Aboriginal Spirituality

Abstract

'Spirituality' is a fashionable word. What it refers to, however, is beyond fashion, even beyond speech. Kees Waauman links it with the scene in the fifth chapter of John, to the healing of the cripple and to the reference to the angel 'stirring up the water'. Spirituality, he says, has to do with disturbance, disturbance by 'something beyond our world, our situation ... [the Spirit] that blows wherever it pleases'. It therefore has to do with the in-breaking of the other and thus with transformation. The growing interest in Aboriginal spirituality may therefore represent a moment of grace, of this kind of inflowing from within ourselves, from some hidden spring, but also from beyond our world and our situation.