sunburnt soul

I was lucky enough to get a whole swag of books from the Uni library recently for my Australian Christian History Assignments (thanks J) and some thoughts in one of the books have struck me. This book was written in the early eighties and here is what the guys says

"I began to wonder about Christ. Although he was the one whom it was all about, he had become a figure captured within the confines of church teaching. I knew he was a person who had spent his life in Palestine among the ordinary experiences of life - but this aspect of his character had somewhere become lost. He was also becoming lost to me... there were aspects of my life which gave me great fulfilment and joy, and yet I sensed in my image of Christ a coldness and impatience with such worldly matters."

This describes my exact predicament through much of my adult life. And as a dissonance playing in the background that I didn't like or understand, I found myself becoming deaf to it. I tuned out.

But the sound I tuned out from was the sound of SPIRIT. And so I became split in two, ignoring the small still voice of my own spirit and the God spirit within me.

Learning to listen again leads me to a man who was accused of being a glutton and a drunkard, whose teaching reverberated with the sounds of ordinary life, who adjusted religious practises to accommodate the needs of ordinary folk. A man who calls on people to look around their immediate experience for knowledge of the God whose presence pervades all.

extracts taken from David Millikan (1981) The Sunburnt Soul: Christianity in search of an Australian Identity, Anzea Publishers, Australia.

Does Nature Speak to You?

Can you tell me when you were last alone? ...you are not alone while you know that you can have someone with you the instant you choose

Then what I would have you do is to make yourself alone in one of nature's withdrawing chairs... On a day when the weather is fine, go out by yourself. Tell no one where you are going or that you are going anywhere. Climb a hill. No book, remember. Nothing to fill your thinking place with the thoughts of others.

When you are quite alone, when you do not even know the nearest point to anybody, sit down and be lonely. Look out on what you see, with the lonely sun in the middle of it all. Fold your hands in your lap and be still.

Do not try to think anything.

Do not try to call up any feeling or sensation; just be still.

By and by, it may be, you will begin to know something of nature, and then possibly of the God whose clothing it is.

I do not know you well enough to be sure about it; but if you tell me afterward how you fared, I shall then know you a little better, and could perhaps tell you whether nature had or will speak to you.


I have been challenged by this reading and would love to hear your stories.


extract from George MacDonald, What's Mine's Mine, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Publishers, London 1886