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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

[Between the Hammer and the Anvil]

[Between the Hammer and the Anvil]

. . . In an interview once, Pope Paul spoke about Pope John, and said – ‘A Jewish child asked an old man what the just should do. And the old man, without hesitation, replied: “Do you ask the sun to do anything? It rises, it sets, its soul rejoices.” Pope John rose, set, rejoiced souls. Thus he set in page 222 motion a current of love and this current of love was irreversible . . .’.

Again with trembling I confess to you, Sister, that this is my sole vocation – to love them, to love the Many. So many that my heart becomes like a stone trodden on by everyone in the street – I trust by the end of my life it will be worn thin as a wafer and cracked in two so as to belong to Him irrevocably.

Again, once at the Cistercian monastery at Kopua, I saw the Host lifted up and knew – ‘One must become the bread that is broken and the wine that is drunk; one must give oneself to be eaten by others; it is not enough simply to try to obey His law.’

And if Our great Lover, Our Sun, laughs at my sins and says so often that he is not interested in them, but in me and Us – well, He also wishes me to laugh at darkness, pain, or a species of annihilation. Have no doubt, the sins are real enough. The miracle is that He does laugh at them, and say – ‘Begin again, idiot – what could ever stop Me loving you?’

A vocation of love implies total poverty. For the door to swing freely it must not be blocked with old poems, self-congratulatory messages, and such wadding. There is one extraordinary reward of poverty – to see paradise here on earth – I mean, the paradise of the poor, the paradise of sinners, where that most beautiful of creatures, the human soul, rises to the surface of a friend’s face – and trees, houses, rain falling, everything, share in this unobstructed beauty – it all costs nothing; He gives it – one has to go to the poor and be poor with them to share it – but of course, because we are on earth, these times are islands in a sea of darkness and pain.

I remember, when I left Auckland, talking with a dear friend who is a priest, and then bursting out weeping – I hardly ever weep – and saying – ‘I’m sorry, man. It’s their beauty that makes me weep.’ That great beauty – that beauty being trodden down in the mud – Norma, Gipsy, Yancy, Peter, Clarissa, Jeremy, Milton – so the litany goes on – and I remember that bit of Scripture – ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon the high places . . .’.

What hurts me most about the buyers and sellers of people and things, Sister, is that they are oblivious to the enormous heart-rending beauty of human souls – like flowers on earth, like stars in Heaven – less than a hairsbreadth away from the Divine Beauty of the One who made them and keeps them in being by a sustained act of creation, as the fountain carries the ball on its breast.

Well, what do I say to the kids, dear Sister? I say – ‘You must first hold the head up – whatever your circumstances – move against the fear, don’t give way to it when the fuzz (the police) crush your fingers in the door in interrogation – when they offer you money to give information about your friends – when the bosses have turned you down for a job for the eighteenth time – when a boss has asked you to sleep with him to hold a job (a girl of course) – when a parent has told you for an hour that you are dirty, lazy, immoral, insane, useless, spineless – hold the head up! Without courage, page 223 nothing works – courage is the flashpoint of every virtue – to be a friend, to console the Many, one must have courage, one must hold the head up.

‘Then you must love one another. Show it. Meet each other with an embrace. This love is physical, not genital. There is a distinction. The embrace cracks the paranoia. Avoid all bitching and forgive faults as soon as they are committed.

‘Share your food and your money. Not to have is not the crime – the crime is to have and not share. A cup of shitty water shared among friends becomes wine. But the reverse is true. The food they have, and don’t share, in the money dungeons, becomes like stale sawdust in their mouths.

‘Light a cigarette and pass it to your friend. The saliva is part of the friend. Speak the truth to one another. Don’t conceal things. If words are true, they become the slashers to cut your way through the brambles with. If you’re at fault, admit it. Then the fault is robbed of its bad effect.

‘If you do these things – hold the head up, love, share, speak the truth – then the soul will rise to the surface of the friend’s face, as a fish rises to the surface of the water. Then you are in paradise – the paradise of the poor – then great beauty breaks like a sunrise.’

(I think the Trinity may be concealed somewhere in this primitive theology – the love of the Father, the truth of the Son, the beauty of the Holy Spirit – but the kids belong to the Church Invisible, and formal theology would mean nothing to them. I think the soul, when it rises in answer to the call of love, is actually Christ buried in the heart – otherwise, why is it always beautiful?)

I say – ‘In the house of love the door is never locked – it may have been smashed a hundred times by the fuzz anyway – but you don’t lock it, because the Friend’ – a concealed Christ image, I think – ‘may arrive, and he will be sad to see the door locked, and go away. Surely, it could be an enemy; but better that the enemy should come in than that the friend should be excluded; and the enemy is the friend in disguise.

‘In the house of love the wallpaper may fall off the walls – perhaps again the fuzz tore it off, looking for roaches (marihuana butts) – and the boards are bare, and there is little food, and there are blankets, not sheets, on the beds. The point is, the people there are concerned with one another, not with their possessions. And if they are married – (the marriages may be de facto, Sister, but personally I always respect them) – then they are happy in bed together, because their love for one another is unobstructed by the love for possessions. And when the woman boils a turnip for her man, and uses the last of the coffee – it is a feast, because it is made with love – and the friend who arrives is asked to share this feast, because it is made with love – and the friend who arrives is asked to share this feast – a piece of boiled turnip and the last spoonful of coffee.

‘In the house of death the door is always locked; because there the people are frightened somebody will come to do them harm or take away their page 224 possessions. Therefore the friend is locked out.

‘In the house of death they sit in front of the telly all evening and never communicate with one another. They have lost the power to communicate. The fridge is loaded with food that is not shared. The noise box is on full blare to drown out all thinking. There is a flight of china ducks flying diagonally up the wall.

‘When the married in the house of death go to bed together they are still solitary. They do not see beauty in one another’s faces. They can’t communicate. Their love has degenerated into a security mechanism. They are full of fear they might beget children, and each blames the other for neglect, though each has chosen to put possessions in place of people. The fault is not in marriage as such, which can be strong and beautiful, but in the attachment to material possessions.

‘They sprinkle Odorono and wash continually to keep down the smell of the carcasses they are becoming. But it doesn’t work. The smell still asphyxiates them. The crime is that they have and don’t share – they don’t even know the names of the people in the next house. And their kids move away as if jet-propelled as soon as they hit the teens. And these unfortunate people with dead sad eyes talk about “teen-age rebelliousness”.’

I say – ‘In this country people worship the secular Trinity – the Dollar Note, Respectability and the School Cert. Examination. I grant these things may have their particular use; but, since I am a Christian, I worship the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit instead. Unfortunately a boy can go through a Catholic school and get the idea that the main items of Christian Doctrine are to go to Mass, to have his hair cut an inch above the ears and get a well-paid job. A girl can go through a Catholic school and get the idea that the main items of Christian Doctrine are to go to Mass, to retain her virginity and never to swear. This may be close to being pagan fetishism.

‘Pre-marital celibacy makes sense; work makes sense; going to Mass makes sense, if you are a Catholic. But without works of mercy these things are dead as a doornail – without the love of poverty and the sharing of goods. A boy who doesn’t work much or a girl who’s not a virgin can please God abundantly by being merciful to others. The practice of charitas tends to drive out other faults as clover drives out couch grass from a paddock . . .’.

Well, here’s my crude tape of some of my primitive theology, Sister. Tell me what you think of it. It is born between the hammer and the anvil. I trust I am not a heretic.

I think the C[onfraternity of ] C[hristian] D[octrine] has things in the wrong order – Doctrine, the Sacraments, and then in very small print – works of mercy. I think one finds the Sacraments essential to give one the strength for works of mercy: and then Doctrine can explain what’s already happening. . . .

1970? (633)