Dreams, Visions, and Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs)
‘God of Holy Dreaming’ in the Anglican Prayer Book for AustraliaFootnote 1 is a significant inclusion by Revd. Auntie Lenore Parker of the Yaegl people of the Northern Rivers. It is one of the first inclusions of a recognisably Aboriginal prayer within a national prayer book of a church which has been party to an often brutal and tragic colonial history. So, its contextual significance is huge, representing an inclusion of Aboriginal thought within a key church document. This prayer is not just an expression of Aboriginal thought, but is also a product of a traditional wisdom and spiritual practice which recognises dreams and visions as significant. This may be, for some readers, a challenging notion.
Thinking about dreams and visions reveals the ever-present problem of simply adopting the conventions of one’s own environment as the premises for thought and critical reflection. This hinders, as Owen Barfield pointed out, the process of reading texts and traditions from elsewhere. He encouraged a process which he identified as unthinking:
Nevertheless, when two consciousnesses differ, as it were in kind, and not merely in relative lucidity– there the problem of sympathy can always be narrowed down to the problem of the meaning of some one or more fundamental words. One of the most striking examples of this truth is the interpretation of Greek philosophy by modern Europeans. Such a one can read Plato and Aristotle through from end to end, he can even write books expounding their philosophy, and all without understanding a single sentence. Unless he has enough imagination, and enough power of detachment from the established meanings or thought-forms of his own civilization, to enable him to grasp the meanings of the fundamental terms– unless, in fact, he has the power not only of thinking, but of unthinking– he will simply re-interpret everything they say in terms of subsequent thought.Footnote 2
Thus, readers today need to step back from their default positions to engage with either Aboriginal or emerging Christian thought in a way which actually respects the material under investigation.
This is particularly true of modern Northern and Western readers who encounter phenomena such as dreams and visions. Social-science commentators have identified these as examples of ASCs.Footnote 3
Two classic definitions are found in the writings of Ludwig and Bourguignon respectively:
I shall regard “altered states of consciousness”—as those mental states, induced by various physiological, psychological, or pharmacological maneuvers or agents, which can be recognized subjectively by the individual himself (or by an objective observer of the individual) as representing a sufficient deviation, in terms of subjective experience or psychological functioning, from certain general norms as determined by the subjective experience and psychological functioning of that individual during alert, waking consciousness.Footnote 4
and
altered states of consciousness are conditions in which sensations, perceptions, cognition, and emotions are altered. They are characterized by changes in sensing, perceiving, thinking, and feeling. They modify the relation of the individual to self, body, sense of identity, and the environment of time, space, and the other.Footnote 5
These include a wide range of phenomena:
One scholar has identified more than thirty such states of consciousness, including dreams, daydreams, nightmares, incubation dreams, directed imagings, hallucinations, dédoublements de conscience, illusions, visions, depersonalization, derealization, bodiliness, the stare, fugue states, sexual ecstasy, mystical ecstasy, prayerfulness, inspiration, furor, aesthetic contemplation, Ergriffenheit (being seized), being charmed, transported (in the French sense of transporter), entranced hypnotic trance, possession trance, television trance, distraction, soul loss, soul flight, shamanistic trance, nirvana-like experiences, susto (sudden, overwhelming fear), near-death experiences, and a host of drug-induced experiences of varying intensity and phenomenology, not to mention “normal” consciousness.Footnote 6
What the modern Western thinker might disparage as ‘the voices’, in a caricature not far removed from Round the Horne’s comic creation, J. Peasemold Gruntfuttock,Footnote 7 are, for many others, privileged perspectives from which the world may be viewed.Footnote 8 Bourguingon’s analysis of 488 societies identified 437 in which ASCs were accorded value, compared to 51 in which they were absent.Footnote 9 Western society ‘seems to have blocked individuals’ access to these otherwise pan-human dimensions of the self’,Footnote 10 seemingly because:
Westerners developed an ‘acquired consciousness’ whereby they could dissociate the self and look at the self ‘objectively’.Footnote 11
Whilst the dominant tendency is to consider ASCs as ‘irrational’ or even ‘pathological and infantile’,Footnote 12 Westerners may still document experience of ASCs and include them in psychotherapeutic practice.Footnote 13 Christians of many cultures experience them within their spiritual experiences (e.g., glossolalia, xenolalia,Footnote 14 visions, mysticism and hesychasm,Footnote 15 etc.), even if some theological traditions would claim that such phenomena ended with the age of miracles.Footnote 16 There is a need to review why these have been set aside when they were instrumental in the growth of early Christianity, and are enshrined in Scripture.Footnote 17 The Cessationist case (that miracles stopped) simply does not survive historical scrutiny, even if endorsed enthusiastically by key figures of the Reformation whose critiques were deeply political and polemic.Footnote 18
The remarks which follow offer an exploration of ‘God of Holy Dreams’ against the background of ASCs in both emerging Christianity and Aboriginal life and argue for its validity and value as the product of an ancient spiritual consciousness. It may be counted among those missiological movements which, from the early Church onwards, have embraced the possibility of positive engagement between the gospel and the cultures it encounters.
Dreams, Visions and ASCs in Graeco-Romanitas, Judaism and the New Testament Environment
ASCs were part of Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean culture. Oppenheim’s comprehensive study, The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, indicates the ubiquity of dream related practices.Footnote 19 The significance of dreams and visions can be seen from Homer onwards: they were recognised as privileged both within religious (e.g., the incubations of Asclepius) and intellectual traditions (e.g., Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato).Footnote 20 Their persistence can be further seen in Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica (On the Interpretation of Dreams – late 2nd–early 3rd century CE).Footnote 21 One of the famous dreams which it describes, Alexander the Great’s vision of a satyr dancing on his shield, illustrates the need to distinguish modern interpretations from classical:
And it strikes me that Aristander was felicitously lucky in his interpretation of the dream seen by Alexander of Macedon when he was besieging Tyre, fretting at the time the blockade was taking, and becoming impatient. Alexander imagined in his dream that he saw a satyr (satyros) playing about on his shield. Aristander happened to be there at Tyre accompanying the king in his campaign against the Tyrians, so by separating the syllables in the word satyros into ‘sa Tyros’ (‘Tyre is yours’) he was able to sharpen the king’s appetite for the war, with the result that he took the city.Footnote 22
While Freud could see this as ‘the most beautiful dream to survive from antiquity’ embodying his own fascination with ‘wish-fulfilment’ and ‘visual imagery’ in his ‘new science’, ancient views were different: ‘For Aristander, Alexander’s dream did not signify that he wanted to capture Tyre; it signified that he would capture Tyre’.Footnote 23
Unthinking.
The ubiquity of dreams includes Judaism, in which the value and variety of dreams have been preserved in the Jewish Scriptures. ASCs permeate the canonical texts of Judaism and Christianity alike:
In fact, altered states of consciousness experiences fill the Bible beginning with Genesis when God puts the first creature into a deep sleep in order to create Eve, his helpmate (Gn 2:21) and ending with Revelation where John the Revealer repeats four times that what he reports is the result of experiences in trance (en pneumati: Rv 1:10; 4:2; 17:3; 21:10; Malina and Pilch 2000; Pilch 1993). According to the Deuteronomic Historian, trance experiences were one means that God used for communicating with human beings: “The word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision” (1 Sm 3:1–21).Footnote 24
Jean-Marie Husser notes that the Hebrew ḥlm describes different types of dreams:Footnote 25 joy, illusions, nightmares, ordinary, premonitory and allegorical dreams, divine speech, and theophanies.Footnote 26 Different traditions within the Jewish Scriptures vary in the value afforded to dreams, and identify them as, variously, symbolic, messages, or prophecies.Footnote 27 Occasionally, they are connected to oracles, oneiromancy, and incubations.Footnote 28 Oneiromancy refers to dreams which foretell the future, and whose meanings are discerned by either inspiration or deduction.Footnote 29 In an incubation, a sleeping dreamer is given advice or guidance; they are found in a number of Scriptural passages.Footnote 30 On occasion, these are linked to sacrificial elements or places already associated with divine encounters (e.g., Gibeon – 1 Kgs 3:4–15).Footnote 31 Journeys to upper and lower worlds may be experienced (e.g., Gen. 28:17; Ezek. 3:14–15).Footnote 32
ASCs persist in Jewish mysticism and 2nd Temple Judaism. Jewish mysticism has it origins in, amongst other things, the heavenly visions found with the prophetic writings of the OT, Qumran,Footnote 33 and the pseudepigrapha.Footnote 34 Indeed, dreams still retain a significance in some modern and contemporary Jewish circles. Pilgrimages to Meron are one example.Footnote 35 Given this rich Judaic background, and the Graeco-Roman counterparts, it is no surprise that dreams and visions occupy a privileged place in the NT and its depiction of emerging Christianity.
The NT embraces ASCs wholeheartedly. Within the gospels, dreams (e.g., Mt. 1: 20–24) and events like demon possession may be reckoned as such.Footnote 36 ASCs include:
for Jesus, his baptism and testing by Satan, and for the disciples, Jesus walking on the sea, the transfiguration of Jesus, and experiences of the risen Jesus.Footnote 37
Acts abounds in ASCs: the ascension, Pentecost, heavenly visions, mantic dreams, angelic appearances, miraculous escapes, magical encounters, and healings.Footnote 38 John J. Pilch suggests that there are 20 or so recorded within it.Footnote 39 Paul’s experience at Damascus, recounted three times to stress its importance, may be identified as an ‘ecstatic trance’.Footnote 40 Acts 5:1–11 admits the possibility of thought-reading in Peter’s awareness of Ananias and Sapphira’s actions, though he may be privy to other undisclosed sources for this knowledge, because of the presence of the Spirit (Acts 5:3–4, 9), as well as ‘sorcery syndrome’ and ‘uncanny death’.Footnote 41
Paul’s writings include ASCs among the gifts of the Spirit (e.g., 1 Cor. 2: 1–14, 12: 1–31, 14: 1–40),Footnote 42 as well as his calling and the account of a heavenly journey:
Paul ascribes his call by the God of Israel to his change-agent task to an altered state of consciousness experience initiated by God (Gal 1:1, 12). His descriptions of Jesus-group experiences that he ascribes to God’s Spirit are all instances of such altered states events, as indicated repeatedly in our commentary. He himself notes his sky journey in which he experienced the ineffable, in “Paradise” (2 Cor 12:1–7). Paradise in Israelite lore, of course, was the name of the garden of pleasure created by God for the first human beings (Genesis 2). However, by Paul’s day this place of blessedness was transposed into the sky (see Luke 23:43),often referred to as the third or highest level of the sky, where the righteous dead dwelt awaiting the resurrection of the dead. Paul himself frequently receives directives from the realm of God (Rom 16:26; 2 Cor 12:8; Gal 2:2). Of course, Paul ascribes the visions of the resurrected Jesus to such altered state experiences (1 Cor 15:5–8).Footnote 43
Hebrews potentially refers to Jesus as superior to angelic sky-servants.Footnote 44 Elsewhere, Rev. may be described as a series of heavenly visions and sky journeys.Footnote 45 In essence, the whole book ‘depends on the alternate state of consciousness of the prophet John’.Footnote 46 Whilst Freudian psychoanalysis sees dreams as a ‘resource for therapy’:
Revelation, fortified by Daniel, will not abide by these constraints. In these books, God is a “Known-Maker”, knocking on the door of human reality more persistently than human beings knock on heaven’s door…the content exceeds what is humanly imaginable, awake or asleep, and the source is a God who makes things known.Footnote 47
Others go further and suggest that both Baptism and Eucharist are ASCs: they ‘tell’ the ASCs which Jesus ‘showed’: they ‘re-enact’ and allow ‘relexicalization’ of the actions of Jesus, so participants engage in a ‘resocialization’.Footnote 48 Thus, 1 Peter 3: 18–22 links baptism with the account of Jesus’s proclamation to the angels and heavenly ascent, reminiscent of the Enochic material.Footnote 49 But, there is more to this than just social identity:
Jesus claimed that he could already enter the kingdom of God and that the kingdom of God could already be realized for people who lived their lives as he did… This was symbolized by participating in the Eucharist. The Eucharist made the kingdom of God a reality in the present lives of the participants. We should keep in mind that the earliest Jesus followers adopted an apocalyptic worldview… In the earliest Jesus-followers’ practice of regularly celebrating the “Last Supper” until Christ would return (“in memory of Christ”), this apocalyptic worldview is foregrounded. By doing this they experienced “another” time, the time of God, as breaking into ordinary time. This is nothing else than the experience of an alternate state of consciousness.Footnote 50
Here, it may be suggested that the potential offered by ASCs for assessing our place in the world and relationship with God might yield insights lost to the default skepticism of Western and modern thought, as well as theological stances like cessationism. Unthinking again.
The Positive Role of Culture: Acts 2 and Justin Martyr
In addition to adopting ASCs, Acts makes it clear that the appropriation of language in all its fullness, and the endorsement which it gives to the use of culture, is part of the Pentecost experience. Attempts to claim that what is presented here is a single heavenly divine language now made available to believers, a reversal of the Babel story in which a plurality of languages is now superceded by the irruption of a single divine language, simply does not work. The text clearly points to a different dispensation in which believers are able to hear in their own languages (tē idia dialektō – Acts 2:6). Best taken as indicating xenolalia (‘the actual speaking, miraculously, of an unlearned foreign language’),Footnote 51 this phrase endorses unity in diversity, not uniformity. Recognisably human languages and dialects are meant rather than glossolalia (that is, ‘tongues’, unidentifiable languages), even if Frank D. Macchia, who endorses such a definition, cannily points out that the event of Pentecost still:
resists making any single language or idiom absolute in significance but rather embraces and transcends eschatologically all human languages and idioms.Footnote 52
The interpretation of Pentecost as a return to some blessed and universal primordial language does not hold.Footnote 53 If the story of Babel and the fragmentation of humanity by language tell of preventing the rise of a single ideology or imperialism,Footnote 54 Pentecost does not revive it. Rather, it offers the potential for all to recognise and engage with God from within their own culture, and thus allows every culture and ethnicityFootnote 55 to hear the good news and promises of God in terms that are familiar. This needs a qualification: not everything found in a culture is necessarily in harmony with Christ, but, equally, not everything is opposed to him.Footnote 56
This is an understanding of gospel and culture which resurfaces in the writings of Justin Martyr (c. 160 CE). John Behr points out that his thinking enabled him to see Christ at work in all cultures:
He [Justin] held that the Word of God is in all creation, as the ‘sowing Word’ (λόγος σπϵρματικός) spreading ‘seeds of the Word’ (σπέρμα τοῦ λόγου) in all. The Word of God, as the Logos spermatikos, implants in human beings a seed, a sperma, which enables them to think and live in accordance with the Logos. Such a seed of the Word gives them a dim perception of ‘the whole Word’, the Son, so that some, like Plato and Socrates, were enabled to live and think according to the Word.Footnote 57
Such a perspective provides a foundation for Charles Harris’s comment about Australia:
The fact that God was already here in this land long before 1788 proves the fallacy of the missionaries who came out and told the Aboriginal People that they were bringing God to us. God was already here and with the people.Footnote 58
Djiniyini Gondarra’s words, which offer a challenge to look beyond cultural default settings, must be taken to heart:
…we cannot establish an Aboriginal church and Aboriginal theology without going through pain, suffering and hardship. The birth of Aboriginal theology must go through this cultural pain and be willing and prepared to accept it. The birth of the early church had to go through a similar experience in the New Testament. We have to let go of some of our precious cultural values which stop us reaching out in love to our people.Footnote 59
In the contemporary Australian context, it would be invidious for all the ‘pain, suffering, and hardship’ to be endured by Aboriginal peoples in an environment in which they have already suffered so much and the church has a strong settler identity, often causally linked to that suffering. Some of the weight must be borne by non-Aboriginal Christians moving beyond their cultures. That, for modern Western Christians, involves re-thinking the role of ASCs, dreams and story-telling. An analogous experience would present itself if it were possible to enter into a dialogue with their earliest Christian ancestors: it would be diachronic rather than synchronic. NT precedents allow the potential for ASCs within Aboriginal religious experience to be reckoned vehicles of theological truth.
Dreams, Visions and ASCs in Aboriginal Spirituality
The importance of ASCs within Aboriginal culture, religious experience and practice is a given:
The local terms used for this myth, Tjukurrpa, lchera and Alcheringa have been translated by anthropologists as “The Dreaming” or “Dream-time”. This is only partly accurate. “Ancestral Order” is another possible translation, though even that phrase obscures the restless stirring of creative potency that is part of it, too.Footnote 60
This Dream-time refers to ‘both a creative period… and a continual, atemporal metaphysical reality’: an ‘“everywhen” to articulate its timelessness’.Footnote 61 Thus, the Aranda phrase alcheringa (or altjiranga) refers to the time when the ancestor spirits formed the physical world, but ‘ [a]t the same time, altjira rama means “to see or dream eternal things”, or “to see with eternal vision’.Footnote 62 Parallels are found in the Karadjiri (bugari), Western Desert (djugurba) and Murngin (wongar) nations.Footnote 63 The link means that dreamers do not necessarily see themselves as autonomous originators:
If we take human culture to be humanly created, then we are forced to the conclusion that there is among Aborigines a profound resistance to crediting themselves with their own cultural achievements. Their plan of life is held to have been laid down during the Dreaming by the powers, and occasionally to have been modified since by the intervention of these powers, as when one appears to a man in a dream and communicates a new song or rite. Aborigines claim credit only for fidelity to tradition or, as they put it, for “following up the Dreaming”. It is powers alone who are conceived of as creative, men being passive recipients of unmotivated gifts.Footnote 64
It defies Western categorisation:
The term ‘Dreaming’ is itself an inadequate English translation of a sophisticated metaphysical concept, the complexity of which has historically been poorly understood. The Dreaming encompasses all life as well as the connections that link life together; it is the non-linear expression of everything that was, is and will be.Footnote 65
It has different concerns:
The Dreaming stories teach of both the ‘how’ and the underlying ‘why’ of all things, and understanding the ‘why’ as an interconnected reality of constantly moving relationships has profound consequences for the thought systems that are shaped by these stories…
…Aboriginal systems, like those of other Indigenous peoples across the globe, do not ask, ‘what is real?’ or ‘is one thing related to another?’ As Aboriginal scholar Mary Graham observes, these questions are products of intellectual traditions that make divisions between thought and matter or internal and external worlds (2009: 76). Aboriginal systems, which are the oldest continuous living intellectual traditions in world, have developed by asking a different set of questions. Our systems presuppose that everything is related and thus ask how phenomena relate, and seek to document shifting contexts in which relationships operate.Footnote 66
Western observers also need to disengage from linear concepts of time, and admit the possibility of ASCs admitting revelation of a mythic reality.Footnote 67 As Max Charlesworth notes:
The Dreaming is then the most real and concrete and fundamental aspect of Aboriginal life and it has nothing to do with the Western concept of dreaming as an imaginary, fantastic and illusory state of consciousness. Once again, it needs to be emphasized how necessary it is for us to purge our minds of Western European preconceptions if we are to understand the Aboriginal religious world.Footnote 68
Unthinking.
A fundamental difference emerges here. Crucially, dreams and dreaming are manifested in a ‘sacred geography’.Footnote 69 Aboriginal and the dominant Christian world-views do not coalesce on the issue of ‘sacred land/place’.Footnote 70
Within Aboriginal practice, several ASCs may be identified, many also found in the NT analogues:
Aborigines and modern religious movements such as the Pagans believe in psychic phenomena such as thought-reading and thought-transference, shape-shifting, communication with spirits, and out of body experiences (‘fast travelling’ for Aborigines and ‘astral travelling’ for those in the West).Footnote 71
The Dreaming is the domain of the ancestors, and it may be entered through dreams:
Dreams are an essential avenue of contact with the ancestors in Australian Aboriginal societies. It was through dreams that ancestors conveyed their creative powers to the now living. All innovation, all creative processes, come to the artist or innovator from the ancestors through dreams.Footnote 72
Indeed:
The aborigines affirmed the democratic accessibility of dreaming as much as any culture in history, and they made a point of teaching their children about dreaming from early in life so they would be prepared for the opportunities and dangers that arose in their sleep experiences. In fact, the aborigines believed each child was born into this world through a dream experienced by the mother or other close relative (whether or not they remembered having the dream). In this dream the spirit-child began the process of moving from the Tjukurrpa into human form. Death for the aborigines was a movement in the other direction, from physical embodiment back into Tjukurrpa.Footnote 73
Dreams, knowledge and movement between realms all resonate with the phenomena of ASCs: dreaming may involve what might be called a soul-journey in which a ‘dream-spirit (partunjarri) is released from the physical body and is able to fly into the realm of the Dreaming’.Footnote 74 They are real experiences and events;Footnote 75 they are psychic states or trances.Footnote 76 Dreams could also be collective experiences, co-ordinated by experts (maparn), in which dreamers were predicted from ‘malevolent forces and beings’:Footnote 77 demons or supernatural dangers might be encountered.Footnote 78 Dreams are part of both male and female experience.Footnote 79 Dreams may provide solutions to problems or healing from an expert (or even ancestral), vantage point.Footnote 80 A Gadjari story concludes:
That night the older brother dreamt of a magical formula that enabled the two men not only to resurrect their sons but to produce an unlimited supply of children without the aid of women.Footnote 81
They allow communication with beings of a different order like ‘spirit-children’, which in turn point to a continuity with the ancestors of the Dreaming,Footnote 82 and totems.Footnote 83 Spirits who survive death communicate with the living in dreams.Footnote 84 They may include advice about rituals which need to conform to existing patterns: ‘there is no place in the Aboriginal scheme of things for religious heretics or schismatics or “reformers”’.Footnote 85
Whilst traditional activities were often condemned by Christian missionaries,Footnote 86 dreams persisted among Aboriginal converts. They were a part of the conversion experience of Teenminne, a Ngarrindjeri woman (c. 1859).Footnote 87 The dreams of Rebecca Rakua (baptized 1888), an Arrernte woman who worshipped with the Lutheran Hermansburg mission, particularly after the revival of 1921, included visions of the Archangel Gabriel and news of her children and their destiny,Footnote 88 and ‘transgressed the established bounds of both male and missionary authority’.Footnote 89 Dreams and the Dreaming continue to remain vital for authentic and contextual Aboriginal theology and religious experience.Footnote 90
From such perspectives, Auntie Lenore Parker’s ‘God of Holy Dreaming’ may be reckoned an example of an ASC. Her account of the prayer and its creation give an example of a cross-cultural ASC: an Aboriginal Christian experience, in content, production, and delivery.
In further acknowledgement of orality in Aboriginal culture and that literature (and the increasing demand for footnotes and citations in Western academia) not being intrinsically superior or appropriate,Footnote 91 it is primarily an oral account summarised: a ‘yarning’Footnote 92 in conversation with her daughter, Susan Parker Pavlovic on September 17th, 2025, to which the reader is invited.
God of Holy Dreaming
God of Holy Dreaming, Great Creator Spirit,
from the dawn of creation you have given your children the good
things of Mother Earth.
You spoke and the gum tree grew.
In the vast desert and the dense forest,
and in the cities and at the water’s edge,
creation sings your praise.
Your presence endures
as the rock at the heart of our Land.
When Jesus hung on the tree
you heard the cries of all your people
and became one with your wounded ones:
the convicts, the hunted, and the dispossessed.
The sunrise of your Son coloured the earth anew,
and bathed it in glorious hope.
In Jesus we have been reconciled to you,
to each other and to your whole creation.
Lead us on, Great Spirit,
as we gather from the four corners of the earth;
enable us to walk together in trust
from the hurt and shame of the past
into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ. Amen.Footnote 93
The first stirrings of this prayer came from Auntie Lenore’s participation in the National Aboriginal Anglican Council Conference held in Darwin in 1994. Here, experiences of the liturgy, language and dance evoked the possibility of the praise of God being found in Aboriginal forms and her alienation from the forms of worship enshrined in the prayer book:
…Bishop Arthur took us one Saturday afternoon to a gathering at prayer and praise gathering at college.
And that was when they were singing in, we heard all these different languages from the top end.
And so for me to be present in that, in that space with these men and women who were dancing and singing in, and when it came into carrying the gospel in for the prayer, worship, they carried it and they danced it in.
They sang and danced. And, and the Bible was held so high.
And, I just thought, I hadn’t, hadn’t seen this before, like with such reverence that they had for, for the living word of God and for their daddy, God. And so it was, that was a Saturday.
Then on the next day, Sunday, we were at the Darwin Cathedral for, for the morning service. And then, um, we were all there in the front row waiting, being so proud of our beautiful Aboriginal brothers walking in, you know, with their white robes. And then the, when they, the bishop did the welcome, and then after the, the prayer, when they opened the green prayer book for Australia at that time, the, when I heard the language coming from, that the spirit within me just groaned. And I knew that I was listening to something else. It wasn’t what the land where I was, it wasn’t what they were telling me, what they’d spoken to me.Footnote 94
These prompts initiated a process of inspiration to recover the riches of Aboriginal tradition in the service of God. Precursors to this had included dreams two years earlier of Mary and Jesus. Thus, with hindsight, she recognised later the movements of the spirit which had anticipated the prayer. After the Darwin meeting, a meeting with Father Doyle in Ballina yarning about the Dream-time prompts her to say:
…then I came back from Darwin and went into our first gathering at Ballina. And what happened there? Well, with the prayer, when, um, Robert Raffin, he said (this was 1994 now), so Robert Raffin, he said, “Oh, well, we have our own prayer now… you[r] God of holy dreaming prayer”.Footnote 95
This implies a crucial part of Aboriginal spiritual tradition: the acceptance by the community.Footnote 96 Peter Burke also notes:
The prayer arose from the Spirit of God entwined with Lenore’s spirit, and the way she demonstrates in the prayer the connectedness between Aboriginal/First Nations Spirituality and Christian Spirituality. As an aside, and a telling one, in the same year the prayer was written (1994) I met sometime later a newly ordained Aboriginal Deacon in the Northern Territory who told me ‘I used to be Aboriginal and now I am a Christian’.Footnote 97
‘God of Holy Dreaming’ offered an end to such a bifurcation.
Auntie Lenore’s account then moves to a meeting of the General Synod Women’s Commission in Sydney. At this meeting, she describes speaking the prayer publicly, and it being transcribed by Peter Burke. She describes later hearing the transcript and recognising that it was not of her own design:
[W]hen Peter said those words to me, Lenore, these are your words. And for me, I was, I was just amazed. Amazed at the words that came out of my mouth. And so for me it was, it was that like that um, like I guess an epiphany moment when I was in amazement of my own words that came out of my mouth. And then all the others who were there present when they heard it, they too were amazed at what they were listening to and what they’d heard.Footnote 98
Dr Muriel Porter also comments on this occasion that:
In what clearly seemed to those sitting around the table to be nothing less than divine inspiration, Lenore’s face shone as she voiced the prayer in a seamless whole. Two members of the Commission, sitting either side of her, quickly wrote down the words as she spoke.
Archbishop Aspinall describes this:
I was sitting next to Peter Burke as Lenore spoke (I don’t think we were sitting on either side of Lenore) and I nudged Peter to write down what Lenore was saying, to capture the metaphors, images, poetry.Footnote 99
Aspinall notes the following process:
[Peter] fashioned the compilation into the form of a prayer, which might be submitted for inclusion in APBA. I then refined it into the traditional shape of a Eucharistic preface: trinitarian: creational/protological, incarnational/soteriological, pneumatological/eschatological. Some material was added to what Lenore had said to achieve this traditional shape, from memory ‘when you spoke…’ (creation through the Word), ‘when he hung on the tree he became one with wounded ones, the convicts, the hunted and the dispossessed’ and may be some other bits…Footnote 100
Noting this editing, he concludes that:
the heart of the prayer remains the passionate, evocative stream of images and words that Lenore spoke in her stream of consciousness.Footnote 101
Peter Burke also provides a recollection of the recording of the prayer:
Lenore began to speak. Instantly, I and other members of the Commission were captivated by what Lenore was saying. I think Phillip looked at me as if to say, “Write this down” and I recall distinctly interrupting Lenore, and asking, ‘Lenore, do you mind if I write this down?”. Lenore said ‘Yes” and I could see her beaming, and other members too. I think this is important because I sought Lenore’s permission first. What I felt was actually happening has many layers. It was a transition from an oral to a written tradition. It was, in my experience and subsequent reflection, a Spirit filled moment, a moment of reconciliation, a moment of cultural integrity, authenticity, connection and integration, all at the same time. These moments are rare in life, and are unforgettable… Everything seemed to flow beautifully from there in Lenore’s speaking, so the structure of the prayer was liturgically and theologically intact as Phillip has outlined. There was some drafting and I recall that both Phillip and I took what was written and did some work overnight after which it was read the following day. I recall that Lenore beamed with pleasure at this. What finally became the prayer was as authentic as any prayer transitioning from oral to written text could be.Footnote 102
The process which occurred here re-iterates how the vision had already been endorsed by Aboriginal elders.Footnote 103 Peter Burke describes the Prayer as ‘one of three key outcomes of the Commission’.Footnote 104
The Commission decided that the prayer should be forwarded to the General Synod Liturgical Commission for consideration as a Eucharistic preface in the new prayer book.Footnote 105Porter notes that the final publication of the prayer was not without difficulty.
The editing included the production of a draft version by the Liturgical Commission:
Creator Spirit, God of holy dreaming,
from the dawn of creation you have given your children
the good things of this [Mother] earth.
You spoke and the gum tree grew.
From the vast desert and dense forest
to the cities at the water’s edge,
all creation sings your praise.
Your presence endures [as the rock] at the heart of our land.
When your Son Jesus hung on the tree
[you heard the cries of all your people]
[and] you became one with your wounded ones:
the convicts, the hunted, and the dispossessed.
The sunrise of your Son coloured the earth anew
and bathed it in glorious hope.
In Jesus we have been reconciled to you,
to each other and to your whole creation.
Lead us on, Holy [Great] Spirit,
as we gather from every [the four corners] corner of the earth.
Enable us to walk together in trust
from the hurts and shame of the past
into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ. Amen Footnote 106
This would be superseded by the version which appears in the APBA. Initially submitted as potential eucharistic preface, it would finally be published as a free standing prayer.Footnote 107
As Auntie Lenore notes, criticism may have emerged from the association with the Women’s Commission:
They thought it, they thought it was the women of this women’s commission… they thought it was the women from there…’cause they were prominent Anglican women, you know. And at that time it was where we were, there was this pulling and teasing about women in ordination and things like that… So they were thinking it was like a lobby… sort of propaganda issue…The women putting Mother Earth in…
And then, so when I, when I got the…, received the prayer, how the Liturgical Commission, how they had changed it and put it to me. And again, once I’d seen it, and I,… a spirit within me groaned again, because what was left out was Mother Earth. And so Mother Earth is pivotal to the indigenous peoples.Footnote 108
With the encouragement of a local teacher (Esther), Auntie Lenore wrote to the then Chair of the Liturgical Commission (Laurie Bartlett) explaining how the omission had made her spirit groan, and offering to explain Aboriginal spirituality.
Matters would ultimately be resolved at the 1995 General Synod, As Muriel Porter describes it:
Just before the version printed in the draft prayer book was due to come before the 1995 General Synod, Lenore and another Aboriginal woman, the Revd Gloria Shipp, who were present in the public gallery at the General Synod, sought me out. They told me they would rather the whole prayer be removed than it be printed in its altered form.
So when I had the opportunity to speak in the debate, I shared the concerns of our Aboriginal sisters, pointing them out in the public gallery. Without much further ado, the original version of the prayer was accepted. Following the session, however, I was roundly abused by a Sydney bishop, who accused me of playing the “Indigenous card” by referring to the presence of Lenore and Gloria. Their presence had clearly been the decisive factor in getting the original version of the prayer restored.Footnote 109
The term ‘Mother Earth’ appears to have been particularly contentious, but re-instated in the final, published version.
The accounts above suggest that then-current tensions over feminist theology, women’s ordination, and New Age ideas,Footnote 110 exacerbated by the perception that the Aboriginal context was being used to manipulate the final verdict, complicated the reception of the prayer. A contemporary controversy may be noted in Bolivia within the Roman Catholic church.Footnote 111 The comments above about ‘the indigenous card’ are revealing. They indicate, in principle, no issue with the Aboriginality of the prayer, but with its possible political and syncretistic misappropriation.Footnote 112
Nor need ‘Mother Earth’ be as contentious as is sometimes claimed. A wider sweep of patristic theology reveals that identification of the earth as mother is found in theologians who are reckoned as orthodox. Thus, the following catena of texts might be noted:
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• Sir 40:1– mētera pantōn (LXX)– “mother of all the living” (NRSV)
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• Ambrose, De excessu fratris 2.61- omnium…parentem- parent [feminine] of allFootnote 113
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• Ambrose, De Poenitentia 1.17.96 – quam de matre sumamus – which we take from the motherFootnote 114
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• Augustine of Hippo, Man. 43 – postquam a terra quasi a matre separata sunt (after they had been separated from the earth as from a mother)Footnote 115
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• Augustine of Hippo, Civ. 12.25 – sed ne ipsam quidem terram, quamvis mater omnium fecunda videatur,., cum itidem legamus- we do not even call the earth this [creator], although she seems to be the fertile mother of all)Footnote 116
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• Basil the Great, Homilia II in Hexaemeron 1 – tēn gennasamenēn – the one who gave birthFootnote 117
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• Eusebius, Oratio de Laudibus Constantini 6.616 – hestian kai tithēnon kai mētera zōō pantōn – the hearth, the nurse and mother of all living thingsFootnote 118
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• Eusebius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae 9.7 – tēn trophon hapantōn kai mētera gēn – the nurturer of all and mother earthFootnote 119
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• Gregory Nazianzus, Theological Orations 2.28.26 –tēs koinēs pantōn mētros – the common mother of allFootnote 120
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• John Chrysostom, De Sancto Ieromartyre Babyla 2 – tois kolpois tēs pantōn metros…gēs – in the breast of the earth, mother of all.Footnote 121
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• Tertullian, De Resurrectione Carnis 63 – in suam matricem terram (to mother earth)Footnote 122
No claim is being made here for a full-blown theology of ‘Mother Earth’; simply that ancient writers described the earth in maternal terms. Reflection and nuance is possible: Augustine’s explorations (Civ.) clearly distinguish earth as mother from God as creator. In itself, the phrase ‘Mother Earth’ is not necessarily unChristian: the agenda of its interpreters may make it so. The zeitgeist may skew the interpretive task: theological and political axes were likely being ground.
‘Inculturation’ or ‘contextualization’,Footnote 123 not to be confused with the more pejorative ‘syncretism’,Footnote 124 necessarily demands some give and take. Even when branded as syncretistic, a cultural expression of theology may be viewed positively:
Christians have always been syncretic. Syncretism is a natural response to the incarnation—God involving Godself with the messiness of this world. Colonialism and racism, however, have blinded us to this truly radical grace, and so perhaps an embrace of syncretism can help us finally see aright.Footnote 125
Concluding Remarks
Auntie Lenore’s ‘God of Holy Dreaming’ marks an important landmark: the inclusion of a First Nations prayer, the product of an Aboriginal religious consciousness recognisably identifiable as an ASC, within the APBA. Its presence and method of composition provide a stark reminder of the new and fresh ways of looking at the world which may open up if modern and Western backgrounds do not limit the parameters of legitimate spiritual experience.
If care needs to be taken in not dismissing ASCs out of hand, as Westerners have so often done,Footnote 126 neither should the process be inverted: ‘If visions and possession in traditional societies should not be discredited as pathologies, neither can they be elevated in an inverse ethnocentric way to reveal the ‘true’ state of reality or ‘alternative reality’.Footnote 127 Yet, it remains true that ‘states of consciousness play an equally important role in creating and maintaining cultural beliefs and practices over a wide spectrum of cultures and societies’:Footnote 128 neither superior nor inferior, but still valid.
Article XXIV of the Thirty -Nine Articles includes the blunt statement that:
It is a thing plainly repugnant to the Word of God, and the custom of the primitive Church, to have publick prayer in the Church, or to minister the Sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.Footnote 129
There is much more to ‘tongue’ than words: it is a cipher for a culture or a worldview. Those of Western modernity hold no monopoly in a truly catholic church. If Aboriginal culture and belief are to be truly embedded in Australian Anglicanism, ‘God of Holy Dreaming’ is a necessary artefact – and must be used. To date, it remains significant as ‘one of the few credited in the Prayer Book to women, and one of only three prayers in the Prayer Book with Aboriginal/First Nations themes’.Footnote 130 It should not remain alone as a silent, solitary, token gesture, not least because significant work must be undertaken in both nation and state to rectify the manifold injustices perpetrated in the colonisation of Australia, to make vital corrections to the polities of both, and to heal the prolonged and frustrating despair which Aboriginal people still experience.Footnote 131 It is a first step, locating Aboriginal experience within a core liturgical document, crying out for justice in the face of history. It must be neither the last word, nor an ossified token statement.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Most Revd Philip Aspinall, Mr Peter Burke and Dr Muriel Porter for their assistance.
In this paper, ‘Aboriginal’ is used as the materials recorded do not include Torres Strait Islander culture and experience: ‘The term ‘Aboriginal’ is generally not inclusive of Torres Strait Islander people, and conversely the term ‘Torres Strait Islander’ is not inclusive of Aboriginal people’; ‘The Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet Guidelines for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Terminology’, Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet (healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au,no date). Accessed 03 February 2026.
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