Spiritus nullias?
When Australia was first discovered it was described as Terra nullias, or empty land. This view was used to justify the settlement, genocide and land grab that happened thereafter. But the Aboriginal people were already there before the continent was ‘discovered’. They were already farming the land, it certainly wasn’t empty! But it now seems clear that the new settlers didn’t recognise the Aboriginal land use as farming, at least partly because it was different from European farming. There weren’t enclosed fields, none of the marker posts delineating ownership that the settlers were used to. Instead there were groups of people following a well-established pattern of land use, making good use of the natural resources, trading when they needed to, and caring for the health of the land with carefully controlled seasonal burning.
I wonder how often we assume that the world in which we move is a sort of ‘Spiritus nullias’? Somewhere that we can bring God. Whether we somehow fail to see that God is already here and at work in every corner of the universe? The missionaries didn’t take God to the indigenous peoples of anywhere. God was already there, and had been throughout their history, walking and working with them, but their view of him was and is different from our Western mindset.
There is a lot we can and are beginning to learn from indigenous spirituality. A lot of our learning is about how to develop a good relationship with the earth, a relationship founded on respect and care, rather than resource and profit. Thank God that somewhere there are still pockets of people who can help us all to find a better way to relate to each other, our fragile earth and our future.