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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

In a Spirit of Poverty

In a Spirit of Poverty

From time to time I find myself in the company of young people who were reared in Christian homes but who have abandoned Christianity.

The problem is of course widespread throughout the Western world.

I do not think many of us accept it with equanimity. With the churches half empty and the streets full of teenage wanderers, one hears in Israel the voice of Rachel lamenting for her children.

If they had been seduced by the materialism and empty pleasure-seeking of our times, then one could mourn but do little to help. If we had offered them Christian ideals and examples, and they had chosen otherwise, then we would simply have to accept that refusal and pray that life itself would teach them greater wisdom.

But this is not the case. The boot is indeed on the other foot.

When I visit Auckland it is my custom to sit for a while each day cross-legged on a patch of grass above Vulcan Lane, and meditate on the joys and sufferings and divine manifestations contained in the life of our Lord.

The trees above that patch of grass change with the seasons. In winter it is perhaps the emblem of Jeremiah, dark against a dark sky: ‘Give God his due, before the shadows fall, and your feet begin to stumble on the dark mountain page 214 ways. For day you shall long, but he will have turned it into night; dark as death the lowering of the storm’.

In summer the wind blowing among its glittering leaves has seemed to me the gentle voice of Hosea: ‘It is but love’s stratagem, thus to lead her out into the wilderness; once there, it shall be all words of comfort. Clad in vineyards that wilderness shall be, that vale of sad memory, a passage way of hope, and a song shall be on her lips, the very music of her youth, when I rescued her from Egypt long ago’.

It could appear strange to meditate in the centre of a New Zealand town. Men from the R.S.A. building opposite would sometimes look out and frown, or passers-by would purse up their mouths.

But I was never molested, either by my city neighbours or by the police.

Often the young ones who had abandoned Christianity would sit beside me courteously, boys or girls, and meditate in their own way. Generally their meditation was Taoist or Buddhist or Hindu.

I would say jokingly, ‘It’s quite all right for us to meditate here. All the people here are meditating – some on their bank accounts, some on their health, some on the fact that they will die soon, some on the fact that their wives or husbands neglect them. Everybody meditates. We are just doing the same as everybody else.’

But they could never accept that my thoughts or behaviour were those of an ordinary Christian.

‘It’s not Christian to be poor,’ they would say. ‘Buddha was poor. The Yogis are poor. But Christians chase money and prestige.’

I would reply, ‘Christ was a poor man who loved his friends. Saint Francis loved poverty.’

‘No,’ they would insist, ‘Christ may have been poor, but these days he’d be in jail for being idle and disorderly. The Churches don’t like poverty.’

‘What does Christianity mean to you?’

‘It means getting a short back-and-sides and a good job and going to church every Sunday,’ the boys would say. ‘It certainly doesn’t mean poverty.’

‘It means dressing tidily and not swearing and keeping your virginity till you’re married,’ the girls would say.

Many of the girls who had been practising Christians gave this up when they lost their virginity, even with a boy whom they loved dearly. I tried to persuade them that they were mistaken.

‘Virginity isn’t a special Christian thing. The Moslems and Hindus are much stronger about their wives being virgins. The special thing about Christianity is love and mercy. Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy”. A merciful prostitute is a better Christian than a virgin who thinks of nobody but herself.’

But they wouldn’t believe me. They had been too heavily conditioned.

I doubt if there was one of them who did not carry the spiritual scars of page 215 interminable home battles in which Christian ethics were identified entirely with the social norms of money-making, respectability and educational success.

The young ones were rarely if ever cynical. They weren’t thinking of themselves alone. They would share their last fifty cents with a friend who needed a meal.

On the walls of their communal flats the head of Jesus often appeared, with piercing dark compassionate eyes, gazing from a bush of black hair. They had no quarrel with Jesus. They were only at loggerheads with the Churches.

I quoted Pope John and told them that moderate poverty was the Christian norm; that how you dressed or whether you swore or not had little or nothing to do with Christian ethics: that the early Christians were known chiefly for their great love for one another, and used to embrace and kiss after the Lord’s Supper; that for once that Jesus stressed the need for chastity there was a hundred times when he warned people against the idolatrous pursuit of material goods; that the disciples were mostly illiterate fishermen; that Jesus said people would be judged on whether they had fed the hungry and clothed the naked and comforted the sad.

They listened intently and often with gladness. But they were unable to equate what I said with the Christian teaching they had received.

I suggest that it is time the Churches began not only to stress the duty of Christians to alleviate the evils of undesired poverty, but also the fact that a spirit of poverty and detachment from material possessions is central in the gospel.

I believe that if we offered our young people no watered down version of our Lord’s teaching, but poverty and meditation and the kind of love that issues continually in works of mercy then they would come back to the churches, and Rachel could begin to dry her eyes.

In our time the sword of Herod is being exercised not only by our determinedly godless and secular culture. The Churches themselves become Herod when they teach materialism to the young.

They are right to run away into Egypt from our cruel solicitude.

1970 (630)