Sermon – Spirit Journeys
Opening Prayer
Dear God, You are our beginning and You will be our end.
Be with us in this place as we reflect on journeys undertaken, and journeys that have come to an end, and await journeys that have yet to begin.
Amen
Announce Kwementyaye Cavanagh’s death
In the early hours of last Wednesday morning, Kwementyaye Cavanagh passed away in the Palliative Care Unit. He was a senior Eastern Arrernte man and an important ngangkere and a dear friend of my family and well known to some of you here this morning.
Our thoughts and prayers are very much with Kwementyaye’s family, particularly his wife Mali, who cared for him to the end, his children and stepchildren, Seraphina, Magrida, Yami and Jarrod. We also particularly think of his grandson Clayton, who many of you will remember as he became part of Emily and Martin’s family and often attended this church.
Keith and I visited Kwementyaye the week before he died and we were able to thank him for the gift he was to us and to pray with him. Kwementyaye told us he was not in pain and regarding dying, in his words, he was “looking forward to it.” On the Monday before he died his family had taken him out onto his country. We believe he had laid down his burdens and was at peace, and we trust his spirit is with God.
Spirit Journeys
I will make a confession… I hadn’t actually realised I was rostered on to do the sermon this week so had not prepared anything and was going to renig, but when we heard of Kwementyaye’s passing , I thought it might be a good opportunity to talk to you all about the Spirit Journeys this church auspiced and Kwementyaye led. Some of you probably know a lot about Spirit Journeys and some of you will know nothing. Many of you will probably remember how for some years the Reverend Dr Geoff Broughton would turn up at our church every winter with a bunch of people who were going to be taken onto country with Kwementyaye on a Spirit Journey.
Anyway, I hope you will find it a bit interesting to hear a bit about what I consider has been a valuable part of our church’s wider ministry. I am not going to do the usual sort of sermon but tell the story of Spirit Journeys because it feels timely following the passing of a man who played the key role in these journeys. We call them journeys but in some ways they have been rather like pilgrimages. It also seems significant that it is raining this weekend as Kwementyaye was a rain man… part of his country… Glen Annie Gorge at Ruby Gap … being important rainmaking country.
I should also say that Mali and her daughters have given consent for me to do this talk this morning. And it is also important to acknowledge Mali’s role in Spirit Journeys, talking with people before and after they went out and supporting Kwementyaye.
History of Spirit Journeys
So what are Spirit Journeys?
The concept was created many years before Kwementyaye and this church was involved by a few Uniting Church people, including Tarn Kaldor’s parents. The idea is to take a small group of pilgrims out into arid lands in 4WDs with basic camping gear, to foster spiritual reflection and experience. This follows a deeply Biblical tradition… all through the Old and New testaments, God kept drawing people into the desert to open them to His transforming presence… or as the prophet, Hosea put it (Hosea who we learned much about last year!), to “lure” us into the desert to “speak to the heart.” It would seem many of God’s revelations have taken place in a landscape where people felt a correlation between understandings of holiness and the emotions evoked by the desert. And of course, in the first millennium CE, the early Desert Fathers and Mothers took off into the deserts of northern Africa to develop a monastic practice which has had an enduring impact on Christian contemplative practice. The meditation practices at Campfire in the Heart draw on these traditions. There appears to be something about being in the desert that can clear the space for the mystery of God. Deserts are perhaps what in Celtic tradition are called “thin places”, where the veil between here and eternity is thin. There is also a silence, a stillness and a sense of timelessness in the desert.
Even before we moved to Mparntwe, Alice Springs, Keith and I did one of these journeys with Rev Ian Robinson.. .a Uniting Church minister from Perth. When we bought Ilwempe Ilwempe, the block at Whitegums, 20 years ago, we offered to host Spirit Journeys….. provide a base near town where travellers could meet and gather supplies and so forth. We also ran a couple ourselves. I should say, there is not a lot of stillness at the start of the journeys with a lot of shopping and sorting and checking and packing everything into the 4WDs. They take a fair amount of organisation and creative packing.
So how did Kwementyaye Cavanagh became involved
Like many here today, I was not born in Mparntwe. I am from Sydney in the north, from Dharug and Guringai country. And like many, I am often asked, “Why did you move here?” I guess we all have our different answers, and I am always aware when I try to answer this question, I am not really able to get to the truth of it. Rather than having clearly thought out plans or visions, I would say Keith and I had more of a sense of being drawn here… like how Hosea put it… being “lured into the desert”. Being awed by country here… it’s beauty, its timelessness, its people, its unsettling history. Keith and I almost on a whim, bought the block we now live on, 20 years ago. The block came with a few dwellings.
Not much more than a month after we came here, we got a call from David Woods from Campfire in the Heart who had a call from Father Raas the Catholic priest at the time, that an Arrernte family had come in from bush and needed somewhere to stay. As it happened, we had a vacant 4 bedroom house. And that is how the Cavanaghs turned up. We thought they were coming for a night or two. They wound up living on the block with us for close to 13 years.
I read somewhere ( I wish I could remember where) that the things we really need in life come as a gift, not of our own devising, but as grace. And I believe the Cavanaghs coming was a gift for us. I won’t pretend there weren’t challenges for all of us in this arrangement, but the gift was that Kwementyaye and Mali took us in as family and taught us so much about the Aboriginal perspective on life, particularly around relationship to country. We are not the same as a result.
Kwementyaye invited us out onto his country out Arltunga way, to their outstation on Ambalindum station. That was when we had the idea of him leading a Spirit Journey onto his country. I still remember the first Spirit Journey we did with him and we had people flying in and 4 cars packed, and waiting to see if Kwementyaye would really go ahead with it. When he walked over with nothing more than an extra coat, I just knew everything would be all right. I remember Keith asking Kwementyaye if we had packed enough water and he reassuring Keith that we would be fine. He knew how to find water out there.
On that first Spirit Journey, along with a few others, were Emily and Martin, and Steve and Mirium Bevis. At that point they all still lived in Sydney and there was no Nina or Shona. It was after that journey, and inspired by that journey, that Emily and Martin decided to move to Mparntwe… and a few years later, Steve and Mirium Bevis came too. Without that journey this church may well not have had it’s last two ministers.
On Spirit Journeys Kwementyaye took us out to Arltunga, his outstation and on to Ruby Gap, to Glen Annie Gorge, rainmaking country, to Paddy’s Rockhole (where some of us here were swimming this Easter weekend just passed). The highlight was always to what we dubbed “Moses Rockhole” on that first journey and the name stuck. Kwementyaye liked it… he was deeply respectful of the Bible stories and read the Bible a lot.
Moses Rockhole is way out east past the ranges where the land is largely very flat and open and sparse. There is a small rocky hill in the middle of it. Kwementyaye drove us to the base of the hill and we climbed about a third of the way up and there is a rock about the size of a loaf of bread he lifted up and underneath was like a small font of water, cool sweet tasting water… kwatye. Water in the rock, water in the most unlikely place you would think to look. Most of us would look for water in the low lying areas but this was water part way up a hill surrounded by desert… no early white explorer would think to look there. We were all blown away. It felt like… so these are the secrets Aboriginal people knew and a large part of how they survived…. And big sacred stories would lead them to these highly valued places. Last year, when Kwementyaye had lost both legs and was in a wheelchair, he asked Rev Geoff Broughton to take him out to Moses Rockhole to be baptised…. Keith and David Woods and Mali went too. Geoff called it among the best and most important days of his life.
Some of you may also remember that as a church we went out onto Kwementyaye’s outstation for a church camp on one occasion, and on another we went out when Nina, Clayton, Sonny, Memphis, and Nora got baptised on the Hale River out there… the young people had to dig about a metre into the dry riverbed for the water Steve used to baptise them.
Keith and I lead a couple of Spirit Journeys with Kwementyaye but it was a lot of work and, as many of you would know, the longer you live here, the more things you wind up getting busy with. So it was a relief when Emily and Steve at the Alice Springs Uniting Church took on the role. And then later Rev Geoff Broughton took over the job with Emily still doing a lot of the background work. Geoff is an Anglican priest who trains up Anglican priests and brought many of his students on a Spirit Journey. Keith and I continued to host the journeys at the start and beginning. We had the particular privilege of sitting around the fire with Kwementyaye and the pilgrims at the end of their journey reflecting on how the journey had impacted them. Some would speak of struggles with having to camp and go without some of the thing we white fellas find necessary like toilets, showers, a roof over your head, a flat white, and so forth.. . there were sometimes grumbles like the Israelites in the desert…particularly if the flies were bad. But everyone was always moved by Kwementyaye and how he opened their eyes to another way of looking at country. Before he passed, Kwementyaye would have led around 20 journeys and around 200 people on those journeys. It was a significant ministry.
The Power of Spirit Journey with Kwementyaye
One thing we noticed going out onto country with Kwementyaye was that it was like he grew another foot taller… he came into himself on country. He was somehow transformed. His country made his spirit strong, and yet also humble. He was just part of his country… it was not all about him. He had a gentle but powerful presence.
We learned that going out onto country with Kwementyaye was not about sitting around a fire being taught about Aboriginal understandings and perspectives. He didn’t work that way. He had no spiel. You just had to hang with him… sit next to him in the car or on top of a rolled up swag, walk beside him as he wandered around pointing out different plants or tracks in the ground, have a laugh with him as he made a fire, sit quietly with him as the billy boiled and the damper baked in the coals. He showed us plants that were bush medicines and foods, and how to get honey from the tree… how to put your ear to the trunk of a tree and listen. He did a lot of quietly sitting. We did a journey with Sarah Bachelard and some others who are involved in the World Christian Meditation Community… they guided us on some meditations on the trip and Kwementyaye easily understood and told us he did that sort of thing too. Every journey was a bit different, responsive to what arose, not a formula. We would drive off and then somewhere along the line Kwementyaye would stop the cars and point out some features and tell us how they were part of the emu songline or some other significant story. We noticed that it wasn’t always the more spectacular features that were important…. Sometimes it was a relatively non-descript rock that was significant. We learned Ambalindum Station is named after Ampe-arle-inteme … meaning where the baby is lying down sleeping… it is a relatively small ordinary looking rock near the cattle station ranch.
We also learned some of the traumas of colonisation,…,the poisoning of the water at Arltunga, the impact of cattle on the soil and plant and animal life. Kwementyaye had, like many Aboriginal men of his time, worked as an unpaid stockman for years. He had loved being able to be on country and ride horses but the lack of pay and then having to pay rent to be on his own land hurt him. He did have hurts… being beaten in the mission for speaking language, separated from family while at school… the all too familiar story. So it always felt like such an act of generosity that he would host us white fellas in his country, make us welcome, keep us safe, teach of its hidden abundance, encourage us to pay attention to its revelations. He always spoke of us needing to walk forward together. It felt like reconciliation in action. It was inspiring and healing for many of us. Kwementyaye, as a ngangkere, was a healer in many ways.
I think most of us who went onto country with Kwementyaye realised that our western culture had lost the capacity to really listen to country, to hear, as the psalmist put it, the speech of God pouring forth from creation, the word of God not only in letters on a page.
In Kwementyaye’s presence, in watching how he related to country, we caught a glimpse of the God who, as Paul put it in Romans, has been revealing his eternal power and divine nature through what He has created since the beginning of time.
It was a transformative privilege to have journeyed with Kwementyaye on his country and allow something of his mysticism to transform us. Keith and I are grateful we got to thank him for this and pray with him a week before he died. We will not forget him.
And with his death comes the end of this part of our church’s ministry. And also, Emily has just left, another ending, and we are in a stage of waiting to see what next may emerge.
As Paul wrote in Ephesians, (and used in the oft repeated prayer at Campfire in the Heart), God is able to do immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine. Neither Keith nor I could have imagined that when we moved to Mparntwe we would meet and go onto country with someone like Kwementyaye. We grieve him and the ending of this period in this church’s life. We never expected Emily and Martin would join us here or imagined that Emily would become the minister of this church and we grieve her departure to Adelaide. But now we have to let go what has been and await and be attentive to whatever next may emerge and how we may participate in that.
