Compassion. In all of the discussion about the Indigenous Constitutional Voice that is the one word missing. In all of the column inches, in the voices on the airwaves where is compassion?
On Q+A this week we devoted an hour to the many and varied views on the Voice, from no to yes, from sovereignty and treaty to justice and law and politics, but not once did anyone utter the word compassion.
Without compassion how can we begin to bear the weight of Australia’s great sin? How can we begin to move toward healing, truth or forgiveness without first compassion?
Can time heal suffering?
The great German theologian, Johann Metz, characterised this as memoria passionis: a remembrance of God that inspires a divine sensitivity to suffering. Metz called into question our ability to see ourselves in each other. We may call it empathy but it demands more than that. It means that we transcend our cultural amnesia.
Modernity itself is built on forgetting. On moving on. Captured in the phrase “time heals all wounds”.
As a German, Metz had to confront this after the Holocaust, when he wondered: “Where was God? … Where was humanity?”
Can time be expected to heal the suffering of Auschwitz?
The “sword of forgetting” and the “shield of amnesia” deadens us to suffering and evil. As Metz wrote, “Yesterday, Auschwitz; today Bosnia and Rwanda; and tomorrow?”
Forgetting is erasure. Modernity’s faith in progress imagines that we can lock suffering in the cold storage of history.
But we cannot progress our way to healing. We cannot progress our way to peace.
Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of forgetting, conceded the haunting power of memory. As he said: “Only that which never ceases to hurt stays in memory.”
I have the wounds of my family
I have Wiradjuri wounds. I have the hurt of my Kamilaroi and Dharrawal family. First Nations people carry the memory of wounds.
The Voice to Parliament speaks to politics. But there is also a deep ache of the soul. Surely any consideration of justice for Indigenous people begins with compassion for suffering.
Yet sadly, we live in a nation where so many Australians do not even know a First Nations person.
We are the most impoverished and imprisoned people in the country, and yet as the miserable reading of the Closing the Gap statistics reminds us, nothing changes. It is as though First Nations suffering is factored into Australia.
As an Indigenous person and a journalist I cannot easily separate myself from what I am reporting on. Already I find myself caught in the backwash of politics. There is a conflict between what I do and what I am.
Questions of a Voice, treaty, sovereignty, justice are existential questions for me as they are for all First Nations people.
Australians will not be just voting on a Voice, I cannot but think they will be voting on me, on the existence of my people.
I am sustained by the survival, strength and love of my people. Philosophy too is useful, but ultimately insufficient as a tool to try to navigate this.
The thinker I turn to
As a Wiradjuri-Kamilaroi-Dharrawal person deeply connected to my culture and spirituality and a person of faith, it is theology that, for me, best speaks to this moment. It is thinkers like Johann Metz, who have had to confront and deeply contemplate evil and suffering in the world, whom I turn to. He speaks more profoundly than the op-ed columns and headlines of the day.
He had to ask where his own faith was in a world of abysmal suffering. How do we hear, what he calls, a “landscape of cries”.
On the suffering of Indigenous people in South America, Metz wrote that he “saw the eyes without dreams, the faces without tears … the unhappiness beyond wishing”.
Can we say we don’t see that too here? But in those faces of mourning, Metz also saw “distinctive strength, a secret resistance”.
Same here.
It is a resistance against the “hectic acceleration of time”, against “forgetfulness that nests in our modern consciousness”.
Metz believed in a political theology. Where people look into the face of suffering and see themselves. They must act. And they must look inward, particularly to their own alienation where human beings are sacrificed to the myths of modernity. Where they become “merely their own experiments, and less and less their memories”.
The totalising, oppressive universalism of modernity has been countered by a post modernity that fractures the world and in our fragments we also fail to see each other.
Metz would say that European domination of the world — colonisation and empire — had “no eyes for the trace of God”.
Whether we are of other faiths or no faith, this year invites us to look behind politics and to carry the weight of our responsibilities to the most vulnerable.
To bear the burden of our history. This will be a bruising year. Already the political battle lines are being drawn.
The voices and the faces of those who suffer are being silenced and erased. We have by passed compassion and moved straight to combat.
Stan Grant is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and presenter of Q+A on Thursday at 8.30pm. He also presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel.