Ten Aussie Words I Miss

Diversity as a Path to Fuller Life

As an Aussie living in America, it’s a lot of fun learning about different cultures, even the minor differences between American and Australian culture. Diversity is beautiful, but I still miss Australia. Here are ten Aussie words that I miss hearing regularly.

1. Yabber- as in to talk (a lot). In good Aussie style most group of friends will include one person with the nickname “Yabbers”.
2. Wobbly- as in to chuck a wobbly or get very excited or agitated.
3. Not the full quid- as in, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, or a few kangaroos loose in the top paddock.
4. Give a gobfull- as in to tell someone what you really think. The person getting a gobfull might be gobsmacked, as in surprised.
5. Ankle biter- as in a small child not a deadly snake.
6. Cactus- as in dead or not working. As in what happens if a deadly snake bites your ankle.
7. Daks- as in pants. If there is a way to shorten a word, Aussies will find it.
8. In the nuddy- as in your birthday suit.
9. Spit the dummy- as in give up.
10. Ear bashing- an alternative to a gobfull.

Diversity is beautiful. Every country has its own language and phrases, and many parts of each country have completely different accents and phrases. When I first moved to America, I was mistaken for a Floridian, Bostonian and even a Middle Easterner. Then of course there were people who thought Australia and Austria were the same place, but that’s another article that involves questions like “Do you have electricity in Australia?”

Every person, place and culture has its own unique experience. Our senses deepen our experience of life, and we barely even touch the depth of our senses. Each of us has a unique blend of sensory experience. One in every thousand people even experiences a phenomenon called “synaesthesia” which is the pairing of senses. They automatically link one sensory experience with a different sense; for example they smell sounds, see smells or hear colors. The most incredible thing is that many of these people don’t even know they have synaesthesia. The way they perceive the world is normal to them.

The way you perceive the world is a unique part of your divine expression. Hebrew religion says that all of life is made in the image of God, therefore everything is an expression of divine diversity. All the diverse parts of yourself are beautiful. You have your own accent on life. You have a spiritual dialect that is your unique gift in the world.

Life is so much fuller when diversity is celebrated rather than feared.Affirm diversity, your own and others. There is nothing to be feared and so much to be gained. Spread the seed of love and healing by celebrating diversity.

www.soulseedz.com

Seed of Diversity

Celebrate your contradictions. Be an extroverted introvert or a task oriented romantic. Be an at-home Mom who likes pole dancing or a meditator who likes heavy metal music. Don’t resign yourself to your quirks. Don’t even tolerate your idiosyncrasies. Celebrate your contradictions today and build them into your own unique style

Say to yourself: I am one of a kind. I am large and have space to hold diversity.

Seed of Sensation

Your senses are alive and connected. Do you see colors when you think of certain people or places? You may have moments when you smell sounds, see smells or hear colors. Certain words or music may evoke flavors or colors. Maybe you see music. Allow your senses to tease your imagination, and enjoy a sensual smorgasbord.

Say to yourself: My senses are finely tuned. My life is sensational.

Spiritual But Not Religious

What’s your feeling about mainstream religion? Do you resonate more with the phrase, spiritual but not religious?

I grew up in the church. When kids said, “You live in a church?” I understood their confusion. I lived so near the church that I could hear church mice eating stale communion wafers. My early memories include over-sized bishops falling through dining chairs, adult home groups singing “trust and obey” with off key gusto and Jesus’ sister (from the local psych. hospital) snoring loudly in the front pew through my dad’s sermons. It was all curious to me, curious enough to draw me into its web when I came of age.

Maybe it was because I was so familiar with church that I never fell for religion’s dogmatic lair. I sat through four years of reformed theological education and didn’t get excited about much of it. It wasn’t that I disagreed. I just couldn’t see the point. My desire to run a church was about nurturing the type of raw human community that had intrigued me as a kid, rather than telling people what to believe.

Two decades, three countries, and a bunch of grey hair later, I bear the scars of my idealism. In every place, there are people prepared to bleed for their dogmatic comforts. There was the Benedictine Monk. He was an accountant by day, caped crusader by night, hell bent on removing me from “his” church. There was the threat of heresy charges for not condemning my gay and lesbian friends. There was the letter from a Bishop stating that I remain in good standing in the Anglican world, and his sneered tone as he handed it to me, “this isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

Then there were the constant reminders that my presence in churches, though offensive to some Christians, meant something positive to the church alumni. These were the people I wanted to be in community with, and I always believed that I could still nurture the type of community that met the needs of this scattered group. The homeless people, the broken people, the creative people, the liberated people, the recovering people, the inquiring people, the family people, those who put their humanity before their ideology; these were my people. I met them in pubs and on university campuses, in gyms and at school picnics. I stood alongside them at protests and bar lines. I just didn’t see them in church.

It was only when I arrived in West Michigan (of all the most unlikely places) that I found a sizeable population of church alumni who were prepared to get organized into a life affirming community. What’s more, they wanted to be part of a broader vision to resource and connect this massive network of people around the world. For the past 5 years I have worked with the most impressive group of human beings I could ever have hoped to encounter. C3 is ready to explode.

I am deeply committed to C3’s health and growth. I depend on this amazing community to feed and sharpen my vision and ideas. I am intimately related to the people and the shared vision. The next step in this evolution is for me to grow wings and fly into open space, knowing that the nest is secure.

The Spiritual but not Religious community is large in number, somewhere between 25 and 40 million just in the United States. Currently, the community is only loosely formed. A new and wonderful spirit is emerging that is passionate and inspiring. It is not bound by ideology or geography, but by a desire to live with integrity, grounded in the power of presence and compassion.

Together we serve the Greater Good, or God, or Wonder or whatever words best describe the beauty that sources our lives. We promote a sense of wonder, and the rapture of being alive. Spirituality is wonder, experienced in the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life.

I am most familiar with Christianity, but that is not an exclusive identity. I am Australian, but that doesn’t prevent me from being a global citizen. I am a parent, but that doesn’t fully define me. Above all else, I am a human being, on a journey of growth and discovery. The label I am most comfortable with, because it includes without compromise all the other roles I play, is inclusive spiritual.

Will you join me? You need give nothing up; neither identity nor tradition. If you like the idea of connecting with the massive number of people who no longer want to be defined by narrow beliefs, but want to have a deeper experience of life, then join the conversation. If you want to make a massive difference in the world, then join the conversation. Together we will love the world with abandon, in an ever widening circle of kindness, until the day when love conquers all hatred and no one and no thing is excluded from love’s tender embrace.

Unity in Diversity

“Multiplicity without unity is chaos; unity without multiplicity is tyranny.” Blaise Pascal

Everybody loves unity. How could you not? But what do we mean by unity, and do we seek unity at any cost? Unity can sometimes be a justification for uniformity. That is a dull form of unity that sucks the humanity and creative freedom out of life.

Unity can sometimes be a justification for conflict avoidance. I sometimes felt in the Anglican Church that unity was code for “lets not rock the boat.” As Bishop Spong says, “the church may die from boredom, but it won’t die from controversy.” Unity that compromises principles and core values is unity that will eventually destroy vision.

The third danger with unity is fragmentation. If unity is legislated, it can fragment groups who are unable to toe the line. Even “minorities of one” can be marginalized by this form of unity. Unity needs to hold in balance personal freedom and social order.

Unity in diversity is the healthiest form of unity. It looks something like this.
Unity in diversity- Unity without uniformity
Unity with truth- Unity without defensiveness
Unity with dialogue- Unity without fragmentation

In my sermon on unity, I attempted to outline the case for unity in diversity. Unity begins with a healthy sense of self, and proceeds to a sense of self in comm-unity with all that is. I used the example of Gandhi as the greatest example of unity in diversity. Last week’s Inauguration was a beautiful symbol of unity in diversity, and a call to the work of unity that all of us need to take responsibility for.

I didn’t include this quote in the sermon, but find it quite a beautiful expression of unity in diversity-
“…the individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully pieced together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world.” Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson