25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008 Volume: 18 Issue: 2 Cricket ...

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Volume 18 Issue: 2 25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008 number of Anglican missions, who, despite a reputation for being an authoritarian mission superintendent, played a key role in uncovering the Forrest River massacres, leading to a Royal Commission investigation. Loos also offers a more nuanced picture of Aboriginal responses to missions, one which points to their active agency within the considerable limitations imposed on them. Some indigenous people discerned something of value in what was being offered and made choices about how they would engage with that offering. Loos shows this especially by tracing the history of Aboriginal leadership within the Anglican Church, from early leaders like James Noble, through a range of lay evangelists, to significant milestones such as the episcopal consecration of Bishop Arthur Malcolm as the first Aboriginal bishop in the Anglican Church. He also points to the more recent Christian revival at Yarrabah, led by Aboriginal people, interpreting their experience in ways that make sense to them, despite scepticism from some white Church people. For some indigenous people at least, Christianity and mission history ‘is not an aberration in their experience; it is as central as the Dreamtime.’ One point that Loos refers to only in passing requires further development. This is the area that philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan calls incarnate meaning — the meaning of a person or group or way of life. Mission studies tend to focus on two areas: the verbal communications of missionaries (what they said in their catechesis and preaching); and the social structures of mission life (how missionaries controlled indigenous life, as in the prohibition of local languages and rituals, or the creation of dormitories which separated children from their families). But for all ethnocentrism of the verbal communications, and all the destructiveness of the social control, there were also the missionaries themselves — their presence and the relationships they formed with the people. At various points, Loos shows the deep respect indigenous people had for at least some of the missionaries — people who lived with them for long periods of time, who maintained contact and relationship with them, who shared the hardships of mission life, who persevered with little support from their own churches and culture, and who gave witness, in fragile earthenware jars, of a treasure they wished to share with indigenous people. The tragedy, of course, is that these same people undermined this reality by various forms of collusion and paternalism. This book, though, ends on a note of hope, as Loos outlines the growth of a ‘black church’ in which, out of a most ambivalent history, indigenous people emerge with a desire to continue to engage with Christ and to share his Gospel, not simply with their black sisters and brothers, but with the wider Australian Church and beyond. ©2008 EurekaStreet.com.au 28
Deep spirituality underlies gay Catholic’s activism BOOK REVIEW Terry Monagle Michael Bernard Kelly, Seduced by Grace: Contemporary spirituality, Gay experience and Christian faith. Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan Publishing, 2007, website . The essays assembled in this book are passionate and prophetic. Kelly must be a man of courage. He undergoes the personal struggle to reconcile his own deep faith with being proudly gay; he then commits to the struggle of achieving a right to an accepted presence for gay people in the church. Volume 18 Issue: 2 25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008 Kelly came to prominence within the Catholic Church in Australia, most noticeably, for his part in organising the Rainbow Sash movement, and its contentious attempts to receive communion from bishops in cathedrals. From 1998 he has been the movement’s writer, spokesperson and co-convenor. These essays are both strongly personal narratives, and the proclamation of a manifesto. In some sense he is not alone. ‘Liberal’ Catholics have an habitual deep frustration with the managers of the church tradition to which they have a powerful sense of belonging. Women, in particular, have felt marginalised and patronised by the clericalised Church. Kelly experiences this, but not only does he find incomprehension for his point of origin inside the church, he also finds incomprehension from many outside the church in the mainstream gay movement. ‘Why would you bother?’ is their challenge to him. This guy is not going to win, you think. You wouldn’t volunteer for this role, this multi-focal isolation, unless you were both sincere, generous and prepared for loss. It makes you think of prophets like Jeremiah who knew they were on a hiding to nothing, and begged God for leave to resign from the cause to which God had conscripted them. Kelly says, ‘There are few precedents in Church history for what we are trying to do. This is a radical experiment. It is not surprising that the Churches are unnerved by ©2008 EurekaStreet.com.au 29
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Page 25 and 26: 2008 up and rolling EDITORIAL Micha
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25 January 2008 - 1 February 2008 Volume: 18 Issue: 2 Cricket ...

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