SAND, SALT AND SYMBOL: Spirituality in ‘at the beach’ experiences

By Gregory Smith

Unpublished paper for the inaugural Youth Spirituality Series, the University of Queensland Chaplaincy Series 2014
Presenation at the April 2015 Spiritual Care Australia Hobart Conference "The Ground of our Being." What sustains me?

ABSTRACT

Robust spiritualities feed upon aesthetics as aesthetic experiences better mediate the sacred silences occurring at intersections of sacred and profane. Aesthetic experiences are moments of transcendence enabling initiates to return to an otherwise bland world refreshed, recharged and transformed. One area of enchantment is the Australian beach that is rich in associations about growing up and it offers a focus for environmental action. For the beach experience offers unique creative spaces to access some of the subliminal and saving meanings in our lives. The paper argues that reading the natural environment found at the beach in the way Gadamer does excites increased responsibility for it and for the self. Such an aesthetic reading offers a method for building a contemporary and relevant spirituality. The paper shows that meaningful spiritualities can be built outside formal religious structures.

Media grab: 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 such as 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 envisages 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.

KEYWORDS: spirituality, transformation, Gadamer, identity, connectedness, transcendence, aesthetics serving theology.

6198 words
Overview

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 participation at the beach is rewarded many times over. At the beach, 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 awareness. Finally, the beach's sheer simplicity engages, challenges and disciplines its devotees at subliminal levels in its impact upon body, mind and spirit. Such an engagement with the seasons and cycles of beach life mandates a commitment to sustainability as a suitable ecospirituality in our times.

 
Script

Introduction

I invite you today to join me in an experiment launching another focus for spirituality. We conduct this experiment in our own living culture without being able to identify all the possibilities but well able to steer our way. This experiment is like launching a fragile paper boat with all the excitement and risk that that entails.

Our experiment assumes that quite often a group freely gathers round a powerful focus, and that this interest has an explicit power to unite them and justify their fascination. In this case, that fascination is the lifestyle focused upon the beach experience.

As I lead you into this spirituality, I invite you to calibrate it against our own experiences of spirituality, because it is but one among many. I call this paper boat a ‘Spirituality of the At the Beach Experience’. For this is an exercise of looking in from the outside so we may understand how people any practise their spirituality, those frameworks of ultimate meaning by which people today find meaning in life. This paper is a considered attempt to explore values and practices that appear in Australian society. I thus acknowledge those people who hold these beliefs as their genuine attempt to give shape to the existences they lead.

So to background this paper, it is fair to say that the rise of such new spiritualities is evidence of the interiorization of religion going on today. In our own materialistic society, where there is much hungering for experiences of God, the presentation of the static doctrines of the past offers little satisfaction. Everywhere in the wider culture there is a fascination with mystery, authenticity and good clean living. This explosion of new spiritualities is too easily dismissed as individualistic, and reflective of consumerist attitudes and lifestyles. Often the result is an uncritical mixture forever seeking greater substance and stability. In their use of aids like candles, icons, silence, chant and hints of mysticism, people today seek to build themselves a viable spirituality in a self-conscious search for spiritual answers. They hold there is more to life than materialism, and by building spirituality they piece together an eclectic set of beliefs by which to live a more fulfilling life.

Intuitive, artistic and creative forces drive seekers of spirituality. For aesthetic experiences very often better mediate the sacred than do doctrinal formulations because they employ the language of the imagination.  Using the poetic or ‘aesthetic imagination’, seekers of Beauty can actually live in the mystery of the Reality they seek; for they grow from creative impulses that are more experiential and personal and so are more authentic. Embodying one’s belief has greater cogency in a postmodern world. Seekers of transcendence at the beach find richer templates for human happiness in valuing bodily integrity. In support, James Fowler writes: “The processes, the changes, the waxing and waning of our lives as bodies, is integral to our spiritual lives.”[1] In effect, this paper draws attention to the richer path of cultural aesthetics in the effort to build spirituality.

Historical and cultural context

In a post-modern environment, no one model can adequately ascribe enough significant meaning to artistic experiences, nor can a single text be offered to access infinite Beauty. Many find that the unique model of creative imagination can glean worthwhile results using interpretative processes or hermeneutics. A spirituality that lives by the cycles of nature offers remarkable refreshment. Thus, the model of ‘the beach experience’ can offer everyone a much-needed centralizing ‘pull to the sublime’, for generating human happiness. It offers a proven help to overcome “the intense emptiness of modernity” says poet Les A. Murray.

The world needs some spiritual liberations, some experiences that can be savoured as satisfactory and transcendental. Through the twentieth century, humanism and existentialism failed to offer transcendence with the result that attempts to explore alternatives ways of living broke out in the 1980s. Today’s spiritualities evoke refreshment and debunk meaninglessness. Spirituality offers a net of meanings for understanding ourselves and the world.

Because of “the lack of an assured place for religion in our public life,”[2] individuals feel free to explore ‘the deeper issues’. In our culture of indifferentism and scepticism about religion,[3] there is a huge silence about religion in Australian society. Theologian Tony Kelly writes, “In the Australian conversation, there's timidity and embarrassment about religion.”[4]. However in fact, the laconic Australian national character respects the private world – maybe refusing to say something is saying something. Such immanence in fact grows an Australian mysticism. That private world explores the silences occurring at the intersection of sacred and profane, as unique creative spaces for accessing some of the subliminal and saving meanings of our lives. As our leading poet Judith Wright says, silence is “where the truth waits to be heard.”[5] Builders of spirituality shape those silences into creative significance. Thus they practise an increasing interiorization of religion in the rise of new forms of spirituality.

Coincidentally, today’s new interest in spirituality readily aligns with environmental concerns and shows a strong identification with the natural world. So this exercise seeking transcendence over greed and exploitation is timely. Accordingly, in any exercise of the aesthetic imagination, the concept of hope overcomes despair.

Valuing aesthetics in spirituality

The method presented here employs theological aesthetics whereby the seeker of spirituality builds upon common environmental experiences to find grounds for continuity and hope in today’s search for meaning. The aim is to retrieve one practice of insightful experience in a modality increasingly acknowledged as valid. It is a hermeneutical experiment. It is but one of many attempting an ecospirituality with substance. Sally McFague[6] uses the image of a ‘quilting bee’ where individuals in a rather haphazard way sew on their fragment to the academic endeavour of ecospirituality.

This discussion will argue the value of prizing aesthetic experiences as relevant and effective pathways to God. People searching for God today seek to meet that Presence in ritual, in aesthetics and in fulfilling human encounters. The believer engaging in aesthetic experience already brings to it a greater openness to reality.  The believer hungers for rich layers in experience, actively seeking to find identity, connectedness and transcendence through deep appreciation of the textures of sounds, symbols or rhythms broken open in reflection upon the localised particularities of experience and pain, to obtain some transcendence over the unrestrained forces that lead to unhappiness. Theological aesthetics reconceptualises everyday experience within the larger picture of God’s Providential actions. Thus, ‘faith in God’ becomes a lived moment of embodied exaltation rather than a mere affirmation of a verbal creed.

More generally, spirituality gives shape to life; it frames all one’s actions and even explains what one does. It explains one’s personal routine through the day or an array of idiosyncratic preferences. As a work of the imagination, spirituality offers an “enlargement of consciousness” (Coulson[7]). As products of the imagination, literary tropes for instance can eminently well image a better world. Poet David Malouf reports an inductive, embodied wisdom. He touches on its explaining power in his novel, The Great World,[8] when his character discourses upon “all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is a major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the beginning. ”

So importantly, spirituality describes and explains one’s lifestyle. Its attitudes, actions and routines express hidden values and strong assumptions about what is the best way to face life’s uncertainties. If those actions contain rites, then they can be more easily identified; if they derive from aesthetic experiences say at the beach, they may mandate moral responsibilities about protecting the shoreline and all life forms gathered there. In that sense then, whether spirituality is shared or personal, overall it describes, explains and motivates attitudes, habits and practices of everyday life. It comes to the fore in crises because it gives coherence to life.

Spirituality gives a set of life-defining beliefs and practices. It offers five features:

·      Connectedness; an enduring and durable perspective; a framework for understanding the world; gives transcendent meaning to life; sense of wonder, awe and “otherness”

·      Refuge and support in crisis: it speaks beyond the merely rational

·      Cause and commitment: priorities and goals: how to spend one’s time, what to pay attention to

·      Consolations: a way to deepen our relationship with the transcendent; access to the spirit dimension of the human person; ways to rebuff darkness of soul, disturbance, attractions to things low and earthly, disquiet of different agitations; reasons to reject apathy, complacency and smugness

·      Health, hope and hygiene of the mind.

Building spirituality takes time and commitment. It is a nurturing process into a relationship with the Creator Spirit or Huey and all of creation. Accordingly, in the ebb and flow of sensations in an aesthetic experience, the actant, initiate or participant is searching for sources and connections by making sense of patterns, and in identifying a Gestalt to reconcile passions within the self.  The focus of such a seeker is to lose oneself in the flow of experience, and to involve oneself within the text that sets it off. In spirituality, seekers find insights about authenticity, the chances of re-enchantment, and the prospects for a moral re-engagement to transform their lives and society today. For many, aesthetic experiences are moments of transcendence enabling them to return to an otherwise bland world refreshed, recharged and transformed. Restructuring Time in aesthetic experience brings a sense of the ecstatic thereby colouring all other reality in its intensity. I argue that the pursuit of spirituality feeds off aesthetic experiences that in turn comprise the on-going personal rhythms essential for self-identity.

Process and method

Spirituality needs then be creative, dialectical and critical. In this hermeneutical experiment, it is observed firstly that ecospirituality is creative. As the engine of creativity, intuition is a talent worth developing but scholars too often distrust it. Intuition is the fruitful fillip that can generate ‘compelling knowledge,’ to get us beyond the predictable into the unchartered waters of the sublime where we may be more likely to feel ‘the tug of immortality’ (Malouf). Relevantly here, Canadian contemporary philosopher John Ralston Saul argues for a recovery of passive intuition, a faculty that is organic, unmediated, simple and essentially defensive. He says our obsession with certainty shields us from intuition, "it marginalizes our imagination and so turns intuition into a potential wild card."[9] Saul speaks about an operational vector for recovering personal truths. So one might define intuition as an unskilled potential for seeing and acting that is genuine for being an unmediated impetus for action. It is a powerful dynamic for attaining truth and for effecting the transformation of persons.

Notably too, spirituality is dialectical – it deals with "limit situations" such a pain, loss and death where language fails. That attempt speaks towhat is in the heart. In the aesthetic imagination, believers frame such limit experiences within bigger patterns so as to understand the exigencies of life and endure suffering more tolerably. People building spirituality bridge both the experiential and the theological cultures by generating meanings and refreshing insights that raise affectivity. Building spirituality rests on the tenet that change is possible when consciousness changes.

Aware of the pits of arbitrariness in subjectivity, this hermeneutic must also be critical, challenging actants to improve their lives to intimate, resonate and encapsulate personal truth for the common good. A robust spirituality dares to expose the radical contingency of human life and deal with the reality of pain.

‘Reading’ the beach for spirituality is an exercise of contextual theology. In this hermeneutical and theological task, we read beyond the text ‘for surplus’ to create our own new texts in front of the beach’s environmental texts. That process is defensible for the search for transcendence is always contextualised in living situations and recognisable circumstances, with the result that our needs, aspirations and dreams genuinely grow from a life focus. Seekers of spirituality find crossovers to intensify their spiritual nourishment with reflection on life themes. Indeed Malouf[10] suggests that writers have the duty  . . . to provide an experience of the imagination that will have the . . . effect of immediate illumination and understanding. So for our immediate purpose, this meditation upon life at the beach evokes retrieval, restoration and refreshment. The current hermeneutical and aesthetic task seeks to connect inherited faith with ‘readings’ from life experience, to be validated by the coherences and valency they offer for re-igniting hope.

This exercise in contextual theology reads for responsibility. The reading the beach experience recognises the “thick” textures in response to the common human challenges that face us all. It celebrates the land- and seascapes of the beach. It reads the litoral beyond the literal; that is to say, the theological reading begins with sensual perception in all its richness to begin to consider some more metaphysical dimensions and meanings gleaned in times spent at the beach. Such readings for responsibility resist the irrationalities and insensitivities operating in a society becoming more dissociated from transcendence. They seek a more holistic view found in moral mandates and respect for our lands and seas. The data revealed in this meditation then are the insights of moral intensity won in experiences had at the beach.

Conveniently, deconstruction and postmodernism have presented writers and thinkers with a new set of analytic tools for conducting such an inquiry. Within this newfound freedom, we now have the opportunity to meld environmental insights with traditional expressions of faith, and to discover newer expressions in the eternal quest to find meaning in human experience. This “hermeneutical hankering” makes meaningful what has become irrelevant, unattainable or meaningless. For an exercise of the theological imagination operates in the discovery of self-transcendence and its validation. In particular, this present hermeneutical reading of beach experiences is a complex cameo on what happens when people come together on holiday, in those “blessed moments when power and ideology are absent” (Les A. Murray.)[11]

To identify the dynamic, some today read modern art, particularly the non-referential paintings of Mark Rothko, who was celebrated for his ability to communicate through deceptively simple paintings, as spaces for the imagination to create experiences that can be savoured. In them the object of the viewer’s address is not defined with the result that the art lets that address live, “the art creates the space for that address.” In addressing such an artwork, the viewer’s experience is said to be liberated. This term address is the key to understanding the dynamic for our purposes here too. Address is a focusing of attention, both the mind’s attention and the body’s sensory involvement. The term describes engaging with the artwork.

The application

Having dealt with methodology, we now apply the model. The beach is a relatively non-referential focus for the senses, one that sets off an address as one takes it in and allows the imagination to travel free of any given human references. In a painting we might see people at work or at leisure and the painting offers human points of reference to which we attach our responses. Similarly, in experiencing the beach as the object of our address, the dynamic goes like this: one’s address sets off engagement that can become a conversation that in turn can lead to a ‘conversion’. That conversion is the sudden grasping of the text that changes one’s whole attitude to it and that leads to what Schleiermacher classed as an “inner feeling of connectedness.” That surely is the goal of spirituality being achieved in those three steps: addressing, engagement, and conversion/transformation.

In this regard, Berkeley academic Niklaus Largier[12] describes how transcendence is invoked when one is addressing something that is beyond. The address takes you beyond yourself; it takes one to the horizon of communication. Thus, prayer is seen to be a rhetorical address, the place where this address happens and the practice that makes it present. He notes how the real SELF is emergent only in the ACT of the prayer. An address typically begins with reading a text. In religion an address begins in reading scriptures. He notes how a chosen text has something spiritual within it, so that in reading that text, devotees engage with it to liberate the spirit of the text. More experienced readers reach the point where the text really speaks to them deeply. By reading it more and more, one becomes deeply affected sensually, emotionally and spiritually by the text. One becomes a reader “affected by the text”. The art of reading permits them to become moved by that text. The text speaks according to how one addresses the text, so that the text communicates itself. By engaging in various ways of reading, readers open up their hearts to the chosen text and so the text in turn addresses them significantly and uniquely.

To put it another way, ‘reading’ such a text involves three levels: the first is a highly experiential reading where one is absorbed into the text; the second is the conversation to make meaning of its various figurative ways and tropes so one can emulate and live the text; and the third is where the reading challenges itself so that one is transformed by it, so much so that one can grasp the moment of suspense we call transcendence. That is in fact the prize of the capture and rapture so lost in modernity.

In effect, a spiritual text offers a story though which you see yourself explained and thus it becomes the story of one’s life. Reading such a text then activates the imagination so that ‘reading’ it is like a theatrical performance in one’s head where the imagination lets itself be challenged by limit positions and marginal situations in order to explore and overcome the text itself. The text eventually inscribes itself into one’s body and infuses one’s life overcoming many limitations and promising fruits.

So this dynamic is transferable. My original contribution here is to apply this method to the text of the beach. I take the beach as my text for its multiple evocations, moods and possibilities. I offer the text of the beach as having potential to release spiritual meanings so I begin the three step process of reading it deeply, experiencing it fully and sensually, and become absorbed in the text. I engage in a conversation with this rich text exploring its various meanings for me so I can ‘liberate its spirit’. I may even climb into intensity with it to locate my life story within this text and let it ‘tell my story’. Finally, I test my reading of this text with common limit situations to see how it can meet expectations for stability, coherence and connectedness with life and the world. That to me is the process of building a spirituality.

The dynamic seeks to access the sacred, to go beyond immediate predictabilities and clichés to reach the more sacred free space of questions and creativity. In this process, the sacred lies in clean simplicity, and health and welfare subsists in freedom from intoxications. So as their cognate, the beach offers a remedy surpassing what more complex therapies can ever achieve. That remedy is a better re-connection with the planet, for becoming more responsible, for building sustainability and environmental conservation. 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, readers of nature (or insightful visionaries in Gadamer’s sense) will find food for hope and therapeutics in the sacred presences discovered in its cycles.

Thus the beach becomes one’s prayer space, the ‘congregation’ is the fellow sun worshippers, beach inhabitants, surfers and those arriving early and staying late. The beach is my sacred text that I read as the catalyst for liberating its spirit within me (“watching or the right wave.” The beach is a sacred icon, an idealised window to the divine. The wind is incense, the sand my ground of being and the water its daily baptism. The sea itself supplies the daily communion of fish, prawns, mussels, and dried seaweed all readily available and nutritious. At the beach experiences offer an edgy experience in that tenuous balance between finite and infinite, life and death, pleasure and pain, inspiration and hedonism. In that relatively non-referential space one can feel free to engage in a worthwhile meditation upon change, mortality and the search for meaning.

So in summary then as a source and catalyst of spirituality, the beach:

·      offers continuity in ready access 24/7 for it is dependable

·      is bigger than oneself and so offers transcendence

·      works through incremental processes, undergoing gradual changes while constantly renewing itself in its constantly changing shoreline and sandbars

·      models long-suffering in dealing with tidal challenges

·      is regenerative for it brings one back to ‘the real’

·      grants freedom and space to breathe individuality

·      rewards engagement many times over

·      feeds, inspires and explains much ordinary living

·      offers contact with a life force

·      offers challenge as an irresistible natural force, to be reckoned with

·      demands humility for the beach needs to be treated with respect, and

·      the beach gathers other devotees who share their passion.

Refreshing experiences

The first phase in the process of growing a spirituality of an ‘at the beach’ experience is to enjoy the raw experience of the beach itself. Our script could go like this. On arrival, the sea air fills the lungs and the blinding 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?” as you plunge into the endless space of an Australian beach. Perhaps for some it is a daily experience. But for most, it is a dream lived once a year. At the apparent edge of the universe, the beach experience and the refreshment of the beach offer practical sources for refreshment. In effect, by immersing oneself in the beach experience, one can leave chronological time and enter the time of kairos, that is, opportunity for decision, change and even repentance.

On the second level, reflection upon ‘at the beach’ grants an abundance of notable experiences. Primarily, 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, as a 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. Typically first sex happens in its exciting environment. In that vastness, with its own cycles, whispers, and roars, one meets the most eternal in the most elemental together. Dynamically, the beach refreshes and shapes life narratives.

Thirdly, the three-step method seeks applications. Here the beach experience refreshes by stripping off past perceptions to ready us for life’s surprises. It can analogise the human journey inspiring insightful inhabitants about the realities of suffering tsunamai damage and enduring a slow recovery, or worse, the trauma of shipwreck or oil spill. Observing how nature deals with such events inspires the ecospiritualist to learn patience, endurance and resilience.

Indeed, the beach can be a place of transformations. Holidays at the beach bring rest and refreshment especially over New Year. The beaching of whales evokes an outpouring of care and concern even pathos.

With a greater intensity of reflection, we come to value a tantalising paradox in the fact that the ocean, a clear 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. Perceived thus to be expressing the paradoxes of time among the constant swirl of circumstances, the ocean contiguous with the beach offers a sharing in refreshment and a denial too of access to its secrets. Bathing grants only a limited share of its treasures.

To repair the ware and tear in the waves of modern life, experiences of the beach refresh by widening experience. To experience the beach is to open one’s sense pathways and to open one’s heart, to ‘loosen up’. Beyond the immediacy of one’s own concerns, the beach experience can heighten responsibility. For example, refreshed perceptions may perceive the sea mollusc in the rock pools[13] as reflecting the activity and the creative presence of the creator and sustainer of life itself. Whereas Auden’s celebrated poem “Dover Beach” is a heart-felt cry of despair, for holidaying Australians the beach is an experience of rejuvenation, renewal and refreshment. Enraptured by its rituals, habitues of the beach re-connect with themselves and the earth.

In many ways then, the beach experience broadens the parameters of experience and for believers focuses faith in Providence. The beach grants greater freedom, it devises its own etiquette, and it offers a new perspective with which to judge one’s life. So as well as offering new experiences, the beach intensifies experience, heightens perceptions and offers fresh perspectives.

Lending intensities

Socially, the beach is great theatre; it is inherently democratic. In his poem “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,”[14] poet Les A. Murray depicts the world of surfers at play like warriors:

The warriors watch waves break and are reserved, refusing pleasantry;

They joke only with fellow warriors, chaffing about try-ons and the police.[15]

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. The beach is where people gather, exercise, bathe and relax. We see here many forms of human behaviour: the zest of the young men, the love of young couples, the frolics of children, the care of parents and the dignity of the elderly. We also see much there that is ostentatious, wasteful, crass, vulgar, cheap and increasingly, and what denies others their human rights.

In Murray’s use of ‘the numinous’, this distinctively poet builds bridges between the ordinary and the spiritual, accessing immanence and ‘making room’[16] for the numinous to make meaning of life. Murray for instance integrates his beliefs with the vernacular culture where most Australians live. For instance, this poem’s texture is rich in themes for recognising the initial grace of the gift of creation, for disposing the holidaymakers in the abundant summer environment towards change, and for invoking justification and renewal of their inner selves as they peel off the old year’s dialectics and put on transformation. The poem dramatises how the summer cycle triggers transformation in each and every element both human and organic within the seasonal movement of the whole.

Private beaches overseas are so alien to our experience of beach here. In the Australian experience, the common access to and ownership of the beach repulses territorial claims to this or that area, this or that privileged access or view. The 2006 Maroubra riots were an aberration arising from darker forces threatening that time-honoured tenet. Like the use of the air and water, the Australian beach is for everyone. On the beach, everyone wants to get along, so 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 there.

Pre-eminently at the beach, beach-goers express their liberty and grow identities. Les Murray’s poetry celebrates the life of the body; he rates events and life experiences as valuable and significant intimations of divine presence. Murray describes its quality as sprawl,[17] for it so frees us from demands to meet social, cultural, educational and societal expectations, standards and frames of reference to grant personal identity. Sprawl is an expression of one’s basic humanity, that apparently anti-intellectual unselfconsciousness that allows others to be themselves. As an experience of sprawl, the beach grants individuals a unique freedom over any constricting and potentially deadening conformity. Seen as the time to sprawl, the beach lends new intensities to what is basic about choices, our liberties and ourselves with insights about providence.

In that vast space of air and sea in a seeming eternity of opportunity and renewals, 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 place to recover the self that is so fractured and fragmented by modern demands. The beach experience lives the 
cycle of days and the extent of hours from dawn through noon to nightfall. It accesses an eternity in the escape of fishing with a surf rod. 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 framing views of this life’s pleasures and troubles by taking its cue from the environmental elements and processes.

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 illusions and grant a kind of forgiveness destroying the tapes of our past, to erase them and discard them.  It is said that Albert Camus always sought a swim in the warm Algerian sea to wash off existential angst. The beach grants such a forgiveness – lending its intensity to molify unhappy memories and to relativise hurts. It is the unfortunate habit of some people constantly to revisit their pasts, and look for the points 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 in the beach experience and on holiday, much of that painfully unnecessary examination is passed over and dispensed with. Submitting to its present time, to the immensity of the beach and its different rhythms can be like submitting to endless forgiveness. This ‘environmental spirituality’ works to deal with the past.

Applications: Yielding greater understandings

On this third and more symbolic level, in its progression of tides, cycles and seasons, the beach can foreshadow the incremental advance of mankind’s liberation. At the edge of experience, the litoral reads beyond the literal. In that process, we sense more starkly some paradoxes, for the beach is both destructive in its excess and creative in its processes. Intensifying that experience, one comes to view this life’s cares and troubles within a bigger perspective for dealing with the paradoxes of imperfection, mediocrity, pain, and naked evil and unseen catastrophes. Most notably, the ocean reminds us of our human limits and mortality.

Most relevantly, this experiment in hermeneutics mandates a moral attitude. An experience of environmental responsibility just like an encounter with art implies questioning ourselves. Jean Grondin (1998) 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 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 current endeavour plots a reading of the text of the natural environment at the beach as a found artwork, to excite increased responsibility for it and for the self.

So in its internal dynamism and irrefutable declaration of limits, seekers of spirituality find a truer context within nature’s dynamic artistry at the beach. It is not stretching the bow too far to claim that beach experiences prefigure and anticipate “a non violent dreamtime where no one living has been” (Murray). A faithful reading of the data mandates environmental responsibility.

By way of practical application to close this section, those living ecospirituality are characterised by:

·      sharing a deep love and firm confidence in the dynamic of their spirituality

·      acknowledging the lifestyle they enjoy at 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 resolving 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 having a 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 similar clients 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.

In these sixteen ways, initiates in the beach experience affirm themselves and their place in the world.

Conclusions

This paper began claiming that people today search for the Eternal or Beauty in ritual, in aesthetics and in fulfilling human encounters. We applied the aesthetic imagination to the natural world. Using it, the insightful actant is able to use this cognitive, aesthetic and mystical steps to dream of justice and right-relatedness.

This paper has sought to address the second way showing how to read the silence in the cycles of life at the beach. Reflecting upon experiences of life at the beach permits us to employ the aesthetic imagination to better understand the vast richness and abundance of the Earth. It found that the beach dramatises humans’ place in nature’s dynamic artistry.

So on three levels, the beach demands attention. At the perceptual level, 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 an unmediated interpretative framework for reading nature. Relaxed at the beach, the mind is liberated to respond to pristine instincts of our shared humanity. On the aesthetic level, the natural environment focuses attention. As recipients of its spiritual nourishment, beach-goers do not pass by its appearances salamander-like, but are nurtured more deeply in its harmonious rhythms, ‘pulsing more truly to human nature, more truly to themselves, (to bowdlerize a line from Judith Wright). In that discovery of environmental engagement lies an environmental mandate to accept responsibility for beach conservation. A spirituality of the Beach experience accesses this immortal, perennial impulse to care for the environment.

On a third and more symbolic level in its dynamism and aspect, the beach experience enacts humans’ longed for liberation. Advantageously, abiding rituals at the beach bring humankind nearer to greater dignity, indeed nearer to shared values. In the same sense that Murray seeks translations, the experience of the beach ruptures society’s conventionalities by translating “the invisible to the tangible and specific.” Murray extols this embodied power of dreaming the transcendent interfacing human and divine as being dynamic, possessive and therapeutic all at once. In particular, At the Beach experiences structure human actions to be socially harmonious and environmentally responsible. At the beach then one can suspend chronological time and enter the time of kairos, with opportunities for creativity and transformation.

This paper has argued that a robust spirituality can evolve in aesthetic experiences. Because our convictions wax and wane on the waves of modern life, we need time and opportunities to open ourselves to greater experience; we need opportunities to sift and understand how experience structures perceptions. To meet that need, articulated experiences of nature like those at the beach can intensify spiritual resilience. Just as the beach’s tides and cycles suggest the perpetual movement and restlessness of our hearts, a reflective attitude can find new intensities and more insight into limit experiences so that what seems less actually grants more. An uncomplicated view yields many more insights.

This reflection has offered some appreciation of the worth of experiences of being at the beach, has suggested that they can shape and structure our perceptions about worth in the world and society, and has shown that by intensifying them we can generate meanings of worth and value for grounding moral imperatives. Quite truly, no aesthetic experience can disregard the truth claims art makes, for contemplating both art and nature raises moral consciousness, as Gadamer describes. For ethics and aesthetics are inextricably linked; aesthetics drives ethics. In an aesthetic reading for spirituality, numinous presences can be glimpsed in simple experiences at the beach, the better to bring us to better states of mind.

This paper arises in a new century more aware of emergent religious plurality and must be located within that global context. The paper has shown that while various religious traditions collected certain stories into their official sacred books, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian scriptures, the Koran, etc., other expressions of the human spirit capture, express, raise questions, and point direction toward the ultimate realities of life. The method shows glimpses of redemption for the Earth and ourselves in the act of imagination, in imaginative anticipations of better outcomes. The paper has examined a specific basis for spirituality not categorized as formally religious which does, in fact, touch the human spirit in deeply spiritual ways.

REFERENCES

Ackland, M. “Why read Australian poetry?” Southerly 57.1 (1997), 183.

Coulson, J. Religion and Imagination: In aid of a grammar of assent. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981.

Conway, R. Land of the Long Weekend. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1978 (1980).

Fowler, J. W. Faithful Change: The personal and public challenges of postmodern life. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

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.

Hart, K. The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Kane, P. Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Kelly, A. J. A New Imagining: Towards an Australian Spirituality. Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991.

Largier, N. “Lecture 22: Modern Art and religious experience: From baroque plenitude to modern minimalism.” Religious Studies 90A 001 Fall 2009 UC Berkeley. iTunes podcast accessed 2/8/2013.

Malouf, D. Imagining the Real: Australian Writing in the Nuclear Age, Dorothy Green and David Headon, Eds. Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1987.

Malouf, D. The Great World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990.

McFague, S. ‘An Earthly Theological Agenda, Christian Century, 108, 2 January 1991.

Murray, L. A.  Collected Poems 1961-2002. Potts Point, NSW: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.

Saul, J. R. On Equilibrium Camberwell, Vic: Penguin Books, 2001.

Wright, J. Judith Wright: Collected Poems. Sydney: Angus & Robertson 2002.

FOR FURTHER READING

Dawe, B. “Tributary streams: Some sources of social and political concerns in modern Australian poetry” Australian Literary Studies 15.3 (May, 1992), 97-109

Eliot, T. S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London: Faber and Faber 1933 (1970).

Glasner P. E. “The study of Australian folk religion: Some theoretical and practical problems.” In A. W. Black & P. E. Glasner (eds.) Practice and Belief, pp. 167-180, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983.

Kelly, A. J. “Spirituality: An Australian accent”. The Way Supplement 73, Spring. London: Heythrop College, 1992, 87-97.

Pearson, Clive. “Towards an Australian Ecotheology.” Uniting Church Studies Vol. 4, No. 1, March 1998, 1-15.

Rahner, K. “Poetry and the Christian.” Religious Investigations IV pp. 357- 367. Baltimore: Helicon, 1966.

Smith, G. B. Images of Salvation: A study in theology, poetry and rhetoric. PhD dissertation 2007. [On-line] Available: www.openthesis.org/documents/Images-Salvation-study-in-theology-276951.html

___________“The holy spirit of larrikinism and irreverence in mid-century Australian religious verse.” Theology @ McAuley Banyo edition, February 2003 Issue 3 [on-line] available: dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ ejournal/Issue3/Smith.htm [2004 June 12].

________ “Walking knee-deep in ferns: Salvational themes in the poetry of Les A. Murray” Australian Ejournal of Theology August 2004 edition 3 [on-line] available: dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_3/Smith.htm [2005 April 6].

________ “Communing with David Malouf: Considerations upon salvation” Paper delivered at the Biennial Conference in Philosophy, Religion and Culture:  “On The Good, Goods And The Good Life” Catholic Institute Sydney 2 October 2004. Unpublished monograph available upon request.

________ “Communing with David Malouf: Considerations upon salvation.” Australian Ejournal of Theology 2005, No 4 [on-line] available: dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_4/gregsmith.htm

[2005 April 6].

________ “Striking the metaphysical chord: How the gifts of nature image salvations.” Australian Ejournal of Theology August 2005 issue 5 [on-line] available: dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_5/GregSmith.htm [2005 August 9].

________ “We are turned into a great tree: Judith Wright’s strange word about trees” Australian Ejournal of Theology Issue 7 Pentecost 2006 edition [on-line] available: dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/aejt_7/greg.htm [2006 June 7].

____________________ “Re-Forging Theological Language Through Poetry” chapter in Priest, Poet and Theologian: Essays in honour of Anthony Kelly CSsR. Preston Vic: Mosaic Press, 2013.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Smith PhD reads and writes in contextual theology, seeking sources for inspiration and fuses for faith in life and literature. He has published similar articles in the Australian Ejournal of Theology. Contact: greg.hub@pacific.net.au He is the Deputy Academic Dean of the Multifaith Academy for Chaplaincy and Community Ministries Inc. Brisbane.

Influences and Sources

• David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book : Christian Identity and Literary Culture Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996.
• Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the religious imagination San Francisco: Harper and Row 1987.
• Umberto Eco et al, Interpretation and Overinterpretation ed. Stefan Collini CUP 1992.
• Re-read Luke Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary Theory Macmillan 2003 and its review by Beulah Baker in Christian Scholar’s Review Vol XXXIV, No 2 (Winter 2005), 259-261.
• William F. Lynch, “Theology and the Imagination” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly Vol. XXIX, No 112 (Spring 1954), 61-86.
• Michael Griffin, Arthur’s Dream: the religious imagination in the fiction of Patrick White. Paddington, NSW: Spaniel Books, 1996.
• James Duban, Melville’s major fiction: Politics, theology and imagination. Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.
• Peter Kirkwood, “Two Australian poets as theologians: Les Murray and Bruce Dawe.” Compass Theology Review 19.1 (Autumn, 1985), 31-44.

Related Article Published:
“Communing with David Malouf: A hermeneutical reading of The Crab Feast” Australian Ejournal of Theology no 4, 2005.

STUDY QUESTIONS arising from this  paper

1. Spirituality today gives the right tone, the right feel, the right ‘context giver’ for living well. Can using the aesthetic imagination supply such a spirituality? How?

2. A theological reading connects inherited faith with ‘readings’ from life experience. It begins with sensual perception in all its richness to begin to consider some more metaphysical dimensions and meanings gleaned by the perceiver. Use the experience, reflection, application steps to construct an outline for a satisfying spirituality.

3. The theological imagination operates in the discovery of self-transcendence and its validation. Is this a sufficient basis for spirituality?

4. By constructing spiritualities, people seek meaning at depth (in perennial resonances) relevant to their contexts and their circumstances. They seek interconnectedness, relationships and transcendence by finding meaning and deep values in narratives. Give examples of such stories that comprise ‘spirituality.’

5. Gadamer held that aesthetics drives ethics so contemplating both art and nature raise moral consciousness. Seekers of spirituality find a richer context within nature. Show how this focus might start a spirituality.

6. Because we are spiritual beings who seek to engage a connection with the transcendent in sacred spaces, meaning making comes in recreating the past to sustain the present for living the future. Explain how this is done with some examples.

7. Respond to this statement in the light of the paper:

Spirituality comes through allegiance or commitment, and in rejection of materialism, commercialism and exploitation. It stresses individual needs and experiences, and should act to fulfil the individual’s spiritual needs.

7. When poet Les Murray talks about ‘incarnational faith’ based on the life of the body, he means a faith-filled reading of the data of experience. Show how this can be a suitable basis for spirituality.

PUBLICITY

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 such as 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 envisages 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.

Greg is the Academic Dean of the Multifaith Academy Brisbane.
studies@chaplaincyacademy.com