by Dominica Roebuck.

I am sitting in the domestic departures lounge at Sydney airport, about to jump on a plane to outback NSW. I’ve just travelled from Mparntwe / Alice Springs, where I spent two weeks volunteering at ‘Campfire in the Heart’, and attending the ‘Beholding Divine Beauty’ retreat, facilitated by Judi and Paul Taylor.  I’m drinking a red wine, staring out at the sparkling metal cylinders of light entering the evening’s atmosphere, and I am thinking of all the bodies and minds shuffling around, busy bees buzzing from here to there. There’s a surrender to these waiting spaces: I am reduced, just a part of the organism as it breathes in, and out.  I am reflecting on the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) newsletter that I’ve just read on the journey here. I was particularly struck by two articles – first, Fr. Laurence Freeman’s opening article Sailing with Winds of Wisdom and Compassion, and secondly, Jim Green’s article, Songs and Sacrifice. Both were earnest, acute and spoke to something deep in me that I’ve been trying to locate. I will attempt to pen some of these thoughts in response to those articles.

When I first came across Fr, Laurence, on a radio podcast (Soul Search with Meredith Lake, ABC Radio) I was walking in the backstreets of Marrickville, near the Cook River, on a Sunday afternoon. I still remember what Emily Dickinson called the “slant of light”:  the golden wintry sun bathed a terrace courtyard in warmth, as I crossed the wide and quiet road, listening to Lake interview Fr. Laurence. I was obviously left with a strong impression. It is striking how the body and mind work together to store impressionable memories – from trauma, when the body is flooded with cortisol, all the way through to peak elevated experiences, when oxytocin flows. The long and short of it: when heightened experiences happen that are different to the every day –  it’s all imprinted on our individual psyche with acute sensory detail. I wonder if the same is to be said for moments when we genuinely hear, process and understand something new. There’s a synthesis of the senses, a flow where suddenly the body and mind experience a form of unity in the knowledge that is made clear. Boundaries dissolve, and all is understanding.

“Some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, as a golden link, into the great chain of order”
Edwin Hubbel Chapin, 1814

Another impression surfaces as I write: I was driving through the WestConnex late on a Sunday, and listening to one of Fr. Laurence’s talks on modern distraction. Something about his words coming out of the speakers amidst the fading city afternoon, the dark tunnel and my vague twilight mood- it made me quiver.

So by the time I began the retreat at Campfire in the Heart, based around the WCCM teachings, I wasn’t surprised something mysterious had led me back to Fr. Laurence. The retreat itself was equal parts challenging and affirming. The challenge partly lay in the rhetoric of ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ that was hard (and is still hard) to disassociate from my own upbringing (I was raised Catholic, and have an ongoing, at times unyielding relationship with unlearning and relearning the bigger mysteries behind these notions). The retreat was affirming, as I am on my own creative and psycho-spiritual adventure, and felt I could (somewhat) meet the thoughtful content that was presented to me. Leaving the retreat, I was handed one of the WCCM newsletters.

Reading it here at the departures lounge, I find Laurence’s article gentle yet probing.  About mid-way through, he invites us to picture ourselves observing the world from multiple visual perspectives- the ocean, the atmosphere, the furthermost reaches of outer-space. He emphasises the importance of these practised perspective shifts as a way to humble ourselves, and keep us closer to the mysteries- “The true scientist who practises science contemplatively is thrilled and humbled with each advance because the more we see the more we know, and the less we understand”. Developing an intimacy with the unknown is not a new spiritual idea, nor is it new to those who spend their lives committed to a knowledge discipline- I still remember in university being introduced to the ‘Rumsfeld Matrix’, as a way of mapping out the knowledge gaps inherent in ourselves, and the worlds we are in. I think what struck me about Laurence’s invoking of this as necessity was the fact that an embracing of unknowing at an individual and broader level was being presented in Christian material. I am sure many reading this are thinking “of course!”, and I know the Christian mystics were deeply versed in the unknown, but as someone who has grown up with a static, doctrine framing of Christian belief and discipline, this is deeply refreshing. I felt a leaning into the unknown at the Campfire in the Heart retreat too, in the themes and conversations explored. More broadly, in this fear-saturated world, I feel anything unknown is associated with negativity, heaviness, something to avoid. It is so rare to hear leaders speak of what they don’t know. I take solace that there are leaders like Fr. Laurence who are making decisions and acting for a community in their own framework of being, but are still emphasising to themselves, and the rest of us, that we must go deeper into the unknowing, and not vacillate in it for self-flagellation… but be willing to change and grow inside it, for the better. With the increasingly neoliberal emphasis on human life as individual and atomised from one another, it is a powerful exercise to imagine how our structures and everyday lives would look if we contemplated, admitted and even loved the things we don’t know, in safe, communal environments. Maybe that’s a spiritual community at its best. Regardless, I feel it is the embracing of these unknowns, in a contemplative way that quietens fear, that could take me closer to what Jonathan Green recently called “the subtle infinities of hope” (The Monthly, May edition).

In another article in the newsletter,’ Songs and Sacrifice’ , Jim Green bravely engages with the practical (and at times clunky) aspects of hope as something that needs to be lived, kneaded out, fought for. I like the way he explores our purchasing decisions as an immediate ground in which we can all more deeply engage with the challenges our time is being presented with.  He refuses to resort to identity politics in discussing consumption choices, which makes me think a lot about just how easy it is to feel tricked into thinking that what you do (and don’t) buy is a genuine reflection of who you are, and what you value.  I suspect there’s something here about our collective fear of the unknown too, perhaps the more I dwell in fear, the more it seems that my decisions and actions could somehow claim a modicum of control over my life. Green brings the hypothetical of deciding whether or not to purchase international flight tickets, considering they are the most carbon-intensive type of transportation. He writes “the story isn’t offered as an ethical stick with which to
beat those who [fly]…, Choices have to be made in the context of unique and complex lives”. Who would have thought? The decisions we make are wildly unpredictable, and influenced by thousands of different energies interacting at any given point in time.  We would be kidding ourselves if we thought otherwise. Green goes on by offering us some leading questions to ask ourselves when deciding to buy stuff, suggesting that we need to thoughtfully check the desire against our own deeper sense of self- “Do I have to take that car journey? Do I have to join in with Christmas as a retail bonanza?”. He says “And of course, as we ask ourselves these vital questions, Do I have to? Will at some point change into the much more interesting question of do I want to? It roots the ‘problem’ in a deeper part of our being and starts to indicate the way forward”.  I do agree that a genuine contemplation of what we want can take us closer to the encompassing and more holistic human challenge we are currently being presented with, “What does the Earth and its song (of which I am a part) want?”. We need to see our decisions as part of a bigger field around how we treat, relate to, and live in our common home- more than just individual actions against an ecological ‘problem’. Green invokes Johan Rockströms presentation at Laudate Deum, encouraging us to “free ourselves” from “mistaken ideas” about sacrifice as an inevitable part of the story, instead encouraging us to think about what we will do, how we will act together, generatively, in the communities we are in. He is presenting us with a choice: we can either stay in the zone of binary thinking, and needing to ‘sacrifice and give up’, or see the possibility of multiple courses of action and change in the unknown “embracing the need to change is the only way to avoid the otherwise inevitable social instability, conflict and economic chaos”. Jim Green finishes the article by saying – “the world sings of an infinite love: how can we fail to care for it?”

I finish writing by thinking about just how pervasive the fear narrative is, and just how ‘real’ this version of the world (not the one of infinite love) apparently seems, the incessant presentation of terrible news and events, how serious it (and me) takes itself. Now that I’m at the end, the clarity with which I started the article feels clouded. I’d be kidding myself if this tiny speckle of insight, felt in fragments, changed my mindset over night and had me wake up a different human. But maybe that’s the point. So rare and mysterious are these moments of crystalised thought- you think you have an answer, a puzzle piece, and just before it reveals itself clearly…poof! It’s vanished again.  Maybe that’s infinite love singing. Just when I can hear the note… it mysteriously vanishes to another frequency.  The river keeps on flowing.  But I’m here for all of it.

“O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was so beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or a cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all, but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken and in the end one grew old and looked cunning…or wise…and still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening”

Herman Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund

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Dominica Roebuck attended the ‘Beholding Divine Beauty’ retreat held at Campfire in the Heart in May 2024, as a volunteer and retreat participant.

Interested in volunteering at Campfire in the Heart? Find more information here.