Nullaga
A couple of weeks ago I was walking in the evening as a storm came over. It wasn’t quite dark, there was still just enough light to see the grassland moving in the wind from the storm. The grass is above my knees and silver at this time of year, and the smell of rain came in waves across the hillside. It was gentle and easy to miss, but when I took the time to be silent and listen, the world was transformed for a few minutes.
After a time when there was only the whisper in the grass to be heard, the whole hillside was lit brilliantly with lightning and the following thunder felt like it was coming up to me through the earth.
My friend Rod Mason is a Bemeringal Storyteller, one of the few keepers of the old knowledge from the Monaro and surrounding mountains. The Ngarigo word for our open grasslands here is Nullaga - “the free country”. On either side was important men’s & women’s country, but Nullaga belonged to no one. I used to look at the hill where I walk and only see the weeds that had been allowed to infest some pretty nice native grassland. After spending enough evenings walking there however, it now towers over me and invites me to come and explore the hidden saddles, find the animal paths and sit in the silence to listen to the voice of God.
As I lay in the grass on the ridgeline last night, the strangely mild wind that comes ahead of snow brought the whispering back to the grass. If I am prepared to be honest, it’s difficult to believe in a God that lives in formality, suits & ties when all of his expressions are so wild. It’s also not possible to consider my deepest questions and believe any longer that God is too remote to relate. Whether it’s the grass by moonlight or Black Cockatoos wheeling and crying as a snow-bearing gale roars up a mountainside through the Ash, when I chance on one of those corners of the world where the wildness walks and I glimpse part of the face of my God, I want to go deeper somehow. I think the best words for it here come from the man who knows all about glimpses of another world, C.S.Lewis:
“In one way of course, God has given us the Morning Star already: you can go and enjoy the gift on many fine mornings if you get up early enough. What more, you may ask, do we want? Ah, but we want so much more - something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves - that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image. That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods. They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so.”
Jesus said “The wind blows wherever it chooses. You hear it’s sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” In a world of people driven by their own needs, what could be less predictable - more wild or more beautiful than Jesus’ image of someone that lives by love? Someone that has no “sensible” limits but “spends themselves” on behalf of the needy; who returns love for hate, protects the dignity of people trapped in their own failures, cares intimately for the small things, stands up to the powerful on behalf of the oppressed and is motivated by a level of compassion that causes them to feel the suffering of others as if it was their own? Isn’t the longing for this the same wind from God’s country blowing in my face as the one I feel on the mountain?
Every time I hear the Black Cockatoos in the storm or see the day’s last light across Nullaga I am aware that I have just glimpsed a hint of God’s country. It makes me restless and the longing is stirred up that I don’t want to be normal, I want to join with these and be something beyond it all, something beautiful. It still eludes me and I live a normal life of self-preoccupation, but as Lewis put it, I have just experienced “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited”. If it was only possible to live without numbing this deepest part of my soul.
“The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” John 1:5
