Songman

One of the teachers who lives at the school recently lent me an autobiography called "Songman", which is the story of an Aboriginal Elder's life. At the age of seven, Bob Randall was stolen away from his mother as part of the scheme to assimilate mixed-race children into mainstream white society, which was achieved by cutting them away from their traditional homes and everything that was ever familiar and safe to them.

I've only read a few chapters into the book, but already the pain and trauma that this man has had to endure at the hands of the white missionaries who were "called by God" to "save" these children is evident and shocking to read. How these people could have preached a Jesus of love and compassion to the Indigenous people, and then treated them with cruelty and hatred, I will never understand. Perhaps I don't want to be able to understand.

But the amazing thing is, that despite the fact that Bob was degraded and treated as inferior, and even though the missionaries and teachers never demonstrated simple love towards the children, it seems that Bob began to recognise God's face in the natural world around him:

"I began to realise that the God that was being talked about was everywhere and in everything. Life was God in all things and it was only humans who were in the position of denying that, through our confused minds. Everything was already completely perfect, a dance of creation, a celebration of life itself in the land, in absolutely everything."

Pretty cool hey! Instead of discovering God in the people around him, he found it in the natural environment. How sad it is that we treated the Aboriginal people so abhorrently. Sometimes I wonder if there couldn't have been another way to do things. How could we have come to this land in peace? I wonder what alternatives there could have been, and if those alternatives aren't too far gone to reclaim?

Christ himself is our peace. He made both Jewish people and those who are not Jews one people. They were separated as if there were a wall between them, but Christ broke down that wall of hate by giving His own body.
Ephesians 2:14