My friend would have hated what was said at his funeral

I sat in an Anglican church at the funeral of an old man who had been father, friend, uncle and adversary to the congregation. He’d been awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to community, and served in the army fighting German, then Japanese, soldiers in World War Two. He was my friend, and we’d watched many dirt roads slide under the hood of a car together while we talked.

The priest began his exequies by paying respect to Indigenous elders past, present and future and acknowledging that their ownership of the land we were on was never ceded and making a commitment to the task of reconciliation. The deceased was not an Indigenous Australian. Lately, I’ve heard this acknowledgment precede wedding vows. But funerals are so sadly intimate, ideally so detached from wider reckonings, so focused on the one life, I’d assumed them exempt. But that wasn’t why I found this one jarring.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I’d talked much about Indigenous Australians to the man now lying up the front of the church in a coffin draped with the flag under which he fought. His views were perhaps dated. He believed this a coming age of separatism, and a mistake, and had come to believe reconciliation was a list of demands that will be made by people not yet born of people not yet born. A process that demands non-Indigenous Australians live a life of contrition to atone for a sin they didn’t commit. The church, he noted, has been running this business model for 2000 years.

Whether my dead friend was right, or wrong, or somewhere in between, only time will tell. But, musing as the hymns were sung in typically sheepish Anglican manner, I realised why I had found this particular acknowledgment jarring. It was its dishonesty. Clergy acknowledging the theft of land is an historical sleight of hand. Land was one thing invaded, one domain stolen. Belief was another. In its acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians, the church would be more honest to make mention of the spiritual colonialism in which it participated. Christianity scoffed at, denounced and forbade nativist beliefs, and perhaps it’s time reconciliation was offered by it for that.

If the church is to preface a eulogy with an acknowledgment, I think it’d be more pertinent that it confess to the culling of the many spirits and deities, the creation beings and ancestor beings and totemic beings, the debunking and colonising of the pre-white spiritual realm that had to take place so its Jehovah could rule despotically, unopposed. One God? Well, yeah, once you’ve cleared the field.

This is what I think a church would more pertinently recognise and repair if it were serious about reconciliation. It would encourage Indigenous spiritual beliefs and critique its invader’s theology from the pulpit. It would disconfirm the primacy of its own God, who – unimpressively for an omnipotent being who might more appropriately have arrived here by revelation or sent another son by way of another virgin birth – hitched a ride on worm-riddled transports crammed with convicts and their keepers. Time for the church to perform mea culpas and enable Indigenous nativism and to accept Jesus as a mere lad when you look around at the other, more venerable, spirituality on offer.

These were my reflections as my friend’s family eulogised him. And, sitting there, just to save the church the sweat and honesty required, I went so far as to compose an acknowledgment of Indigenous spiritual sovereignty to be read from the pulpit at church funerals.

“We, The Church of (Insert own denomination), acknowledge that in the service of Our Lord we attempted to drive the Dreamtime from the land. But that the Dreamtime was never ceded, and Indigenous spiritual belief always was and always will be the first and true religion of this land.”

Of course, I don’t know if Indigenous Australians want such a thing. But if so, the bishops should commission a First Australian scribe, who’d doubtless pen a far better, more apposite, acknowledgment than the one above. I think something that recognises the spiritual world of Indigenous Australians and the spiritual colonialism of the church would more accurately orientate Christianity in the firmament of colonial recompense and get a congregation nodding along.

But the deceased, an impatient man, lies waiting. His funeral is over and an organ melody choreographs our shuffling exit. It is time to rap on my friend’s coffin, tell him, “Righto, then… ” and let the forgetting begin.