The paper explores the
possibility of devising a
satisfying spirituality upon
aesthetic experiences like
the Australian beach. The
three fold process values
experience, understands it
in metaphors, and seeks
applications for life.
The
process is
based on Gadamer's
hermeneutic where a
"reading " mandates
moral attitudes and
applications.
The
paper argues a viable
spirituality as a framework
for seeking meaning, for
explaining what happens to
one and for connecting
to the web of life. Such
developed understandings
frame daily routines and
justify conservation of the
environment.
ABSTRACT Robust
spiritualities feed upon aesthetics as
aesthetic experiences better mediate the
sacred silences occurring at
intersections of sacred and profane. For
believers, aesthetic experiences are
moments of transcendence enabling them
to return to an otherwise bland world
refreshed, recharged and transformed.
One
area
of
enchantment is the Australian beach that is rich
in associations when growing up and a focus for
current environmental concerns. For the beach
experience offers unique creative spaces to
access some of the subliminal and saving
meanings in our lives.
The
beach offers a spirituality that is clean, simple,
and accesses the eternal. Forever offering
replenishment, clean air, blue sea, and freedom from
the grime of urban life, the beach is Australians'
preferred escape. Without complication, initiation
or internship, its cleansing powers offer both
physical and metaphysical refreshment, relief and
renewal.
Beach experiences entice and satisfy; engagement
saturates the senses while that exchange explains
itself. Any input is rewarded many times over. There
the initiate soon becomes the master, its way of
life directly rewards its adherents. The beach's
rhythms access the eternal in their reassuring
continuities, just as its elemental substances
ground the conscious experience for enhanced
awarenesses.
Finally, the beach's sheer simplicity engages,
challenges and disciplines its devotees at
subliminal levels beyond any simple comprehension of
its impact upon body, mind and spirit. Such
engagements surely describe the dynamics of
ecospirituality in our times.
•
is
where divinity
is known, experienced and respected
•
is
a
spirituality of
inclusion and compassion for all, the
idle, the focussed, the lonely and the wounded
• is a spirituality
possible in a local venue
•
is
a
spirituality
for inspiration,
refreshment and sheer joy.
"Reading"
the beach
A
work of art helps us see in
more ways than one e.g., sensually,
intellectually, and attentively. Art requires
participation, a response, or what Gadamer
calls a ‘reading.’ An aesthetic experience
cannot disregard the truth claims raised by a
work of art.
So
this reading of the text of the
natural environment at the beach as a found
artwork excites increased responsibility for
it and for the self. ‘Reading’ the beach for
spirituality is an exercise of contextual
theology.
In
reading the eternal restlessness of the
waves, the exposure and
closure of the tides, the slow erosion
of beach and cliffs, the eternal search
for food by fish, with the eyes of faith
readers of nature (or insightful
visionaries in Gadamer’s sense)
find food for faith and therapeutics in
the sacred presences discovered there.
The
open beach represents a better
time and place to recover the self that is so
fractured and fragmented by modern demands. In fact,
the experience of the beach’s immensity and
“eternity” echo and evoke the search for permanent
happiness. Recovery, retrieval and recreation gained
at the beach lend intensity to faith-in-the-Saviour.
Thus, ‘environmental spirituality’ works to deal
with grieving.
On
arrival, the sea air fills the lungs and the
dazzling sunlight temporarily blinds you.
The tang of the familiar ocean excites
images in memory. “Ah,” you say, “We’re
here. Why’ve we been away so long?” And you
plunge into the endless space of an
Australian beach. Perhaps that’s your daily
experience. But for most of us, it is a
dream we live once a year. At the apparent
edge of the universe, the beach experience
and the refreshment of the beach offer
practical sources for theological
reflection. In effect, this paper outlines
how immersing oneself in the beach
experience one can leave chronological time
and enter saving time, for it grants us
opportunities for recreation, refreshment
and even transformation.
Process
and method
The
world-wide interest in spirituality readily
aligns with environmental concerns and
fruits in a strong identification with the
natural world. While many Australians seek
to immerse themselves in a hedonistic
lifestyle and ignore questions of ultimate
meaning, others engage in a self conscious
search for spiritual frameworks to provide a
more meaningful life and on which to build
responsible commercial practices. So seeking
transcendence over greed and exploitation is
timely. These readings for
responsibility resist the irrationalities
and insensitivities operating in a society
becoming more dissociated from
transcendence. We here seek a more holistic
view found in moral perceptions and
attitudes to our lands and seas.
Relevantly,
an experience of renewed responsibility like
an encounter with art implies questioning
about the worth and use of that work. Jean
Grondin [1] notes that an artwork “always
has something to say, speaks to our
cognitive and moral sensibilities and brings
them into play.” For inevitably, a work of
art makes us see in more ways that one
(e.g., sensually, intellectually,
attentively). Art requires participation, a
response, in what H-G. Gadamer [2] calls a
‘reading.’ Hence, an aesthetic experience
cannot disregard the truth claims raised by
a work of art; rather it mandates them. So
this current essay is a reading of the
natural environment found at the beach, to
excite increased responsibility for it. In
seeking to apply faith to the environmental
agenda, it is an exercise in contextual
theology.
People’s
search for moral transcendence is always
contextualised in living situations and
recognisable circumstances, with the result
that our needs, aspirations and dreams
genuinely grow in living contexts. Readers
of poetry and literature find crossovers to
intensify their search with reflections on
themes in literature. Similarly for our
purposes, this process is applied to
perceptions of retrieval, restoration and
refreshment won at the beach. The current
hermeneutical and theological task seeks to
reconnect inherited faith and tradition with
current experiential sources, as religious
readings from experience, validated by the
coherences and valency they offer for
igniting faith. That effort could be renamed
Intensifying Faith from an Environmental
Focus.
As
well, deconstruction and postmodernism have
presented writers and thinkers with a new
set of analytic tools for conducting such an
inquiry Within this new-found freedom, we
now have the opportunity to affirm newer
insights into faith for responsibility, and
to discover newer expressions of the eternal
quest to find meaning in human
experience. This “hermeneutical
hankering” [3] (Eagleton 2005:149) makes
meaningful what has become irrelevant,
unattainable or meaningless. This exercise
of the theological imagination operates in
the discovery of a process to
self-transcendence and its validation. In
particular, this hermeneutical reading of
beach experiences is a pertinent and complex
meditation on what happens when people come
together on holiday, in what Les A Murray
calls, those “blessed moments when power and
ideology are absent.” [4]
Such
readings in contextual theology attempt to
recognise the “thick” textures in response
to the common human challenges that face us
all. They begin with the land- and seascapes
of the beach. They read the litoral by
savouring beyond the literal, that is to
say, the hermeneutical reading begins with
reflection upon sensual awareness in all its
richness to consider some more theological
dimensions and meanings gleaned in times
spent at the beach. The data of this
meditation then are the insights of moral
intensity won in experiences of reading the
artwork that is the beach.
The
discussion seeks to access the sacred, to go
beyond immediate predictabilities and
solutions to reach the more sacred free
space of questions and creativity. The
process assumes that the sacred lies in
clean simplicity, and that health and
wholeness subsist in freedom from
intoxications. So as their catalysts and
corollaries, the beach offers a remedy
surpassing what more complex therapies can
ever achieve. That remedy is a better
re-connection with the planet in becoming
more responsible for its maintenance. In
'reading' the eternal restlessness of the
waves, the exposure and closure of the
tides, the slow erosion of beach and cliffs,
the eternal search for food by fish, we can
find the therapeutics of the sacred.
Application
of the model
The
beach grants refreshing experiences. First,
the beach grants an abundance of body
experiences. At its most primal level, the
beach is a step into vastness – the wide
expanse of sand, the dazzling blue of the
sea, the exciting unpredictability of the
waves, the very real pressure of the moving
air – all of it saturates the senses. The
long wide arc of the beach, the certainty of
the level horizon, its vivid colours, scents
and sensations hurl us into itself, embrace
us body and soul in raw ambiance. There is
nothing quite like the open beach, that
revelation after the cool gloom of the
dunes, in an encounter with what is primal,
essential and original. The beach is the
edge of the land, the final destination for
explorers, the staging place for holidays
and for most Australians is the place of
romantic beginnings. In that vastness, with
its own cycles, whispers, and roars, we meet
the most eternal in the most elemental.
As
a social reality, the beach is a great
leveller; it is inherently democratic. For
at the beach, there is no clear divide
between the sophisticated and the
instinctive, the truly human and the veneer
behaviour expected by society. At the beach
people feel perfectly free. European private
beaches are so alien to our experience of
beach here. Here the beach is where people
gather, socialise, exercise, bathe and
relax. We see there many forms of human
behaviour: the zest of the young men, the
love of young couples, the care of parents
and the dignity of the elderly. In “The
Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,” [5]
Murray depicts surfers at play like
warriors. Unfortunately too we also see much
there that is ostentatious, wasteful, crass,
brutal, vulgar, violent, cheap and
increasingly, behaviour that offends others’
human rights. Whether to ban smoking on the
beach is currently a debate on the Gold
Coast.
In
the Australian experience, the beach
expresses the democratic spirit. Our common
access to and ownership of the beach repulse
territorial claims to this or that area,
this or that privileged access or view. It
grants a greater freedom, even devises its
own etiquette. The 2006 Maroubra riots
were an aberration arising from darker
forces threatening that tenet. Like the use
of the air and water, the Australian beach
is saved for everyone. On the beach,
everyone wants to get along, so a beach
etiquette has developed, which could be
stated as, “annoy no one and no one will
annoy you.” Such traditions and customs
structure everyday relationships for harmony
and peacefulness.
Further,
the beach refreshes by stripping off past
perceptions to ready us for life’s
surprises. The beach then can be a place of
revelations. Jesus’ post-resurrection
appearance on the shore of Lake Tiberias
evoked Peter’s repentance and his triple
affirmation of his discipleship, “Feed my
sheep” (Jn 21:17). Over an early morning
breakfast of roasted fish and broken bread,
the lapping of waves accompanied an opening
of hearts in the everyday ritual of eating
together. That opportunity gave Peter a
significant moment for repentance when Jesus
grants him forgiveness. With an abundance in
that morning’s catch and in shame before his
Lord, Peter finds on the beach his longed
for reconciliation with his Lord.
In
these several ways, a spirituality of life
at the beach refreshes perceptions by
widening knowledge and deepening identity.
To experience the beach is to open one’s
sense pathways and to widen one’s
experiences. Beyond the immediacy of one’s
own concerns, the beach experience can
heighten responsibility. For holidaying
Australians the beach is an experience of
rejuvenation, renewal and refreshment.
Enraptured by its rituals, believers at the
beach re-connect with themselves and the
earth.
Thus,
the beach rituals broaden the parameters of
experience. Reconnecting with the elements
there we recover commitment to life’s
positives and so repair our waxing and
waning on the waves of modern life.
Reflection on life at the beach brings a new
perspective with which to judge one’s
actions. As well as offering refreshing
experiences, the beach intensifies the
sensory perceptions, heightens self worth
and offers fresh perspectives on life. The
dynamic is the threefold process: aesthetic
enjoyment, understanding it, and applying
the aesthetic imagination. Beach
spirituality, as I present it, is itself a
moral enterprise that focuses upon the
preservation and worth of the artwork. For
indeed, the beach itself is a living
artwork, at the same time the focus, context
and reward of the aesthetic endeavour. Its
aesthetics generate a moral response.
Lending
intensities
Pre-eminently
at the beach, beach-goers express their
liberty and enhance their identities. Les
Murray describes this quality as sprawl, for
it so frees us from demands to meet social,
cultural, educational and societal
expectations, standards and frames of
reference regarding personal identity.
Sprawl [6] is an expression of one’s basic
humanity, that apparently anti-intellectual
unselfconsciousness that allows others to be
themselves. Both sprawl and the beach grant
individuals a unique freedom over their
constricting and potentially deadening
conformity. Murray’s poetry celebrates his
incarnational faith based on the life of the
body (“I am only interested in a God who is
embodied”), and so he rates events and life
experiences as valuable and significant
intimations of divine presence. In his view,
the beach lends new intensities to what is
basic about ourselves, our choices and
liberties with insights about providence.
In
that vast space of air and sea in a seeming
eternity of opportunity for renewal, the
board rider dreams of the perfect wave, the
teenager dreams of the perfect romance and
the retired dream of perfect rest. The
sea-change experience has been well
documented as an attempt to retrieve some
personal space after the crowding of the
cities. In that space for dreaming, the open
beach does not represent loneliness as much
as a better time and pace to recover the
self that is so fractured and fragmented by
modern demands. In fact, the experience of
the beach’s immensity and “eternity” echo
and evoke the search for permanent
happiness. Recovery, retrieval and
recreation gained at the beach lend
intensity to spiritualities aiming at
transformations.
In
the dynamics of spirituality, some greater
intensities of perception come when we
realise the tantalising paradox in the fact
that the ocean that symbol of transformation
is itself unpotable. While the land thirsts
for water, we cannot drink the sea. As the
source of life and in its cycles of erosion
and repair, the ocean’s own life models our
uncertain human attempts to secure a
foothold upon the eternal. Caught in
outstanding paradoxes of time among the
constant swirl of circumstances, the ocean
viewed from the beach offers
invitations to refreshment and a denial too
of access to its secrets. Bathing grants
only a limited share of its treasures for
whole-person replenishment.
At
a second level, the beach demands focused
attention. The sand between our toes, the
brisk salty breeze, the lulling of the
waves, the mournful cries of the gulls, the
squeals of happy children bombard the senses
with a new interpretative framework for
reading nature. Relaxed at the beach, the
mind is liberated to respond. There with a
better repair of dualisms, a faithful
reading better accesses its riches with an
urgent impulse to care for that environment.
For the natural environment demands our
responsible attention. We cannot but respond
to it. As seekers of spiritual nourishment,
faith-filled beach-goers do not yield
salamander-like to its passing externals,
but are nurtured more deeply by its
harmonious rhythms, to become devotees
pulsing more truly to nature, and thus more
truly to themselves. In that environmental
engagement lies an environmental mandate to
accept responsibility for beach
conservation. My thesis is that such
aesthetic reflection mandates moral
responsibility.
On-location
and on a deeper level, one applies one’s
memory and intelligence lending a cognitive
intensity to realise that the beach is both
destructive and creative in its operations.
The horrific Aceh tsunamis reminded us that
the ocean brings terror to the beach.
Theological reflection strives to navigate
between those two extremes of terror and
being carefree, finding due caution between
terror and genuine enjoyment. The beach
dramatises paradoxes, and a spirituality of
beach experiences repairs them holding those
opposing ends of experience in tension to
yield a viable path forward by framing this
life’s pleasures and troubles as part of the
perpetual cycle of birth and decay. For the nation too, the living beach location is a locus of
collective memory. Now in this centenary year of the ANZAC
landings at Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, our soldiers
crossing that fatal shore is the focus of powerful
lengends around that significant historic event. This
year, that particular beach focuses the nation's attention as
never before. Multiple poster and filmic images of
the beach landings celebrate that site of heroism, self
sacrifice, suffering, courage, bravery and defeat. Historical
commentary, reflection and commemorations focus on that event at
that place. That beach bears unique scars as the scene of
paradoxes, the birth of a nation's identity, and now food for
its spiritual consciousness. The contours of that sea and
landscape define our nation's spiritual heritage. The
annual commemorations each April 25th set up the nation's
spiritual rhythm. Striking re-enactments there and here
remind us all that it was at the beach that our nation was born,
and at the beach our men are buried. Later, Slessor's poem "Beach
Burial" further refined our collective attachment to that
locus genii (spirit of place), for it is not only a
great social leveller in life and in recreation, but also in
death. Images of the beach landing lend collective
intensities to the grief, pain and pride of the national
spiritual inheritance.
On
the other hand, the immensity and intensity
of the beach can erase illusory intensities.
A robust spirituality has the ability to
destroy the tapes of the past, to erase and
discard what one regrets. The beach
grants a similar forgiveness too – lending
its intensity to erase unhappy past events
and relativise hurts. Chaplains find it is
the habit of some people to revisit their
past, and look for the point where they took
the wrong turn, where they made the wrong
decision, when everything started to fall
apart, by dissecting past mistakes and
dragging themselves over the coals again and
again. But on holiday, much of that
painfully unnecessary examination can be
erased, passed over and dispensed with.
Submitting to present time, to the immensity
of the beach and its slower rhythms can be
like receiving endless love and forgiveness.
That surely is the better way to deal with
the past.
Yielding
greater understandings
After
outlining levels one and two, experience and
understanding, we come to judging as in
Bernard Lonergan’s EUJ epistemology [7]. We
move to examine the third and more
integrated level in the practice of this
spirituality, After reflecting upon the data
of experience such as the beach’s repetition
of tides, cycles and seasons, we reach the
action component in application. Reading
beach experiences this way, the litoral
moves us beyond the literal. In that
process, the imagination can read more
starkly the paradox in the fact that as a
symbol of transformation, the ocean, is
unpotable. While the land thirsts for water,
we cannot drink the sea. Intelligence knows
too that the beach is both destructive in
its excess and creative in its processes.
Intensifying that experience, we can come to
view this life’s cares and troubles within a
bigger perspective for dealing with the
paradoxes of imperfection, mediocrity, pain,
naked evil and unforeseen catastrophes.
Another example might be to reverse our
impatience and accept that mankind’s
liberation is an incremental advance, so
that we accept present time’s pains as
inevitable within the processes of
existence.The fruit of this spirituality is
to curb impatience and rationalise our
plight.
A
robust spirituality yields greater
understandings to curb greed, reckless use
of power and overarching egotism. The
beach’s internal dynamism and irrefutable
limits teach us our place in creation. The
beach grants a living context to accept
humans’ place in nature’s dynamic artistry.
It is not stretching the bow too far to
claim beach experiences prefigure and
anticipate “a non violent dreamtime where no
one living has been” [8]. Granting a bigger
picture about irreconcilable dichotomies is
the strength of a viable spirituality, the
test of which is how well it deals with life
at its most difficult. A faithful reading of
the data mandates environmental
responsibility.
On
this third and more symbolic level, the
beach brings a taste of mankind’s longed for
liberation. Advantageously, abiding rituals
like daily bathing at the beach bring
initiates nearer to greater dignity, indeed
nearer to integrity and wholeness in the
same sense that Murray seeks translations of
the natural world. Experiencing the beach as
a raw encounter with nature ruptures
society’s conventionalities to translate
“the invisible to the tangible and
specific.” [9] Murray extols this embodied
power of dreaming the transcendent in
interfacing human and divine as being
dynamic, possessive and therapeutic all at
once. In particular an “at the beach”
spirituality grants unmediated experiences
of insight and liberation. The spirituality
of the beach experience structures behaviour
to be responsive, socially harmonious and
environmentally responsible. At the beach
then one can suspend chronological time and
enter (kairotic: kairos, καιροs: critical
time, opportunity) saving time.
Conclusion
This
paper has sought to find the ground of our
being in ‘reading’ the silence and cycles of
life at the beach. Reflecting upon
experiences of life at the beach permits us
to glimpse the vast richness and abundance
of eternity. Too often regarded as a place
of rampant sensuality, the beach challenges
its initiates to retrieve what is more true
to the self. The beach dramatises our human
place in nature’s dynamic artistry.
We
outlined the process and the benefits of the
three level structure at the heart of
building a spirituality of the beach:
drinking in the intense raw experience,
reflecting upon it, and applying that
understanding. Repeating that process day by
day better reveals and applies the anodyne
enchantment driving it. The process fruits
in a more coherent identity, greater respect
for self and others, and focused reflection
mandates moral responsibility. So to read
the beach this way reveals truths about
ourselves and our world. In its powerful
dynamics, we can reconnect with ourselves,
others and our environmental
responsibilities as a race.
This
paper has argued that because our
convictions wax and wane on the waves of
modern life, we need times and opportunities
to open ourselves to greater experience, and
further, that we need opportunities to sift
and understand how experience structures
perceptions. We found that experiences of
nature like those at the beach can intensify
resilience. Just as the beach’s tides and
cycles suggest the perpetual movement and
restlessness of our hearts, the practice of
this spirituality finds new intensities in
more insight about it, so that what seems
less actually grants more. The resulting
uncomplicated view can yield many more
insights for a viable spirituality.
ENDNOTES 1.
Grondin, J. “Gadamer’s Aesthetics –The
overcoming of aesthetic consciousness and
the hermeneutical truth of art” Trans. M.
Kelly, Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics Vol 2,
pp. 267-271. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998. 2.
Gadamer, G-H., Truth and Method
(1960). “the aestheticisation of
judgment and taste which had previously
possessed a cognitive function” and a
reflexively critical understanding to give
“a genuine critique in hermeneutics.” 3.
Eagleton T. Figures of Dissent (London &
NY: Verso 2005), 149. 4.
Murray, L.A., “The Human-Hair Thread”
Meanjin (4)1977 in Murray, The Paperbark
Tree: Selected Prose (London:
Minerva/Mandarin 1993), p. 92. 5.
“They joke only with fellow warriors” Canto
9, line 11. Les Murray Collected Poems
1961-2002 (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove,
2002), p. 142. 6.
Murray,“The Quality of Sprawl” from The
People’s Otherworld (1983) C.P.1961-2002,
182-3, and in David Lampastato, Upholding
Mystery: An anthology of contemporary
Christian poetry. (New York: Oxford
University Press. 1997), pp.165-166. 7.
Lonergan. B. (1961). Insight: A study
of Human Understanding and Method in
Theology. passim. 8.
Murray line 30 in “On the Present Slaughter
of Feral Animals,” Collected Poems
1961-2002, p. 408. 9.
Read Murray in discussion of the numinous
perception as translations of the divine or
explorations of all the places where God is
‘caught, not imprisoned’. His anthology,
Translations of the Natural World dramatises
his ideas of dreaming and thinking in poetry
discussed in his “Poemes and the Mystery of
Embodiment” Meanjin 3(1988)519-533
especially 527-8.
REFERENCES
Eagleton,
T. Figures of Dissent: Critical essays on
Fish, Spivak, Zizek and Others. Verso 2005.
Grondin,
J., “Gadamer’s Aesthetics –The overcoming of
aesthetic consciousness and the
hermeneutical truth of art” Trans. M. Kelly,
Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics Vol 2, pp.
267-271. New York: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Gadamer,
H-G. Truth and Method (1960:89). [In reading
an artwork,] “the interpreter should attempt
to bring his own living actuality into the
closest accord and harmony with the stimulus
he receives coming from the object, so that
the two vibrate in consonance, that is, in
tune with each other.” In other words,
installing hermeneutic consciousness as a
critical social theory. Discussed in Grondin
J. Introduction to Philosophical
Hermeneutics (Yale University Press, 1997),
128.
Murray,
L., Persistence in Folly, Sydney: Angus
& Robertson, 1984,
Murray,
L. Les Murray: Collected Poems North Ryde,
NSW: Angus and Robertson, 1991.
Murray,
L. Collected.Poems 1961-2002 Potts Point,
NSW: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.
The
author: Greg Smith is Academic Dean at the
Multifaith Academy for Chaplaincy Brisbane,
and conjoint lecturer in Theology and
Philosophy at University of Newcastle - BBI.
He reads and writes in contextual theology,
seeking sources for inspiration and fuses
for faith in life and literature. He has
published similar articles in previous
editions of the Australian Ejournal of
Theology. Contact:
<greg.hub@pacific.net.au>
Experiences of nature found at the beach can
shape and structure our perceptions about worth in the world
and society, and that by intensifying them we can generate
meanings of worth and value.
The paper examine a specific basis for
spirituality not categorised as formally religious which does,
in fact, touch the human spirit in deeply spiritual ways.
Malouf’s “particular fragrance of the landscape”
values it as:
distinctive, unique, contested
an identification marker for responsibility
fragile: can be lost, removed without trace
perennial, persistent, aromatic
pervasive, accessible, common property
accessible, shared, not esoteric
evokes memories - recalls significances.
Reading the beach: Method
A work of art helps us see in more ways than one
e.g., sensually, intellectually, and attentively. Art requires
participation, a response, or what Gadamer calls a ‘reading.’
An aesthetic experience cannot disregard the truth claims
raised by a work of art.
So this reading of the text of the natural
environment at the beach as a found artwork excites increased
responsibility for it and for the self. ‘Reading’ the beach
for spirituality is an exercise in contextual theology.
The Process
The first step in the process is to enjoy fully
the raw experience of the beach itself.
On the second level, reflection notes
that the beach grants an abundance of notable transitions,
e.g., the beach is a step into vastness.
Thirdly, the three-fold method seeks applications.
The beach experience heightens responsibility to re-connect
with the Earth.
Outcomes: What a spirituality does:
·grows the narrative of nature and human
interaction with it
·gives more than it takes
·is available, immediately, through 24/7 access to
the beach
·offers the repeatable sacrament of washing and
refreshment that is visible, actual and participatory
·is proclaimed by devotees, participants, actants,
workers and visitors.
·is known best in practice
·is where God is known, experienced and respected
·is a spirituality of inclusion and compassion for
all, the idle, the focussed, the lonely and the wounded.
·is a spirituality possible in a local venue.
·is a spirituality for inspiration, refreshment
and sheer joy
·available for all cultures and peoples
·is shaped by broad, current experience
·practises health, society, challenge and humility
before the forces of Nature
·that calls all to enjoy human nature, experience
and relationships
·is characterised by sheer simplicity
·reveals wider horizons and many layers of
experience
·is a spirituality of optimism
·is a spirituality not dispensed or controlled by
institutions, but is shaped by individuals
·is a spirituality nurturing creativity, freedom
and cultural diversity.
Applications
Chaplains give spiritual care to those living
ecospirituality by:
·sharing a deep love and firm confidence in the
validity of this spirituality
·acknowledging the covenant the client makes with
the beach
·respecting his or her spiritual engagement with
beach life and issues
·sharing resistance to the dominant consumerist
and industrialist expansion into beach environments
·repairing gaps in understanding and modeling
tolerance of ambiguities about the fate of the Earth
·nurturing dedication to the dialectic
relationship between humans and the beach
·nurturing spiritual awareness that opens the
heart beyond wealth preservation and consumption to the
aspiration of care for others and the local environment
·engaging in critical reflection upon threats to
the beach environment and culture
·affirming the person’s connectedness with the web
of life and the forces of growth, healing and continuity
·nurturing compassion and fulfilment by purifying
desires, aspirations, and needs
·affirming the environmental cause and the
conscience about its cognate issues
·reaffirming one’s the right to express one’s
beliefs and live one’s life in our own way as a fundamental
right of every human being
·encouraging the client’s values of equality,
harmony and brotherly and sisterly community with all
creatures
·assisting those who conscientiously seek to
discern life directions and make choices inspired by the beach
experience
·assisting the client to give meaning and find
direction in life
·revealing the facts, feelings, faith and freedoms
in the person’s life.
Relevance
“Knowledge of God is not just analogous to
knowledge of place but is, in part at least,. . . knowledge
of the sum of the created order.”
“In knowing God we have knowledge of a genius
loci, where the relevant locus is the world or the created
order in its entirety.”
Winn, M. 2007. “Knowledge of God, Knowledge of Place,
and the Aesthetic Dimension of Religious Understanding” paper
at the 'The turn to aesthetics’ conference held at Liverpool
Hope University, 5-7 June, 2007. at http://www.acu.edu.au/about_acu/faculties_schools_institutes/faculties/theology_and_philosophy/schools/theology/ejournal/past_issues/aejt_11/Aesthetic_Dimension_of_Religious_Understanding/
