We are doing to ourselves what we have been doing to our Aboriginal
people for the last 200 years.
We are destroying our cultural and spiritual heritage with
cynicism and scorn.
Story is the front door into that great interior mansion that we furnish with the memories and metaphors of our lives. It is where we explore our own reality, and the reality of those we encounter on the way.
It is the place where we explore love and fear, success and failure, identity and purpose and our hopes and dreams. It is where we discover empathy and compassion, freedom and healing.
It is a place where the longed for ‘ideal’ can negotiate with an often-harsh ‘real’: where the ideal can begin to have its sway. And much, much more!
It is the mansion of our spirituality: our personal and communal ‘container’ of all that we are.
In a very real sense, it is the place of our Dreaming, the place where our personal and communal experience of living influences our present and informs our future.
When we literalise and rationalise our stories, attempting to turn them into history or science, we strip them of their transformative and sustaining power and run the risk of making them objects of ridicule.
We stripped our Aboriginal people of the place of their Dreaming with the introduction of a Christianity trapped in literalism and the desire to change all into itself, and now an equally aggressive and literalistic rationalism is doing the same to us by subjecting our stories, our dreaming to scorn and ridicule.
Our personal and national morality and subsequent behaviour is formed in story and metaphor, not in the short-lived process of our intellect.
If I ask to the young offenders with whom I work:
‘Johnny, is it wrong to steal a car, or rob a house or hit someone so hard that their life is destroyed’?
All would answer Yes!
Good Johnny, Out of jail you go!
The prisons are full of Johnnies!
If I ask a politician:
‘Is it wrong to tell lies and deceive the people for the sake of gaining power’?
All would answer yes!
Good Polly, promotion to party whip for you!
Politicians lie and deceive for the love of power. Read the news.
It’s an age-old problem. ‘I do not understand my own actions’, wrote St Paul. ‘For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’. Displaying a level of honesty that most of us would find difficult, he might as well have been speaking for the entire human race. Marlene Cohen: The Divided Self
The life time work of integrating the ‘Divided Self’ is done more in the mansion of our spirituality, and less in the political focus group or ethics discussion group.
This familiar old story from the American Indians takes us into that mansion in a very powerful way, presenting each of us with the great question of life, How do I live?
An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life...
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.
"One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.
"The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
"This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"
The old chief simply replied,
"The one you feed."
The Spirit of our Nation -
Of which we are all a part
Learn it! Love it! Live it! Write it!
By
Giving Respect - Expecting Respect
