The Maori View of Life and Death

There is, thank God, no racial segregation in New Zealand in the Rhodesian or South African meaning of the phrase. European and Maori are free to marry one another; they have equal legal status; and though one may encounter considerable pockets of racial prejudice on either side of the fence, it is a personal aberration, not a destructive myth supported by law and custom. Yet these suppositions still imply that there is a fence, a barrier, a difference. To my mind there is a real separation between Maori and European, the causes of which are essentially cultural rather than racial, though the ignorant may see them in racial terms, and indeed part of a culture may be the mythical attitudes held by any individual towards his own and other races. I wish to examine broadly some of the differences between the two cultures, with a particular eye to the situation of Maori people in our towns.

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When we think of those cultural differences, we would do well to keep in mind the stinging words of Pope John in his encyclical, Mater et Magistra, and the truth that lies behind them:

It pains Us . . . to observe the complete indifference to the true hierarchy of values shown by many people in the economically developed countries. Spiritual values are ignored, forgotten or denied, while the progress of science, technology and economics is pursued for its own sake, as though material well-being were the be-all and end-all of life. This attitude is contagious, especially when it affects the work that is being done for the under-developed countries, which have often preserved in their ancient traditions an acute and vital awareness of the more important human values. . ..

The New Zealand European community has often stood in much the same kind of relation to the New Zealand Maori community that Pope John has here negatively envisaged as existing between separate nations. The European who has approached the Maori and offered him in ignorance and arrogance the benefits of a technological culture, may frequently have resembled the fox in the fable who had lost his tail and tried to persuade the other foxes to have their tails lopped off, too. Granted the various technological assets of modern civilisation, granted also that every Maori person in the country is already conditioned by European modes of thought – from the old woman buried in dreams of her childhood in a village where only Maori was spoken, who nevertheless now smokes Pall Mall cigarettes, to the young man who has never spoken Maori in his life, whose chief ambition may be to buy a particular type of car or to get a degree in architecture, who nevertheless would say, ‘Yes; I am a Maori’ – granted all this, there is still a definite difference between the two cultures.

We (I speak of the New Zealanders of European descent) should remember the words of Pope John, to avoid any nuance of unconscious arrogance, and to develop the kind of humility that may enable us to see ourselves as learners rather than as teachers. The Maori is the elder brother; the European is the younger one – at least in the matter of a grasp of communal values. Let us not try ignorantly to reverse the role.

When one considers the way in which Maori communities have adjusted to the life of the Church, one soon encounters the difficulty of an apparent indifferentism. It might seem that a number of Maori people had not distinguished very sharply between the differing doctrines and practices of the various Christian denominations. I have heard of cases where a Maori family might from week to week attend different churches because the different members of that family each belong to different denominations. This is no doubt traceable to the larger world-wide scandal of Christian disunity. Yet Maori indifferentism is quite different from European indifferentism.

If, let us say, a New Zealand Catholic of European descent chose to attend page 376 the services of various denominations, and neglect the Mass, we might judge fairly enough that he showed signs of a wandering spirit, a lack of loyalty, an uncertainty in his grasp on the Faith. But if a Maori Catholic did the same, it could well be because he unconsciously set the unity of the tribal group before the unity of the Faith. His indifferentism would thus have a positive source. One is obliged to recognise that the tribe, or the local semi-tribal community, has commonly among Maori people a most powerful symbolic and spiritual force, of a kind that Europeans may find it hard to understand. The Church has to work with this force, not against it. I know from many conversations with Father Wall, of the Maori Missions, that she does try to work with it. Nevertheless, one or two dedicated and enlightened men or women working with it are not enough.

Both priests and laity in the European community have an urgent need to get a better understanding of the meaning and positive power of Maori communal life, which invariably includes many religious nuances lacking in our European communities. The Church does not have to commit herself to current secular views of Maori culture. She can ideally add the salt of doctrine and the Sacraments to any type of community. But, in practice she is hamstrung by muddled thinking, unconscious prejudice and sheer ignorance of Maori thought and custom among her European members.

Consider the possible case of a man who works in a factory for making refrigerators. He is a Maori. One day he approaches the boss and asks for three days leave of absence to go to his aunt’s funeral. The boss is a European and also a Catholic. He has never read the words of Pope John; or at least they have never sunk in. The conversation might run something like this:

‘Well Jack, that’s a long time to take off to go to a funeral. I could let you have half a day perhaps. . . .’

‘I have to go up to Whangarei. It’s a long trip. I had thought of asking for a whole week off.’

‘Look, mate, I wouldn’t think of taking more than a day off if my own mother had died! Why should I make special exceptions in your case? We’re short-handed as it is; and the factory has to keep going. . . .’

‘It’s the Maori way of doing things. There’s got to be a big tangi.’

‘All right! All right! But if you’re not back in three days on the dot you needn’t expect to find your job waiting for you.’

And the boss goes back into his office grumbling about the peculiarities of the Maori race. He is quite a decent man. Another boss might have brought down the hammer and refused any leave of absence whatever, claiming that all the Maori worker wanted was to have a holiday and a booze-up. To understand the event we have to look at the case more closely.

When the man’s aunt died the spiritual resources of the Maori communal group had to be gathered together, partly in order that nothing should be lacking in mourning for the dead, partly so that the living should be able page 377 to meet and experience the crisis of death in an atmosphere of communal warmth and brotherhood. Spiritually this is a more important obligation than the production of twenty refrigerators. The fact that the European community does not see it so is our own grievous spiritual loss. We are trying to live by bread alone; and we are trying to make our Maori neighbours do the same.

To understand the situation the fictional Catholic boss would have to think in terms of the liturgy of the Church’s burial service as it affects the fears and aspirations of the entire Mystical Body. And in our modern circumstances this might be a step he would lack the insight ever to take. He, however, not the Maori worker, would be acting and thinking ‘as though material well-being were the be-all and end-all of life’. The Church should help him to remedy his mistake.

I am not an expert on statistics; but I have seen somewhere that when Maori Catholics come into the towns, their attendance at the weekly Mass drops from roughly eighty per cent to roughly twenty per cent. In the light of my preceding comments it should not be hard to see why. In the country they would very likely have been members of a strong communal group with its spiritual centre at the local church and meeting house. By coming to the town they will have lost contact with that group. There is no effective substitute in the comparatively thin and slight communal bonds of the modern New Zealand parish. That parish has no recognition (unless there has been a local miracle) of the needs and attitudes of a newly arrived Maori family; and there may in any case be grave awkwardness and shyness on both sides.

I think the most effective way of dealing with the shift of Maori families to the towns is that which is already being used by certain interdenominational Protestant groups, who have initiated services in Maori in churches decorated in the inimitable Maori style of art, and have linked these services to traditional Maori communal activities, thus providing a kind of substitute tribe. But the Catholic Church has on the whole so far been backward in coming forward in this most sensitive and important area of development. I could mention a few striking and even glorious exceptions; but those which I know fall within a special field connected with the work of the Maori Missions.

Again, with the breakdown of tribal and semi-tribal contacts, the Maori family is hurled directly into that more or less anti-communal secular abyss which constitutes our towns and suburbs and to which we Europeans are thoroughly used as we are used to many other evils. The tone of our civilisation leaves little room for communal values. Landlords will object to couples with large families renting their flats and houses. European neighbours will not count it any part of their business to call on the new family and welcome them. This may be so even if they are wholly devoid of racial prejudice. After all, they hardly know the names of the people who have been living alongside page 378 them for twenty years. Why should they put themselves out for people whom they have never met before? European parents may covertly forbid their children to play with ‘those Maori kids’ down the road.

The Maori family has to sink or swim in its new environment, where none of the Maori communal values are even recognised, let alone appreciated. It may, of course, sink; and if it swims, it may become a new entity, more European than the Europeans, riddled with our obsessions of time and money and status and hygiene. The change is not one I can contemplate with pleasure. I see it predominantly as the job of the European Catholic laity to make tactful and helpful contacts with Maori neighbours. This field has been hardly yet touched, even on its fringes – but if we begin by throwing away both our positive and negative idealisations – ‘The Maoris are a marvellous people; noble; generous, statuesque; childlike’ – or – ‘The Maoris are dirty and rowdy and workshy’ – then at least we will have made a beginning with ourselves, and may start to give and receive, walking carefully wherever we are unsure of the ground.

Material help is rarely the important thing; and even if it seems to be needed it would be better to abandon the idea of it than to tread on the corns of one’s Maori neighbours. The important thing is real unprejudiced friendship. And this comes from a recognition of one’s own need to be accepted and understood. I have noticed that many Maori people adhere to a magnificent tradition of tolerance and understanding in dealing with European guests. The clumsiness, the faults, the dropping of bricks, are nearly always on the other side. Yet, if one is prepared to move gently and learn by one’s mistakes, one may receive the gift of insight into another way of life, and so begin to set one’s own a little in order.

In proportion to the European population there are more Maori people working in labouring jobs than, let us say, in clerical work. One can see a positive reason for this – a Maori man or woman in a clerical job will very likely find it harder, whenever she pays a visit back home, to be re-absorbed by the tribal community, than if they were employed driving a bulldozer or carrying dishes. Clerical work has more of the distinctive European odour about it. Personally I do not grieve about this, remembering that the Apostles were in most cases artisans or labourers, and that Our Lord was an artisan. Yet one has to examine also the negative side of the picture.

In the economic sphere the crucial test of whether or not racial prejudice exists in this country rests on whether a Maori finds it harder (given similar qualifications) to get a good job than a European does. My experience in many towns leads me to the conclusion that it is, in fact, harder. Concerning this, the Catholic laity should examine their consciences closely. Have they ever, even once, turned away a Maori person seeking lodging or work, on the ground of some vague prejudice? If so, it would be well to remember the Judgment, and not make the same mistake twice. I see also a grave need for page 379 hostels in all our towns with mixed populations of Maori and European – mixed, chiefly for the benefit of the Europeans, who may learn many things they did not previously know they needed to know – comradeship, courtesy, an appreciation of folk art, and a natural approach to life.

I have only touched the fringes of my subject; but if I can help others to think about the matter, that is at least a beginning. Deep changes, not shallow changes, are what we need. And in this context it may be of value to consider further the differences between the commonest Maori and European attitudes toward death.

I doubt if the expectation of one’s own death ever ceases to be a spiritual problem, even among those saints whom we have so obviously as yet failed to become. The problem is basically one of insecurity. Apparently God has not willed to give any of us an absolute spiritual security, except in the sense of reliance upon His grace and mercy. He does not tell us that we will reach Heaven. Rather, He gives us the means to reach Heaven, and allows us to work out in experience the kind of living relationship to Him which will make those means effectual.

And as men come nearer to God, so they also become more aware of the distance between themselves and God and the differences between the Divine Nature and human nature. It was not a trembling alcoholic or an adulterer or a cruel war-lord grown old and religious-minded who said that he feared God as a man in a small boat would fear the stormy ocean – no, it was a holy man, one of the desert Fathers. Variations in the degree of fear of death may depend in a large measure on individual temperaments. It seems more than possible that God allows some people to be troubled by an excessive timidity just as He allows others to be troubled by the stings of the flesh or apparent hardness of heart. I do not apologise for introducing the intuitive observation of a great Protestant writer, John Bunyan. One of the characters in Bunyan’s allegory of the progress of the soul was named by him Much Afraid. She shrank from difficulties; she trembled inwardly in anticipation of Divine disapproval; she did not have an untroubled hope of her own salvation. Yet when the travellers came to the river that divided the land of the living from the land of the dead – ‘Much Afraid passed over the river singing; but none could hear the words of her song.’

These beautiful and profound lines have always roused in me a desire to weep, since they express, I believe, the secret and unique relation of love that exists between God and each individual human soul.

Societies may differ profoundly in their view of death. It is true that the Church presents the mystery of death to her members by a communal and sacramental ritual on Ash Wednesday, when we accept death as a common burden and a common sign of our eventual return from exile into the fatherland of Heaven, by way of the Cross that Our Lord climbed before us. Thatat least is my subjective interpretation ofthe saying–‘Man, you are dust, page 380 and to dust you will return’ I see it as a communal acceptance of death within a sacred context.

But in the streets outside our churches, when we return there with the mark of the ashes on our foreheads, there is rarely any such recognition. I have often felt that our secular society’s flight from the very idea of death is profoundly neurotic. We build so many walls – walls of social hygiene, of Safety First maxims, of excessive care regarding diet and clothing – and all to shut out what cannot eventually be shut out at all – Death, God’s messenger.

I do not in the least imply that we should not look after our own health and safety or occupy ourselves with works of mercy, spiritual and material. It is the quality of panic in the face of a universal human destiny that seems to me neurotic and ill-based. It is natural for the human heart to shrink from the unknown; for the human flesh to fear what may be a painful ordeal; for the human soul to have some qualms at the notion of appearing naked before its Creator. But panic is another thing. I speak certainly as a man of forty-one, who does not expect to have to climb the Cross tomorrow; and I may find myself much humbled when that time arrives. Yet I pray that God will give me the confidence to meet Him, however painfully, still without panic.

Recently I had the privilege of attending a Maori tangi, a gathering where the friends and relatives of a man who had died came together to farewell him and to share their grief and hope and love. Afterwards, meditating on the occasion, it occurred to me like a belated thunderclap what the main difference is between Maori and European society. Maori society has accepted death as the centre of life, as a source both of grief and of communal transformation. Even before Christianity the tribes had grasped a secret (explicit for us in the Mass) which our own society is in great danger of losing, if it has not already lost it.

There is certainly in Maori society a definite separation between the dead and the living; the dead are tapu, sacred, to be held in awe – and the ritual of a common washing of hands before eating, after the actual funeral, marks that division. On the other hand, the grief of the near relatives of the dead man or woman is made a determinedly communal matter – they do not retreat into that privacy in which there is a danger of the heart being turned to stone; they must greet the guests, the other mourners, and make their own grief a thing to be shared. Here there is a distinct advantage over our reticent and withdrawn European customs of mourning, where even tears may be regarded as improper. And furthermore, though the Maori dead are separated from the living, they are still joined to the living as ancestors by a most definite and real spiritual link. I see in the Maori view of the dead a natural intuition that rises towards the Catholic awareness of the unity of dead and living in the Mystical Body, and which could well be implemented and completed by actual membership of that Body; whereas in our own society the Church is propounding a doctrine of closeness to the dead which is bound to meet with page 381 the unconscious aversion of many who fear both death and the dead with a concealed and profoundly neurotic self-concern.

I suggest that a sacrificial element is present both in the sharing of food which is part of every tangi, and in the wearing of green branches by those who participate according to the old customs since these branches have to be cut or broken from the tree. And it is possible that the greenness of the leaves may indicate, among other things, not just the greenness of memory, but a faint fore-shadowing of the Resurrection, an intuition that death is not wholly death – both grief and possibility mingling together, as in the lines of Thomas Hood:

Where are the flowers of summer? Where are they?
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy winter through
In the smooth holly’s green eternity. . . .

These are speculations. The primary point I have wished to make is that the Maori view of death is incomparably more mature and positive and adult than the view most current in European society.

For Catholics, whether Maori or European, the situation both can be and should be somewhat different. The tribal view of death can easily be grafted to the tree of Christian knowledge; and those who have no tribes but only families may still learn to take a broader view. Holding to the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body – which follows with absolute logic from the circumstances of Our Lord’s Resurrection and the Assumption of Our Lady – we may rightly suppose that nothing of earth will eventually be lost, not a memory or intuition, not a hair of the head, not a modulation of the voice – that these will rather be transformed into the full Heavenly reality when God so wills it.

I have felt that the loss of the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body may indeed be the greatest loss which the scandalous divisions among Christians have inflicted on our Protestant brothers. Many of them hold to a Platonist view of death – that the body dies for good; that the soul returns to God; and that there will never be a reuniting. This is to deny implicitly part of our total humanity; and it accounts for an ineradicable sense of excessive sadness at death among those who are convinced of it. I think that we should carefully and tactfully point out that the full Catholic doctrine makes for the eventual transformation of everything in us that is natural, with only a temporary destruction of the body, so that Heaven itself will be a human home.

Nevertheless I have often thought that if I were an atheist I would have less fear of death; for to be annihilated is an end, whereas for the soul to be stripped of the supports of earth and to meet God face to face in all its weakness and imperfection is a thought and expectation that cannot easily be page 382 endured. This is probably because my gaze is fixed with habitual egocentricity on myself rather than on the Heavenly Bridegroom. If my thoughts were habitually of Him rather than of myself, then I could use as my own the words of Pope John: ‘I await the arrival of Sister Death and will welcome her simply and joyfully in whatever circumstances it will please the Lord to send her.’

Death should not be terrible to a heart that is in friendship with God; and the infinite mercy of God is the sole bridge one needs to cross that final chasm, as a child might run on a plank across a bottomless ravine, without fear, because it sees its father on the other side waiting to pick it up and embrace it. I pray that that will become my own disposition. The Last Sacraments have undoubtedly been given us as a means to bring about that transformation; and I hope that they will be available for me at that time. But with or without them, God’s mercy is the final bridge.

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