as a Reiki practitioner. I open myself up to God’s energy and I ask Jesus to be my guide as I lay on hands and trust in whatever healing the client is open and ready to receive. There is a real fear within Catholicism of the so called New Age movement and my Catholic upbringing made me wonder if I was doing the right thing, again! What I have discovered instead is that there are many, many people who are open to, believe in and trust in a God of love and who struggle to find any connection between this God and organised religion. During that year of learning Reiki I went to London to visit my daughter. While there I took the opportunity of doing a 5 day silent retreat in Assisi, Italy. It was a retreat open to people of all faiths, all walks of life and from anywhere in the world. However, it was based on the life and the spirituality of St Francis of Assisi. One day we were taken up into the mountains where Francis went to get away from the hustle and bustle of life and to sit in the silence with his God. While there I had a vision of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. In this vision I saw the humanity of Jesus, of his freedom to choose to walk away from his impending death and realised that it did not matter to God what decision he made. I was reminded of when a very dear friend of mine had told me she could no longer accept that Jesus was the Son of God. My first reaction was one of horror as she was challenging a core belief of our shared Catholicism and I remember questioning whether I would still be able to be her friend!! I quickly dismissed these thoughts but her statement had niggled away at me for years. Yet on this mountain I came to understand what she was saying. I had grown up being told that God lives within each and every person and all creation and that God’s love is unconditional. Yet I Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 83 also learned that God sent Jesus his son to die on the cross to save me because I am a sinner and unworthy. As I sat on that mountain I asked myself – what was Jesus saving me from? God’s love? I returned home a changed woman with a thirst for understanding more. I spent much time reading and in prayer and meditation, and realised I could no longer close my mind to what I was reading and hearing. I attended a psychic development courses, a tarot card course, courses for understanding and working with crystals and with colour, regular sessions with a mentor and joined a weekly meditation group which I have attended faithfully now for about 2 years. The support from this group has helped me to commit to trying to meditate on a daily basis and to continue to grow to understand and to embrace the God of love. After a while I set up my own Reiki and Counselling practice renting rooms for three days a week whilst house sitting. Then the financial crisis hit and people were forced to cancel planned holidays so there was no house sitting opportunities, so I decided to rent a home with room for me to set up my business. I wasn’t sure how this was going to happen because of my limited funds and not being able to prove a regular income. But I prayed about it and asked my dad (who died when I was 19) to help me. I found a place on the internet in an area that I hadn’t planned to live in but had felt drawn to look at. . On arrival at the open inspection I found the perfect house, in a beautiful tree lined street in Lockleys. It was near the sea which I love and right next door to Linear Park with beautifully maintained wetlands. I was taken aback with the number of people who were looking at the house and didn’t think much of my chances of being selected as the next tenant. I then realised it was the anniversary of my dad’s death so I asked him if the house was meant to be mine to see to it. Two days later I received a phone call telling me that I had been successful. In the past year while I have lived and worked in that home I have continued to be challenged and grow in many areas in my life. The people who came to see me and to share in the activities I held also helped me to deepen my understanding as, once again, many of their stories connected with my own journey. Last month the home ceased to be available so I have had to move again. I have relocated to live with family as I sit and wait to discern the next stage of my journey. In the meantime, I have come to embrace Jesus as a man filled with God’s spirit who invited and continues to invite each and everyone to connect to the abundance of God’s love in the same way that he did and to see each other and the world from love and not from evil. The pressure of always wondering if I am doing the right thing has gone. I no longer judge my actions as right or wrong but as experiences that lead me to learn the lessons which will help me to understand and bring me closer to the fullness of my divinity. It may take many lifetimes to perfect but it is a journey worth taking. I am now striving to embrace that we are all beings of love, striving to live in perfect love and that is what matters to me. I no longer have to earn God’s love as it is a constant. So, daily, I take the hand of Jesus and ask him to walk beside me as my brother and guide me on the way of living a life of love. Lyn Rose 30/1/10 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 84 About Lyn Rose Lyn Rose is a Reiki Master and counselor. She has come a long way on her journey to knowing herself and her God. Born into a large Catholic family she struggled to find her own identity and to accept herself for all that she is. In her story we see the challenges she faced in her upbringing in organized religion to finding her own spiritual identity. Lyn can be contacted via email, lynrose.ats@gmail.com Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 85 Leaving Religion Behind Randah Wassef Growing Up As a child, I was especially rambunctious, curious and cheeky. I was troublesome, extroverted, energetic, completely unbridled. Truth is, these things have probably not changed too much. Underlying all this was a constant desire for knowledge, to find, discover, and uncover things, a complete lack of satisfaction with settling for anything. “That will do” never was and never will be a part of my vocabulary when it comes to things I care about. One other thing about me that will need to be highlighted here is that I am not a person who does things by halves; I am an all or nothing kind of person. This proved particularly problematic in two areas of my life - school and religion, the two not being entirely distinct of each other. I was the product of an orthodox Christian family, Coptic Orthodox to be specific, and my schooling included stints at Catholic primary schools and a Uniting Church high school which involved going to chapel one morning a week. While most people seem to consider the Catholic Church to be the worst in the Christian arena, the most strict if you will, I beg to differ. This is not to say that I have much sympathy or any less problems with the Catholic Church, it is just that, well, Coptic Orthodoxy was pretty strict. Growing up, there were several periods of fasting in a year, including Lent, the pre-Christmas fasting period and a couple of other smaller fasting periods for particular feasts. As far as my knowledge of fasting for other religious groups goes, in Catholic fasting they choose a particular food to abstain from, in Islamic fasting they eat absolutely nothing till sundown, and then there is the Coptic orthodox way of fasting. Our fasting periods consisted of being completely vegan in Lent, whereas all other fasts were almost entirely vegan with the exception that we could eat seafood. Yes, you did read that right, almost entirely vegan with the exception of seafood. I never quite understood that one myself, and that was only the first of the many questions I asked religious figures but from whom I received inadequate explanations or unsatisfactory answers. I am not sure how many people are aware of this, but here goes. Easter on the Orthodox Christian calendar is one week after the Jewish Passover, and Christmas on the Orthodox Christian calendar is on January 7. With this we come to my next source of confusion with regards to Christianity and my conflict with Religion. I mean, if people under one (alleged) banner fail to even agree on a damn date for a ‘celebration’, then where does that leave things? I have done my homework, and the disagreement of the date for Easter to be celebrated comes down to some churches believing it is linked to the Jewish feast Passover, while the Coptic Church believes the date falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon, apparently the first moon whose 14th day is on or after March 21. Ultimately, regardless of how each church or denomination calculates the date, does it really matter whose method of Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 86 calculation is inaccurate? When they are celebrating the exact same thing, it seems particularly fickle. So, there I was, left with questions I persisted in asking and receiving inadequate responses to. Call me simplistic, but I fail to understand how a Religion or Faith (call it what you will), which advocates love, respect, and unity, can see people disagreeing on something as simple as a date for feasts or significant events. (I do not intend to make this the “101 issues I have with the Christian Faith.” It is merely a tale of my experiences growing up in the Christian Faith and subsequently abandoning it. In my opinion, no religion or faith is without its faults and my experiences with religion and spirituality are no more or less valid than any other person’s experiences with religion and spirituality). The questions did not end here either. I am not by any means saying that there are some things that one cannot have blind faith in; I do however think that blind and unquestioning faith can only take a person so far before they will naturally yearn for some solid evidence. This inevitably led me to think that when those who apparently have unwavering blind faith and are supposed to have the most knowledge about the Religion, are also those who are unable to give adequate explanations and satisfactory answers to perfectly reasonable and justified questions, then in my opinion, one has to wonder. I am a firm believer in the right of an individual to choose their religion, faith, spirituality or belief system, I simply was unsatisfied with the answers to the questions I was asking, and there it was that my search began. I still believe that there is a God, or perhaps more than one God, I am as yet to determine whether I adhere to ideas of monotheism or polytheism, but regardless of whether I can physically see a God, or Gods, I do believe in the existence of a (higher) power and also in the existence of spirits. I also believe that this higher power does not have a sex or gender which fits within the parameters of sex or gender as known to human beings and is nongender specific. I do not believe any (spirit) has a sex or is gendered, and as such, have great issues with the assertions within Christianity of the existence of a ‘Son of God.’ I in no way can settle with the notion that any being that exists outside or beyond the realm of human beings can have a sex or gender, (and if they do, it is up to them to self-identify). With all that said, my place on the spectrum of Religion and Spirituality was left oddly clear yet still somewhat unclear. In my younger years, there were several things I know now as an adult I was keenly aware of, the first being that I knew I could never, for myself, stomach the idea of marriage. I could not tell you exactly what age I decided this, but definitely when I was younger than 10. I simply knew I did not want to get married, and failed to understand the obsession of many female-bodied people with marriage and weddings. I now understand where these obsessions stem from, but am incapable of empathising with them. The other thing I was particularly aware of was that I did not have the same concept of sex and gender roles that the majority of people were socialised to have. I never believed there were things I could not, or should not do because of my ‘femaleness’. As a child, when given typically ‘girly’ toys, such as Barbie Dolls, I used to maim them and they would end up as strewn limbs in my bedroom - head somewhere, arms somewhere else, body and legs somewhere else again. I was also bothered by the fact that Barbie Dolls were predominantly marketed Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 87 and sold as white figurines. It did not stop with my Barbie Dolls, but extended to my Cabbage Patch Doll, who to begin with had long straw-coloured hair (this doll was also white), but by the time I was done with the doll, it had short black hair. There were never clear sex and gender lines in my world. I cannot explain why, this is simply how my conceptual views were when I was much younger. I am now, however, much more aware of why I had these conceptual views when I was younger. Leaving Religion Behind The final two straws for me, those which completely pushed me away from the Church, were the seeming lack of practice outside (and sometimes even inside) the Church, of what was being preached inside the Church, and issues with the stance on sexuality and gender. Every Sunday, being the faithful young Christian person I was, I would go to Sunday mass with the family. Now, bearing in mind, again, the differences between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, to my knowledge Catholic masses or services run for the duration of an hour and not much more, whereas Coptic Orthodox services run for the better part of two and a half to three hours. I had a short attention span as it was, so this was pretty torturous already, but couple that with what it was like during and after the service when it came to people’s attitudes, if there were ever a hell for me, this would have come pretty close. I was not then, and am by no means now perfect (I could write endlessly on what is or is not perfection; I truly do not believe it to be definable). Having said this, there are certain things I have always felt especially strongly about. Among those things is my unwavering belief that it is not the place of any human being to judge another for any reason. I am not saying that it does not, and will not continue to happen. To fail to recognise this would be foolish, simplistic and naïve. Human beings will always judge other human beings, it is a reality of life, and I am most certainly not innocent in the matter. Recognising that I do not walk into this issue with ‘clean hands’, I do however, walk into it being especially aware of when I am guilty of judging someone else, and always try to self-interrogate in instances when I have done so. With this in mind, what I recall is the charade and how it would play out. It started off in the Church building itself as mass would start shortly after 8am, with the pews only filling up very slowly in the first hour, then once the first hour was up, it would fill up pretty quickly. People stumbled in, half awake, but always making the effort to look at who was there already, what they were wearing, who they were sitting with… It did not stop there, though, because as people walked in, those already present would repeat the process of observing what the new entrants were wearing, where they sat… One would have thought it was a beauty pageant or something, it still astounds me. It always got under my skin, knowing that the Priest would give sermons on loving people regardless, on not judging people as it is not our place to judge, and it was like people simply did not listen to what was being said. I say listen, as one can hear without listening, but to listen means actual effort to process what is being or has been said. The charade killed me, the thought that people would hear these sermons, yet as soon as they left the Church building would act in complete disregard of what had been preached. For me, the old adage “to practice what you preach”, or to be an active believer rather than a face value believer - one who can talk the talk, but not walk the walk has been and always will be something I feel passionately about. What bothered me equally as much as the fact that this charade would happen, was that nobody would question it, and if you did, as in my case, you only became more disillusioned. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 88 Having said this, I can also safely say that an odd mix of my impatience, quizzical nature and Christianity did provide me with some fantastic moral values. Acknowledging that Christianity in part attributed to the development of my values, does not exclude awareness that there are many faiths and religions which also contribute to the provision of what I believe to be wonderful moral values. One has to wonder whether prior to the existence of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other major world religions human beings still knew that certain behaviours were inherently “morally unacceptable.” Therefore, if people know (innately) that certain behaviours are morally objectionable without religious guidance, do people need to be religious to know right from wrong? There is no question in my mind that with or without religion, human beings would be aware as to whether the nature of their actions was morally dubious or intolerable. I mean, really, we do not need religion to tell us we will get burned if we put our hand in fire or that it is wrong to take the life of another human being. The final straw for me though were the moral values that the Priests in my Church attempted to defend, which I could simply not stand by, i.e., the prevalent sexism and queerphobia perpetuated and sustained by the Church. As I mentioned earlier, one of the other things I was intensely and stubbornly set on when I was younger, was that I knew I did not want to get married. From this came the barrage of questions directed at Priests, my parents, and anyone who I thought would be capable of delivering well informed answers to my questions. Was I ever mistaken! I mean, I love my parents, and they have been incredibly, wonderfully loving and amazing people. I can honestly say from the depths of my soul and my being that my mother and father are two of the most beautiful and inspirational people in my World. They were incredibly selfless in the way they raised my younger brother and myself, and I cannot fault them for having a religious upbringing and remaining faithful. This is their choice, and out of my love for them, I respect this choice and would never judge them for their religious convictions (or for anything else for that matter). As an independent minded human being, though, I am unable to agree with everything that comprises their faith or religion. The as yet unsatisfactorily answered questions include; why sexual expression is unacceptable outside of a matrimonial relationship, why homosexuality or ‘same-sex’ (though I use this term loosely) attraction is wrong, why men are supposed to be in control in marital and other relationships, why it is that Eve receives the blame for corrupting humankind, when according to the stories, Adam willingly ate of the fruit (it is not like she held a gun to his head!) and why women or female-identified, or female-bodied people are not allowed to be priests, bishops, deacons or other religious figures- not forgetting also the position of pope. This was just the beginning (I did warn you that I was curious!). I still fail to understand how such notions can be not only propagated, but supported by such vast numbers of human beings with such a lack of reasonable justification. I mean, I could defeat all of these notions with one simple question; if ‘God,’ according to Christianity, allegedly created us all in the image of ‘God’ then how can it either be wrong for a person to simply express what feels natural to them and how can any physical characteristic affect the roles people are able to take in society? What a heinous thought, that someone could be created only to be damned. It has often frustrated me to hear things said like “God doesn’t make mistakes,” when referring to people Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 89 who identify as homosexual, queer, trans*, genderqueer, transgendered, transsexual or intersexed. This inherently implies that either people who so identify do not have valid feelings or understandings of their bodies or desires, that they are mistaken about their identities, and also suggests that this “God” Christians and certain other monotheistic religions speak of, is not responsible for creating these people. If this “God” is responsible for all things created, how can responsibility for creating these “mistakes” be vitiated? Even if one is to put sexuality to one side, this leaves us with people who are born with disabilities, mental and physical discrepancies or variances to what medicine would consider a completely ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ child, and we are still left with one significant aspect related to sexuality, sex and gender which falls outside those possible to record on a birth certificatemale and female. As it stands, there are over 15 known intersex conditions, which means that there are over 15 ways in which it is possible a child is born and not easily categorised as male or female in strict medical terms. These conditions all exist at birth or develop naturally as the person develops, and not as a result of any body modification or alteration made by the person. I am definitely not going to be the one telling any of these people they are mistakes, and religion certainly has no place to do so either. To maintain that God is perfect, and that we are all created in “his” image, well, this makes me a perfect, obsessive compulsive, queer, genderqueer person. Awesome. If that be the case, I look forward to meeting my perfect, obsessive compulsive, queer, genderqueer maker in heaven! It is at this point that I will take the time to give my Mum, May, and Dad, Rafat, the tribute I truly believe they deserve, and also give you an insight into my world and the people who play significant roles. Before I do this, I will have to let you, the reader, know that no amount of words can truly do them the justice this tribute should. After all, no words will ever suffice to allow me to fully convey the intensity or amount of love and respect I have for these two incredible people. There is also no way that I could write about my spiritual journey and neglect to mention two of the most important people involved. The departure I took from the Religion they raised me with has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with me. I say this because this is something I want to make clear. I cannot fault them for raising me in what they felt the best way possible, and I have learned many incredible lessons from these two amazingly beautiful people. They have been thoughtful, strong, wise, selfless, loving and caring at all points in my life, and despite our disagreements, have supported me unquestioningly and unwaveringly. I learned from my mother not to judge anyone, and to simply accept people for who they are. This was done by her actions rather than words, and after all the curve balls (challenges) I have thrown my mother, the amazing strength, wisdom, love and acceptance she has shown coming through those challenges continues to inspire me. May, my mother, is still the most amazing woman in my life, and I know that it will be impossible for any human being to even come close to comparing. Someone willing to give up their relationship with their own parents because of the love they have for their child and then, despite the conflict with their faith, accept their child’s sexuality and gender identity, this is love-unwavering, unquestioning and true. This is only one tiny, ridiculous example of what my mum has done for me. As I said earlier, no words could encapsulate the beauty of this human being, it would not matter which language I used, there are simply not enough words in the vocabulary of any language. This is one of the two people who have been there since day dot of my existence, and one is no less amazing than the other. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 90 Rafat, my father, is no less amazing than my amazing mother and his loving wife, May. I often tease them, and ask Mum how on any planet she could have married Dad, but, despite the teasing, and personal issues with marriage aside, in the depths of my heart, I know the answer to this teasing question. There are many words, and there is much love, that my brother and I tease our father with. Dad is goofy, silly, stubborn, hopeless at admitting when he is wrong (he still maintains, over an argument we had two years ago, that Ringo Starr is dead), and so much more. Above all this, he is human, and he is a human being with one of the biggest hearts I know. For all the difficulty he has suffered in his life, my father walks through it with a smile on his face and a cheerful heart. It is from him that I get the stubbornness, the fighter in me, the determination, and resolve to achieve whatever it is I set my mind on achieving. Acceptance of my sexuality and gender identity have proven more difficult for my father, though he still has little things that give away the extent to which he is trying, despite the conflict with his faith. Dad has now seen me through two Mardi Gras parades and countless Queer events without any of the negative remarks he would have made about Queer people prior to me coming out to him. I love him dearly for this, because I know our tongues are as sharp and fast as each other’s. Mum, Dad, I love you, always have and always will, no matter how painful and rambunctious I have been and can be. Mum, Dad, I love you, despite how painful you can both be, and my prayer is that one day you will both listen and hear when I speak about religious issues that pain me and stifle many from living in the way that they should be able to. At the age of 18, I started working in the beauty industry. This work, for me, consisted of travelling to department stores to promote new fragrances. In the course of this work, I met a very dear friend, and definitely the first ‘out’ and very proud gay male friend I had. It was the start of a lasting and interesting friendship, with Will exposing me to my first experiences in the Queer community. What I loved, and still love about Will, is that he is honest, fearless, sensitive, loyal, eloquent, determined, hardworking, and vibrant. The response I got from Will when I came ‘out of the closet’ quite some time into our friendship was “Finally!” I was happy that he was so accepting, intrigued that he seemed to know what I had to reveal before I had come to the realisation myself, annoyed at him for not telling me what he thought. It was what Will said next that is something that really strikes at the core of how I now feel about Religion and Faith - “You had to find out for yourself.” It is also one of the major reasons I have so much respect for Will, and his attitude for a person’s self-realisation process. There are many people in the World who feel it is their place to tell other people how or what they are, or how or what they should be, whether this be with regards to religion, sexuality, gender, body image, a plethora of things. Quite simply, in my opinion, it is no person’s place to tell anyone else how or what they should be, now, or ever. It is up to each individual to find or choose their path and to discover things about themselves, and it is these choices and discoveries, after all, that make life a little more exciting every day. If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say “a lady shouldn’t do that” or “a lady- insert whatever inane thing a lady should or shouldn’t do here”, I would be a damn rich human being. The lady garbage is just the start of it, we then move onto the way women should be, the way I should be living my life depending on my age, and, well, the list just goes on. At University in 2005 I met one of the best friends I have ever had, Chris. Within a short time of knowing him I told my mother with complete confidence that if ever I were to get Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 91 married, it would be to Chris. Now, have no illusions, we will never get married, due to several major purple and pink elephants in the room, pun intended. Firstly, Chris was the first ‘out’ gay male friend I had at University. Secondly, well, I am sure I have made expressly clear how I feel about the institution of marriage. I vividly remember the first time I met Chris’ parents, and having a conversation with his father, who had abandoned Christianity when confronted with Chris’ sexuality. I found it incredibly beautiful that his parents could be so amazing when it came to accepting his sexuality. The thing I love most about Chris is that he is not judgemental, is open minded and incredibly loyal. Throughout our friendship, there is nothing one of us wouldn’t have done for the other, and I know this still remains true. It is here I can say I have faith, I have faith in knowing that Chris and I will stand by each other for many years to come, and for this, my heart feels that bit lighter and happier. With regards to the issue of marriage, time and time again when I tell people I do not want to get married (sexuality and legality aside), it is met with the response “you say that now, but wait till you get older…” or a variety of other responses pertaining to my age, what I am doing now with respect to my life, that I just have not met the right person yet. Quite frankly, I am sick of it. The notion that people will ‘settle down’, as if some ever ‘settle down’ even after getting married, the notion that love is finite, the notion that we, as human beings are ultimately meant to dedicate our being to one other, that ‘significant other’ or ‘soulmate’. All rubbish! The assumptions involved here are so loaded I have no idea where I should or would start. Or more to the point, the frustration lays in wanting to address all the issues at once, as no single one of the assumptions is more forgivable or acceptable than any other. The institution of marriage has changed vastly over centuries, but it is interesting to note in ancient roman times that a husband yielded a considerable amount of control over his wife, which extended to him being able to sell, kill or punish as he deemed appropriate. In more modern times, though not nearly as severe, the institution of marriage, as do many legal and religious institutions, still treats men favourably. It is also interesting to note that in times past divorce was in some ways easier, depending on which civilisation one looks to, but despite this, the divorce rate still averages approximately 39 out of every 100 marriages across the globe. So much for till death do us part. Finally, well, there is also the ‘purple elephant’ in the case of my sexuality and ‘pink elephant’ in the case of Chris’ sexuality. The one thing that was quite significant in all of this was, and still is, that my mum loves Chris, and I am sure there would be no objection from her if we were to actually get married. Which makes me wonder, if a woman as religious and faithful as my mother can love someone in my life who is so out and proud gay, and recognise that his being gay is quite clearly an inherent part of who he is, then how can anyone consider homosexuality to be a flaw in God’s design or creation of humankind? Surely God does not make mistakes. It was meeting Chris, though, that made concrete in my mind that there was no possible way that same sex attraction, or any sexual identity that varied from heterosexuality, could possibly be a reason for someone to be eternally damned, and if this was how Christianity advocated it to be, then there was something wrong with Christianity, not with people who identified as anything but heterosexual. It has always bothered me that people who do not identify as heterosexual still have to ‘come out of the closet’. Last time I checked, closets are designed for clothing and shoes, not for people! This socialisation, which can be in large part attributed to Religion, that anything outside of heterosexuality is not normal, is a farce that has to end. The struggle for Queer Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 92 rights will not end till the day comes that people do not have to ‘come out of the closet’, because a closet is simply no place for people. There are two more people I have to mention, if I am to do justice to the key players in my life with regards to sexuality and identity. Sass and Mich. I love Sass for her strength, wisdom, determination and confidence. Sass, or my non-sexual life partner (how we have chosen to endearingly refer to each other), I am constantly forgetting is younger than me. This is because her wisdom and character are such that most would consider her to be older than she is. Sass stands tall as a proud lesbian, woman and daughter of Irish Catholic parents, among many other attributes that make up her amazing self. In the insane world of Queer Activism, Sass has proven to be my emotional rock, inspiration, counsellor, supporter and one of the best friends a human being could possibly ask for. In the time I have known Sass, we have supported each other through the fun times and the difficult times, and through the activism we constantly engage in. Mish, my amazing trans-indentifying queer best friend, one of the most beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful people in my world. I can only imagine the suffering a person like Mish goes through on a daily basis because of the way society struggles to understand the way in which Mish expresses identity. A particularly poignant memory I have of a time I spent with Mish is one night we went out to dinner at Newtown. For those who are not familiar with Newtown in Sydney, it is a very cosmopolitan and queer area, it is a hub of excitement and political activism at the best of times, and has a vibrant energy. On this particular evening, I met Mish near Newtown train station and we were unsure of where we were going to eat, so went walking down King Street to survey our choices. In the course of our stroll we passed several groups of people, one a particularly revolting group of people who were casting the most horrified look at Mish. I spun around and told them that if that was how they looked at people, then they did not belong at Newtown (or, if it were up to me, anywhere else in the world!). While it is easy to say, who am I to judge, live and let live and the like, I am not immune to vulnerability, and they found mine, my protectiveness of those I love. I was not so much thinking that Mish was incapable of responding to these foolish people, more just annoyed and slightly infuriated that people could cast such looks at others, not only in a way which inadvertently imposed their perception on how people should be or look, but also with no consideration to the impact these looks may have. The journey I am on and awareness of my identity have been much more significant through having Mish in my life. It has now been 8 years since I walked out of the Church and I have no regrets. It has been one of the best things in my 24 years of existence that I have done for my sanity. I have explored some of the other texts and academic critiques of other faiths and religions, and drawn much from these explorations. I believe a lot can be learned from the vast realm of religion and spirituality. The thing I have found most difficult to resolve in my mind is the incredible power Religion has to both unite and divide people simultaneously. People seek out religion for many reasons, one of the most poignant of which would be to feel united to other people. Yet on the other hand, religion has also been one of the most significant factors in many wars, both civil and between different countries. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 93 One of the other major issues I have with many organised religions, the church being the most prominent, and yes, again, particularly the Catholic Church, is their reliance on the financial generosity of members of their faiths. I realise that to survive anywhere on this earth, given the capitalist nature of the world we live in, groups or organisations of any nature need some form of financial support, but, really, the Catholic Church is one of the richest institutions in the World yet much of their riches have come countries they have pillaged and looted. Despite having enormous wealth, the amount they actually give back for services to people in the community is insignificant. The reality is that the Catholic Church, not to the exclusion of other religious institutions, spends a lot of money and time covering up acts committed by their own which would be considered immoral and criminal both by the standards of most of the world’s major religions and also by the standards of the legal systems in most countries. Were the Catholic Church to use its vast riches in a truly charitable way, they could potentially feed an incredulous number of starving people in countries where starvation is a problem, or provide funds for medication in countries which suffer from an AIDS crisis. Another significant issue when it comes to religions and their involvement in countries with respect to charitable endeavours, aid and such, is that they seem to embark on such endeavours in a rather self-interested manner. The self-interest I refer to is that of bringing their religion or faith to the people of the countries they enter into under the guise of providing charitable assistance. While respectfully recognising that a lot of wonderful charitable work and assistance is provided to countries by charities run by religious organisations, I believe it raises a serious ethical and moral dilemma if the group provides this charity or assistance without acknowledging other interests they may have which are completely unrelated to the provision of charity or assistance. Where My Spirituality is now About January of last year, I was informed that the eldest of my cousins was going to get married this year. The first thought I had, naturally, was ‘gross’. Simple as that, it felt disgusting. Then came the big question, no, not the obvious “will you marry me?”, when it comes to weddings, but the big, scary question, “was I going to go to the wedding?” It is one of the moments in life where I felt incredibly conflicted. How can I resolve my inner conflict of how I personally feel about the institution of marriage while also respecting another individual’s choice to participate in such an institution? I still do not know the answer to this question. A part of me knows if I was to go to the wedding I would most likely want to be sitting in the back row with my favourite uncle (a divorcee himself) and mocking everything that happens, but then a part of me would also be thinking that if the two people getting married have willingly and happily entered into such an occasion, then I will respect that and be happy for them. My final thoughts are these: until we live in a world where people stop using their religious convictions in an attempt to justify hate and murder, and learn to accept and celebrate diversity of beliefs, I will adhere to no particular faith or religion. I yearn for the day which sees a true separation between religion and the laws applicable to people in whichever place they live. Our legal system here in Australia is still heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian teachings, and I find this incredibly disturbing given not only the composition of people in the country and the diversity of religious beliefs, but also that inherently our legal system is supposed to (yes, supposed to, but does not actually) respect a separation between church and Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 94 state. It also bothers me to no end that this lack of separation continues to be, not just unquestioned, but also reinforced constantly, a prime example being the definition of marriage in the Marriage Act (1961) Cth. Why do we still have a marriage act when marriage is a religious institution rather than a civil institution? At this point in my life, I identify comfortably as agnostic and enjoy reading spiritual and religious texts to decide for myself whether or not I agree with the teachings of any one particular religion, or whether I will remain identifying agnostic and align with ideas of monotheism or polytheism. I am a very spiritual person, and do not believe this has to translate to being religious, the two can operate mutually exclusively of each other. I believe that whatever we give is what we get back, whether that be in the form of the energy we express - positive or negative, the actions we take, the words we say, our inaction or failure to act. I am of the opinion that both spiritual and religious journeys are incredibly personal journeys and that one must carve their own path. Nothing in life is definite, and nothing is provable absolutely and utterly beyond the shadow of any doubt. For now I’m content to I respect every individual’s right to be religious as long as they in no way attempt to force their religious convictions on myself or anyone else. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 95 Images on a Spiritual Journey Lynne Sinclair-Wood I was born in 1950, a Sagittarian, and lived in an inner city suburb of Newcastle, New South Wales for the first eighteen years of my life. As a child I found comfort, within a highly charged emotional environment, in listening to the sea as I fell asleep each night. On full moons I would move my bed around the room so I could sleep with the moon on my face. My mother said doing that would send me crazy. I guess she was right. Mother had a Welsh background, descended from women who were herbalists and midwives. However, my mother and grandmother, living under the influence of the Welsh Methodist Church, had been convinced that the ancient practices were evil and signs of madness. Mother had been taught to suppress her power and wisdom and was a very angry and frustrated woman, who regularly went for ‘a rest’ in a local psychiatric hospital. My father had been an actor in the early Australian film industry during the 1930s and 1940s but gave it up to get married in his mid thirties to a much younger woman, following a suggestion from his dying mother. I was their first born and my two younger brothers followed over a period of five years. Family responsibilities meant Dad had to get a ‘proper’ job, so he worked on the Newcastle Morning Herald newspaper as a proof reader doing night work, along with a rich assortment of other creative eccentrics – musicians, poets, writers, people who operated best during night hours. Visiting Dad at ‘the office’ late at night was always a great adventure, I loved talking to his work mates in the proof reading room or in with the journalists. Most exciting for me was when Dad took me up onto the roof of the Herald Building to view the stars through a telescope. I spent more time with my head in the stars (and the moon) during my early life than in the so called ‘real’ world. Nothing’s changed much really. Our home for the first eight years of my life was in my father’s family house, shared with my grandfather and Dad’s younger brother. My grandfather, known as Old Jack, carried the ancient wisdom of Scotland passed down from his mother Kate Sinclair, a Wise Woman of the Old Tradition. Old Jack taught me to accept the gift of ‘the sight’ warning me that it may not always bring me a happy life, but on the other hand it would be very interesting and rewarding. He told me many tales of Scotland, about the land and its power. There were myths and legends that explained natural phenomena like thunder storms or told why there are waves in the ocean. I learnt how to hear the songs trees sing when you press your ear to their trunks, how to communicate with fairies and to listen to what animals have to say if you are very lucky and patient. Old Jack encouraged me to draw and paint, explaining that while I may not always be able to talk about experiences with fairies, I could draw them. From Old Jack I had the advice, “There are two types of people in the world: those who know about fairies and those who don’t. If you want to survive, only talk about what you see and feel about fairies with those who know as well, and stay clear of the others”. This wise piece of advice has proved valuable throughout my life, not that I have always followed it as often as I should have. As a child I often found gifts from the Little People under my pillow—a book, a Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 96 coveted sable paint brush, special coloured pencils or paints, and I could never understand why other kids only ever got silver coins as fairy gifts and then only after they had lost a tooth. Very shy about my drawings of animals and fairies, I rarely revealed them to anyone other than my father or grandfather. Drawings were my responses to fairy stories or myths I was hearing at bed time or when listening to my father’s extensive repertoire of Aussie Bush Yarns that he told so well in his own quiet unassuming way. Many of my pictures were quite unconventional, different to art classes at school, so I often found myself ridiculed by teachers ignorant of the creative sensibilities of a child living in another dimension. This was, after all, the 1950s. Then during the 1960s, my teenage years, the world began to make radical changes. I first read The Female Eunuch as a seventeen year old school student, and felt the anger of seeing the place of women in society in the past, while also being excited by possibilities for the future. Germaine Greer showed us that we now had the chance to strike out in a different way, to take a different path to our mothers. I had a choice now to be free, but was a bit confused by all the sexual complications that this freedom brought with it. I knew that academically I could now do anything I wanted as an equal with men. This social revolution freed up women’s choices about their bodies, marriage, children, but what would it mean to be a woman who didn’t want marriage or children but still wanted love and intimacy in relationships with men? How could I pursue my interests in spiritual matters and still satisfy my need to love and be loved in intimate relationships? This has been a life-long quest, not really resolved even now. At high school, I found one or two teachers who encouraged my odd way of making images, feeding my curiosity for the ancient world, the Classical world and exciting new art styles that were breaking through more mainstream conservative culture. I read books on mythology, romantic poetry, the novels of the Brontes and Jane Austin and historical novels set in Britain or France in Medieval or Arthurian times. I had a passion for Pre-Raphaelite art and dressed in velvet with my long wavy blond hair. French Art Nouveau and the painting of Gustave Klimt transported me to a time and a spiritual landscape where I seemed to belong rather than the harsh Australian landscape. I majored in art and ancient history, the two great passions of my life, and followed on to art school and teachers college where my will to make art my own way got me into lots of trouble. The late 1960s and early 1970s gave us great music, drugs and the Pill and, as an art student, I had many opportunities to experiment. It was with a mixture of incredible naivety and often ignorance that I ventured into these experiments, often finding myself in compromising situations, but I did learn to push boundaries in my own psyche, to be open to visionary experiences or the boundless adventures of the mind and spirit as well as the body. After graduating as a high school art teacher, I began my adventures in the world away from my home town. My first teaching appointment was as the only art teacher in the western New South Wales town of Temora, north of Wagga Wagga. This was my first experience of living in the country. Along with a couple of other first time teachers, we shared a small cottage on a farm where we had a reputation for wild parties – sex, drugs and rock and roll – a little exaggerated. Here I spent many happy hours walking in the bush and through cultivated landscape. I felt a strong sense of connection with the ancient spirit in the land, trees, birds, Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 97 rock formations within this country that was essentially what Australia is about. But I did feel somehow out of place, that I didn’t really belong in this strange landscape, so alien to what I had read about or seen in art books or novels. While I could feel the power within the earth, the changing seasons, the trees and the stars, it somehow didn’t feel quite right. I made drawings of the landscape around Temora during this time, drawings that have a strange resonance with work I would do for the next thirty years, where my body and the land seem to merge. Image 1: “Narrumburra Hills, Temora” Pastel Drawing. 1974 The desire to be an artist rather than a teacher took me to Adelaide in the late 1970s, a time when Don Dunstan was Premier and the arts were flourishing. The art school in Stanley St, North Adelaide had a big reputation as one of the best in the country, so I enrolled in the Fine Arts Degree course, majoring in sculpture. Performance Art was an extension of sculpture where the artist uses her own body as the medium, pushing the boundaries of traditional work. This really fascinated me. Maybe it was the theatrical influences of my childhood that made me want to perform. However, I did make sculptural objects as well, mostly figurative and often as part of an installation in a gallery setting where I would also perform. At art school in Adelaide, I discovered the Women’s Art Movement meeting in a warehouse behind Rundle Street. Here women artists and students worked on Feminist issues to do with the female body, desire and sexuality, and ancient images of the Goddess. I responded to these ideas through the sense of my female body being one with the earth and the elements of nature. I discovered that throughout history in many world cultures, this symbiosis of woman and land was reflected in images and stories of the great goddesses or women of mythology. From my reading of philosophy and physics, I was also learning about the impact of cosmic forces like magnetism on earth energy, the tides and the human body, particularly female cycles. I discovered that a dualism existed in western European culture between the spiritual dimension of these forces and the more rational scientific position or in other words between rational (male) intellect and (female) intuition or empathy with natural forces. In a series of installations with ritual performance - “Instinct”, “Rationality” and “Spirit” at the Women’s Art Movement during 1978/9, I explored this duality. For the “Spirit” installation, I filled an empty room with purple mist and allowed people to wander through, to sit quietly and meditate on the nature of spirit. Photos were taken of participants. Image 2: “Spirit” Installation. Women’s Art Movement Exhibition Space, Adelaide. Dec. 1979 The Experimental Art Foundation at the Jam Factory in Adelaide during the 1970s under the guidance of Irishman Noel Sheridan, was a great Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 98 environment for many new ideas in the arts from all parts of the world. At the EAF, I was turned on to earth and body art installation and performance work that was happening in Britain and Ireland and other parts of Europe. Then in 1980, an inheritance allowed me to interrupt my Fine Arts degree studies in Adelaide and travel to Britain where I met up with other artists, writers and poets who were involved in the Earth magic, body art, spiritual focused scene, thanks to introductions from Noel Sheridan. For over four years, I just followed my instincts traveling around Britain, immersing myself in the sacred landscape of my ancestors, learning about Celtic culture and being part of the emerging Feminist Goddess Movement. I absorbed the spirit of the land of my ancestors, explored the contemporary art scene and participated in the creation of rituals that inspired my own spiritual path and art work. Meanwhile, I worked on my drawings while living this nomadic life, finding fellow travelers and making interesting connections that are still important now thirty years later on my spiritual journey. I even met German superstar artist Joseph Beuys and had an interesting conversation with him about shamanism and art. The Goddess Movement introduced me to amazing women, like Feminist artist Monica Sjoo, who helped me build on the sense of my body and spirit as part of the whole pattern of life. I was involved in a number of group exhibitions in UK and Europe with my drawings, installations and performance work. Inspired by my own spiritual experiences connecting with the powerful energy within the landscape of my ancestors, I also explored cultural history and mythology and what remained of the culture in more remote regions. The land, trees, animals, flowers, the sea, the sky and particularly the many islands of Scotland, all sang to me in a way I had never experienced in Australia. I felt that I had found my ‘true’ home. I lived mostly in Wales and Scotland, plugging into the network of people across the Celtic world that channeled the ancient wisdom in creative work – painting, performance, sculpture, music, poetry, film and literature. Living within communities of artists and crafts people, all with strong ties to Celtic culture, helped me to grow in my Celtic ancestral spirit and creative energy which is such a central part of my spiritual journey. We shared a spiritual focus that had grown from our own ancestral land and centuries of tradition shaped by the environment. Within this community, I discovered a ritual life recreated from the remnants of our cultural roots that helped negotiate the quickly changing and dangerous world we were living within in the late 20th century. In “Celtic Mandhala”, painted on the floor of a café in the town of Llanidloes in Mid Wales, over a weekend on magic mushrooms, I was inspired by the Celtic spirit within the sacred land of my ancestors as well as the experience of walking the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France a few weeks before starting this painting. I felt a strong sense of ‘belonging’ to this place and community. Image 3: “Celtic Mandhala”. Acrylic on wood (floor). Great Oak Café, Llanidloes, Wale 1981. At the same time as I was awakening to the deep spirit of the land of my ancestors, I also kept up regular visits to London which was very much a crossroad for new ideas and Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 99 people from other cultures. Exciting art shows, music, bookshops and public events and lectures gave me much to consider intellectually along with the direct experience of the sacred land itself. In Britain in the early 1980s I found many like-minded people trying to make sense of this resurgence of spirit in the land, ancient monuments and Celtic culture. These were people also experimenting creatively for contemporary ways to express this spirit within, or alongside, the more mainstream intellectual tradition. There was a lot of interest in the merging of spirit with some aspects of the academic world, looking at British ancestral wisdom alongside the wisdom of indigenous cultures from many parts of the world, such as Australia. During more formal studies within Druid lore with a group in London, I found a mentor in hereditary Irish Bard Geraldine Cash, beginning a strong friendship which was to continue till Geraldine’s death at ninety-seven in 2008. The growing sense of being part of my own ancestral sacred landscape made me consider more deeply the indigenous cultures of Australia. I began to consider how alienated so many European Australians like me are from awareness of the relationship between people and the sacred land. This awareness had been lost by those who colonized other countries so far from their ancestral roots. My work began to explore this duality between ‘being’ Celtic, feeling at one with my ancestral place and culture in Britain, and my present life as a third generation Australian born into landscape that is sacred to another culture. In 1983 I landed a job in the northern alpine region of Italy at the UNESCO World Rock Art Centre in Valcamonica. I worked on collating a ‘Who’s Who of World Rock Art” drawing from the work of those studying ancient and traditional rock art all over the world. When many of these people gathered at the Centre (Centro) for a conference, I had the opportunity to meet people of many cultures who were taking a more academic approach to understanding images and symbols carved and painted onto rock across the world, especially amongst indigenous people. Valcamonica in northern Italy is famous for the many sites of rock art with layers of images from Pre-History to modern day. These carvings show the development of imagery from ancient pre-historic times to Iron Age Celtic culture that flourished in this region of Northern Italy up to and after the Roman Empire. These images in Valcamonica bare a striking resemblance to Australian Aboriginal art and the ancient rock art I had seen in Britain and Ireland. I began to realize that these common images and symbols reflect human spiritual experience, regardless of historical time or outward trappings of the different cultures. Through the research of people I encountered at the UNESCO World Rock Art Centre, I was encouraged to follow my own interest in common points between symbolic carving on sacred stone monuments in Britain and Ireland and imagery of Australian Aboriginal culture. I realized I was onto something that had relevance to Australian culture in efforts to bring together indigenous people and European colonial culture in Australia. These carvings in Northern Italy offer the earliest evidence of human spiritual relationship to sacred place in European culture. Maybe there is a point of reference through these rock carvings in Italy, as well as in Britain and Ireland, where European Australians could begin to understand Aboriginal connection to sacred place in Australia. While working in Valcamonica I made an image of the sacred mountain called “La Concorina” (‘Conch Shell’ or ‘Vulva’) that looms above the town of Capo di Ponte. In local lore this mountain was said to be ‘The Mother’ while carved figures in walls of local caves are ‘Her children’. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 100 Image 4: La Co cori a, Valca o ica, Italy . Watercolour & Gouache on paper. 1983. Against my better judgment, I returned to Australia in late 1984, when I heard that my father had taken ill. Finding myself back in a place where I didn’t fit, I decided to try to find a connection to sacred land here in Australia. The most obvious place was Ayers Rock/Uluru, so I headed into the Central Desert to spend almost a year living and working at Uluru. The result was a series of brightly coloured pastel drawings in response to the incredible light and colour of the desert. From Aboriginal women in the Central Desert, I learnt much of the culture and their ‘one-ness’ with the land that is so much their own body. I talked to these desert women about my ancestral ancient British culture and traditions of relationship to land in UK and Europe. As a result of this communication with traditional people in their own country, I was beginning to understand how important the culture/land relationship is to feeling ‘within one’s place’ anywhere on the planet. From the wisdom of these indigenous women, I learnt better to understand my body as the earth here in my birthplace. Art works I made at this time reveal ‘feeling’ this notion of my body and the earth as one, here within the Australian landscape. Image 5: Katajuta . Pastel on watercolour paper. 1 4. A series of drawings made while at Uluru were presented as part of a major exhibition in London in 1985, alongside drawings of sacred sites in Britain. Image 6: “to ehe ge Pastel o watercolour paper. 1985. In a ritual performance on the Opening Night of this exhibition, I ‘drew’ on the gallery floor between and within images of Uluru and British sacred sites. Using my body, coloured paint powder and lengths of fabric, I wove and ‘painted’ a triple spiral pattern of the elements, Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 101 weaving together awareness of my place within the landscape of my British/Celtic ancestry my heart and spiritual connection, with the land of my birth as a third generation Australian. Image 7: Installation and Ritual Performance at Acme Showroom Gallery, London. 1985 Returning to Adelaide in 1986 to complete my Fine Arts degree, I also arranged for a major oneperson exhibition of my work at the Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery. This exhibition was a drawing installation inspired by the sacred site of Callanish on Hebridean Island of Lewis in a very remote part of Scotland. I had been inspired to make a drawing installation of thirteen large vertical pastel drawings of each stone that makes up the stone circle at Callanish, as well as a large 1.5 metre long drawing of the whole circle complex. The individual stones were hung in a circle formation suspended above the ground and lit individually to create a powerful atmosphere within the gallery. The Opening night of this exhibition became the focus for a cultural event for Adelaide’s Scottish community, with singing, dancing and poetry within and around the ‘Stones’. Image 8: “Standing Stones of Callanish” Drawing Installation, Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery. 1986 The stone circle at Callanish, is an ancient sacred site on a rocky headland overlooking a sea loch on western side of the Hebridean Island of Lewis. This stone circle complex of fifty-two tall stones focus on a sacred mountain in the distance. For five years while living in the UK, I visited the village and the stones at Callanish regularly every year and was privileged to learn some of the ancient wisdom of the place, part of my ancestral heritage, from the guardian of the site, Annie Macleod. From Annie I learnt that each of these ancient worked Stones hold the wisdom of the land itself. The layout of the Stones, in partnership with points within the local landscape, reveal our connection to the stars, the sun and the moon while traditional stories in this region give clues to cosmic mysteries. Astronomical events viewed from this sacred place have a particular focus on the 18.6 years cycle of the moon and the rising and setting of the Pleiades (The Seven Sisters). The rising and setting points of the moon over the 18.6 years period are indicated by the placement of the stones in relation to natural formations within the local landscape. The Callanish Stones have helped calculate the correct timing for the agricultural and ritual year for thousands of years for people of the Hebridean Islands, using phases of the sun, moon and star patterns including the Pleiades, to help the people and all earthly life to vibrate in harmony with the universe. This ancient sacred site has inspired ritual and spiritual journeys, art works, music and story for thousands of years in similar way to sacred sites within natural landscape in Australia . Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 102 As well as this major one-person exhibition at the Adelaide Festival Centre in June 1986, I also exhibited an installation piece in a group student graduate show in December 1986 at the ‘Union Gallery’ at University of Adelaide, to complete my Fine Arts degree. ‘Image 9’ shows this installation piece using ceramic forms, rope, pitch and sand and photographs. Inspired by the surface of Uluru, these forms reference its flesh-like qualities, talking about my sense of the land and my body as one. The piece also made reference to the dramatic effect of water running across the surface of Uluru after rain. These two major works – Callanish Circle drawings and the Uluru installation, reflected my continuing efforts to come to terms with my own personal ancestral traditions and the sacred nature of Australian landscape. Image 9: “Uluru 84: Adelaide 86”. Installation—ceramic, rope, wood, pitch & sand. Union Gallery, University of Adelaide. 1986 Image 10: “Arianhrod of the Silver Wheel”. Pastel & Gouache on watercolour paper 1992. After completing my Fine Arts degree, I moved to Aldgate in the Adelaide Hills to concentrate on my art and spiritual path work. In this environment, I was surrounded by many varieties of European trees growing alongside native vegetation. My first house was an old place built in European style, surrounded by oaks, beeches, elder and holly trees, drawing me back to the British ancestral wisdom and spirit. From 1990 to 1995, I exhibited drawings in a couple of group shows, work based on sacred landscape, Celtic Spirituality and mythology, along with works that went back to images of Uluru and the Central Desert, continuing the quest of finding a place for being Celtic within the Australian landscape. For most of the 1990s I taught Celtic culture and spirituality, ran courses and workshops on the quest for the Holy Grail and workshops on self empowerment for women using stories of women from Celtic mythology. In 1999, as a result of these workshops, I published a book titled ‘Creating Form from the Mist: The Wisdom of Women in Celtic Myth & Culture’ (Capall Bann UK). This book focused on how contemporary women can be inspired by the wonderful women of Celtic Myth & culture. One of my original drawings was used in the cover image for this publication ‘Arianhrod of the Silver Wheel’. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 103 Image 11: “Hiraeth: Earth” Pastel on watercolour paper. 1993. Image 12: “Hiraeth: Fire” Pastel on watercolour paper. 1993 For an exhibition at Prospect Gallery in Adelaide with Suzanne Redman in 1993, called ‘The Sacred Marriage”, I presented a series of drawings influenced by Alchemical symbolism and the writings of Carl Jung. For some years I had been a member of the Jungian Society in Adelaide and worked with a Jungian dream therapy group for two years. I was also reading work influenced by Jung, by writers such as Joseph Campbell, Marie-Louise von Franz, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Robert Johnson. I was looking at deeper spiritual meanings in mythology, along with psychology behind relationships between men and women. Holy Grail symbolism became an important influence in my art work produced at this time. Celtic symbolism, the Holy Grail stories and modern interpretations of the alchemical process, came together in my drawings for this exhibition at Prospect Gallery. I created images based on the four elements, earth, air fire and water, fusing Celtic patterns with alchemical symbolism, to create ‘maps’ for my spiritual path. Two images here presented are titled “Hiraeth: Earth” and “Hiraeth: Fire’. ‘Hiraeth’ is a word from Welsh language that describes the sense of longing for the past or for that which is lost, that longing for the Otherworld just beyond our grasp. The influence of working with Jungian psychology led to a desire to follow through some ideas and philosophical concepts that were growing from my own spiritual experiences and what I was reading. In 1996, I was awarded a Masters Degree in Women’s Studies at University of Adelaide with a thesis that took an overview of women’s spiritual experience in western European culture, with particular reference to the continuing pagan traditions of the Celtic world. Beginning with a general overview of ancient traditions of the Great Earth Mother in Europe, I then looked at what is revealed of women’s spiritual experience in pre-Christian Celtic culture of Britain and Ireland and contemporary Celtic spirituality. I devoted a chapter to the position of women throughout the history of the dominant Christian discourse of Europe and how some women managed to find a voice and imagery for their own female spiritual experience, while others were silenced. I then looked at the impact of the revival of the Goddess in the late 20 th century which allowed women to embody the Divine Feminine and speak of their own experience in their own imagery. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 104 In summing up my argument, I looked at the contemporary writings of Post Structural theorists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, in their deconstruction of psychoanalytical theory, particularly the work of Freud. I also looked at the ideas of Carl Jung and his followers with regard to how women can articulate the Divine Feminine using pagan imagery and stories from traditional mythology. The main point in the thesis was that I believe women actually experience spirituality in a very direct way – through our bodies and our direct connection with the natural world and all its forces and elements. However it has been difficult for women within western European culture, and the dominant Christian paradigm, to articulate their unique experience, except through symbols and imagery created by men. Pagan traditions, such as what remains of the Celtic culture in Britain and Ireland, can provide strong imagery and stories that give women forms with which to express their experience in a unique and powerful way, imagery that comes from a woman’s experience of the world and spirit. This thesis gave me a chance to articulate in words what had been driving my art work for so many years; my own unique spiritual experience as a woman in a woman’s body trying to find ways of working in close relationship with nature as part of the pattern of all life, using imagery that has its roots in my own ancestral Celtic culture. From 1994, I began leading tours to Britain focusing on sacred sites from Celtic myth, ancient stone monuments and Celtic art. I have always believed that those of us on a spiritual journey need to find our ancestral place, where ever that is in the world, to make that physical link with sacred place through our own blood. Once we do this we can then find the sacred in any landscape, where ever we find ourselves and know how to be in that landscape with respect. I think this is particularly important for those of us from a colonial culture. Honouring the ancestors and ancestral place, ours and that of other cultures, is central in all spiritual traditions. In Celtic Druid tradition, when we begin a ritual we first acknowledge the spirits and ancestors of the place where we stand. This is particularly important here in Australia where there is a living traditional culture of another people. In my experience we get clear evidence of acceptance or rejection within the natural forces around us when we do this. We then acknowledge the ancestors of our own family line, paying respect to the blood flowing in our veins, ’the Blood of the Mothers’ and giving gratitude for our life on the planet at this time. Then in acknowledging the ancestors in ’Spirit’ we connect with the spiritual tradition and teachers we work with now on our path. I led my first tour on ‘Celtic Culture in England, Scotland and Wales’ for WEA in 1994, mostly with people who had done my courses and workshops over the years. Then in 1997, I designed and led a tour of ‘Sacred Ireland’ which was very successful. Since then I have taken a group to Scotland to ‘The Sacred Isles’ for the Lunar Standstill in 2006 and a ‘Celtic Art’ tour in 2008. These tours, apart from being great fun, give me a chance to renew my own spiritual ties with the sacred land of my ancestors, visit old friends from my days in Britain in the early 1980s and to help other Australians make links to ancestral place. In 2010 I will lead another tour to Scotland, Ireland and Wales, titled “The Goddess and the Green Man”. Around 1997 I began to attend study sessions at Buddha House in Adelaide under the guidance of teacher Khensu Rinpoche, while at the same time continuing my Celtic spiritual practice. I found that there was some overlay in Buddhist philosophy and Celtic spirituality. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 105 Strong visual images within Buddhist practice helped me give form to some of the more elusive concepts now lost within Celtic spirit and culture. In particular, for me, the image of ‘Green Tara’, the female face of Buddha, reflects the Celtic ‘Brighid’, providing a practice with a very real image of female power who can work in a practical way in my personal life. Buddhism gave me a discipline through teachings and practices that supported my more personal ‘Otherworldly’ experiences within my Celtic path work, where there are only remnants of a once complex philosophy based in nature. At the same time, I continued to work with groups that followed the Druid teachings of Celtic spirituality and Western European Pagan traditions, which helped to keep me clear within my own cultural awareness. The shamanic qualities in Druid wisdom and Buddhism create an interesting balance with the more ‘earth bound’ ritual practice of pagan traditions and strong visual components of Buddhism. Then in 2001, I was diagnosed with cancer. This, of course, was a great shock and the following years have been focused on reclaiming my health and healing the emotional and spiritual issues that contribute to this disease, with the help of some wonderful spiritual healers and a fantastic supportive community of friends and family on both sides of the planet. This personal healing process has helped to uncover another dimension in my art work. Between 2001 and 2005 a series of ‘Goddesses” emerged in my art work. I believe these women were reflecting a stage in my healing process. One of the earlier ones was “Green Tara”, ‘she who clears away obstacles on the spiritual journey’. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 106 Image 13: Gree Tara . pastel & Gouache o watercolour paper. 2002. (This image needs a full page next to above paragraph – also cover image) Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 107 Image 14: “Goddess and the Green Man”. Pastel & Gouache on watercolour paper. 2005. Each of these five ‘Goddess’ drawings began from images in postcards or cuttings from magazines or newspaper articles that I had collected over the years. It gradually became clear that what I was doing was trying to define the many aspects of myself, within this battle for my life. While these women were quite confronting, their power coming from my subconscious, they all had something to teach me that would help me to survive, to heal and to thrive. ‘Green Tara’ revealed to me my strength and resilience. ‘The Green Man and the Goddess’ reflected the true nature of a long relationship with a man that had grown out of the love of trees and the sacred ancestral land, but was lost in romantic or sexual fantasies that could never be realized. Image 15: “Past: Future” Pastel & Gouache on watercolour paper. 2004. “Past and Future’ emerged during the time of my mother’s death. It reflected the troubled relationship with my mother, a woman who struggled through an unhappy life where she never was able to realize her potential. Whatever I achieved in my life only served to show what had been denied to her. I had the choices she never had and made a life she envied, while I never had her love, support or acknowledgement. Her death then was a release and allowed a new phase in my healing. After my mother’s death in 2004, I returned to Wales and found the house where her family belonged. While I was there, I had strong sense of having returned the lost spirit of one of my female ancestors. I knew that one particular woman ancestor had been torn from her land, against her wishes, to die of a broken heart on the voyage to Australia, thus generating a line of angry disappointed and heart-broken women. When I found her family house, I felt that I had brought her spirit home and felt the sense of that line of angry and hurt women now laid to rest. Wales has always drawn me in a very powerful way. Since first visiting and then living in Wales in the early 80s, I have always felt a strong emotional bond with the place – its green fertile hills and valleys, its soft, feminine landscape. But I have also felt the pain as well. I guess I was carrying the grief of that woman ancestor. Now I feel she is sleeping peacefully in the land of her, and my, ancestors, just as the disease in my body is now sleeping peacefully within my own ancestral blood – the “Blood of the Mothers’ Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 108 Leading a tour to the Western Isles of Scotland for The Lunar Standstill in 2006 gave me the inspiration to produce a series of works about being inside (the stone circle) feeling the power of the Otherworld within myself, while looking out at the sacred landscape of the ancestors. These drawings reveal a sense of being at a ‘gateway’ in my life and spirit journey. There is a sense that I am moving beyond what had held me in the past in a sort of ‘golden age’ that had begun in early 1980s with my first time living in Britain. My healing process was leading me through a threshold into a new cycle in my life, into new territory in my spiritual journey. However the thread of ‘sacred land’ and the Celtic ‘Otherworld’ is carried with me into this new spiritual landscape, through the ‘gateway’ into the unknown. Image 16: “Callanish Gateway by Day”.Pastel on watercolour paper. 2007. Full moon on 11th June 2006, the night of the Lunar Standstill, saw maybe a hundred people from Scotland, Britain and other parts of the world, gather together to watch this amazing event within and around the stone circle of Callanish on the Hebridean Isle of Lewis. From the stone circle we viewed the moon rising over the body of the Goddess Mountain, Sithean Airghid (literally ‘the Silver Maiden’, also known locally as ‘the Sleeping Beauty’). Then over a couple of hours the full moon moved up along Her body to drop out of site at Her head and then re-emerged a while later from Her brow. Local tradition says that at this time, which occurs every 18.6 years, the life force and energy of the land and all those focusing on the event will be regenerated. The stone circle at Callanish was built thousands of years ago to observe this phenomena, along with other lunar, solar and stellar movements, all viewed through the landmarks of the local environment. In 2006, the Lunar Standstill also coincided with the rising and setting of the Pleiades star group, the June full moon seeing the Pleiades directly overhead. The Callanish stone circle formation has avenues to the east and west which delineate the rising and setting of the Pleiades at Spring and Autumn Equinox. Image 17: “Ancestral Bones at Callanish” Pastel on watercolour paper. 2007. Throughout 2006, both before the trip to Scotland and on my return, I spent a lot of time with Ngarrindjeri people of the Coorong near Adelaide, learning about the star lore of their culture, which has strong Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 109 parallels with star lore in the Hebrides in Scotland. Sitting with these women of the Pleiades at the Coorong helped me to pull together teaching and wisdom learnt over many years, to complete a cycle to do with this sense of not knowing where I belonged on the surface of the planet – Australia or Britain. While at Callanish for the Lunar Standstill, I was able to ritually make links between the wisdom of the ancestors at the Coorong and the ancestors of my people in Scotland. After I returned to Adelaide, I was privileged to be invited to participate in a ceremony with the Ngarrindjeri people at the Coorong during the southern Spring Equinox in September. This ceremony was to do with the stolen bones of the Ngarrindjeri being returned from Scotland to their ancestral place here in Australia. This was a profoundly moving experience having a far reaching impact on my life and spiritual journey. It has allowed me to begin to understand that I belong where ever I am, with one foot in the mundane world and one foot in the Otherworld, simultaneously. This ceremony also made it clear to me that this understanding brings with it some awesome responsibilities. These experiences of land and spirit wisdom on both sides of the planet during 2006 resulted in a series of drawings that look through the gateway of the mundane world and the Otherworld, between life and death; day and night. Image 18: “Self Portrait with Guardian” Pastel on Watercolour Paper. 2007 A self portrait made during 2007 revealed my sense of self at that time of my life. This image shows the imprint of my ancestral place and its cultural patterns and my acceptance of the responsibilities I carry as an Elder within my own ancestral culture as well as across the world in the land of my birth. Here I am, in all my power and life experience, carrying the ancient lineage, with the protection of my guardian spirit companion, my cat Grianne (Celtic Goddess of the Sun), who guides me in negotiating between the Otherworld and the everyday mundane world. Image 19: “Ancestral Window 1: Scotland/Wales: Lobethal Bush, South Australia”. 2008 Digital photograph and chalk pastel on German etching paper Another visit to Scotland & Ireland in 2008, leading a ‘Celtic Art’ Tour, took me back to the ancestors once again to immerse myself in the more shamanic elements of ancient art work. The Pictish stone patterns in Scotland and stone carvings at Newgrange and Lough Crew in Ireland have much in common with imagery in Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 110 Australian Aboriginal art. The experiences of this tour resulted in a series of new works, part of a one person exhibition shown in Adelaide’s ‘Premiers Gallery’, opening at the Spring Equinox in 2008. With these large major works, I am reflecting a deeper level of awareness of my body and spirit being ‘in’ or ‘of’ the land. I am a Celtic Australian looking into the Australia landscape as both an observer and as one moving within the sacred land on a spiritual quest, a woman embodying the spirit of life and the land itself as women always have in every culture and in every historical period. Image 20: “Ancestral Window 2: The Rock of Cashel, Tipperary, Ireland: Rocks at Port Eliot, South Australia” 2008. Digital photograph and chalk pastel on German etching paper. While in the UK for the tour in June 2008, my long time teacher, mentor and friend in Celtic spirituality, Geraldine Calca Cash, died in her ninety seventh year. Her death passed on to me an added responsibility, to live the ancient wisdom of my own ancestral sacred land held within my blood and spirit as an ‘Elder’ and teacher of my own ancestral culture and wisdom. I know how important it is to pass on this wisdom, even while living within the sacred landscape of Australia, looking with Celtic spirit eyes. I will take up this challenge in the best way I can with whatever time I have remaining of my life. This new more confident vision, is placing me at the gateway to a whole new path in my spirit work, my art and my life as a woman of power and apprentice Wise Woman for the 21 st Century. The future is completely open as I live for a while down by the sea at Aldinga Beach, south of Adelaide and begin to work on landscape/seascape paintings of the beach here as well as paintings of the mountains of Scotland. A home near the sea in South Australia has taken me back to my childhood experience of lying in bed at night listening to the sound of the sea as I go to sleep with the moon on my face, while dreaming of sacred landscape of oaks, rowan and hawthorn trees, standing stones and Celtic patterns in Scotland and Wales. Still crazy after all these years. Lynne Sinclair-Wood Aldinga Beach, South Australia January 2010 http://www.lynnesinclairwood.com/ Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 111 A Fairie Path to Eco-Femininst Spirituality Judith Haines Today I believe that my spiritual existence began before notions of time, before the seasonal cycles arranged themselves in the flows they now follow and before human beings took a place on earth. For me reality is spiritual, without breaks, ruptures or hierarchical divides, perceptions of separation or distance between realms is a manifestation of consciousness in the process of human beings with the function of mind and thought. So I am never separate from the vast flow of life that is spirit and I trust that all life in all time holds and activates knowledge in consciousness of spirit. My earliest experiences of a spiritual energy in life began very young in my sense of wonder at life itself and an awareness of the life that makes up the spaces between the things and events that we call reality. The secret lives of animals and plants, fleeting expressions on people’s faces and the myriad, complex and simple dramas playing out behind the social presentation of selves around me and inside me. Of course as a child I rarely articulated my own way of engagement with the world but I instinctively knew it was important for me. One hot summer night when I was very young, about five or six years old, my parents, grandmother and an older cousin decided we should all go to the beach. As we approached the sea my cousin who was sitting with her arms around my brother and I began singing the popular song of that time ‘Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket...’ Her spontaneity and wistful celebration of the present moment caught and ignited my spirit and while she sang quietly the night sky, the sounds and smells of the sea and the soft warmth of her arm all drew together inside me in a way of knowing the world as magical and mystical. This experience stands out in the beginnings of my awareness of sacredness in everyday life that could be held and touched with or without permission and from the focus of my own senses in the life around me. Like many families my family struggled with its particular set of problems and I experienced my own distress from an early age. With that universal gift of childhood it was my engagement with the wonder of life, of an inherent beauty and serenity flowing through all places and situations that nourished and strengthened me. Long days and long summers playing in neighbourhood gardens with friends provided a world where nature, balance and quiet were possible and the discovery of all the unimaginable quirkiness in the world....that creatures like frogs live much of their lives in the soil, that free roaming chooks leave clutches of eggs in tall grass and that fairies mostly love to live in moss houses. And all these moments, games and discoveries always overlooked by the ever presence of the bluest skies. My sense of wonder was my response to a vibration and resonance of a vast sensibility or consciousness, charged with an electric kind of energy. This was my unarticulated sense of a force that was conscious and sensible that was larger than the lounge room, the neighbourhood, the world of human toil and its perplexing events. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 112 My closest childhood friend had the strongest influence on my early spiritual unfolding and imagination and now at the age that is called middle life I see that her influence is just as strong as I consolidate what for me holds spiritual meaning. Perhaps her influence was in unlocking doors and windows in my imagination, mind and heart ... she was a child filled to the brim with a rich, fully developed spiritual and imaginative culture of her own and she seemed almost driven to impart her fascinating and elaborate systems to her friends. As one of her closest friends I was fortunate to share her energy, imagination and attention for long periods of time. Apart from my ethereal sense of wonder I felt like a blank page and impoverished in lived expressions of meaning, so we were the right combination as friends. We formed a special bond and friendship and were each other’s confidants. Jenny (a name I have made up for her) took it upon herself to teach me about the fairies and their special brand of magic, that they loved the natural world and particularly flowers, that they gathered, danced, played and sang among roses and in shaded secluded places in gardens. I learned that fairies live in a kingdom that overlaps human reality and that human beings had mostly lost the ability to see and interact with them. If we made a conscious effort to communicate with them and befriend them they would move closer to our awareness and we could develop our ability to see them. Jenny taught me that those unusual, fleeting sights and sounds in gardens, nature and quiet places were the fairies going about their business and sometimes trying to communicate or catch our attention. We built fairy houses by carefully lifting moss patches in the dark shade down the side of my family home. We installed minute pieces of furniture that we’d made from sticks, leaves, berries and stones and placed flowers around the entrances to encourage the fairies to take up residence. It was important to look after fairy homes even after the fairies had moved in so that they would want to stay close by. I learned that one way to communicate with the fairies was by writing letters in their own formula of invisible ink. This ink was made by placing a jar of water under a rose bush for at least half a day and asking the fairies to add the special ingredients that would make it visible to them. Writing a letter required paper that had some attractive or special quality for the writer and was to be written in a secret place favoured by the fairies. When the letter was written an envelope needed to be made and addressed and sealed with a fairy kiss. Fairy letters could only be posted in remote, hidden places accessible to small light creatures that could fly. Much time was spent locating such places and actual posting of letters always involved precarious climbing, scraping and maneuvering and usually some form of minor injury. These cuts, scratches and bruises had the quality of blessings and honour from the fairy realm and were borne with pride and wondrous curiosity. Summers were spent in these enchanted adventures interspersed with games and activities focussed in the more mundane world. As we began to grow beyond childhood these games and pursuits receded into our own mythological background but the experiential charge of realms and potentials beyond everyday life had become part of our personalities. While we moved toward the requirements of the adult world, Jenny and I maintained a shared consciousness of reality extending beyond the bounds of material substance and exclusively human projects. Jenny was eighteen months older than me, and this I think, added to her pedagogical role in our relationship. So when she began attending Sunday school and church when I was about Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 113 eleven I soon decided that I should do the same. As usual I was encouraged by her fascinating way of describing the things that interested her. Attending Church and Sunday school was the beginning of my experience of the world beyond family, home, neighbourhood and school and I was fascinated by this new culture. Movement into the wider world was the beginning of diverging paths for me and my close friend. Jenny quickly became devout in her Christian beliefs and I noted a sense of suffering and burden that coaleased around her new faith. I was interested in the teachings in services and in Sunday school lessons but now I was learning and experiencing spiritual meanings in a manner and time frame of my own, apart from Jenny’s. I felt no compulsion to take up new ideas or beliefs and very happy to let them wash over me and explore whatever impressed itself as meaningful for ongoing reflection. I was also very curious about the social and cultural dynamics within this world. I remember a sense of disappointment at the one dimensional format of the church service and vague boredom in the discovery that each service was delivered by one of a small group of men, in dark suits who told the congregation what Christianity meant and what we all should do and believe. I recall confronting disbelief in these lay preachers while remaining engaged with exploring Christianity for myself. Stories of ancient times and events and the mystical aspects of this system held my interest and curiosity. A lot of my time in church was spent watching people and my strongest observation was of the docility of the congregation overall. Even at that young age I sensed a kind of ruse, that people were play acting against their will, going through the motions of something that provided benefits outside the teachings and the hall of the church. I detected a type of defeat of the human spirit in this expression of faith and so ultimately could not connect it to faith as living and animated experience. Along with this amorphous comprehension was an even vaguer sense that faith did not have to be expressed in this passive and controlled way. After a few months of attending services my sense of ambivalence met my sense of insincerity in continuing there so to I decided to stop attending services and continue at Sunday school. With this decision came the beginnings of a sense of my spiritual displacement in this environment. I could not imagine a time when I would be able to invest myself in this culture as a young or full adult. Though I was still mostly unable to put into words the feelings, thoughts, instincts and processes I was experiencing, in hindsight it was the overall replication of social order inside the church to that outside the church that did not inspire hope or enthusiasm in me. In Sunday school in the backrooms of the church, women and sometimes young males tutored us younger ones in the stories and principles of the bible. We usually sat in small circles and everyone was encouraged to participate in discussion. I enjoyed hearing the opinions and questions that others had about the stories and people of the bible. In this more inclusive context Christianity seemed more alive and relevant to me. When I was twelve years old the Sunday school held a summer camp on the south coast. As well as the camp leaders who were our Sunday school teachers, some young people in their mid and late teens attended. One evening after dinner we had a meeting of religious instruction followed by a testimonial session in which some of the teenagers and teachers told the stories of how they became Christians which meant accepting Jesus as the figure and Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 114 being who would ensure their spiritual survival and wellbeing. While listening to the testimonials I felt something powerful and beautiful move inside me that did not seem entirely of me. I had an experience of mystical grace that was involved with what I understood about Jesus and this included the simplicity and loveliness of the people present speaking so openly from their hearts about a sacred energy in their lives. I was learning that this energy which the church called power is always present and simply needs to be opened to and engaged with. After the meeting had ended I decided that I wanted to keep this awareness and this relationship with the divine being that I understood to be Jesus. I talked about this to one of the teachers who I admired and felt close to and she gently offered guidance and told me about some of her experiences in faith. This experience was and still is important to me and today still holds the radiance and vibration of a quality of love that over time I have sought, explored and gradually begun to understand. The other event that remains firmly in my memory from this camp was that I almost drowned while swimming around rocks in the sea and was recovered by one of the older boys. Although my experience of spiritual opening had altered my perception of the nature of life, divinity and of myself, my unease in the religious environment at church did diminish. In fact my spiritual growth made me more uncomfortable in the church environment. The disparity between the meaningful relationships and activities within the Sunday school and the cold, almost theatrical performance quality of church services and wider culture was becoming irreconcilable. The inclusive atmosphere generated towards children in the rooms at the back of the church stopped abruptly at the church door. In the organisational space between Sunday school and church numerous question marks hovered and slowly became larger. I certainly don’t remember identifying that most of the women in the bible were problematic or just simply bad but an overall ethos and atmosphere of divisiveness became repellent to me. By about the age of fourteen I could no longer find any reason to continue attending church. While my friend Jenny became stronger in her faith and more strongly involved in the church, I turned away and unconsciously and temporarily suspended my views and opinions about religion and belief. But on deeper, mostly hidden levels inside myself, my impulse toward spiritual life and clarity continued. As I moved toward adulthood I invested myself wholly in the material and emotional aspects of existence: work, friends, boyfriend, popular culture and plans to marry. I needed these areas of life to fulfil all my needs and at times this need had a pitch of desperation that I would become aware of. I knew something was amiss and I periodically felt out of balance within myself and with life. Without wider knowledge I continued on as best I could and thought my bouts of floundering were a normal part of adult life. My submerged spiritual awareness and activity rose to the surface unexpectedly from time to time and although it interested me, I simply did not know what to do with it. I regarded it with a vague sense of distrust, identical to the distrust I felt towards the church. So I would hold them at a distance and observe them like unusual flowers from a strange place and then put them aside and carry on. I had no skills or knowledge for understanding how to integrate this aspect of myself into my life as a whole and no sense that this might be a desirable course to take. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 115 When I was seventeen, I spontaneously wrote a poem that surprised me. I didn’t understand the content of the poem and wondered where inside myself it had come from. I found it comforting and disconcerting at the same time. The poem is as follows The prophets play all day, all day they’ve heard a word but never say. They’ve seen a star and found the way and greet the king who never stays. On chosen nights I hear them still I feel them come and go at will. As from life’s cup I drink my fill the prophets count each drop I spill. Yet to the trees I feel so bound they grow me up and drop me down to a warm moist bed beneath the ground where I can hear God’s every sound. The first two verses of the poem seemed self-explanatory, expressing my disillusionment with my exploration of Christian religion and even deeper doubts perhaps with notions of institutionalised religion. But the imagery, language and themes within the third verse were completely unfamiliar to me and seemed to come from somewhere outside myself although I felt moved by their clarity and strength. I was unaware at the time that I was writing my future as well as reviewing the past. A collapse of boundaries of timeframes within creative process later became a feature of my song writing when lyrics I didn’t understand at the time of writing them would later take form in an area of my life. Decades after writing this poem I can see that the last verse was not alien at all, that threads of continuity were not only surviving but were also developing inside myself. I now recognise these threads in my childhood absorption in the natural world and the small but powerful deity like creatures that traverse both spiritual and physical realms. I also believe that these threads of meaning and the content of the last verse of the poem are about Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 116 my experience beyond this life, perhaps past life or even parallel life. I think that the Western construct of time and existence is mechanical and linear, it suits social organisation and focus on the material world. I believe reality is more fluid than this. It is significant to me that I have remembered this poem without having a written copy for four decades of my life, although I remember there were originally four verses. The other experience that was important to me as I approached adulthood was an image I saw in the state between sleep and being awake one night when I was nineteen years old. I saw a large hill in a countryside scene. At the top of the hill was a warm glowing light and up the edges of the hill the people of all the religious and spiritual denominations and sects of the world were ascending in rows of their own faith and meeting and becoming one group together at the top. When I saw this I realised that the impulse to faith is something that human beings share and that the form faith takes need not divide people. From this picture I experienced awareness that spiritually it is important for human beings to identify and celebrate their shared humanity, that this in itself is a significant spiritual goal. This experience may have come about from my learning eastern transcendental meditation when I was eighteen. I didn’t feel that I had much success with meditation at that time as I was mentally scattered and overactive as a young person and was unable to come anywhere near stilling my mind. I was taught that persevering with mental distractions was one of the primary tasks of meditating but I found it too frustrating at the time. In retrospect I didn’t allow myself to be a learner in many things because I thought I had to get things right quickly or I had failed. But something about the philosophy and practice of this form of meditation resonated with me as being organic to human spiritual growth and health. Three friends and myself learned transcendental meditation from an Indian woman who had recently arrived in Australia. I was also drawn to the more spiritual orientation of our teacher’s culture and felt very fortunate to receive her philosophical and spiritual knowledge and wisdom. Many years later I meditated daily for ten years, returning to the practice that I had learned when I was eighteen. This time I persevered with my restless mind because I believed my wellbeing depended on it. Entering into adult life began a course of personal developments and changes that led to several distinct turns in my spiritual development. I married a few days before my twentieth birthday and at that time and for years before and after, music was my spiritual experience, although I did not use the word spiritual then. Music was my greatest passion and it was the place in which I found most personal meaning. I had loved music since early childhood and started writing lyrics and melodies at age eleven. I experienced music as a world where human beings could contribute to and co- create reality and that here I could have more choice about what my reality would be. Having struggled with depression since pre puberty, I engaged with music in part as an escape from the challenges of life that I felt unequipped to meet. But my main pull towards music was the expansive potential that it possessed to enter into, explore and express areas of experience not articulated and acknowledged in everyday life. Later when I worked in music I read that music is the key to heaven. Although I didn’t believe in heaven in the Christian sense of the word, I immediately knew that for myself this statement was true. In that moment I gained insights about myself, my love of music, and the nature of music that seemed mysterious and strangely powerful and my understandings of these notions have continued to unfold ever since. This statement and my response to it Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 117 returned me to a deep almost lost knowledge that there is much more to existence than the material world and its projects and struggles. The failure of my marriage brought about a crisis of meaning and direction for my life. I wavered between despair and a sense that I was starting out on a long and winding journey, in which I was meant to find a way to live and be that held integrity and creativity. While I was pursuing a bachelor of education I formed a friendship with a college librarian who felt I should meet his partner as we had a lot in common. I invited them to visit me at home and that began a friendship that changed my life completely. My new friend was in the process of exploring feminism and was becoming involved in the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement. I was familiar with some of the foundational principles of feminism having been introduced to them by a woman I had previously worked with. It seemed like a logical and interesting thing for me to do, to explore new horizons for women. This was in the mid nineteen seventies and I headed off to one of the early Bloor Court meetings. I was nervous and shy and while I listened to ordinary women talk openly and honestly about their lives, struggles and desires I was riveted in the knowledge that I had found my way into something truly revolutionary, important and necessary. I became involved in the movement straightaway, although beginning with small steps. For two years I participated in feminist activism, in the planning and carrying out political actions, rallies, marches and demonstrations, co-writing feminist articles in Liberation, Adelaide’s feminist newsletter and working rosters at Liberation House, a drop in, information and meeting centre for women and the movement as a whole. At the same time I was a member of a feminist consciousness raising group. Although we were a diverse group of women from different backgrounds and with differing personal goals a basis of mutual respect made our group strong and I found the trust and safety there to learn and grow beyond what I could have imagined for myself. In this group and in wider friendships and networks in the women’s movement I learned how to think critically about existence and the world, beginning with analysing deeply the ‘givens’ of the culture and society I was part of. I remember having conversations while living everyday life that stopped me in my tracks and shifted the bedrock of my intellectual, emotional and psychic being. I developed a passionate love and loyalty for all the women engaged in this monumental activity and task, including those I did not agree with or resonate with personally. This passion and loyalty abides today and I celebrate it and nurture it when I reconnect with women that I lost contact with in those transformative times. In this human revolution I learned that the personal is political and the political is personal across the entire spectrum of human activity, that a person’s personal information and agency is a part of their own power, integrity and wellbeing that is deserving of respect. I learned for myself that respect for others at this level is the basis of non-violent and life affirming existence, to interfere or intrude in the sovereignty of others is where social and personal violence begins. Inclusive in this notion is that I deserve this care and respect from myself and that such a consciousness of personal and inter personal interaction is empowering both personally and socially in a simultaneous and accumulative dynamic. I grew up in the nineteen fifties in an era and environment where resentment and dislike of women was thinly disguised and often not disguised at all. Several years ago I made the Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 118 realisation that my involvement in the feminist movement and my own empowerment from my commitment to liberation from patriarchal domination was the beginning of my spiritual growth as an adult. Feminism gave me my humanity in providing the tools for my deliverance of myself to myself from political and spiritual exile. Feminism gave me a path from the margins of human existence where women had been relegated in post war Australian society to a consciousness of redefining what society could be and my place in it. When I began to define myself as a feminist I quickly added Marxism to my selfidentification. Mostly I resonated with Marx’s care for the conditions that human beings work in and live by. I could readily see the concern for human justice in his ideas. When I understood the materialist principles underlying his theories I was able to embrace them too as I had seen for myself the divisiveness and domination of people by the everyday politics within organised religion. In a desire to have things neatly and clearly defined and demarcated I automatically discarded my personal experience and perceptions of a spiritual aspect to life. Claiming and respecting deeper levels of my being were to come later in my journey. While I found my personal-political identification empowering at the time it placed me psychically and intellectually in a position that took an immense transformation to evolve through. Throughout the nineteen eighties I moved through a long reflection of the nature of existence generally. While my commitment to feminism was unwavering it became obvious that there was more involved in understandings of justice and reality than could be explored and negotiated by political and philosophical frameworks. At the same time I hung onto my position that existence is wholly about the material and physical. So I trawled through a long period of what often felt like psychic and intellectual wasteland. Though this time coincided with periods of existential despair I later found that none of this process was futile and that my opaque questions were creative and powerful questions. During this decade within the labyrinth occasional signposts appeared that pointed to what would become a path of meaning for me. Not only was this path to be meaningful intellectually but it included healing and finding a sense of wholeness and connection with the wider world with our historical and contemporary challenges. For me the process of revolution and transformation were to become translated into all the deeds of being. About halfway through this period I experienced an epiphany one-day when I was alone and in my usual state of contemplation. I saw an image of the universe as if I was way out in space and able to look at, around and beyond individual planets and galaxies. I saw planet earth in harmonious interaction with the other planets, stars and galaxies of the solar system. Then my perspective slowly moved back so that I could view the universe surrounding the solar system. Because this image and experience occurred as if I was actually there in outer space with that particular perspective it was sensually and spiritually extraordinary and filled me with a sense of awe that felt innocent, gentle and powerful at the same time. I then looked back at planet earth with an awareness of the enormity, in human terms, of life and reality. With that awareness came a realisation of my own personal size, position and dimension in all this immense creation. Instead of feeling like an insignificant speck I was flooded with a wondrous and comforting feeling of complete belonging in all this great mystery. I experienced a deep understanding that if all this space, stars, specks of dust, whirlwinds, Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 119 planets and galaxies belonged here in their particular states of being then I belonged here too in my own way. I grasped an appreciation of the dance and ultimate harmony between uniqueness and unity that gave me a sense of all being well in the larger scheme of things. I believe that this epiphany was a beginning of spiritual reopening within me, like a heavy door that had been jammed shut for a long time and had somehow creaked open again. Although this was an uplifting and unique experience, I still had a long way to go before that quality of peace and wellbeing would become part of my life. I continued to experience depression and was beginning to give up hope of ever living without it. While visiting a friend one evening she got up to get something from another room in the house. As she walked past me she suddenly stopped and stood silently for a few moments. Still looking ahead she said to me that my problems are spiritual problems. We were both amazed by this experience. The word ‘spiritual’ wasn’t a part of either of our vocabularies. Although my friend seemed to have some psychic abilities she had never responded in this sort of way before. Throughout the nineteen eighties women began to publish books exploring topics of feminine deity, archaeological findings of Goddess religions and figurines and records of ancient cultures in which social inclusivity extended to both male and female representations in pantheons of gods and goddesses. I was fascinated by these studies but my interest was from political and cultural perspectives. I was intrigued that such discourses of the feminine as powerful, influential and divine had been completely omitted from traditional Western knowledge, culture and consciousness. The last remnants appeared in classical Greek mythology and even these have been found to be patriarchal reconstructions of earlier and more influential deities. I became interested in what else might have been lost, buried, and submerged in our cultural background. I sought out studies of cultural reclamation and learned that modern Western society rests on the denial of great violence done towards women in past times and on the destruction of valuable cultural forms in which women played important roles. These roles included healing, the arts and spiritual and community leadership. These studies made my feminism even more relevant to me and I now felt identification with women across many centuries. This area of learning brought changes to my orientation to ideas of justice and I felt new commitments anneal themselves within me that bound the realms of politics with spirituality. While I navigated these new internal and external landscapes my lifelong depressive illness led me to a crisis point. I found I could no longer patch together ways of ‘coping’ with life, and the energy it took to contain and control the grief of early life trauma simply ran out. My personal reality crumbled and I had no idea what to do about anything. I simply moved from day to day following my nose as to what was right action to take. From the early stages of my illness I felt a belief that there must be something in this world that could help me. I would think about how clever and resourceful human beings are and I would then think about my enduring belief in mystical, unknowable forces moving simultaneously around and within humanity. I hoped desperately that in that mix of extraordinary energy and consciousness something would exist that would heal me. Directly before this crisis I injured my back and had to lie flat for two weeks so that it could heal. A woman I worked with visited me and brought a thick book for me to read. ‘This will keep you occupied for two weeks’ she said with a certain gleam in her eye. The book was Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 120 The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a light but purposeful story centred on the women of early English spiritual mythology. The story pursued a legend of the ‘grail’ that connected it with a divine feminine symbolism. This book was the right medicine for me at that time on many levels. Because it was well written in a lighter tone it did keep me interested and entertained. But it also wove together the threads that I was discovering for myself of the role that politics plays in spiritual and religious developments in human affairs and how this role is not limited to the material, physical world but is part of a greater unfolding of a divine reality. Another outcome of my back injury was my chiropractor advising me to learn and practice yoga for spinal health maintenance. I took his advice and from my first yoga lesson another level of transformation began. In my first class I remember experiencing a revelation on a sensual level that my mind and my body were connected and that they were meant to function in communication with each other for my wellbeing. I felt as though some sort of trick had been played on me, and that everyone else probably knew these very basic things and I had missed out on this vital information until now. This was such a wonderful discovery and it gave me hope that I was finally approaching or even on the right track Several days after my first yoga lesson people were asking me what I had done because I looked so well and seemed somehow different. Now I know that the ancient practices of meditation and yoga are two of the worlds best kept secrets. Not because people don't know about them but because in our fast, rational, consumerist society people cannot grasp that health and wellbeing can be largely achieved with our own bodies and minds. If I let my yoga practice lapse and then start again one of the first things I notice apart from physical flexibility is how mentally and emotionally fit I feel and much lighter. While positive developments were slowly coming into place a larger process involved with my depression and lack of a sense of meaning was beginning to eclipse everything else in my life and I found myself in a state of inner collapse. Although it felt life threatening for some time I understand now that this collapse was actually a process of health. It demanded that I open to new and different ideas and that I give up many habits of attitude and lifestyle that I took for granted. But before I found constructive ideas and direction I floated in a twilight land not daring to hope for anything. During this time a friend who I hadn’t seen for awhile visited me and told me about a group she had stared attending for spiritual growth and healing. My friend was struggling with some of her own problems and I was very interested in the fact that she was moving in a spiritual direction. Spiritual topics and interests were not a usual part of her experience. Over coffee she told me about some of the difficulties that led to her decision to try this group and she described a little of the format and principles that the group functioned by. While she talked a slow, gentle and clear realisation occurred to me that this was what I also needed to do. It was a spiritual sensation and it felt like the sun coming up at earliest dawn. I got the details of the group from my friend and she was happy for me to go along with her. When my friend left I felt stunned and dazed for a long time. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. Something told me that this made sense because it was the last thing I would consider left to my own devices and I knew I had to move right out of my usual range of commitments Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 121 and interests. I was stunned that in the course of a conversation I had moved away from my materialist position and the more I considered it the more comfortable I felt. On later reflection I identified that my move to a materialist stand was in part politically symbolic, I wanted to make a stand against the betrayals of organised religion. But my experiences and awareness of a mystical, spiritual quality in life were left unexamined and unresolved to my new loyalties. In the psychic power of that cultural era I threw the baby out with the bath water. I was now aware that in reclaiming this part of my existence I could become a person very different from how I had been so far as an adult. This seemed both strange and desirable at the same time. I felt a need to give myself some time to adjust to this shift and development and I decided that I would go to the group in two or three weeks time. I waited and contemplated my planned move and over the course of the following three weeks I developed a firm assurance that this was very much the appropriate thing for me to do. So off I went with my friend into an unknown world. I was used to feeling strange in a negative way but here I felt very strange in a positive way. I had thoughts like ‘You’re very vulnerable now, you could be drawn into something unhealthy...what if these people are part of a seductive cult and I don’t find out until it’s too late?’ But I sat down and adjusted to a paradox of everything seeming weird and very real at the same time. I found the group nurturing in a non-interfering way and I soon understood that many there had been or were in a similar crisis to the one I was in. I felt as though I had found a spiritual hospital and I was in the emergency ward. Once I established that I was in the right place I felt safe to drop the huge, messy, unwieldy bundle of unresolved grief I had been struggling with for so long. The sheer relief I experienced over the following several months from the release of this weight was health giving in itself. Along with relief came the realisation that I was going to have to make a big effort to heal and grow and that the effort required was spiritual. I was still amazed that my life had required such a turn and I knew without reservation that if I did not attend to my spiritual wellbeing there was unlikely to be a future for me to consider. So I made a resolve to do what was required. I felt that I needed to establish a focus through which to reclaim, explore and strengthen my faith and my sense of my own spirituality. I contemplated my early childhood faith in the Christian god and in Jesus but their associations with patriarchy, violence against women and religious institutions made this course impossible. I felt that I was experiencing my need for spiritual renewal in an exciting and creative social era and felt empowered that I could shape my spirituality entirely in a way that is meaningful for me. For some time I thought about my own feminism and what this now meant to me in a spiritual context. I increasingly returned to the Goddesses I had been reading about, whose ancient and now contemporary images I could see in books and in the social worlds I came into contact with. I decided one day that it was appropriate for me to have a feminine deity for my spiritual focus. This choice has not wavered in the past sixteen years and has provided spiritual context for pursuing and examining many issues and projects that are important and life affirming for me. I do not believe that deity or divine consciousness is gender or sex specific or even resembles human representation. I made this choice for personal, political and spiritual reasons and today I believe there is no real divide between these categories. For me a focus on Goddess imagery and mythology provides a powerful and empowering means of Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 122 healing from the harms I have incurred and continue to incur because I am a woman. It is a way of increasing and strengthening my care and loyalty to myself and to all women by projecting into my life conceptions of women as having reverential status. My focus on feminine deity helps to overturn in my own psyche the inferior status of the feminine and of women that I learned as a child and that society continues to generate. My political reasons for focussing on feminine deity are to project notions and images of the feminine and of women as being sacred into the social world and to contribute to the social movement of inclusion of women and feminine deity into social conceptualisations of spirituality and religion. My wider spiritual reasons for focussing on feminine deity is to help counteract the overwhelming imbalance of male centred energy that has been generated on earth in the reign of patriarchal politics which includes male centred religions. I believe that this imbalance contributes to an atrophy of the human functions of compassion and empathy that allow disregard for social suffering and need in economies that govern human beings, in warfare and widespread violence and the crisis in environmental health. I believe that the reinstatement of a consciousness of feminine divinity and of women as sacred is crucial in achieving harmony for sustainable life on earth. In now believe that all of life is divine consciousness so that everything is Goddess or God or both and that these are names we have made for divinity. My faith is in immanent divinity, right here and everywhere. I believe that everything exists in a vast flow of energy that is conscious and that I have my part in this, therefore I along with everything else am divine. I desire for my divinity to be respected and I respect the divinity of everything and everyone else. I particularly like the potential for egalitarian interrelationship in this conception of sacredness. My explorations of Goddess mythologies, systems and religions has brought me to a earth based spirituality that embraces the earth and the universe to which we are related as spiritual home. This form of cosmology holds similarities with numerous indigenous belief systems and helps generate identification with and care for the environment as being alive spiritually and as being family. My belief that I am part of a sacred wholeness has helped heal much of my early sense of disconnection from life and gives me experiences, symbols and a language of meaning that I was previously unable to find. Continuing my practices of yoga and meditation and learning new practices such as chanting are all harmonious with my earth based, holistic beliefs. My spirituality is a journey of study, exploration, reclamation and action. A part of my journey is the search and reclamation of the belief systems of my ancestors and a major part of this project is centred within the British Isles. In this study Celtic systems are an important part. It adds to my sense of meaning that my search has led me back to the fairies and to an enchanted natural world. For me this is not an entirely ‘fluffy’ or childish endeavour, although the child who is alive inside me gains great joy from it. Today my re-engagement with the world of Faerie is partly concerned with expanding my environmental comprehension of existence and reality. I am exploring an idea that what my ancestors understood as an enchanted world with magical beings was an old and deep awareness of a Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 123 mystical conception of eco-systems, of the subtle energies that make up the connections between all things, and that ultimately all this is spiritual. In returning to the beliefs and practices of my ancestors with an open mind I am making a path to my own indigeneity. It occurred to me several years ago that most western peoples do not have a conception of their own place and culture of ancestral origins. Many like me feel bereft by the absence of a deeper culture and pursue reconnection through the compilation and study of family trees. I am more immediately concerned with the spiritual trees. For me it is important to articulate my journey as partly concerned with my indigenous heritage. I can then take my place, even if still obscure, among other culturally enfranchised peoples and feel that I have the personal power and blessings of my own roots. Secondly my engagement with cultural reclamation gives me empathy with indigenous peoples who struggle to maintain and reclaim their cultures and builds compassion and respectfulness in how I go about learning from different cultures. Another reason that it is important for me to articulate my search as one for my indigeneity is because my ancestors suffered similar trauma, abuse and eradication of culture hundreds of years ago as those suffered by indigenous peoples today. The consequences cross culturally and across time are similar. Despair, apathy, restlessness and turning to compulsive behaviours to fill the void of meaning appear to be common human responses to breaks, ruptures and disconnections of cultural heritage. Laying blame is not the purpose of my focus but gaining wisdom and perspective is. My practice of exploring cultural heritage as spiritual practice is connected to my concern for the environment and the fairly new, or is it reclaimed, knowledge that diversity is strength and survival and that human culture cannot be separated from the environment and its health. As in many indigenous traditions I believe that establishing relationship with my ancestors is empowering spiritual practice and has overall life affirming benefits. This practice resonates with my holistic spirituality and worldview, which directs me towards community building and conscious sustainable living practices. One main outcome of my spiritual path is that it places me cosmologically to embrace the joy of living. This is not only beneficial for me but I believe that it energetically enhances the quality of the world I am part of. Another outcome of my spirituality is that it has led me to academic research in spiritual ecology where I can further explore my interests and ideas in depth with others. Enjoying a rich spiritual life has not removed problems and obstacles from my path but it has improved my health and wellbeing in many cumulative ways. Having a sense of meaning and purpose is one of the spiritual gifts I value highly. Having faith in the natural flows of life is slowly teaching me that ‘trust’ in its myriad necessary contexts is possible. I recently learned that in order to survive some people find it necessary to exclude thriving and I was a victim of this unconscious adaptation to fearful living. Establishing spiritual roots is providing me the stability and courage to take risks to be more of what is possible for me. Occasionally I am harmed in this process and sometimes I cause harm but I’m no longer shut down by the messiness of living. The unfolding potentials I am experiencing are beyond what I could have imagined. As I continue in faith I am more and more aware that the purpose of my energy and potential is to contribute to the sustenance of the gift of life. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 124 About Judith Haines Judith considers herself fortunate to be exploring her main interests of human spirituality and the politics of human agency. Some of her other interests include poetry, art and walking. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 125 Confessions of a failed pastor Jude Noble “You keep going round and round the mountain, even though there is no guarantee you ever get to the top”, is the way a friend described her vision of life to me. Initially I was a bit taken aback, but afterwards I could recognize this as rather a useful metaphor. On reflection I realised that I had to let go the belief that experiences in life “just happened” and were separate events. It was a growing awareness that there are recurrent themes in my particular journey of life. At least now I’ve also let go the notion that there is any “top” to reach, and acknowledged that it’s a process, or journey, which is by far more interesting! So where to begin? In some ways nothing of particular significance leaps out at me. Just layers on layers…until it begins to unravel and my awareness grows of how I began to make my own meaning, and let go the meaning that I’d taken on from family and social training. The first layer: If I start with how it feels when I think of my childhood I’d say that there are Indigo children and there are invisible children. Like many young families post World War Two, mine was fairly typical. How do you survive such an upheaval, such loss, such angst, and not be scared of the future? I have a photo of my dad holding me at my christening, I was probably 18 months old. The look on his face reflects such mixed emotion; bewilderment, fear, some kind of pleasure, but also concern. Most of my life with my parents was framed by their focus on their own mental and emotional survival – perhaps having children was what society demanded, but most likely it was not what they really wanted. My father never placated the demons he carried from his own upbringing. On one hand he was haunted by the figure of his own father who he tried to make completely invisible through omission and lies, particularly concerning the circumstances of his death. This grandfather had died before my father married. As I later uncovered, following the suicide of dad’s younger brother, grandfather had also suicided. This was a very different death than the “heart attack” story dad told my mother. So on one hand there was / is his buried shame, and on the other his adoration of his mother who held the family together following grandfather’s death. She ran a corner grocery store, and it felt like her values and need for security drove my father for most of his life, and continue even now in his mid 90’s. I guess initially I underestimated the influence of our Scottish Presbyterian heritage with its Calvinist slant on justification through works rather than grace, and its focus on form in religion and the benefits of the tangible world. My mother also colluded both with this view of our family history as well as it values, possibly both to placate my father and keep the peace, as well as ease to the separation from her own family of origin, and her angst at that family’s own internal conflicts and divides. Like many children, my sister and I learned to define ourselves in reactivity to our parents. Whatever the drive that led to us to choose to be born to emotionally unavailable parents it felt like a tightrope that we learned to walk with the balance wavering between a fierce independence, and, particularly in my case in my early and mid years, intense loneliness and craving for intimacy. So much for obvious psych profile! The second layer: If my parents confused me, I know I challenged them! It didn’t help that from early on I was already quite “left field” for my parents. They had struggled with my introversion and “bookishness” in primary years. When I worked myself up to telling my Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 126 parent that I wanted to be a priest when I was about 16, I remember that revelation being met with shock both at this “papist” notion as well as the usual unspoken rider of “Good grief! When will you grow up!” I’m not sure what I had hoped would happen by sharing that self revelation, but it certainly didn’t survive the family critique. I should have realised that in a family that abhorred any emotional self exposure this personal revelation would be dealt with like an infectious disease, as an aberration to be addressed through the quarantine control of ignoring the fact that it ever occurred. Where I even got the idea of being a priest from is vague, even to me. Wherever it hailed from it certainly was in contrast to my background in Christianity 101 that I learned at the local country Methodist church. When I tried to express this vocational desire to the local minister I was met with a similar shock and dismay. Now I understand the very gendered view he held of who could and couldn’t minister at that time, but then the advice offered just to wait and continue with study felt more like a subtext message to stop fantasizing and find something else to do. Perhaps I did have a romantic view of spirituality and ministry. Perhaps the symbolism I absorbed and delighted in from the poetry I read in my senior high school years – the poetry of John Donne, Dylan Thomas, Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The passion implicit in phrases like “Batter my heart three person God” or “Praise be … for dappled things…” had far greater emotional resonance than what I was offered elsewhere. Internally I believe I understood that “priest” represented a way of interfacing with the “greater than” and the promise both of a pathway that might answer some of my questions and a role that would have both given permission and encouragement for me to actually have a spiritual focus as a life path. I had lots of questions – I wanted some answers, and no poetry book or bible class was giving me what I wanted. Even when life later went astray and I didn’t have the internal strength to pursue this goal, there was still a hope inside that kept me going, “there has got to be more to life than this…” I guess, bottom line, I really didn’t believe that the path of domestic bliss or the great Aussie way of life on offer was really all that exciting. . By the time I reached my early twenties I was very skilled at emotional suppression and was quite toxic. Like most young people I was ruled by my emotions, and was also equally unskilled at naming and processing those emotions. A Reverend Mother I knew rightly called that age “the roaring twenties”. The winds and storms seemed overwhelming, rising up from who knows where, and at times all consuming. A deep seated sense of loneliness and low self worth fuelled the depression that underscored those early years. Whatever its roots, whether I learned how to “do” depression and suppression from my moody and controlling father or whether I grew it from within, it certainly hurt with the intensity a dear friend aptly named “the rat bite.” I could feel it gnawing away while I hid behind a mask of a smiling face. The “happy” persona that I enacted became a protective tower that had to be tumbled so that I could move on in this life. When I first encountered the Tarot and the image of the “The Tower” it seemed so apt. Ah the drama of youth! Thank goodness I can laugh at it now. I am still bemused and at times amazed, at how what might be considered cherished beliefs are actually inculcated during our impressionable youth without our awareness. I remember with some sense of shame and a tinge of despair that for years I clung with so much ardor and assertion to the inculcated family / tribal beliefs without any awareness of a need to reexamine them. This acceptance was born, no doubt, from a deep desire to belong, Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 127 to fit in, to be acceptable – ah, bottom line – to be loved. Yet I feel also a kind of elation that somehow inside me a mechanism was operating that piece by piece enabled the pedantic thinking of my early years to be challenged, and finally thrown down from its apparently impregnable position of power. It allowed the protective tower to fall in the flames of a socalled “nervous breakdown”, thankfully not as a suicide, although I frequently toyed with the idea, but with the kind of crash and burn that enabled the promise of new possibilities, like a phoenix rising. So slowly, ever so slowly I began to learn to uncover my own meaning… On reflection it’s a pity I didn’t hold onto my insights right from the very beginning. Maybe it was weak to turn for guidance elsewhere and succumb to what was valued more in our society. The strong connection I felt for the energy moving within the trees, and the water was relegated to “just loving nature.” Maybe the Christian enculturation began from browsing the theology books on the bookshelf stored in my bedroom, left over from my father‘s youth when he tried to be a Presbyterian minister, and influenced me to try to become one of the converted. In my teens I did the “born-again” Christian thing – which interestingly left a bitter after taste. It certainly didn’t help me to fit in and be part of something larger than myself –actually it taught me the diversity of, and shades of grey between the various denominations – and that much is just “churchianity” rather than Christianity. It also showed me that all religions have a cultural overlay, and that this overlay doesn’t equate with spirituality although it often masquerades as such. I also learnt that for most people socially it is preferred if this kind of interest is not too overt! Maybe my psyche was trying even then to shatter the cocoon of conformity in which I continually tried to wrap myself. No doubt I confused myself even more, trying on one hand to fit as an evangelical protestant Christian, and then in my spare time visiting Catholic churches fascinated with the “forbidden” imagery and symbolism of saints and Mary, all wrapped in an alluring rich smell of incense. I remember the secret allure of the Passionist Fathers at Glen Osmond as I wandered the grounds and explored the Stations of the Cross spread through a park made up of a beautiful mix of olive and gum trees, a setting that resonated with a part of my inner landscape. Maybe because we moved house and interstate between New South Wales, South Australia, and Victoria every few years with my father’s work I struggled with the usual childhood angst that comes from regular dislocation. Since I longed for security it’s not surprising that this became equated with the formal structures of religion. Even if I had known about the Jungian concept of the shadow at that stage, I’m not sure it would have dawned on me that my fascination with religious form was only a glimpse of the underbelly of the beast, and what I really craved was connection – not just with friends but also the context and locale in which I lived. Instead I nurtured disconnection and lost the flexibility that might have enabled me to grow me up in all parts of my being, physically, emotionally and mentally. My response to my external insecurity was in becoming quite internally focused. As I mentioned before, at school I lost myself in a love of the feeling of “words”– poetry in particular, and felt seduced by the lushness of the sounds that created words. I could relate to the notions in Ursula Le Guin in the Earthsea Quartet that knowing the name of something gave you control over it. As I desperately wanted to develop balance and have some sense of control over my emotional sea of storms, the idea of being able to name what was going on Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 128 became important, as I might then be able to change it and not be held to ransom. At other times when reading certain books like A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engal, or Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White the word expression and ideas took me into places where my sense of self as separate became blurred – where the boundaries between self and ‘other’ were thinned. I found this both troubling and alluring. On one hand I felt like it put me in a kind of dissociative state, and on the other that it gave me access to some other kind of truth about the world. At that point I didn’t understand that the process of dissociation was a gift that could assist me in creating a gap between my conscious limiting mind and my subconscious. It was like the compound pictures that you have to stare into with unfocused eyes to see the image within. The power of the trance state as a positive resource that could help me to access a deeper level of healings and my intuitive self became apparent later when I studied some of the many different ways that are available to work with the conscious and subconscious mind such as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Neurolinguistic Programming, as well as trance and body work, using Alpha, hypnotherapy, EMDR, kinesiology, guided imagery, and meditation. As the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson expressed it, people will seek therapy because they are out of rapport or out of touch with their subconscious mind, which was very true for me in both healing myself and becoming a therapist. So what begs the question for me when I look back is why did I lessen the value of the love and connection felt in the wonderful lessons in nature? As a fairly solitary kid growing up in the 1960’s on the outskirts of Adelaide in what was then the market garden for the city, I regularly played on the edge of the Torrens River water catchment area. Although Adelaide is now a desperately dry town I remember my play area as one of lush green reed banks, and paddocks thick with gum and olive trees, creating their own synergy. It felt as if when I reached out to them they allowed me into their embrace. There were clouds of Wanderer butterflies that flew up at my approach. The waves of lorikeets, and rosella greeted me with their strident cries. The pools of water in the river shared a tranquility and peace. All these anchored me to this area of the Adelaide plains, Kaurna country. I had a game that I hunted along the river as one of the early Aboriginal inhabitants of this region, although deep inside I knew that was one game I mustn’t share because I “knew” it would create an angry response. At that time I didn’t know why I never saw an Aboriginal face in my very white world – this was the days of the white Australia policy, with Aboriginals confined to the missions, unable to travel without the passes that let them become “honorary whites” for the time of travel, a second class people in their own country without the right to vote. Yet all around us in our neighbourhood and at school were “the others”, the multi-cultural mix of families of migrants, with their amazingly different customs and foods. who settled as economic and political refugees from the cold war which had continued in Europe after the Second World War. At times I wonder if I developed a sharper awareness of our unspoken social mores from contrasting our “Aussie” upbringing with the difference I saw in my Dutch and Persian and Polish best friends. Whilst my world was being shaped by the efforts of emotionally unavailable parents attempting to create their version of normalcy following the war, the lives of my friends were equally shaped by all that they brought with them as they fled from persecution and war. How can anyone make sense of all that hidden pain, be it parents or my Italian or Croatian or Austrian neighbours? My sense of disconnection was not helped when I joined the army at 19 in an attempt to appease my parents. Although I had won a university scholarship after high school they seemed to want to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone, to have me get a “real” job Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 129 instead of wasting my time studying, and to get me to leave home. Going into the army was my last act of formal compliance – not that I didn’t continue to comply to their emotional demands after that! The army had a high value for them even if, for me, it was a very toxic environment. I landed in a world of conscripted soldiers at a time when Australia was trying to decrease its involvement in the Vietnam War. I had my own divided loyalties which deepened my depression and muddied my thinking as I struggled with being a fish out of water and the prevalent culture of alcohol abuse in the barracks. My values took a beating as I vacillated between dating the Vietnamese officers training on the base and attending protests against nuclear testing in the French Pacific. It was all going pear-shaped, so the army and I had a less than amicable parting, which enabled me to flee overseas, first to France, and then to Great Britain. I had toyed with living in religious communities whilst living in barracks. What followed was a year in the very beautiful south of France in a tiny Protestant community called Pomeyrol, and a two year stint in the cloister of an English contemplative community so that I actually had a reasonable taste of religious life and, of course, discovered that once again formal religion was not a path for me. Two things stood out. Firstly I remember asking Reverend Mother, perhaps a tad piously, “How do I pray?” to which she responded, “If you didn’t know you wouldn’t be here!” It may have been a truism but that fuelled my agenda whilst I was “enclosed”… It became a private agenda to seek answers from some of the other nuns and from the writings of the church fathers, particularly those in the Greek and Russian tradition who favoured a more contemplative or heyschatic approach… Since all this was new to me the transformative approach in prayer resonated with experiences from childhood. I interpreted the experiences of the likes of St Seraphim of Sarov that, as in the image of the transfiguration of Jesus, there was the real possibility that the so called sacred and profane – the flesh and the spirit – were not energetically separate. One infused the other. It’s a shame that, at this point, this only fuelled my confusion as to how to juggle the notion of a god “out there” with the power of the imminent sacred energy present in all things. I secretly also had to admit I still couldn’t figure out where Jesus fitted into the Christian notion of the Godhead, except as sacred teacher, and one who had experienced that boundary-less awareness of the sacred. Even later when I studied the concept of the Trinity, the Spirit seemed a more dynamic and pervasive expression of the energy that quickens life than the personhood of Jesus, who continued for me a human figure person who had been deeply transformed by intimate engagement with the numinous or divine. I speculated that if we were to follow a similar path of engagement or union potentially we could also assume the title of “son” or “daughter” of god. Through this I came to understand prayer as a energy work – a process of aligning heart, mind and spirit with the sacred energy or divine intent, rather than a beseeching of a distant deity for a daily list of Christmas presents. As I tried to practice the basics of meditation I recall one dark candle lit night in the chapel becoming aware of myself as being like an onion… no, not the sharp aromatic in taste and evoker of tears! but I saw myself as having many layers and no rigid core. Layer by layer I realized I had the experience of emotions but I was not my emotions. I had feelings but I was not my feelings. For the first time I was able to take a healing step away from the notion of a fixed self and become aware of how I caught myself up through self identification in labelling those feeling, sensations, experiences etc as “me”. The second thing the stint in the convent did was encouraging me to argue for a woman centred approach, even before I had heard the label of “feminist.” It was the 1970’s, but I Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 130 consciously hadn’t heard the “F” word. Living in an environment dependent on the approval of ecclesiastical power and spiritually dependent on the availability of a male priest to say the daily mass proved a catalyst for my politicisation . As the priest we were given was usually elderly and often ill and living externally to the community I couldn’t fathom why the Reverend Mother couldn’t take on the roll of offering daily mass. As for our attempts to live out an ascetic life style mimicking the poverty of St Claire, who had actually lived in a far more balmy Italian climate than our poorly heated, damp English accommodation – my body threw a pink fit, and I spent many months sick with whooping cough. At least it got me out of the early 5am stint at the office of Matins!... Although the ethos of the convent touched my heart, I was incensed by the inequity of the gender linked injustice. Still, if all I gained in the process was a fascination with St Francis of Assisi and the experience of falling in love with one of the professed sisters then probably it was a time well spent. My growing feminism aside, it was inevitably the latter that blew my little coracle out of the water and officially ensured that I could no longer fit in certain circles! So I fled into the embrace of a “nervous breakdown”, and now homeless and rather unwelcome on Britannic shores I was encouraged to return to Australia to the equally unenthralled embrace of my parents. That led to several years of a fairly itinerant rural existence where I found myself exploring different approaches to regain my health. I’m not sure if it was the vigorous form of shiatsu which left my physical self bruised, but pushed through my emotional armoring, seeking the Tao through the writings of John Bloefield, learning Shamata meditation or “calm abiding” which is designed to stabilise the mind & emotions, being in a Buddhist gompa on the windy hills outside of Dungog in New South Wales, reading New Thought authors like Joel Goldsmith, or releasing the idea of a Christian heaven as a destination and embracing the notion of rebirth, but I began to spiritually grow up. My understanding of my mentalemotional body which had been as shallow as my understanding of my physical body slowly evolved into a mind-body awareness. It was all about becoming awareness – waking up! Why hadn’t I realized that before?? So that’s it in a nutshell. It felt as if there was an inner drive or impelling that, whenever I tried to find safety and refuge in conformity, some inner energy would pull me towards another way of thinking or being. I am certainly not labouring under some allusion that my life is somehow special. Above all it has reflected the social context of the 20th century! I am very much part of the times in which I have lived – influenced not only by my family life but also by the influences of a rapidly changing world, even though we live as if we are the centre of our own small universe. When I went to Europe and England, it was certainly not “le grand tour” of cultural exposure so much as an attempt to find my spiritual roots. I “got culture” on the way – an enriching of my interest in history and an immersion in local community that still influences me. I visited Stonehenge and Glastonbury, yet hadn’t yet learned of Findhorn. I felt the spirits of those who died in the blitz bombing in Coventry, and the Byzantine sacredness of Les Trois Marie de la Mere in Provence. Yet my world had already begun to shrink when I sat in my high school classroom and watched Buzz Aldrin & his fellow astronauts bounce around in moon dust. My innocence was definitely lost in the fear of nuclear fallout as the infamy of Maralinga was revealed and with the arrogant testing of nuclear warheads at the Muratoa Atoll in the Pacific. The sexual mores of my peers were certainly influenced by the availability of the contraceptive pill. And on another emotional level I learned from those Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 131 around me the effect of PTSD and alcohol abuse amongst service personnel as a response to the war trauma of Vietnam long before it became a very public health issue. After I returned to Adelaide from my “grand tour” I shared my life for a number of years with a friend who was convinced that there were hidden rules that kept being changed. It was kind of a cosmic conspiracy. I was never clear how these “rules” that governed our lives and dictated how things were meant to be, could be uncovered. At that stage of my life I didn’t have any answers myself. I didn’t know what the “rules” were either. My depression was rampant and I was still hoping that there was a “truth” out there that would unlock things for me. So, whilst overall my engagement with Buddhism has proved the most formative and liberating of the various pathways that I have encountered, it is the idea of presuppositions that I encountered when studying Neuro-linguist Programming (NLP) in Adelaide in the 1990’s with a woman called Jill Fisher that gave a hook on some of the mental games I’d been playing. It clued me in to the trap about “ rules”. NLP was developed by linguists Grindler & Bandler (The Structure of Magic Vol 1 (1975). For those who haven’t encountered NLP, the neurological processing part focuses on bodily senses and the way they affect behaviour. This physiological component showed me the strong link between the mind and body that is expressed through behaviour. The linguistic aspect explores our verbal meaning making as we express our sensory experiences. I definitely related to the notion that we have a tendency to live life in patterns and through learnt behaviour, which is referred to as “programming” (a word which nowadays can have unfortunate overtones). Not that I “got it” in my initial exposure during that year long course…. but I did learn that there was no “One Way”, no fixed answer. Fortunately it also registered that my best learning had been experiential. I’m certainly no candidate for instant ‘enlightenment’ and, despite my slow assimilation, it is fortunate that insight has proved cumulative over time! Certain situations link in my mind with different ideas, and have offered a key, or a clue, that have helped me deal with some of my life’s questions, - to wake me up – hopefully be more authentic – less “acting out of child” and above all, to enabling a reconnection with inner self – helping me grow into my skin that for years had seemed to be a rather poor fit. Presuppositions are a set of key principles, although there is some variation in how they are described, and no one claims these guiding principles are “true” or “universal”. They are called presuppositions because if you begin by pre-supposing they are true, then you discover what happens if you act on them. If life is about fixed beliefs then that’s what you get. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again then you keep getting the same results. I could so relate to that!! Therefore the ability to change depends on whether you want to change – and I desperately did - so, that proved pretty liberating. One of the well known NLP pre-suppositions is “the map is not the territory”. I don’t know why that was such a hard one to unpick. For instance it took years for me to register that just because in certain Protestant traditions “The Word,” which is actually the compiled series of writings they call a bible and which is placed in central position of the communion table, was only a map. It described a possible journey. Not the only journey. It didn’t have to mean it had to contain my lived experience. Later when I formally studied theology to get a scholarly overview of Christianity I again became very aware that it is easy to engage in a kind of Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 132 filtering which encourages you to place the writings over your life to find meaning, rather than place your life over the writing – of no matter which tradition you embrace. The Buddha described the teachings as a raft which, once used to cross the river, could be left behind. When in my mid 40’s I went to Theological College it was initially an exciting place of conversation and discovery. Later when I got caught up in trying to “make use” of all my study I became part of a doomed rescue mission to “save” a small congregation from demise. I tried resuscitation for five years as their pastor. Although it was a congregation content with status quo, and turned inward so that it died from “failure to thrive”, the community it seemed had also made the mistake of confusing the map with the territory. Later I indulged in self blame for this demise, although it was not from a lack of effort, or failure of imagination. It became apparent that the closure was not a matter of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but a question about the place of formal institution in people’s lives. Do institutions become purely a place of meeting and socializing or is it a place which reinforces prescribed beliefs (often dictated by the status quo), or do they function as places where people touch base to spiritually grow and thrive? It was also challenging to attempt to question the investment made in the security of Sunday School beliefs which had become quarantined both from questioning and relevance to daily life. That reengagement with “institution” brought me in a full circle to once again question the seductive warm fuzzies that can be proffered as “spirituality”. If “the meaning of your communication is the response you get”, which is another NLP presupposition, then I sure got the message! When I was a child and young woman I know I felt powerlessness and a victim in my life. Although I realise I actively engaged in creating its form, I also know I felt cut off from others, and my fear based way of living limited my social skills. There is another presupposition that the natural state tends to wholeness. Maybe my early filtering of experience through the lens of dislocation encouraged deep seated loneliness and a feeling of not belonging. Yet it also fostered an understanding that I, as a human, could not and did not hold a special unique place in nature that placed me apart from the larger context of the world I lived in. This never left and later I really struggled with the whole JudaeoChristian notion that just because I was human I was part of a power group which could be granted a divine mandate to dominate, control – and essentially collude to destroy natural environments. I continued to be fascinated with those times or situations when it felt like the boundaries – or barriers – the walls between – thinned, and I glimpsed another “higher” or wiser part of myself and world spirit through this a connection. The link that I felt with trees created aspects of my inner landscape. I had a sense that I could, if I could only let go sufficiently of my separate sense of self, (self as watcher and observer) – I could enter into the bark and sap of the trees around me and feel the life force pushing inside of them - not deliberately invasive, but through reaching out a tendril of my being to join with the other. The psychologist reading this may no doubt label this as just another dissociative experience, yet unlike dissociation which decreases the ability to intimately relate, this seemed to pull me towards a sense of a deeper connection. In that state my sense of self expanded, and the demarcation of ‘tree’ or ‘rock’ as separate or alien from my spirit was erased. Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 133 I grieve a bit that I did not see this as a skill to be cultivated in my earlier years and that, for a while, I lost it altogether when I let my simple pan-en-theist way became overlaid with the trappings of “faith”. Christian layers of sin and guilt and the need to be “saved” only disconnected. When I finally let go the effort to connect with a God ‘out there’, and reconnected with my own agency, things began to regain balance. Possibly one of the most common mistakes with religion that I fell into was the false belief that someone else’s pathway can be your pathway and that salvation has “been done for you.” To actually believe that you don’t have to do anything, just “trust,” whilst quite seductive initially, becomes soul deadening. I learnt that everyone has their own journey to make, and that no-one could “save” me; I had to accept self responsibility for everything, including spiritual growth and transformation. And so it continues, the ongoing journey of meaning making, and the realization that, for me now, there is no “spiritual life” – only life lived in spirit. About Jude Noble Rev Jude Noble is a retired interfaith minister who has worked in the community and health sector for more than 20 years in a diversity of roles. Whilst formally trained in theology, pastoral care, nursing, and counselling, she also has an eclectic education in a range of energy therapies and is currently undertaking formal training as a hypnotherapist. The challenges of life combined with her inner searching for meaning have expanded her understanding of spirituality and the universe in which we exist. Her involvement with women centred spirituality and the daily practice of Tibetan Buddhism in her life have influenced her liberal Christian path, adding to her own unique understanding of herself as a spiritual being. The experience of living in both rural and city settings has further influenced Jude’s spiritual expression and connection with the energies of the earth. Jude can be contacted at ancientspirits7@yahoo.com.au Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 134 Women Journeying with Spirit ©Editors: Deidre Michell & Jude Noble 135