For quite a while, there was a picture of me on the DSPT website dressed in a blue sweater and
jeans and holding an Aboriginal bark painting that was made and given to me by Aboriginal artist William Parmbuk, a friend of mine from the Northwest Territories. This story serves as a window of how much the world of academia has changed, and how much I have changed since I first set out teaching 40 years ago.First there is the development of the Internet that can show pictures of you to people you will never see. But the bark painting itself is what I want to turn to. It is a Dreaming map of a place in the Australian Bush where I once camped with an Aboriginal family. The bark painting might best be described as a sign presentation of a rich pattern of myths and rituals taken from their public/secret religion – although you have to be told of their full significance; you cannot gain that from simply looking at the painting. William knew I teach courses in Myth, Ritual and Sacrament at DSPT and the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), and he made it especially for me. I also give seminars on the religious value of land – every religious tradition believes in the sacred character of land at creation, but they value it differently and make their own religious judgments about land and its meaning for them. For this reason I teach about land and culture in the schools in Melbourne and in Canberra, as well as in Berkeley at DSPT. I have been visiting Australia since 1982 after completing my Doctorate at UCLA in 1978, which, among other things, covered the field of Comparative Religion. While I was completing my studies I thought it was high time that I began to interact with the religions of the indigenous people and the religions of other folks I had been studying. The burning question hanging over the Pacific (and North America, too, for that matter) is how to forge a consensus among people of different cultures so they can live together in a way that is fair and meaningful for each. So from 1986-88, again on sabbatical in 1993-4, and on many other summers, I have traveled to Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia to do research. In the 1990’s I began living in Australia for six months of the year, returning to teach in Berkeley on the Core Doctoral Faculty of the GTU and DSPT for the other six months of the year.
But building intercultural bridges was not always the case with me. Initially I went to UCLA in 1970 to study history – especially the doctrinal consensus in the Catholic Church which in the century before Luther was already unraveling. The previous year I had been the Acting Dean at the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), where I had the opportunity of inaugurating both a MA program in pastoral counseling and a new area at the GTU involving Comparative Religion and Eastern Studies. The nine schools of the GTU newly formed in 1964/5 were building up curricula, establishing committees to implement faculty decisions and to field hostile criticisms about their co-operative ecumenical venture. The 1970’s were a sensitive time for the Western Dominican Province, of which I am a member, as it tried to find ways of maintaining a priorial style of life at our religious community at St. Albert’s in Oakland and at the same time participate fully in the life of the GTU.
But administrative tasks as Dean were really only a sideline. Much of the time in the 1960-70’s was spent in teaching, which I have always loved. I began at St Albert’s immediately after returning from Oxford. I had completed a B.Litt. (now called an M.Litt.) at Oxford (St. Catherine’s College), again dealing with the question of forming consensus. In the five years I spent in Europe (1955-1960) I was encouraged to take time in the summers to travel over the Continent as much as I was able. We were given very little money and were expected to live in Dominican Priories and on American bases using third class train tickets and “auto-stop” (i.e., hitch-hiking). It was a way of keeping our charism of poverty in mind. The Post War was an easy time for meeting clerics and Dominicans from other countries and for meeting layfolk who were so generous to young students – in short, it was a time to mix in other cultures and build bridges and lasting relationships.
At that time in Europe I began to hear rumblings of both theological and political dissent. The old liturgical and religious consensus, which I thought we all enjoyed and were committed to, was being challenged by faithful Catholics. These challenges could not be ignored. The Second Vatican Council bought them to a boil, but in the 1960’s that was still in the future. I had spent the earlier years of my religious formation living within a set of religious patterns which seemed timeless and universal. The round of Priorial life at St. Albert’s and at the Dominican community at Blackfriars, Oxford, the style of it all seemed ageless. I wanted to be a follower of Christ, but was now wondering how wide that road could be. Stability is never forever. Each generation must find ways of forming a living consensus following the Gospel and the teaching of the Church. As Dr. Ladner, my Director at UCLA, had taught me: Reform is not just recovering the past, we reform to find a better future.
In accepting the Bishop Alemany Award for Distinguished Service to Catholic Education at the turn of the 21st century (in 2003 to be exact), I was filled with gratitude to my many friends and academic colleagues. I was then granted the status of an Emeritus Professor at DSPT and at the GTU which meant that I could now teach and do research in whatever fields I liked. It was whispered in my ear that it was hoped that I would continue doing as I had – in Berkeley and overseas, too. In the 1990’s, Australia, particularly the city of Melbourne, had become a second home to me. I live there permanently, and I can always return. Finding a religious consensus among Catholics in Australia is neither easier nor more difficult than finding consensus in America. Among us there is a clinging to the pasts (the plural is intentional) which will not quite die away – the past looking back somewhere before the 1950’s, and the past of the 1970’s and the past of the 1990’s. In Australia there is a very long past to look back on, a past carried forward by communities of Aboriginal peoples, the oldest continuous culture on earth. In a curious way they have captured the imagination of Australian people. The Aboriginals – a group badly treated, browbeaten and unrecognized – are clinging to a tradition which will not quite die away. Rivers of ink and hours of planning have been spent to find out what Australians should do about and for them – the Intervention of June 2007, is only the last of many examples. The Aboriginals of Australia are, of course, Australian Aboriginals, not some sort of generic indigenous people. We might add, they are Christian, often Catholic, but retaining their Aboriginal culture, too.
My life has taught me that there are some human values that are universal in time and transcendental for all cultures – they are rooted somehow in the world of nature that we all share, a world whose existence we did not make and which we cannot form and shape as we would like. There are teachings that are worth defending in every community and that will find defenders. At the same time, my experience has taught me that these universal values cannot be imposed top-down – when that is attempted values are not recognized and are not applied well in different situations. As human beings we sometimes do need to intervene in each other’s affairs, when real damage is being done, but not to jam down our own plans and ideas. We intervene to support each other along the way.
