" The Room of the Spirit "
The Room of the Spirit
and of the Craft.
There is a pattern to
life
We are all
related
Grandfather rock, Grandmother
sky.
We are the voice of the rock,
the home of a milliard,
relative to the virus, wedded
to cabbages.
One family, one Lover, Creator,
Creature.
I have never written before of why
I became an investigative journalist,why I found myself at home with
Aboriginal Australians, why I found myself tilting against powerful
corporations for 25 years, RTZ, De Beers, Merck. Journalists are
supposed to be hard bitten cynics. But the very opposite is true of
many and certainly of me. My writing is driven by a religious
committment. My spiritual experiences have very privately dominated
my life. As a youth I plunged into learning all I could of the
mystics, striving to understand better these experiences.I learnt
above all that we are one family with one divine Lover - a parent of
whom we should never be scared, a loving creator with whom for one
reason or another I felt utterly at home.
I have always felt kinship with
strong sister spirits. Thus I went to France to explore all the
places associated with the warrior Maid of Orleans, Jeanne d'Arc -
thinking that at that time I too may have been burnt - I went to
Avila and to the nearby mountains to seek memories of Teresa, a woman
who painfully carved out a place for herself and companions in the
church. I took my children to Sienna to the home of Catherine, a
powerful woman who felt no fear in lecturing the pope. We went too to
Gubbio where Francis was befriended by a wolf 
and to Assisi, where we were
horrified by the mercenary attitude of the Church, but found the wood
at the top of the hills where Francis and his followers hid out and
lived in small caves.... the glorious seeemingly mad people that
talked to animals that we exalted only after they were safely dead.
But such people are not all dead. I count myself fortunate to know
today people of indomitable spirit, mostly not Christians,as truely
dedicated to working for the oppressed as any heroine or hero of the
past.
And, as I had learnt from
Aboriginal people of the wisdom and inspiration of the ancient
cultures, I delighted to see prominently on the wall of a church in
Northern England an ancient emblem of a woman holding open her vulva.
and to find standing in front of the cathedralin the holy city of
Avila a large statue of the ancient Green Man.
I believe all races, all peoples,
are welcome at the home of their Creator, wise individuals of all
races and religions have reached out and got to know their God or
Goddess... and that many of these individuals have consequently been
rejected by their families, by society. Christ taught us this is all
that we can expect. I myself rarely feel welcome in
churches.
So too did my Northern Irish
inheritance help shape my life. My Mother taught me of how my people
had lost their inheritance. I learnt early of greed-driven
colonisation and the misery it brings.It brought me to work with the
colonised and oppressed Aboriginal Australians and to learn from them
how to fight for justice, to never give up.
In the ranks of the Catholic
church in which I grew up, I also found some to inspire me such as
the worker priests of France that put away all pretence of status to
serve the human family and also Dorathy Day of the Catholic Worker
movement who organised open houses where the poor and lost were
always welcome as members of the family. They combined radical
political action with love and real commitment. But I found such
prophets were the exceptions. Sadly the institution proved no home
for me. The wilderness, formed by the hand of my Creator, became my
spiritual home. I went back to what I had learnt as a child, that on
the hill tops I could talk to my Parent free of all
restraint.
And Australian Aborigines gave me
much. They taught me about the land, gave me another sense of time
and of belonging. I learnt a thousand years was not a long time, that
wealth was an inheritance of all, that rocks could be my 'dreaming',
my own parents
And of course like most humans, I
had the enriching experience of bringing up children, two wonderful
girls.
On top of this I found that the
very factor in my life that I thought was a Pauline weakness, sent to
keep me humble, was a gift from my Lover, my Creator. It enabled me
to watch in the first part of my life as if I were a spy, the
dealings of men, to experience their independence, status,
self-assuredness, mateship, aggression.
Then, once I had come home to my
inner self, as a woman, I found a vastly different and comfortably
familar way of being, a gentler way of life, and a less valued way of
life. As a woman I have experienced male self centredness,
aggression, being used for their relief, their own pleasure. It is
degrading. It has taken time but I am now learning how to not need
men, to be a free woman.
In the Australian Outback,
Aboriginal elders had welcomed me. I was taken to women's
places. Sung the women's songs that greet
the creating spirits. Elders guided me. I was very
privileged.
In 1997 I found myself finally
completing a circle within my life. Australian Aboriginal Elders over
the decade and a half that I worked with them had helped me
understand the sacredness of all creation. They told me one day I
should go back to work with my own people on our own land. This I am
now doing. And I am learning the sacred traditions of our own land in
these islands of Britain and Ireland. I now work close to my own
ground, with the earth as my book. I learn from our sacred places and
I honour them and all that our ancestors have given us.
So this is how I can best
contribute. By singing a song on the internet and in my land, and on
any street corner that makes me welcome. This is my street corner on
the net. Hope you enjoy it!
On love and
children, marriage and giving.
to the
cowardly lioness page.
To
Resources for Mystics
To Resouces
for Druids
To
the Craft of the Wise
To the coffee
shop and meeting place.
Click to return
to the Library Entrance.
To Contact Jani Roberts