I am reflecting that my sense of ‘desert’ has been of an arid, harsh and threatening place. An environment, potentially, of remorseless heat and cold, of thirst and suffering and death, with archetypical images of bleached skulls and bones. In the Exodus myth the desert was a terrible terrain to be crossed, and a place of death. My appreciation of ‘desert’ is changing.

Recently Andrew Denton interviewed Toni Collette on the ABC’s “Enough Rope”, and the current critical acclaim of Toni’s at times visceral and primal performance in “Japanese Story” prompted me to wonder about this young Australian. Andrew elicited from Toni what were for me two notable responses. She confided that she had a “pseudo spiritual experience” in the Pilbara of Western Australia during the making of “Japanese Story”. And after a brief pause Toni went on to describe that experience, one which was obviously more significant to her that her dismissive “pseudo” suggested.

The film is set mostly in the Pilbara desert. During a long drive through this vast, open, red landscape, a tired Toni gazed at the desert passing before her and listened to music. Without anticipation she found herself overwhelmed with emotion. Tears welled up. She felt an aching need to “embrace it all”, to be one with this awesome place surrounding her. She explained to Andrew that there in the desert she could attain “personal being” in a way “never possible in cities”.

My understanding is that, in the language of our western myth, Toni’s was a Grail Castle experience. A profoundly spiritual one. She was transported into that place where she experienced fullness of being, where she was in the presence of the Holy Grail. I felt sad that Toni and Andrew appeared to have no insight into the authentic measure of spirituality which the Myth of Parsifal and the Holy Grail offers us.

The Jungian analyst and therapist, Dr. Robert Johnson, believes that a gratuitous Grail Castle experience occurs in the life of every young man but is rarely understood. Johnson claims that an on-going hunger for more of this experience drives most subsequent life activity. This insight is illustrated dramatically by the American landscape painter Thomas Cole in his “Voyage of Life: Youth” (1842) which hangs in the US National Gallery of Art in Washington [Readily viewed on the web via Google Search]. The angel accompanying the child in his early years, depicted alongside in the craft in Cole’s first of this series of four paintings, is now on the bank of the stream waving on the youth who is voyaging alone towards opening vistas. And there in the distant white clouds above the landscape is an ethereal and inviting Grail Castle. Two students of our human journey, Robert Johnson and a much earlier Thomas Cole, both see life in terms of Grail Castle possibility. And I think that it is so obviously true that our deepest hunger is for authentic spiritual experience. Young people are telling us that insistently. But what a challenge to know how to discern the authenticity of what spiritual experience is. Robert Johnson would assert that it is our great myths, such as the Myth of Parsifal, that give meaning to our experience.

Subsequent to seeing Toni Collette describe with feeling her experience while filming “Japanese Story”, it was an enhanced engagement for me to view the film. The ravishing “being” of the Pilbara transported me, and this too was the experience of the Collette character ‘Sandy’ and her Japanese businessman companion ‘Hiro’. And both confronted death. My perception is that both characters underwent an Exodus journey, and were personally transformed. Before their journey they were both alienated from their personal and human reality (surely an Egypt), and both become dramatically more fully human (a Promised Land). And the “being” of the desert was crucially significant in their personal transformations. And what an insightful, and to our national leader confronting, conclusion by the script writer and film makers with both Sandy and Hero finally able to express deep contrition.

I continue to believe that the ‘desert’ experience is cleansing, because it demands letting go. This is what our Province ‘desert’ experience of public shame has been for us. A necessary and purifying letting go, and consequent blessed Exodus. But I find my appreciation of ‘desert’ expanding and deepening beyond being a place of suffering and cleansing. The “being” of the ‘desert’ invites me, like Toni, to a place where the Grail Castle becomes accessible.

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