Pope invokes ’spirituality of the land’
Chris McGillion 16/7/08; Chris McGillion is the course coordinator for undergraduate journalism and a senior lecturer in print journalism at Charles Sturt University. He is a former senior journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and remains a religious affairs commentator for that paper.
The following is an edited extract from an article that appeared in Eureka Street, April 1995, following Pope John Paul II’s visit to Australia in January 1995. In January I wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that the Papal Mass at Sydney’s Randwick racecourse was the most significant religious event in this country in the past 200 years. It owed this significance to the inclusion of the Aboriginal smoking ceremony in the liturgy. This introduced a distinctive Australian spirituality in which reflection on the physical environment could lead Australians to a deeper understanding of who they are and what it means to live a moral life. Brought together here were the barest threads of a spirituality in which the physical environment becomes available to Australians not merely to adorn their religious ceremonies, but to instruct their religious life. What I had in mind was that the bare threads of this spirituality needed to be woven together into a well-tailored garment through further theological reflection.
See: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=8137
Tags: Australia, Christianity, WYD