I have been reading Stan Grant’s beautiful new book, Murriyang song of time (Bundyi: Sydney 2024). There is in it a sentence pertaining to the Uluru Statement of the Heart and the subsequent failed Referendum. Stan Grant says, poignantly, that ‘the Uluru Statement spoke from the afflicted to a nation that has never loved us.'

It is a very painful experience to feel unloved.

To feel, as Stan says, that it felt like the nation never fully listened to the Statement.

As we know in life, if you don’t feel people are listening to you, it’s hard to feel loved by them.

The Referendum has come and gone but the complex day of January 26 approaches.

Can it be lived with a loving focus on those who are hurting? Indigenous folk as well as other Australians, such as those impacted by the Israel/Gaza suffering.

Ideally there would be a bipartisan, gracious Statement offered on that day. One that  is healing and loving.

Our Prime Minister might suggest this to the Leader of the Opposition.

If this isn’t possible, I imagine our PM will want to offer his own loving understanding. I remember, for example, his tenderness when he announced the Referendum, having listened to what was being asked from Uluru, ever so graciously.

Stan Grant writes about the power of love, active love that will persevere in a way that creates miracles.

He quotes Dostoyevsky’s dialogue in The Brothers Karamazov between an elder priest and a mother in difficulty :” Even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten further from it, at that very moment-I predict this to you-you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you.’

How Stan writes is so congruent with my listening, over the years across Australia, to wonderful Indigenous folk of persistent, loving faithfulness, amidst much grief and disappointment.

With one dear indigenous friend and other friends, we wrote a few studies on the value of forgiveness in a life of persistent, active loving.

Stan Grant writes too of the necessity and complexity of ‘forgiveness’ so as to ‘turn away from vengeance and resentment.’

Resentment is spoken of as the emotion of injustice. We can feel justified in holding on to our resentments because of how we feel we have been treated. But, in the end, this makes for much unhappiness and for alienation from each other. Additionally, it can make people vulnerable to the seductions, as we have seen, of loveless narcissistic figures who seek political power by fanning divisions.

Stan Grant writes with humility and insight, “I have gone so wrong in seeking to confront evil without love. I had thought that speaking the truth was enough, but without love, the truth becomes another weapon. We have tried the truth without love and evil triumphs.”

All this is just to say that January 26 2025 should be lived with loving awareness of those who are hurting in our Australia. Our indigenous folk certainly, and now too those hurting after all that has happened in Israel/Gaza, Ukraine/Russia…after bushfires and floods.

People are hurting and our National Anthem for January 26 calls us to be ‘one and free.’

Our ‘oneness’ requires more empathy-the practice of a more loving awareness of how others are feeling.

This can be all perfectly consistent with having barbeques and watching the Australian Open.