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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Letters to a Priest [second series]

Letters to a Priest [second series]

(1)

Dearest Father,

I have just eaten burnt chops cooked by a homosexual burglar – a gentle boy with a very sunny heart, with whom I once walked through the streets of Marton, singing, and each of us carrying a red-hot-poker flower, and then sat cross-legged with him to meditate in the Catholic Church. It was the Feast of St Francis. The other people in the town were not poor enough, I suppose, to crowd into that empty church and celebrate the Feast of the saint of the poor. They would have to work, then as always. But God had freed A— and myself page 135 from the desire for money. He didn’t even want to burgle any more. So we were both extremely joyful meditating together.

A— (he now stays in my cottage) said recently to me – ‘Before I met you it was ME. Now it is US.’ He did not mean me and him, but the US that is the whole world. Thus, I suppose, Te Atua changes our hearts whenever people express genuine love. Te Atua has sent me this bright sunflower, this boy-girl with a lion’s heart, to bring joy and even turbulence into my life and the lives of the others in the cottage. A— is a deacon in the Aaronic priesthood of the Mormon Church. His certificate stands now on top of the cupboard. There are no problems, since we are brothers in the Church Invisible.

Yes, of course, A— is my son. This old man will be content perhaps only when he has a thousand sons and daughters standing with him in fraternal love in the light of God’s loving eye. It must be the same with priests. Whether or not they have children by the flesh, by procreation, to be happy they must have many children by the Spirit. Then one begins to wish to die for one’s children, to water the roots of those trees, their souls, with one’s own blood – and one begins a little to understand the mingling of pain and dread and mountainous joy in Our Lord’s heart as He dressed Himself to die:

My cup of joy has overflowed
With wine unto the brim;
The shepherd for the sheep is slain
And I will die with him –

So it will be too with the priest whose heart is united to his flock.

I grant there may indeed be great obstacles. A priest of my age (fortyfour) may well be suffering from the prolonged effects of a semi-Jansenist training both in his growing up and in the seminary. If his training forbids him to love, what on earth can the poor man do? Eros and Agape will be at loggerheads till the end of his days. But if he can embrace his friends (not genitally) and be glad, and remember their living souls in his Mass, then his life will be a full one, full of pain and joy.

I have seen the eyes of an old semi-Jansenist priest light up with joy when I came into the room. He offered me gifts of food and conversation. You see, he had learnt to love me, and therefore I was his son – his son by the Spirit. He needed a son badly, waiting for the Angel of Death in a cold presbytery, with younger men, priests also, who did not perhaps love him as much as he needed.

‘They say they love God because they love nobody’ – I think that book, Three Cheers for the Paraclete, should be compulsory reading in all seminaries. It is about a man who insists on still being a man when he is a priest. And of course he is right to do so.

In our Church we have often seen priests pretending to be human – page 136 unbending in false chatter and pious platitudes. How stupid! There were three layers in such people – the pretending human being, the priest, and the actual human being. All that was needed was for the actual human being to learn to speak, to overcome his fear of rejection. If their flocks wanted it otherwise, they should tell their flocks where to go to – or if the Bishops wanted it otherwise. The man has to carry Christ the Priest on his back! The load of the human pretender, added to this, is too much for any man to carry. The Devil added him to the burden, in order to weaken love among us and make us poor harvesters.

E—, I know enough priests to know that a priest of forty-four is a man of forty-four. He suffers from loneliness. He remembers youth with nostalgia. His chief temptation is to despair – not of God’s mercy perhaps, but of any living meaning in his human environment.

My friend A—, the burglar, deacon in the Aaronic priesthood of the Church of Latter Day Saints, likes to be spoken to as ‘Mother’ – he says, ‘Look, Mother’s made a meal for you’ – or – ‘Mother knows best.’ His physical homosexuality is a relatively unimportant factor. He has a spiritual desire to mother people. I have it too, thank God. Any good priest has it. He is father and mother to his flock. This is his road to God. Whoever denies it to him acts more rashly than he knows. He is hindering the growth of love and his brother’s salvation.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(2)

Dearest Father,

Up about 5 a.m. when the Mass bell rings. A rare event for me, this early rising, but tensions in my muscles have wakened me already. A moment of choice between the communal Jesus and the sacramental Jesus. The communal Jesus sleeps in the persons of three of His members in the room with me – the boy turned to stone by butchers in a mental hospital, whose soul is now cracking the stone, a green-leaved Buddhist soul, I think; the boy whose soul is like a stormy petrel flying at the heart of God’s solitude; and the boy I mentioned in my last letter. He wakes when I do.

‘Mother’, I say, ‘I can’t find my sandals.’

He gets out of bed and shifts a great pile of clothes till he finds them.

‘The Mass bell was ringing,’ I say, ‘Like the bell in a plague city.’

‘The plague was here,’ he says. ‘I dreamt about vampires all night. Dracula and all that jazz.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll think about you at Mass.’

The natural thing at 5 a.m. is to snore off in one’s sleeping-bag. But in this fallen world the sacramental Jesus contradicts the communal Jesus a little, page 137 and contradicts the sleep of nature. Without our priests we could not find Him.

Hiruharama, village of graveyards, wild and ghostly at 5 a.m., when God touches you with the night peace and the dawn breath – forgive me, I had forgotten your secret face, the face you show only to TeAtua and a man woken by Him to go over the wet paddock to the church where lights are blazing and Father Te Awhitu in white and brown, a sacramental Jesus himself, is offering the sacramental Jesus to Te Atua, and distributing His broken Body to two quiet nuns in black and to this man who does not know who or what he is.

Here in the church I am that beast and imbecile before God which I always have been – blind, deaf, embryonic, a chaos resembling that chaos on which Te Wairua Tapu moved at the beginning of the world. How great the possibility of joy! How great the actuality of pain! How great the peace of the seed lying in the dark ground, waiting for the Lord who is like the sun to bring it into flower! Blessed be the Name of God! Kia tau te rangimarie. May the peace of God be strong among us!

If the priest does not put on the robes of the sacramental Jesus – if he does not offer Ihu to Ihoa, God-who-is to God-who-is-not-us, Christ to the Father – how then can we become the perfect Bride, abundant and flowering in the Mystery of the Coronation?

E—, tell your brother priests that the solitude of Jesus on the Cross – cut off from the consolation of the Father’s presence and the consolation of nature and the brotherly community in which we so rightly grieve and rejoice – tell them that this solitude is their great jewel, a rock in the heart that is waiting to break into flower when God touches it. Tell them God means them to have it. If they do not carry this boulder in the heart – how then can Te Morehu o Te Atua, the people of God, be joined in Christ to the Father? Tell them that community is not enough. There has also to be the vertical dimension. The Cross has an upright and a cross-beam – the upright of solitude, the cross-beam of communality. True, the Church has become semi-Jansenist and forgotten the cross-beam. Nevertheless, we must have both cross-beam and upright in our lives.

When my brothers here in the cottage ask me about the Visible Church, I do not discuss her much. That is because here we belong to the Church Invisible – the Church of Christ-in-the-heart. Ko te aroha i te Ariki – Where love is, there the Lord is. If they should shout and sing and swear and masturbate, I do not criticise them. Te Wairua Tapu will bring them in the right time to perfection. But at Mass even the tiniest fault of myself and my dear brothers and children is part of the death the Lord endures. In that despair which is not despair, but an acknowledgement that He alone has power, I offer even our sins to the Father for Him to touch the rock and make it flower.

A boat out of sight of land, driven by the wind beyond headland and harbour light, apparently rudderless – what am I, E—? The water and the page 138 wind are te aroha, the love that burns inside the heart. I am te tutua, the nobody, the dead man. Pray for this poor man, blind and deaf, lost inside God’s mountain. I have forgotten how to do anything but love. This is the horizontal dimension, the communal Christ. But if my bare feet are on fire with the cold, as I sit here writing, while the fourth one, the boy who came here from a seminary, rigid and unhappy, is munching an apple in the second room – if my feet are on fire, this is very good. There should be fire where the vertical and the horizontal touch one another. Without pain, how could we call ourselves children of Him who suffers? Why did the seminary not teach that boy how to love? Because it is the house of prudence. Prudence is not negligible, but te aroha must have priority. Here he goes out in oilskins to cut brambles – and he does this out of love for his brothers. The prudence that springs from love is another prudence, a delicate thing, like the tendril of a living plant. The prudence of the seminary is alas a science of road-rules. If they taught them the joy of poverty – if they stressed the Beatitudes instead of Canon Law – if they had the boldness to get rid of crutches and rely a little on the heart – then the seminary too might break into flower.

Chesterton said that the human race lived on an island – that this island had high cliffs and a fence to keep us from plunging over the cliffs – the fence of the Law of God and His Church. So we could play happily like children in the safety of the fence. Because of this attitude of mind Chesterton was always limited and uneasy at heart. He had not noticed that the seabirds nested in the crannies of the cliffs, and flew out over the black rocks and the white waters, sustained by their wings and the air itself. The air is God’s love, and the wings are the will and the intellect and the imagination. Did he not notice that our Master is crucified outside the fence? Perhaps the Cross itself is the Law, and the Son of Man is crucified upon it till the world ends. This paradox is no doubt necessary. But let not the man inside the fence throw rocks at the birds that are learning to fly.

I give you this muddy water to drink. It is all I have to offer. Forgive me that it is so. Words are never adequate. I embrace you. Remember me in your Mass. How can I live if my friends do not have pity on me and remember me at the altar? May God pour down His light and joy on you.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(3)

Dearest Father,

I have neither the mind nor the desire for theological window-dressing. In Catholic commentaries on marriage, the window-dressing is always so massive – the Holy Spirit, we are told, shines through each nook and crevice of married life, so that frigidity is no true burden, and mutual rancour a mere page 139 peccadillo, and the space-suit of ignorant conventionality a suit of armour handed directly to us by God – so massive as to constitute a road-block to all communicative discussion. Who would dare to rationalise away the dull or sharp agony of the lonely married, lying down at night on their twin beds like Crusaders on separate tombs? The answer to that, is – our bogus theologians, of course, our men who would run over the Lord’s crucified Body with a tape-measure and a jar of useless liniment.

It is no different with the agonies of the priesthood. Year after year I find friends among our priests – and when they open their hearts to me, as friends must do to be friends, it is generally the odour of the tomb that blows my way. Endless loneliness, a sexuality technically sublimated but in fact left to rot, a longing to be a child again, a sense of failure in a life spent wandering among road-signs erected around them by the Visible Church – ‘This way to Mount Thabor’ – ‘This way to the mental hospital’ – cheerfulness exhibited on the football field and barren sorrow in the presbytery library – these, and many other aspects of a priest’s life, seem to me like water piled up behind a dam. And the pressure gets greater as they grow older. I long to put my arms around them, and say – ‘Brother, don’t be sad. Some of us love you. Some of us care whether you live or die. Priests or not, you are like us. You are really no different.’ But usually one holds back, partly from respect, partly from diffidence, but most of all because one does not wish to intrude on the terrible solitude in which Christ makes or breaks His chosen ones.

You suggested once to me that priests themselves can come together and console one another. On the face of it, that should be an easy thing. But in practice it is not so. What prevents it? These are some of the possible factors:

(a) A gross fear of the bad opinion of others, natural in all men, magnified in the life of a priest by a sense of being always on show, on parade, on his best behaviour.
(b) An immaturity of feeling. The seminary education, on one hand a period of intellectual and spiritual development or indoctrination, necessary for priestly living, is on the other hand a time of retardation, since the priestin-training does not experience much the common crises and common understanding ofhislay fellows.
(c) An excessive intellectualisation of experience. This means that problems may be ‘solved’ intellectually without being solved at the emotional level. In this respects, priests and varsity students are very much alike.
(d) The usual back-log of Jansenism, derived, I think, mainly from the Church’s educational institutions. The priest is normally a ‘good’ boy from a ‘good’ family who has passed through ‘good’ Catholic schools. I do not suggest this ‘goodness’ is wholly spurious. But it might come as a real shock to a priest if he suddenly realised that he was no better and no worse than the inmates of my cottage zoo. Study of the Parable of the Publican and the page 140 Pharisee will not shed much light on this aspect of things. I would suggest a careful, a very careful, reading of Three Cheers for the Paraclete.
(e) The celibates do not have to wince when they meet the non-celibate – that is not if human love is well known to the celibate in his own experience. But many priests are saddled with the meagre emotional heritage of a boy who has once or twice fiddled with somebody in the back of a car. Age doesn’t change this, unless they do in fact learn to love people well. It is a great tribulation to go to Confession to a priest who has never heard that people have to try to love one another with their whole heart and mind and soul. One’s stumblings will seem to him a mere neglect or ignorance of the roadsigns.
(f) A servile obedience has characterised the religious development of many priests. In later life, they either keep this kind of obedience, or burst like bombs. The delicate virtue of filial obedience, linked with epikeia and a full self-respect, is no doubt hard to practise. As long as it is not practised, priests will turn much of their attention to the limitations of their Bishop, not seeing that he too is bound by the chains of an immature pattern.

Perhaps too optimistically, I look to the laity to initiate a full human dialogue with their priests. As Newman put it, the Church who is taught is also the Church who teaches. I am not suggesting that the laity have a formal teaching authority – only that God speaks to us through the hearts of our friends. But if I say this, somebody will want to set up a Committee. God help us! I had better be silent.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(4)

Dearest Father,

What then is the older priest to do? I make the following tentative suggestions:

(a) He could throw out of his library all books of more than three hundred pages, especially those written by prominent Catholic dualists of the last century, and fill up the space with the best modern novels he can find, especially those with some degree of theological emphasis. Joyce Cary, Graham Greene – there are bound to be plenty I don’t know about.
(b) He could put mattresses down on the floor of his presbytery and invite the local drunks, hoboes, hippies, and fly-by-nights, male or female, to use his place as their hotel. If his housekeeper objects, he should give her the boot. If his Bishop objects, he should say that the salvation of his soul demands it, since Our Lord told us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. His page 141 theological education would at once take a leap forward, since the Holy Spirit would arrive with the hoboes to teach his heart.
(c) He could explain publicly to his parishioners that he has a fear of falling into the pit poor Judas fell into, who had the job of looking after the communal purse – saying that they must appoint a stronger soul than his own to do the dangerous job of looking after the parish finances.
(d) He could learn to swear well. This would divide the sheep from the goats – the sheep, already sanctified, would travel across town to another church; the goats would remain to enjoy his company. Otherwise he will find himself looking after the sheep and boring the goats, who will go to look for livelier company.
(e) He could wear old clothes and drive an old car, stopping to pick up hitchhikers, especially those with long hair, who are usually gentle meditative people. Thus he would earn the communal blessing God gives to the Maoris.
(f)He could spend an hour a day in front of the Blessed Sacrament, not talking to Our Lord, just opening his heart in silence, for Our Lord to do what He likes with him.
(g) He could wipe his fundament every Christmas Eve on a ten-dollar note, to demonstrate that he is not an idolator.
(h) He could embrace people on meeting them, especially his brother priests. If they object, he should say that the Lord moves him to do this, as a countermeasure against the chronic coldness of heart that engulfs the nation.
(i) He could sayhis Office with attention, but simply and without anxiety, as a man splits kindling daily to light a fire – the fire being charitas in himself and in the Church at large. He should do this, if possible, in a green place, to remind himself that man was born in paradise and will return to paradise. If children join him – or the hippies – he should explain what he is doing, and not count their presence as interruption.
(j) He could drink when happy, but never when unhappy. When unhappy, he should ask the Lord to send him a new friend. Then he could drink happily with the new friend.
(k) He could be gently rude to professional presbytery-haunters and committee people. Simply to swear in conversation with them would be a great source of deliverance.
(l) Whenever he can, he should seek out the company of Maori people, to learn from them communal habits and religious spirit.
(m) He could work a little each day with his hands, preferably digging the ground. Adam was a gardener.

These moderate suggestions do not cover all eventualities. Yes I believe that a priest who followed even some of them would find that his path in life would begin to open before him. The Holy Spirit would show him what to do next.

page 142

Kia tau te rangimarie – May the peace of God be strengthened among us.

May the hierarchical Christ and the sacramental Christ and the communal Christ be one Christ in our hearts.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(5)

Dearest Father,

God provides me with lemons on a tree near where I dig. They take away heartburn, though at first I found them too bitter to eat. So I consider penance and obedience – sour in the mouth, sweet in the belly.

Obedience may have been misunderstood in the past. For some it was a matter of what Aquinas called servile fear – that is, they feared God’s judgment if they did not obey both God and the pastors set over them. Now both priests and laymen have begun to devote themselves with courage and ardour to the service of the communal Christ. So the Church is re-humanised in a de-humanised era. This comes from the Spirit pouring out power on us. But the work is done above all in the Church Invisible, where love in human hearts may be the only sign (though undoubtedly the truest, best and deepest) of the indwelling Christ. That is the sphere of my own labour.

I think priests above all have to maintain a right contact with the hierarchical Christ. Otherwise we will have a waggonload of schisms. The modern priests are rightly enamoured of Christ-in-the-heart, the communal Christ, and partly because they know He humanises them; they maintain contact with the sacramental Christ through the Mass and the Sacraments that flow from the Eucharist, where Christ manifests Himself as the Primordial Sacrament. But the hierarchical Christ is neglected, chiefly because His service is penitential.

I am joined to all people in the communal Christ. I am joined to many who are not Catholics in the sacramental Christ. But my obedience to the hierarchical Christ is the basic sign of my membership of the Visible Church.

If the Cardinal (I am in his diocese, and the Bishop is in charge of charisms) were to say to me – ‘Look, Jim, you may be doing good work, but your support of non-Catholic Maori religious movements is doing harm to the Visible Church. Lay off it. Go and do something else’ – if he were to say this, I would uproot myself and obey him. It might tear my soul out by the roots, since I love my children in the Spirit more than I love my own salvation. But I would obey him for the sake of the entirety of Christ, so that the communal and sacramental and hierarchical aspects of His Presence among us might be maintained in balance.

It is on the whole the older priests who best recognise the hierarchical Christ. At times it may seem that this is the only aspect of His Presence they page 143 do recognise. The young ones go out to serve Him communally. Both young and old indeed are serving Him sacramentally. But the older priests must gently show the younger ones, more by example than by speech, the meaning of Catholic obedience.

If I truly thought it a sin to abandon my children in the Spirit, then I would be bound by conscience to disobey the Cardinal. But that would be arrogance, as things stand with me. God can raise up charismatic men out of the stones of the field. My sins bear continual witness to my unfitness to serve Him. And the blood of my soul torn by obedience may water the roots of the tree of the communal Christ. I know He requires a sacrifice of this poor soul and body. Perhaps I will die outside the Visible Church:

The house where I was born had seven windows
But its door is closed to me –

In the house of the Seven Sacraments my soul was born; and to die outside it would seem to me something that verges on annihilation. Yet indeed I would desire annihilation, or to be inHellfor ever, if itwould givemy children bread and meat and light and joy. This man was made to be turned into dung to manure the fields. I know that. But without obedience the sacrifice is ineffectual. We say of our Joy and Love, the man Jesus, that He was obedient to death. Shall we not obey the Obedient One in this hierarchical aspect? I have called Him my King; I have put my hands between His hands, as the drunken Viking puts his hands between the hands of his chief, and swore to protect him in battle with his own body; he is King in my visible life by means of the Cardinal – am I to quibble and disobey when my King chooses to tear up my soul by the roots? It is His already, beyond all human reckoning. The time will come E—, and when the time comes, this sinner will choose to die with the One who called him a friend and made him glad to be alive in the sunlight. If a sinful layman can do this, cannot a holy priest do the same?

I weep when I think of Him. But tears are easy medicine. It is when the blood of the soul is flowing that one has begun to obey. Let us love Him then in all three aspects – communal, sacramental, and hierarchical. There is no other road for us.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(6)

Dearest Father,

To grow old is always in some degree an affliction, whether one is a priest or not. In fact I doubt if the nature of one’s vocation makes much difference. God rarely mitigates the human crises simply because someone is serving page 144 a special way. Rather the endurance of the crises has to be built into the service.

To be in one’s forties means to look often at one’s own tombstone. The name is clearly written there, whether one accepts the prospect of death with or without resignation. The young subconsciously imagine themselves to be immortal. This helps them to court women who may well make catastrophic wives, climb dangerous mountains, go to battle, take moral risks at work or at home – or to become priests, the most dangerous vocation of all. But in middle life the subconscious afflatus has usually subsided. They are left stranded with the deaths they expect and the lives they have made. It is a time of gruelling sobriety. A literary friend of mine once referred to the middle years as the Frightful Forties. One would speak also of the Fatal Fifties and the Sagging Sixties.

Theoretically a priest does not have a love life. In fact he does of course; he may love some people very dearly, and if he is lucky, they will love him in return. The love life of a priest may have included significant genital encounters, breaches of his vow of celibacy, but still significant if his heart was involved. Now, human sexuality is perhaps best described as that side of a man’s life in which he expresses his chronic need to be loved – this is Eros, who spares no living man. Agape, the love that wishes only to give, is a bird of a more tranquil feather. In the middle years Eros begins to burn more sharply, since death has come nearer, and the idealist illusions of youth – if they were illusions – have been stripped away. A middle-aged man is above all a man who wishes to be loved. Priests are in this respect, as in others, no different from other men.

Happy the man who understands himself a little before the Frightful Forties rumble upon him, like a storm out of the desert! I think priests have special obstacles to self-understanding. I hope they receive special aid from the Holy Spirit in this task.

A priest who hides himself in golf or accountancy will find he is not just a sportsman or business man. He will know obscurely that he is betraying his communal vocation in a socially acceptable way. There is no remedy for him except to come out of his burrow again.

A priest who hits the bottle is probably in better shape. Drunks will come to him for counsel. He may even maintain a staggering but real relationship with his flock. The bad opinion of his Bishop will protect him from ecclesiastical advancement, and provide him with ample penitential occasions.

A priest who walls himself in with doctrine will be in poorer shape. The conceptual apparatus of Catholic theology is perfectly designed for the construction of a Martian space-suit that can exclude almost entirely the breeze of new experiences – a breeze I personally tend to identify with Te Hau, The Wind, the Holy Spirit. He may wear it till his dying day, under the impression that he is obeying God’s will by doing so, and wonder why page 145 he continually feels asphyxiated. A priest who is compulsively drawn in a sexual mode to women or to other men has, I think, one problem only – to set his loves in order. As Aquinas said, virtue is the ordering of love. Such a priest should thank God that there is some love in his heart. Unfortunately a butcher’s training in practical theology may lead him to regard such impulses as animal, ignoring the fact that all human impulses are by definition human. In this sphere friendship is the great teacher.

A rich priest is the Devil’s parody of Holy Orders. God alone can deliver him. I suspect that the same is true if a priest is chronically ambitious.

A ritualistic priest is usually emphasising the sacramental Christ at the expense of the communal Christ. Let him spend his days in the coffee bars and his nights in the pubs, out of uniform.

The cultof sport attracts many priests because it offers a retreat to their own boyhood – very likely the only happy time of their lives – and an appearance of communication. It does not seem to me especially helpful.

The self-scourging priest should impose on himself the penance of doing five things he thoroughly likes each day of the week – not to include the saying of Mass – and seeking out at least one person who is truly dear to him. He, though he suffers, is not in bad shape at all.

The hypercritical priest could reasonably pay a visit to a psychiatrist to understand in himself the mechanism of psychological projection.

The priest who feels continually and very simply that he is a sheep in the wrong pasture, a master of all theological, moral and social mistakes, a mere suppurating jelly, need have no fear at all. Our Lord is clasping him hard against His breast, in life, in death.

A priest whose view of life is wholly intellectual has probably mistaken his vocation. No flock is ever solaced by ideas, without at least the spiritual sense of a human embrace. He should perhaps apply for laicisation and marry his mistreated secretary.

How are they to know these things in the seminaries, E—? They cannot know them. They have to stumble on like the rest of us. At least I will treat them as human beings till the day I die.

A priest is a lonely bachelor. That cannot be denied. Yet Christ who gave him the vocation has always a door open by which he may avoid being solely a lonely bachelor. If he has good friends, true friends, loving friends, he is not so lonely perhaps as most of the married. And then he is not wholly a bachelor, since Eros is part of all deep friendships.

Yet Christ the Priest does share with each priest His own terrible solitude, in the Garden, at the Wedding Feast, by the lakeshore, on the Cross. I would not wish to rob so deep and terrible a gift from any friend of mine.

Arohanui–

Hemi

page 146
(7)

Dearest Father,

When one tries to nail the problem down – why are our priests often incomplete, unhappy, frustrated men? – it turns out to be two problems in one. The first is insoluble. It rises from human nature itself. Human beings are radically incomplete. Our minds, souls and bodies are out of joint. We suffer because we are a fallen species. That problem will only be solved in Heaven. The liturgy of the Church states the problem and proposes also its final solution in Christ.

Therefore we have to obtain wisdom to distinguish what is soluble from what is insoluble. I think of it in terms of the A.A. Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.

But there is a second problem, and it is soluble. It is a problem of false absolutes. Let us suppose a reasonably intelligent, reasonably well integrated man, who is, at forty-five, in charge of a largish parish. His mother gave him a set of false absolutes when he was a child. She gave him the rock-bottom impression that if he defecated on the floor or touched his private parts, both God and she would be very angry. He did not distinguish much between his mother and God. So a child dualist was created. The nuns at his first school furthered this false impression. He, a boy, was awed by their matriarchal angelist spirituality. It seemed so complete and convincing. He did not know they were often fear-ridden bewildered women. In their blue habits and white coifs they seemed to him more like angels of Judgment. He saw the mysteries of our religion through their eyes – a vertical Jacob’s ladder of virtues by which he might, if he was very good, ascend to God. Thus he took on board the false absolute of angelism.

At his second school he played football and learned a great deal of abstract doctrine. He tended to regard the inevitable growth of his own sexual and aggressive faculties as an erosive loss of virtue. His mentors told him that if he masturbated he was in a state of mortal sin. The cult of sport was one of his masculine absolutes – a good Rugby forward was pleasing to God and man. He regarded himself as a being split into two halves, spiritual and animal. The suppression of the ‘animal’ half occupied much of his labour in prayer and devotion.

To be a priest now seemed to him an absolute of altruistic service. The cleanness of the Sacrifice of the Mass occupied his attention. His immature spiritual love turned to the Blessed Virgin. He turned her into a goddess of dualism, a white goddess opposing the Devil, the black god of all that was page 147 explosive and subconscious inside him.

The theology he imbibed at the seminary did not heal much these basic dichotomies. It gave him instead a new false absolute. It provided a static answer to every conceivable moral problem. He quarrelled often with his superiors, being a young man of energy – yet his objections never struck at the root of his own disquiet, his fear of finding himself lost in a wilderness without road-signs. When he was ordained, obedience to the Bishop presented itself as an absolute that would solve all personal problems. At that stage he had not considered the possibilities of personal initiative or the practice of the virtue of epikeia.

He entered a furnace of loneliness after he left the seminary. The seminary had been a womb of sorts. The fraternal love of his fellow seminarians, however limited, seemed in retrospect, an absolute of maternal support. Under a heavy-handed bulldozing parish priest he learnt how to count the dollars and preach sermons that skirted the actual horrors of the spiritual environment of a middle-class congregation.

Between thirty-five and forty-five he did not learn a great deal. His false absolutes are still mainly intact, only weathered a little by a drizzle of worldliness. He likes his whisky bottle. He likes to meet old seminary companions and discuss Rugby patter with them. He does not like modern art or literature.

The one great formative experience of his life has been a ten years persecution by a female parishioner who suffers from hysteria. She haunts his doorstep. She writes him love letters. And he has been wise enough not to ditch her though her presence affects him like having a nutmeg grater rubbed over his raw nerves. From this one sick woman he has learnt more about the workings of the human soul in extremis than any of his books have taught him. Some of his fellow priests make jokes about it. ‘When are you going to run away with Mrs Ryan?’ they ask. But he does not abandon her. In fact he treats her very gently. Perhaps he knows obscurely that his salvation and his function as a shepherd of souls may depend most of all on his handling of this one relationship.

What is my not-so-fictitious priest to do, E—? He has been heavily conditioned. I suggest that there are two supplementary solutions – intellectual and communal.

Let him read books that actually discuss the problem of false absolutes. Let him talk with people who know the problem exists. And let him seek out the most disreputable of his parishioners and make friends of them. It is all hidden somewhere in the Parable of the Unjust Steward. Life is not geometrical.

Arohanui–

Hemi

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(8)

Dearest Father,

Loneliness belongs to Eros and solitude to Agape. Four are leaving the cottage today – two men and two women – and of course my heart goes along with them. I must learn a greater detachment. Meditation is a help; yet when I lie down in front of the tabernacle and surrender to Him, it is always a heart darkened by a hundred attachments to created beings that I bring with me. I am no true disciple of St John of the Cross, though I do chant his song at intervals:

Deep-cellared is the cavern
Of my Love’s heart; I drank of Him alive.
Now stumbling from the tavern
No thoughts of mine survive
And I have lost the flocks I used to drive . . .

But I am not as happy as the drunken herdsman. My flock of attachments gather again.

All the same, the solitude of Agape does painfully begin to fill my soul after each period of attachment. God speaks to me from the dark night and the foggy sky, and also from the fields empty of friends. God has to create a space in the soul for Himself to inhabit.

The two dangers of the spiritual life seem to be either to plunge into attachment and hide oneself from God, as Adam and Eve hid among the bushes of the garden after the Fall – or else, to regard the kind of loneliness our abominably depersonalised society fosters in us as a truly God-willed solitude. Some loneliness there is bound to be. Some solitude there should always be. But one has to strike a balance. And I have the priests particularly in mind when I say this.

Certainly a celibate life need not murder anybody. I have lived for twenty years in marriage; and I am quite sure the pains and loneliness and inevitable sexual deprivations of the married, even the well married, are quite as severe as the pains of celibacy. The celibate thinks the grass may be greener over the fence; the married (or the non-celibate unmarried) know very well that life bursts every bubble.

But the problem is not the pain of celibacy – it is the pain of a non-communal existence, flaying and depersonalising priests and laity alike. Let us take up arms against it. Let us make friends and keep them – ‘friend’ is the beautiful title Our Lord gave to His disciples, therefore wholly appropriate for priests. Those who talk, in our present arid society, of the dangers of special friendships, should have to spend a year camping without company in a corner of a busy railway station. They might get the point then.

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I finish these letters with some hope for the future and a layman’s blessing – Oku manaaki tanga ki a koe. From time to time I meet priests who are both fully humanised and open to Divinisation. They may not be happy, but they are sending out green shoots.

Remember me in your Mass, E—. Without that I would certainly die.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(9)

Dearest Father,

Another letter, this time thinking aloud about priests and me and middle age. I am forty-three; but today was not too bad a day. I spent some of it picking peaches for Wehe and taking them over to her. Up on a ladder with Jonathan catching the peaches I tossed to him. Some of it talking to Tame. About the cops and Maori-pakeha life and the possibility of my making songs in English for him to maorify and put over with the band he is part of.

It sounds idyllic. It is not. My guts are consumed night and day by the knowledge of new and ancient faults of my own and the various agonies of friends. Christ is not my insulation; I suspect He is my pain. I find no escape from Him whatever. He is the lion who feeds on me.

Look, I could go to a beach somewhere and smoke pot and write poems and ‘be unhappy’ in the usual professional way with plays on radio and a succession of mistresses. I ‘am unhappy’ in a different way – somehow, a sinner lost in God. He has taken away my carefully contrived insulation. The plague pit and the sky open at the same time. I know you too are not infrequently ‘unhappy’; I suspect that your sickness too is really Christ and it must be borne with aplomb. How can we ever be satisfied again when once He has touched us? Except, one takes it, by the Beatific Vision shared with everybody we love.

At Owhanga, after being in Auckland, I had a dream. I was back in Auckland. The town was empty except for great heaps of burning rags and rubbish in the streets and men like zombies in greasy corduroys tending these fires. A wind blowing from a lowering grey skin, infinite and wintry. Smoke flowing everywhere among the concrete buildings. Gehenna perhaps. The wind overturned one of the vast smouldering heaps of filth and blew it and a huge rusty iron bracket in my direction. The bracket was bashing against one of the buildings like a menacing uncontrollable creature of destruction. Life out of control. A sense of one’s own infamy. Why not? One is human, and to be human is to have Gehenna inside oneself. But Christ walks with us in Gehenna.

I think the note of middle age is realist rather than idealist. God grant our realism may not be solitary and self-protective.

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Young people are Pelagian by their very nature. They think they can build Utopia or restore the Garden of Eden by simply following their idealist impulses. They blame others for not having done it long ago. But we know that the chief obstacles are inside ourselves – chronic instability of will, darkness of intellect, disordered passions or the lack of any vivifying strength even in our passions. Our temptation is to become severely Augustinian – to let the wounds we have sustained sicken us of battle. We know ourselves only too bitterly and well. Our temptation is to lose hope, forgetting that God knows us better than we know ourselves and sees cause to love and console and trust us. Let us never pass a secret and negative judgment on ourselves. That is not our business at all. God intends to build Heaven out of us and sinners like us. These very afflictions of self-distrust and negative emotion are the means God uses to scour our souls. That God plunges us into Gehenna shows that God regards us as human.

A poem of middle age I wrote with red crayon on the wall of a room in the house at Boyle Crescent that has now been pulled down:

Like I have heard the dead man singing
Under the chains of words and clods.
Like I have seen the stone black mountain
Blow us from its cleft the holy dove.
Like I have known the old man weeping
Be a young child and laugh again.

Alleluia! Amene! (Uncollected)

‘Amene’ is Maori for ‘Amen’. So much of what we regard as a cold of our own making is permitted by God for the welfare of our souls. I have asked often to live without light or peace or joy so that others might have these. Why should I object when God takes me at my word?

The false directions of youth are rectified in middle age. Picking peaches today I thought of many priests I have known, good men who tried to play it safe – to be a sacerdotal image rather than a man. But they have precisely the same nature, the same embedded attributes, the same psychosexual disposition as other men. God doesn’t allow us to change our psychosexual disposition. We may think we have (or that God has) but all that has happened is that we tied down the clamps and sat on the lid.

Bang! At forty or thereabouts the volcano begins to erupt. Women react against approaching menopause, whether they are nuns or housewives. Men, priests or laymen, feel the heavy pinch of depression as old age looms ahead, and the hidden powers within us cry – ‘Not yet! I’ve got a life to live!’

The false directions may have been excessive bookishness – or an attempt to live inside a series of scholastic intellectual boxes – or a reliance on the page 151 football field – or a grim attitude towards the flesh – or a sentimentalising of one’s relation towards one’s parents –or anything, since anything can be used as a shield against really getting to know oneself through other people.

But the gloom and loss of false hope and devastated territories of middle age offer the great opportunity – to help the barriers to break, to accept willingly even the worst knowledge of oneself (because it is true, and truth is holy) – above all, and perhaps for the first time, to offer one’s actual inner self to other people – the only gift they ever really wanted from us.

Let the middle-aged welcome the new dark dimension. It is not infernal but purgatorial. The fact that it has about it a quality of infinitude indicates that God is hidden there. Let them not hide themselves in the time tunnel, lamenting the lost joys and opportunities of youth. Let them live in the present, a peopled present. Other people are always our salvation. They are our Christs.

Let them not look too much for special friendships (though what comes one’s way can be most consolatory) but pour themselves into Samaritanhood. The wounded are always our healers. Let them refresh themselves often by handling substance – washing plates, cooking meals digging gardens – above all, digging gardens, so as to restore that awareness of the cycle of the seasons which our civilisation has fractured in us.

When gross, uncharming, monotonous Freudian obsessions press on us – they usually do in middle age – let us simply thank God for it, even if we frequently fall – because the sugar coating of our Pelagian idealisms is falling off our inner selves, and at last we see what others perhaps have had to endure all their lives. Maybe we dodged the psychiatrist’s couch. But that meant we’d have to be our own psychiatrists. Time to begin. Time to read that big book on Clinical Symptoms and Pastoral Theology, realising without shame and with (we hope) some humour that a good deal of it does apply to us, and all of it could apply.

We wanted to be ‘special people’ – perhaps to please God, and God may have been pleased by our zeal and sincerity – but through the ordeal of middle age God proves to us that we aren’t special at all, not even special sinners – and then perhaps we do at length begin to become ourselves – to recognise the selves we have always secretly been.

God shows vast respect for the selves God creates. We, on the other hand, spend most of our time moving frantically away from the selves we are. Let us imitate God a little. How is a priest to help homosexuals to know themselves and love better (not differently) if he has no homosexual traits in his own nature? Who can help an alcoholic as much as a fellow alcoholic? I think with self-knowledge a person of a Pharisaic cast of mind (who knew it and didn’t hide it) might even lead the Pharisees out of hiding! Let us use our very defects creatively. The more crooked grain there is in the wood the better it looks under the hand of the cabinet maker. But we plaster varnish page 152 on our poor souls. With middle age, thank God, the varnish peels off for good.

God puts the pressure on. God is forcing us to love, to use the unused resources in our nature which we rejected but God did not reject, since God hates nothing in creation.

As always, love is the key. How vast the dark perspectives are around us! It is time to go into Gehenna and find our brothers and sisters there.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(10)

Dearest Father,

Perhaps my last letter was a trifle apocalyptic; but still, our times are apocalyptic, and I have never found it true or helpful to regard life as a dish of cold stewed prunes. Cold stewed peaches are what I eat. I boil them up daily, while the season lasts, and feed the rotten ones to the pigs. They chew them with juice squirting out of their jaws.

God is good; whatever God makes is good; but we are in varying degrees alienated from ourselves. I take it this is chiefly because the Fall has damaged our capacity to love. The Church moves like a boat upstream; she moves against the Fall.

I suggest that we discover our self-alienation (and, if we believe, our alienation from God) more profoundly in the middle years. It may not mean we are growing worse; it may only mean we are less fogged in our thinking. I remember what Vernon Watkins, the Welch poet, said about his well-loved friend, Dylan Thomas, that greater poet and most Christian man who died of alcoholism. He said Thomas thought he was becoming a worse man while everybody else knew he was coming steadily nearer to God. That was something like what he said. God grant it may be true of us. Thomas died at thirty-nine.

Father Te Awhitu has asked me to give a sermon for him – the same sermon twice, here and at Ranana. I shrink from opening my big mouth to a Maori congregation more than I would from frosty winds on land or rough waves at sea. There will be little children among them. The theme is the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

I connect the miracle with our incapacity to love until we have given our hearts to Christ for Him to enlarge them, with the reception of Holy Communion, and with the sharing of food and money as a fruit of contact with Christ. I aim for the little children. I could scandalise them by boring or bewildering them. So I have written five hundred careful words of one syllable, eighty of two syllables, less than twenty of three syllables – ‘Communion’ has three syllables – and four of four syllables ‘everybody’, as I pronounce it, has page 153 four syllables. Perhaps you should have a copy of this not too polished effort. Here it is:

‘Tena koutou. Tena koutou. Tena koutou katoa.

‘I am speaking today because Father Te Awhitu has asked me to speak.

‘You have heard the story from the Bible about the loaves of bread and the fish. The Lord took five loaves of bread and two fish and He fed five thousand people. That was a miracle. After they had finished eating they filled twelve kits with the pieces of bread that were left over.

‘There is one thing we learn from the story. Our Lord was sorry for the people who were hungry. He wanted to feed them. Maybe some of them were good people and some were not. It made no difference. Our Lord still loved them and wanted to look after them. That is how He wants to look after us.

‘Another thing. By doing this miracle He showed that He is God. God made everything. God made the wheat that people turn into flour and then into bread. God made the fish. God can do what He likes with the things He made. By feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish, Our Lord showed that He is God.

‘Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke and Saint John, all tell the story about the loaves of bread and the fish. But Saint John tells us a new thing. He tells us that it was a boy that gave the bread, the fish to Jesus.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that boys as well as men – and girls as well as women – can give Jesus what He wants. Our hearts are very small. Too small, too little for us to love people as they should be loved. But when we give our hearts to Jesus, He changes them like the bread and the fish. He makes our hearts big so that we can love everybody. God is love. Without God we cannot love.

‘Hehu – Te Ariki – is Himself the great Priest – Te Ariki rite ki te ra. When He had blessed the kai, there was enough for everybody to eat.

‘It was not just for them – not just for those people. It was for us as well. The bread was a sign of the Lord. He is the Bread of Heaven. In Holy Communion He gives Himself for us to eat.

‘The Fish – Te Ika – was a sign of the Lord. The first people in the Church made pictures of a Fish when they wanted to show Our Lord. The people who were trying to kill them did not know what the Fish meant.

‘Both the bread and the fish were a sign of the Lord. The wheat has to die in order to make bread for us to eat. The fish has to die for us to make a dinner. The Lord died and then he rose again.

‘Whenever we go to Mass there is another miracle. The Lord Himself has become kai. He gives Himself to us to feed our souls and our bodies in Holy Communion.

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‘Holy Communion is like the seed in the ground. The Lord plants Himself in our souls. But to make Him grow there we have to love one another.

‘When people have things it is like the miracle of the bread and the fish. God made everything. He gives us things so that we can share them. When people share their kai and their money, from love, God blesses them.

‘That is what we have to remember. God blesses the people who give. Whatever their faults may be, God will have mercy on them because they have had mercy on other people.’

Yes, simplicity is what I hunger after. They say they have dug down into the streets of Capernaum and found them paved with salt. Chalk and salt. The salt used to come from the quarry in blocks mixed with chalk. If there was too much chalk, the people tossed it out their windows, and it was literally trodden underfoot.

In middle age, priests and laymen we fear that our salt is losing its savour. For us, I think, the ‘chalk’ is the habit of dealing in high order abstractions. The ‘salt’ is our simplicity. Let us talk simply to complicated people. Peace and simplicity go together.

I spoke of this matter to Father Te Awhitu this afternoon, sitting in my shirtsleeves in the cool presbytery kitchen. He was interested in the salt of Capernaum. He agreed vehemently about the need for simplicity, in particular when I linked it with Our Lord’s injunction that we must become like little children.

The Spirit was close to me as I simplified the sermon. The matter of Christ enlarging our hearts to love came into my mind last night as I lay awake beside a friend with a physically damaged heart, who was snoring ponderously. His snoring kept me awake, and I held his hand (he felt need of that comfort) and thought in a tranquil way how necessary Christ was to us. Christ made this mild ordeal of wakefulness sweet to me, because it was His will that I should love my friend in that way.

A woman will come up on the truck tomorrow to discuss her problems with me. I hope her need for reassurance is not so great as to dislodge the delicate peace of the Spirit from my soul. Not that I demand I should keep it – one has no right to peace when others are in tribulation – but I feel I need it to speak to the Maori congregations on Sunday, especially the children. Their souls have greenness in them, and ours are habitually dry. There is the danger we could forget even what that delicate peace is like.

The Spirit refreshes us most when we approach in simplicity.

Be glad, Father, of any friends who come your way. Give my love to those we both know.

Arohanui–

Hemi

page 155 P.S.

God will look after the woman’s arrival tomorrow. I have a chronic fault of worrying about what might happen – a legacy like an old war wound from my drinking alcoholic days – but tomorrow is always entirely in God’s hands – today also, and the sooner I learn this by heart, the happier I am likely to be.

James K. Baxter.

1970 (606)