By Moore College student Annika
~ Annika visited Darwin in July 2024 and spent a morning talking with AuSIL staff member Caroline Bulabul about her Christian heritage, faith and practice as an Indigenous woman. This is Annika’s reflection on the conversation, exploring some of the complexities that arise when Indigenous culture and spirituality meets a biblical worldview, and gently challenging those of us from a ‘whitefella’ background to think humbly and curiously about what we may learn from our Indigenous brothers and sisters in this space. ~
Caroline came to know Jesus through the faithful witness of her maternal grandmother and her sister. Older relatives in her family have shared really joyful memories of living on Aboriginal missions, especially Ngukurr. Caroline deeply treasures many aspects of her culture, which she calls ‘the Indigenous way’. She described with great fondness traditional food, the best fishing spots, her homeland and the importance of storytelling, art and songs. She spoke with real pride about Indigenous language being taught in remote schools alongside English. Even more evident and compelling than her love for her culture was the way Caroline expressed her love for the Lord Jesus and her passion for telling others about him. She loves getting to know God more, and knows that if she is to teach others about their heavenly Father, she must continue to learn about him too. She spoke about hours that she spends out bush in her homeland, alone with the Lord in prayer. Her own personal study of the Bible has profoundly influenced the ways she engages with her culture. She told the story of attending a ceremony as a young girl. She spoke about the Dreamtime story of some giant men. The giants, she was told, would be at the ceremony. She remembers being told along with the other women and children to cover her head with a sheet as they approached the site. Then the men said, “Chuck ‘em off,” and they threw away the sheets to reveal the giants. But they were made of wood! Caroline described huge sculptures that had been erected, decorated beautifully with paint and feathers, but carved by human hands. Even at that young age she knew that they were worshipping something they had made themselves, and she couldn’t understand why. Then the men told them to listen carefully and hear the giants talking, but she could see them drumming on hollow trees to make the sound of the talking. Later, Caroline recalls reading in Joshua about how the Israelites married foreign women who brought false idols into the land. She recognised it as the same thing – people foolishly worshipping idols made by human hands. This ceremony was idol worship. As a sidebar, I think that in our current political climate, well-meaning, generally white, city-dwelling activists would have a real visceral reaction to Caroline’s rejection of traditional spiritual practices, as an example of modern-day colonialism and whitewashing. I wish they could meet this woman. With her ‘Indigenous ways’ very much core to her being, her convictions are not borne of ignorance or internalised white supremacist thinking. It is not at all that she is forgoing Aboriginal culture for European culture. She is rejecting what she has recognised as idol worship for the truth that she has found in Scripture; and that truth, as it does for Christians of every culture, impacts her life profoundly. On the other hand, I wish that early Christian missionaries could have met her (although, I’m sure they met countless people like her) to see that faithfulness to Jesus is also not synonymous with European culture. We know from the incredibly messy history of Christianity in Australia that one of the most obvious and frequent failings of early Christian missionaries was their tendency to equate ‘conversion’ with ‘civilisation’, and ‘Christian values’ with ‘European values’. In many cases this saw the devastating destruction of culture and language, a lack of respect for local tribes because of a disregard for traditional law, and a refusal to recognise as brothers and sisters those who truly had been saved. What a wonderful picture Caroline is, of someone whose Lord is Jesus, not European-ness, so that she can live as a faithful Indigenous Christian. This is not an uncomplicated reality, however. For Caroline, whose culture is so different to my own, her expression and experience of spirituality is likewise so different to mine that I’m not sure what to make of all of it. In many ways her understanding of the spiritual realm is a lot closer to Jesus’ own first century Jewish context than it is to mine. For her, the spiritual realm is not only real but experiential and tangible. This is so far removed from my own experience that I’m immediately sceptical, but it’s a real challenge to the norms and assumptions I’ve internalised based on my own culture. She mentioned a couple of supernatural experiences, like an Indigenous mermaid and fish raining from the sky, that were extraordinary but didn’t seem to carry a particular spiritual significance. Some others, however, did. She spoke about a holy place in her homeland where her cousin, who was hated by the community because his mother had died of leprosy, was taken up into heaven by a giant lion that called out like a lamb and had six wings and many eyes. There was also a story about the boy’s mother, Caroline’s aunt, who had died alone in a cave by the river because of her disease, and later her body had vanished with only her clothes left there. In the same spot that the lion had come to take away the boy, years later, another of Caroline’s cousins had seen Jesus himself appear in a cloud, like the one that led the Israelites through the wilderness. There were other people with the cousin, but only she could see Jesus, and he told her he was there because of the wickedness of the people. And then Caroline described in great detail a dream that she had had, where she was walking through a golden city, as small as an ant or a little kid. The city had twelve gates and a beautiful river, that ran through the tree in the middle. And a pit opened up, and she heard voices calling from the pit, asking for her help. She looked down into the pit and saw the names, which she listed for us, of some of her family members. She couldn’t do anything to help them, because they were already in the pit. And she woke up, thinking of the beautiful dream she’d just had. It’s really hard for me know how to feel about those stories, and how willing I should be to take them at face value. But who am I to say they didn’t happen? She was very adamant that they did, and a few times mentioned that one day if we came with a 4WD she could take us to see the holy site she spoke of, which is now marked by a fence. A few things stood out to me. Firstly, that nothing Caroline described was a ‘new’ revelation. There was nothing extra-biblical; nothing I noticed that went against the Bible’s teachings or tried to complete or supplement it like, say, the Book of Mormon. So, whether these spiritual experiences actually took place exactly as Caroline described or not, God has protected her and her family from being exposed to misleading spirits, or anything that might have drawn them away from the truth. These experiences do not seem characteristic of the great deceiver. And importantly, Caroline loves to read the Bible. It is in the Bible that she seeks to learn more about God; she doesn’t seem to seek out spiritual experiences to inform her. Secondly, it wouldn’t totally surprise me if in a cultural context where the spiritual realm is much more widely acknowledged, God might at times choose to reveal himself in secondary ways that reflect that. In a similar vein, if people were already interacting with the spiritual realm in tangible, experiential ways before coming to know Jesus, it would make sense to me that God might ‘redeem’ that part of their life, showing himself to be Lord over all through spiritual experiences, perhaps even including miracles and Christophanies. Regardless, Caroline clearly understood all of these to be good gifts from God.