Vale Michael Leunig – cartoonist, artist, mystic and prophet

When Australian national treasure Michael Leunig died last week aged 79, the sense of loss was profound. I had the great privilege of interviewing this man of extraordinary creative gifts, insight and sensitivity, in 1996 and 2000. The following extracts from the interviews explore his yearning for beauty, enchantment, the transcendent and eternal, and his desire to be a voice for the voiceless.

We are created from love, of love, for love – St Ignatius

Through the spiritual exercises developed by the founder of the Jesuits, St Ignatius of Loyola, Roland Ashby has experienced Christ’s loving and healing presence as a physical reality. Roland, who is contributing editor of Living Water (www.thelivingwater.com.au), reflects on how Ignatian spirituality has for him been life-transforming, a spring of living water*.

Desmond Tutu remembered

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Wikipedia.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died in 2021, could radiate the energy of the love of Christ by his very presence. Fiona Garrigan vividly recalls the moment she saw him nearly 35 years ago, a powerful life-transforming encounter that has remained with her ever since.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a transformed human. He was conscious that he was, as St Paul would say, “In Christ”; and that he had indeed become “a new creation”.

Throughout his lifetime, Archbishop Tutu was a Nobel prize winning peace-maker, a courageous, relentless non-violent human rights activist, and one who truly and authentically lived out of and from the depths of his animating, prayerful relationship with the Living God. 

He healed and transformed the world around him, “in Christ”, through his non-violent path to liberation for South Africa and beyond.  My focus in this reflection is on the transforming Divine energy that was clearly alive in him, flowed freely through him, and powerfully radiated from him, and what that may imply for us.

In the early 1990s I was a young adult and made my way into St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne, Australia, with thousands of others, to see and hear Archbishop Tutu. So at about the age of 19, I sat at the end of the pew towards the aisle about half way up the nave, and became very caught up in the excitement and energy in the building as it filled with more and more people.  Archbishop Tutu’s entrance into the cathedral was something I will never forget, and is something I have been ruminating on a lot lately, nearly 35 years later.

On that day, St Paul’s was packed to the rafters, and the energy of the people was clearly heightened.  Scores of clergy and lay people alike processed and it was something to behold; however, quite unexpectedly, the energy of the building went up considerably and I became aware of a new high frequency resonance I had never felt the likes of before or since.

Something in me resonated with this powerfully dynamic, high frequency energy and its unique life-affirming flow lifted the vibration of the entire building; Archbishop Tutu had just stepped inside. 

As he made his way up the aisle, I recognised that this radiant healing vibration was emanating directly from him. I could feel him coming towards me, and as he reached me, there was a bottleneck effect as the clergy made their way to their seats and the Archbishop stood beside me for perhaps a minute or so. 

I was taken aback by his small stature. How could such a physically short man radiate such big high voltage transformative “Christ” energy?  What was actually going on here?

Everything in the Christ energy’s path was resonating and becoming animated within its flow. I observed this same flow swirl around from within me and pour itself from me back towards the archbishop and those around me, and this was all happening quite spontaneously and playfully. 

Something ‘other’ had taken over and I was observing the dance of Divine love pouring out, back and forth, back and forth. We were filled up in the receiving, and yet nothing at all was lost in the pouring out. 

This of course was not something I sensed was in any way unique to just me, but that it was the inner reality of everyone in the building, whether they were aware of it or not. The heat in the building was immense at this point. It was so hot in there. No wonder this man was a powerhouse for peace, reconciliation and non-violence in South Africa and around the world. Our hearts became animated just by being in the same room as him! 

The presence of the risen Christ was clearly embodied in him, pouring out to all of us, and returning back to its Divine source, in a wonderfully transformative, healing dance.

The heat and energetic resonance is still palpable for me today as I write all these years later. I don’t remember his sermon at all, but I do remember this incredible encounter and it invites me once again to challenge and break open my operative image of God.

It was indeed a pivotal sacred experience and is still resonating with me in powerful ways.  It also raises questions about what it truly means to be “in Christ”, and how we might live from a place grounded within, and energised from, the very heart of the Divine Flow. 

Fiona Garrigan has recently been appointed co-director of the Living Well Centre for Christian Spirituality in Melbourne, Australia (www.livingwellcentre.org.au).

This reflection is based on a talk she gave at the Centre in August.

Drinking living water from the well of poetry

Poetry can open our hearts and minds and provide a source of living water for our lives, says author Sarah Bachelard. Dr Bachelard*, who is the founder of the Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra, Australia, reflects on how poetry can illuminate our understanding and nourish our lives and faith. This reflection is based on a talk on 8 September at The Well, a monthly online meditation and talk on a mystic or poet*.

The power of weakness

The ‘gold-standards’ of power, perfection and privilege, which dominated Greco-Roman society, continue to capture us, writes poet and scholar the Rev’d Dr Mark S. Burrows.* But Christianity, he says, is a radical rejection of this ‘false gospel’, believing that true strength and freedom lie not in naked self-interest, but in the ‘weakness’ of compassion and putting others’ interests before our own.

A revolution in wisdom vital for our time

An inspiring and gifted teacher of meditation and spirituality, Dr Chris Morris died suddenly earlier this month. Greatly admired and much loved, Chris was a Senior Lecturer in Spirituality and Head of the Department of Pastoral and Spiritual Studies at Catholic Theological College, Melbourne, Australia. As a tribute to him, the following is a re-posting of an article he wrote for Living Water in June 2021.

In 2020 Chris completed his PhD on Bruno Barnhart, Californian Camaldolese Benedictine Monk, who died in 2015. An extraordinary and life-changing spiritual experience when he was a young man shaped the rest of Bruno Barnhart’s life. It led him to devote his life’s work to recovering and re-conceiving Christian wisdom today, centred on and emanating from the one great revolutionary event of the Cross. Here Chris explains why he found Barnhart’s ideas “compelling and endlessly engaging”.

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