Abstract
It is the contention of this essay that a theological response to the reported epidemic of isolation and social disconnection in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere involves an account of the spatial and embedded character of human life. What follows is a sketch of a geographical imagination that is informed by a theological account of embeddedness and develops Sam Wells’s theology of “being with” at the location of the land, sky, and waterways. Such an imagination promotes a kind of theologically informed sociality that is nurtured and practiced through attending to how Indigenous peoples relate and understand their lands. Engaging the work of trawloolway theologian Garry Worete Deverell, the mutual indwelling implicit in “being in Country” provides a vision of how being with and in Christ can be experienced anew. It will be argued that for settler peoples, especially Christians, learning to be in Country is the beginning of relearning sociality.
The U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, released a report in 2023 calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of social connection. Distilling research from 2003 to 2022, Dr. Murthy determined that the United States is experiencing an epidemic of isolation that has underappreciated yet detrimental individual and social implications. In one study from 2022, only 39 percent of adults indicated that they felt connected to others, including family members. 1 A further study found that young adults are almost twice as likely to report feeling lonely than those over 65. The experience of social isolation increases further for individuals from ethnic and racial minority groups, LGBTQ+ individuals, and victims of domestic violence. 2 Across the many divides within American society, people are feeling isolated, invisible, and insignificant.
According to Dr. Murthy, the physical and emotional consequences of social disconnection are equivalent to other previously identified public health issues, such as tobacco use, obesity, and substance abuse. A study from 2017 determined that the lack of social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day. 3 Combined with the declining trends in community involvement in neighborhood organizations, clubs, labor unions, and religious communities, and the increase in societal discrimination and inequality, the overall picture is one where both individual and societal well-being are severely compromised. 4 Despite the promises of connection through social media and amplified by the profoundly disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, social disconnection is proving deadly. 5
To counter the impact of social isolation, the Surgeon General recommends a national strategy of “six pillars” to advance social connection: strengthen social infrastructure, enact pro-connection public policies, mobilize the health sector, reform digital environments, deepen research, and build cultures of connection. 6 It is significant that the first recommendation is not a social program or public policy but the strengthening of how the built and natural environments figure into a response to human isolation. In prioritizing the role of social infrastructure, the U.S.-based report echoes recommendations from similar reports from across the globe. 7
In deploying the concept of social infrastructure, the Surgeon General extends the concept of social capital promoted by the sociologist Robert Putnam, who referred to “social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness” 8 by including how the physical location and design of buildings, streets, parks, and public services (e.g., libraries and community centers) support or complicate the ability of people to interact in a way that promotes social connection. 9 When social infrastructure is robust, sociologist Eric Klineberg contends, it fosters contact, mutual support, and collaboration. 10 To cultivate social connection, the Surgeon General concludes, requires a recognition of how individual and social well-being is mediated by the natural and built environment. In other words, repairing social divisions and isolation requires attending to the spatial and embedded nature of human and social existence. 11
It is the contention of this essay that a theological response to the epidemic of isolation and social disconnection involves an account of the place-based and relational character of human life. Other responses have included a focus on community engagement and the fostering of “social weaving” practices that contribute to experiences of belonging. 12 The recent retrieval of spatial analysis within contemporary theology provides an adjacent framework that has as its basis a geographical imagination that can serve as an alternative to the social conditions of isolation and alienation. 13 These conditions, I will argue, are animated by the ongoing legacy of the Western colonial project. On the lands now known as the United States, Canada, and Australia – to name just a few – the colonial project assumed a territorial vision of segregation without concern for traditional Indigenous claims to and understandings of the land. This territorial vision was supported and is maintained through a process of transforming places into the commodity of private and State property. 14 The goal of a renewed geographical imagination is the fostering of human sociality at the sites where this segregation began: on the land.
What follows is a sketch of a geographical imagination that is informed by a theological account of embeddedness develops Sam Wells’s theology of “being with” at the location of the land, sky, and waterways. As will be explored, such an imagination promotes a kind of theologically informed sociality that is nurtured and practiced through attending to how Indigenous peoples relate and understand their lands. Reflecting the lands on which I work and live, the focus of this essay is on an account of “being in” the unceded land of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the continent and surrounding islands known today as Australia. 15 As the work of trawloolway theologian Garry Worete Deverell explores, the mutual indwelling implicit in “being in Country” is how being with and in Christ can be experienced anew. 16 It will be argued that for settler peoples, in particular those who identify as Christians, learning to be in Country is a necessary and challenging lesson in forming deep social connections that as embedded connections can contribute to solidarity: among non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples and their land, sky, and waterways, among the various non-Indigenous settler peoples, and between humans and the non-human created order. 17
“Being with”: The Location of Christian Sociality
In A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God, theologian Sam Wells names isolation as the fundamental predicament of human existence and being with God, one another, and creation as the fundamental Christian response. 18 Anticipating by a decade the conclusions of the Surgeon General’s report, Wells suggests that if isolation is at the root of human suffering then the response needed does not come through attending principally to the symptoms of isolation but lie in activating human sociality, something, Wells, notes, we already have in abundance. However, Wells continues, Christians and Western society in general have gravitated away from the efforts toward increased sociality and have embraced and continue to foster responses that reflect more instrumental and pragmatic impulses. These responses are what Wells conceptualizes as “working for,” “working with,” “being for”: dispositions that contribute to human wellbeing through providing assistance and support to suffering peoples, but, Wells contends, leaves the problem of social isolation unaddressed. 19 It is through moving from the other dispositions to practicing “being with,” where human encounter can transform all involved, and solidarity and friendship can emerge.
Wells grounds his account of “being with” in the locations and practices that shaped the life and ministry of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels. The three principal locations where the gospels place Jesus and his ministry – Nazareth, Galilee, and Jerusalem – operate for Wells as the three sites that reveal the character and ultimate mission of Jesus. In brief, while the dominant understandings of Jesus’ mission focus on his teaching and healing ministry in Galilee, and his achievements concentrated in his passion, death, and resurrection in Jerusalem, these only account for a little over three years of Jesus’ life. Jesus’ working with the disciples and working for the sick and possessed, and the ultimate act of working for all creation through his death and resurrection, are predicated on the thirty years Jesus spent in Nazareth. It is here, Wells contends, that Jesus lived and practiced the social connection of being with his family, neighbors, and community, and with God through the worship and social practices of his Jewish context. 20
Nazareth, for Wells, operates as the theological hermeneutic within which the entire story of scripture reveals a God who is Emmanuel, God with us. In the paradigmatic stories of a God who is for us in creating the world and delivering Israel from slavery, and the same God who raises Jesus from the dead to redeem and heal the world from sin and death, God’s actions point to the desire of God to be with us. God works for us in order to be with us. The Christian belief in God as Trinity, Wells contends, “is a straightforward claim that the fount and origin and sustaining and completing energy of all being is fundamentally being with. Being with is the true nature and ultimate destiny of all things.” 21 The implication for Christian faith and practice is that “with” should be taken for granted through the mission and ministry of the church. Instead of expending energy and resources principally in working for others, it is more reflective of Jesus’ own identity and life to be with the neighbor, stranger, and even enemy through practices of presence, attention, delight, and joy. 22
Wells acknowledges that learning to take “being with” for granted can be seen as avoiding the impact of systemic injustices that critics see as requiring more, not less, engagement and advocacy. 23 Yet, as he explores throughout A Nazareth Manifesto and subsequent related volumes, 24 making a difference to suffering peoples and a suffering planet begins and ends with being with, and that the important efforts of working for and with people must be predicated on the kind of compassion (“suffering with”) and attention that offers a shared sense of humanity and dignity that potentially builds relational bridges between otherwise isolated individuals and divided communities. This is, for Wells, nothing less than an imitation of how God chooses to be with us as Emmanuel.
As a theological hermeneutic, Nazareth names not only the relational implications of being with but also its spatial dimensions. While Wells tends to focus on the embodying of being with, implicit to this is the way Jesus’s story is equally a story about place and embeddedness. Nazareth can refer to the quotidian character of life – “the abiding, ordinary pattern of birth and death, work and rest, dawn and dusk, misunderstanding and insight, companionship and controversy, play and planning, that fills a week, a month, a year” 25 but it doesn’t represent some idealized place free of pain, suffering, and oppression. As Shawn Copeland reminds us, in his Nazareth years, “Jesus knew refugee status, occupation and colonization, social regulation and control.” 26 In other words, Nazareth is a location where the practices of being with arise on contested land, where the impact of Roman occupation coupled with episodes such as the rejection Jesus experiences in Nazareth 27 embeds a theology of human sociality on specific places.
The performance of “being with” itself denotes a particular spatial arrangement that locates subjects in some kind of adjacency. In his work, Wells provides ample examples of “being with” as practiced with neighbors, the suffering, creation, and with God, as well as organizations and governments, among others. While these stories unfold in buildings, public spaces, on buses and trains, and in and around churches, these structures and locations remain largely in the background as factors to the relational encounters. Yet, places of encounter are mediated by various infrastructures and environments. As theologian Philip Sheldrake argues, the possibility of social life where individuals intersect and mingle, and human narratives and memories emerge, occurs not in generic or neutral space but at places that are tangible and specific. 28 As the preceding discussion on Nazareth and the shape of Jesus’ ministry demonstrates, when it comes to Christian faith and practice, social proximity matters. There is no story of Israel, Jesus, and the church without specific locations that help dictate the contours of the encounters between God and God’s creation. As a result, to be with as a form of social connection assumes being within particular spatial arrangements created by the built and natural environments.
In summary, the theological concept and associated practices of “being with” inform a Christian response to the kind of human isolation detailed in the Surgeon General’s and related reports. Patterned on Nazareth as both a place and a hermeneutic, “being with” is an expression of the quotidian character of life where social connection is learned and practiced, and a vision of the nature of God and God’s revelation in Christ as God with us. Yet, there are dimensions to “being with” that could benefit from further analysis, in particular, the formational power of places and environments as potential locations for social connection. In pursuing this analysis, what emerges is a geographical imagination that, in promoting a place-based sociality, must reckon with the colonial displacement of Indigenous peoples from their Countries 29 and the logics that have contributed to the devaluing of social connection unless it is in service to consumer interests.
Place, Country, and Displacement
To articulate a spatial or geographic-based understanding of human sociality requires acknowledging the various ways the concept of place and the status of specific places exist within the story of Western colonization. Before attending to how the Indigenous knowledge systems of Nations and Peoples of the lands called Australia provide an alternative to the “diseased social imagination” 30 of the dominant white settler cultures, it remains necessary to briefly explore how notions of place have undergone a tragic transformation under colonial occupation.
Addressing the Western, colonial legacy begins with an acknowledgment that the colonial project is both an event and a system. It is built upon the legacy of (principally) European expansion and invasion beginning in the 16th century and, as Brazilian theologian Vitor Westhelle notes, “a mentality, a disposition of the hegemonic party towards the subaltern.” 31 To address place alongside Indigenous knowledge systems is to shift, or dislocate, the gaze away from the Eurocentric colonial project; on the other hand, entertaining different socio-communitarian paradigms, other forms of knowledge, arts, and morality. 32 The crucial issues for this shift include, first, the recognition for non-Indigenous populations that they live on another’s soil, not as guests but as settlers whose presence is a result of an initial invasion and continued occupation on unceded land. Second, it is a shift away from the monologue of the colonial, white imaginary to the question of conversation partners: whom one listens to, whose voices are trusted, and who is privileged in the engagements. 33 These twin shifts form the basis of what follows.
Colonization as displacement and diseased imagination erases how social identities are formed in relation to earth, sky, and waters. 34 This dislocation violently creates segregated spaces through a process of transforming Indigenous place into the commodity of private and State property. Within the story of colonization, the deep connection between place and identity for First Nations people is difficult for many to grasp because, as theologian Willie Jennings argues, “people have been formed in a world in which such connections are only imagined, only fictions enabled solely by volition and market desire.” 35 This difficulty, trawloolway theologian Garry Worete Deverell notes, is not the sole experience of the settler populations for through the constant and unrelenting pressure of a white social imaginary, it extends like tentacles into the hearts, heads, and assumptions of colonized people too. 36
What has become natural within the diseased imagination of colonization is the abandonment or duplication of commodified place because people have freed up their own ties to the soil, sky, and waters. 37 The instinct of the colonizers is to dispossess others because these others are thought to carry an identity that is minimally, if at all, related to the characteristics of the land in which they find themselves. 38 When connection to place is of no concern, the life-giving collaboration of identity between place and bodies, people and animals is lost and replaced with, “the dictates of capitalistic logic and racial identities that are free-floating and changeable, yet constantly stabilized through the reciprocity of racial being.” 39 In other words, the story of Country is replaced with the story of racialized capitalism. 40
The grotesque nature of capitalist calculations and the commodity claims of private property will continue to inform the social imagination of the colonizer and the social conditions of the colonized without the intervention and performance of an alternative story. For Jennings, even the Christian story requires healing if it is to have anything to say into the loss and mutilation inflicted in the name of God on Indigenous lands and peoples. The kind of displaced and displacing identity of much contemporary Christianity floats, “above land, landscape, animals, place, and space” reflecting a disfigured vision of creation and creatureliness. 41
In the wake of such a disfigured vision, where human identity and Christianity itself is separated from earth, sky, and waters, can the sociality of “being with” even be imagined?
Without a genuinely place-based orientation, being with risks becoming another colonial abstraction rather than a lived practice unless it can learn from Indigenous sources how there is no social connection without connection to soil, waters, and sky, no answer to isolation without first understanding our disconnection from the stories that emerge from life systems and environments. Unless we learn that, as Muscogee Nation scholar Daniel Wildcat says, wisdom sits in places, 42 we will remain in the state of floating that Jennings describes.
Being in Country
Locating “being with” within a noncommodified understanding of place requires an alternative story to that of the dominant white social imaginary and invites a posture of attentiveness and humility before the sources of these stories. In this section, the story being shared belongs to the Indigenous peoples of the continent now known as Australia. In accessing elements of Aboriginal knowledge systems, it’s important to note how much knowledge has been lost as a result of colonial violence. In the estimation of Deverell, it’s not possible to talk about a purely “Indigenous” knowledge system due to two hundred years of colonial and Indigenous contact. 43 What exists as Indigenous knowledge involves ancient learnings, adaptations, and new traditions which underscore the creativity of First Nations people who maintain their knowledges as living and dynamic concepts and practices.
In the knowledge systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the three interrelated and integrated concepts of Country, Dreaming, and Songlines 44 exist in the various language groups and tribal regions of the continent known now as Australia. Together, they function as a worldview that Western categories would roughly describe as ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics if these areas of inquiry were “written in the land” beyond what Goolarabooloo writer Paddy Roe called, the shallows of the “white soil” of settler colonialism. 45
To begin with Country, the first thing to say is that it encompasses everything. It includes both living and non-living elements. It holds everything within the landscape, including Earth, Water, and Sky Country, as well as people, animals, plants, and the stories that connect them. Country is the wellspring from which all knowledge originated. For Aboriginal people, Country is at the core of identity. As reported to the anthropologist Deborah Bird, “when we talk about Country it is spoken of like a person: we speak to Country, we sing to Country, we worry about Country, and we long for Country.” 46 Aboriginal peoples’ connection with Country has continued over thousands of years, from deep time to this moment. It is how the world, past, present, and future, is seen and understood.
The endless flow of life and ideas emanating from Country is often referred to as the Dreaming. Often mistakenly assumed to be another term for “history,” 47 Dreaming is many things in one. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner wrote of Dreaming as a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal people. 48 Deverell echoes this understanding when he speaks of Dreaming as “everywhere and already present in the living things all around and like the breath in our own nostrils; it is a past rendered meaningful, a future full of promise, and a present aflame with life in all its fulness.” 49
As referring to the ancestral past, Dreaming incorporates the stories of Ancestral Beings (sometimes called Dreaming Heroes) who often combined human, animal, and planet qualities, and many of whom traveled about Country interacting with each other and with the environment. These interactions left traces in the environment. The ancestors’ spirit energies remain in the landscape, and this energy is passed down to contemporary generations. With this in mind, Dreaming remains the source of law, ceremony, and morality. It all comes from the creator ancestors, as a Pintupi man put it, anthropologist Fred Myers. 50 “The sites and their energies are still there, whether people know it or not – even in the large cities of Australia,” anthropologist and architect Paul Memmott reports. 51
The third concept, Songlines, refers to corridors or pathways of knowledge that the Ancestral Beings followed as they created the soil, waters, and sky. Walbanga and Wadi architect and writer, Alison Page, defines Songlines as a massive database of traditional knowledge, “a living, ever-evolving storehouse of information about the land, the waters, the sky and the people. It’s the library of the Dreaming.” 52 As Aboriginal people move around, engaging in ceremony, food gathering, or other rituals related to sacred sites, they activate Dreaming and thus maintain the Songlines. As more than just a download of relevant information, Songlines are a living, breathing database, often sung to sacred objects and at significant places, and form part of what Page calls a “network for mnemonic learning” that informs the continued identity of Country and how people engage it. 53 As Yanyuwa elder Annie Karrakayny reported to the anthropologist, Amanda Kearney, “the Songline is everything, it is the only way to know this country.” 54
The living power and sacred authority of Country, Dreaming, and Songlines is captured in a poem by Kakadu elder Bill Neidjie, I feel it with my body with my blood. Feeling all these trees, all this country when this wind blow you can feel it. Same for country . . . You feel it. You can look, But feeling . . . that make you.
55
As Neidjie attests, his embodiment is not a separate thing – a distinct essence – from his embeddedness: body and Country are not reducible to one or the other but are a symbiosis of energy and location, past and present, creator and created. It is a picture and vision of being in Country.
Being in Country: Indwelling with Christ
The radical interrelatedness and mutuality that being on Country speaks and enacts informs an Indigenous geographical imagination that Deverell considers to be the basis for a place-oriented theological vision. For Deverell, Country is like an Indigenous Christ who “teaches who we are, to whom we belong, and what our responsibility or vocation in the world might be.” 56 Against the colonial destruction of the biosphere and the accentuated legacy of racial capitalism, Deverell posits a theology of “being in Country” through decolonizing the ritual dimensions of time, place, body, and text.
The first dimension, time, liberated from the colonial legacy of progress and manifest destiny, is rendered by Deverell as relating to the “constant now, a present-continuous.” 57 As noted above in the brief discussion on Dreaming, in Aboriginal temporality the eternal is always present and the ancient past that lives in the present. Deverell further explains, “For the ancestors who created land and waterway, and continue to inhabit land and waterway, are forever creating land and waterway. They are the vitality which animates and sustains country in its aliveness.” 58 Time, therefore, is not measured by Western accounts of history, but through Dreaming stories which are everywhere and always present in the soil, sky, and waters, and enacted and engaged through the ritual storytelling of dance and song. 59 In this account, time is embodied and embedded rather than measured and universalized.
In displacing First Nations people from their Country and kin, the colonial settlers disrupted how time and therefore Dreaming was practiced and shared. As explained to historian Minoru Hokari, the arrival of British colonists initiated a competing set of stories to Dreaming that are not place-based as in Dreaming stories but are time-based and operate in radical opposition to Country. “Aboriginal law has morality, but Captain Cook law does not,” the Gurindji elders told Hokari. 60 The law and morality of Dreaming as encountered and enacted on Country are, for Deverell, damaged and disrupted by the colonial legacy, but continue to break into the experience of people and call them and encourage them. The landscape has not stopped speaking. 61
Attending to time through an Indigenous theological imaginary involves, Deverell suggests, aligning the rituals and liturgical seasons associated with encountering God with the seasons, plants, and animals of the place one lives. Moreover, it might involve freeing up the liturgical structure of a service and making room for the foundational stories of the community to inform what actions take place. For instance, Deverell wonders if the eating together associated with the Eucharist might happen first while stories from scripture and Country are told or enacted through song and dance within the meal. The next step might involve bringing food to the sick or absent. In this rendering of gathering, the point is not completing all the tasks in a set period of time but allowing the spirit of Christ and the ancestors to be experienced through embodied and embedded acts of giving and sharing. 62 Such mutuality becomes not an end in itself but the performance of the eternal in the present moment and place.
The second dimension that Deverell names as a decolonizing ritual practice is that of place. As has been explored already, the kind of noncommodified understanding of place in Indigenous knowledge systems contains the formational power of identity, belonging, and responsibility. Arguably, colonial culture is the product of a gnostic estrangement from the particulars of place, an estrangement intensified by the explicit assumption that places are empty until cultivated and occupied.
63
Against this gnostic estrangement, as one elder shared with the historian Hokari, earth is alive just like you and me. Everything don’t matter what it is, everything is from this earth, dirt. You born in the ground. Earth know . . . You don’t know the earth, earth tell you, that’s why you born.
64
Within this understanding, the ongoing colonial action of removing people from their Country enacts a continued system of identity dissolution.
To honor place invites a reconsideration of the buildings, furniture, vessels, and clothing used in Christian ritual. As Deverell notes, buildings are not assumed necessary, but if they are used, the barriers between “inside” and “outside” should be minimized if not dissolved entirely. To be in a specific place means being with the sights and smells of the soil, sky, and waters. 65 Likewise, the physical items used as part of the worship – including the images on walls – will communicate the place more faithfully if they are from the place and people of the particular Country. An old local tree, Deverell suggests, serves as a better altar than a stone edifice as the tree holds the power and presence of the ancestors and therefore the creator. Gathered around such an altar, the community mirrors the cosmos and opens itself to be enfolded into both Country and the paschal mystery of Christ. 66 The result of such enactments is the strengthening of what place makes possible, namely, identity, belonging, and responsibility.
The body or materiality is Deverell’s third dimension to being in Country. To echo the Gurindji elder quoted above, the human body does not have an independent existence apart from the earth from which the body emerged. This is akin to the account in Genesis from the Hebrew scriptures where God is said to create adam (the human one) from adamah (the dirt/soil). Within what Deverell has called the Christ-as-Country perspective, our body, like Christ’s body, belongs not just to the soil but to the whole created order. As such, the human body is imaged on a God whose body is all creation. 67
Locating the body in the soil, sky, and waters, and within the creator’s own life, repositions the ritual attention away from the Western colonial inheritance toward the experience and knowledge of the Indigenous imaginary where the “sacred knowledge” and “cultural law” of Dreaming are privileged over the colonial epistemology that is centered on white, male patriarchy. 68 As it is concerned with bodies in specific places, the enactment of an Indigenous-informed Christian ritual will reimagine the food, spaces, gender roles, and particular orientation that a community uses when it gathers. In performing the sacred stories, Deverell suggests that as many elements from Country be incorporated, even the feeling of a breeze made possible by gathering outside, a breeze which is the connecting and communicating of the ancestral spirits or a Holy Spirit. Let Country intrude, Deverell concludes. 69
The final dimension, texts, refers to how wisdom is passed on from generation to generation. Within an Indigenous imaginary, the primary “text” is Country itself. “The stories that tell us who we are, to whom we belong, and what we are responsible for is written there,”
70
Deverell notes. The art of storytelling through ceremonial dance and song, speaks with a voice that sounds very similar to that of the Christ who lives and dies and lives again to give us, as human creatures who participate in his gratuity, that very same life and death and life again.
71
There is an analogy, Deverell concludes, between the text that is Country and the written Western liturgical texts of Christian practice. Yet, the difference in how these texts are performed is instructive to understanding why Indigenous practices cannot be collapsed into Western practices.
The dominance of written texts and their recitation in churches – for example, the Bible, prayer books, and the like – obscures their creation from within communities where stories, songs, and prayers were shared orally, and through the bodily performance of dance. There was a greater reliance on memorization that allowed for the stories to be told and performed across time and place, especially during times of crisis such as Babylon exile following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587BCE. The loss of these practices in the contemporary church has turned ritual re-memorializing of sacred stories into acts of reading. This creates an increasing distance in how the stories function for the community. The texts have become matters primarily of language and reason, and have lost, Deverell contends, their creative dynamism that, through ritual, bodily performance, reanimates the community as members of living stories. 72
In contrast, the Aboriginal tradition of ritual performance of Country is concerned with the stories, songs, and dances that emerge and are shared at the site of soil, sky, and waters. The text of Country is, Deverell argues, not static like a written page, but remains alive through, “adapting and integrating new events, languages, people and cultural practices, even those which were initially experienced as traumatic and life-denying.” 73 Arguably, the oral traditions that formed and shaped the Hebrew and later Christian communities reflect the process of the adapting and integrating character of Indigenous approaches to rituals. As Deverell notes, if Christ is the living Word of God who communicates through a range of mediums, from the oral traditions of parables but also through his bodily presence in rituals such as the Eucharist, there is implicit the idea that Christian worship is not limited to written texts, especially those from other nations. A God who speaks into the present moment and location, therefore, can be imagined differently by referring to, “sights and sounds and smells and a sense of place that is locally capable of speaking about Christ.” 74 From within this reimagining, the white, settler imaginary can be counted against by an approach that addresses God in the bodies, faces, and places of Aboriginal people. 75
The four ritual dimensions of time, place, body, and texts are collectively a form of Indigenous intervention into the dominant logics and performance of white, settler colonization that continues to animate the beliefs and practices of the Christian church in Australia and related colonial spaces. The indigeneity of these interventions is, Deverell reminds us, part of a colonial indigeneity rather than some pure expression of a pre-colonial imaginary. But precisely as alternatives and reimaginings of their colonial analogs is why these dimensions can activate decolonial impulses, especially in non-Indigenous peoples, yet just as importantly in the hopes, experiences, and aspirations of First Nations people too. While belonging within the knowledge systems of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the vision of an embedded, indwelling social connection evident in the four dimensions is sufficiently inclusive to suggest practices toward solidarity between First and settler peoples. 76 In other words, in learning to be in Country, we encounter new depth to the embodied experience of being with God, one another, and all creation.
Conclusion: In Christ, In Country
The genius of an Indigenous geographical imagination is that it centers human sociality in the land, sky, and waters, and in doing so decenters the commodification of place that is a legacy of Western colonization. Garry Worete Deverell’s four ritual dimensions of time, place, body, and texts make it possible to return, at the end, to Sam Wells’s language of “being with” and to specify more clearly what this essay has sought to show. If Wells is right that the Christian life is fundamentally about being with God, one another, and creation, then being in Country sharpens that claim by insisting that such being with is never abstract, disembodied, or placeless. It is learned and enacted in relation to the soil, sky, and waters that hold creaturely life together.
What being in Country contributes, more precisely, is a thicker account of being with creation and being with God. It enhances being with creation by showing that human sociality is formed not only in relation to other humans but within a wider community of life in which earth, waters, skies, creatures, and ancestral histories are active participants in identity, responsibility, and belonging. It enhances being with God by disclosing how the God who is with us in Christ is encountered not apart from place but through embodied, local, creaturely forms of mutual indwelling. In this sense, being in Country does not displace Wells’s theological vision so much as deepens it: it reveals that being with is also a matter of being in – being in creation, being in place, and therefore learning more fully what it means to be with the incarnate God who meets creation from within it. For Australian and other settler Christians, this suggests that resisting isolation and colonial alienation requires more than renewed social programs; it requires learning forms of life in which human solidarity, creaturely belonging, and communion with God are practiced together on the land itself.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.