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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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SPIRITUALITY

On this page: Christina Green

Christina Green

I began to read all sorts of things, such as one fantastic book called LESBIAN NUNS: BREAKING SILENCE (ed. Rosemary Curb & Nancy Manahan, Bantam/Corgi 1985.)

These nuns stood in various relationships to their Christian or Catholic faith. Some of them lost their faith and became pagan and others even stayed within a convent setting and considered themselves an 'out' lesbian.

It was a big thing for me to read that book. At that time I joined a group called the Christian Lesbian Collective, which was operational in Melbourne and Sydney. I began to be involved in 'gay' activism within the Anglican and broader church.

There was a split within the group between those who wanted to embrace activism and those who didn't. It was also my first awakening to what class was - for example, I was already relatively highly educated with the support of my parents and I hadn't realized what a level of privilege that was. That was a pretty big thing to take on board.

I met a woman in this group who wanted to set up an urban community in North Melbourne. She was living with a friend, a straight woman, and we all got on well. I moved in. Unfortunately that eighteen months was a fairly disillusioning experience, but it was in that context that I first listened to South African freedom and other social justice activist music.

We also did lots of things within the churches in North Melbourne, putting on various services using this music, and this was my politicisation at that time.I also became involved in the movement in the Movement for the Ordination of Women in the Anglican church.

In 1988 I went to England with a contingent of Australian women who joined a women's protest group from countries that have the Anglican Communion, like Canada and various African countries. These were fantastic activist women, and at this gathering I even had the opportunity to meet one of the women who had been part of the so-called Philadelphia Eleven - women from the US who hung out for women's ordination. They approached a sympathetic retired Bishop (once you are a Bishop in the Anglican Church you never lose the power to ordain people) and arranged an irregular ordination, which then could not be revoked.

So these eleven women became the first women priests in the Anglican communion. It was a long time before the first Australian would be ordained - Britain got there first.

I couldn't bear the inequitable language in the Church - it never seemed to change. I wanted inclusive language and would go to church and keep going for, probably, another ten years and keep being faced with non-inclusive language when I thought:

" I don't have to make it all ok for the Church. I can let this go".

Also, the sense of faith I had grown up with as a child changed.

So, with an extreme sense of loss, I left the Anglican Church. It was my culture and my community up to that point so it was a big loss. I had been immersed in the Church. I was singing liturgical music the whole year.

I felt then that feminism was my main way of viewing the world. The church had been by whole life, really, so I wondered what I was going to do with myself from the age of 26! I applied to study music therapy. I had been really impressed with women's activism in Britain. I had visited Greenham Common in 1988 and I thought that British women had written the book on direct action. I was so impressed by that I wanted to go back to England and to spend time there. I thought

"how can I do this"?

I applied for a music therapy course and funding and got a British Council Grant and a place in a course. It was supposed to be for a year but I stayed there for seven years. It was good - really good.

When I was in Britain I was active ANTAR (Australians for Native Title asnd Reconciliation) and it was eye opening in terms of getting a different perspective on Australia's racist history, particularly as it followed involvement in racism awareness work I had done in Australia. In 1988 I had been to a racism consciousness raising workshop in Healesville. It really opened my eyes. It was a truly amazing weekend.

There were Aboriginal speakers there and it was from then that I started to write songs. One of the earliest ones I wrote was about a place called Coranderrk, and Tom Roper handing back the cemetery there to the Aboriginal people whose ancestors were buried there. Eventually, due to a number of factors (high amongst them being the difficulty of getting adequate housing when on a fairly low income), I came back to Australia. The first couple of years were just survival but in 2003 things really started to connect when I began Buddhist meditation and I read the work of a woman called Joanna Macy.

She is a fantastic author who has explored Buddhism for its resources for activists, connecting it with a way of working known as Deep Ecology, which invites people to practice locating themselves in a bigger picture, both in the world community, and also in the history of the planet, in order to begin to feel some empowerment around issues such as nuclear warfare, climate change, loss of habitat, the extinction of species, and so on.

I suppose I am a bit between being an eco-feminist and being a Buddhist. That is where my focus lies now. I look to the resources of spirituality, meditation and inner resources, the connections with earth and the web of life, to fuel activism.

I had a brief period of involvement in an anarchist group in London, and also in the anarchist scene here in Melbourne. It was never a complete fit for me but I realized I was much more of an anarchist than a socialist or a Marxist communist. Anarcha-feminism works for me as a political outlook, but alongside a framework of earth awareness and some commitment to cultivating spiritual resources.

There is no such thing as freedom in one sense - you can be free of great need and relatively free of oppression but this does not mean freedom from any kind of constraints or limitations. To me freedom means the liberty to be able to function autonomously within the whole web of life and with awareness that what we do has an impact on everyone and everything else.

It requires thought and constant mindfulness. It only works to try to create conditions that give rise to a better life if you are doing it with the whole in mind. The moment what you do is inequitable and the moment one group is benefiting more than another, well, life has a way of trying to iron that inequity out. So, in this time we are living where there is that much inequity, people rise up. Of course they do - to try and redress the balance.

I like working one-on-one or in small groups of people and I do that with teaching in various ways. I run a women's drumming group and I do instrumental teaching and music therapy. For the last 12 year I have mainly worked in disability as a music therapist, though also in other client areas such as mental health and HIV/AIDS.

The other area that really embodies my activism is my work as a singer-songwriter. I have been active as a singer-songwriter (as I mentioned earlier) since my awakening to Indigenous history in Australia, which was in the late 80s. I combine personal songs with songs of observation and story-telling about people I hear about, activists, people struggling to live in situations of violence, live with the effects of globalisation and so on. I try to bear witness to and to honour the amazing efforts of the people whose stories inspire me to keep going.

Just this year, a new area of work has opened up for me, and I am now doing less music therapy and working in a community for homeless women. With its roots in the Catholic church, the house was set up by Sisters of Mercy, though it is run as a business now, with a casework team of which I am now a part.

I made a connection through The Grove - a women's spirituality centre in Brunswick. I started working there as a music therapist.

Women become homeless by various routes such as domestic violence, refugees without a support network, many different ways.

Working there has really put things in perspective for me. It shows me how relatively privileged I have been and seeing how the resources you have had and your family background have shaped your life, and I see what a life is like without those resources.

Reconciling the workload, and the level of need, and the number of people needing this service with the time and hours allotted to meet this is stressful, but what keeps me going is the women.

They are fantastic and I just really love them.