Extracts from ‘Notes on Community Life’ [1]

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Sanctity consists of obedience to God. The Lord said, ‘My meat and drink is to do the will of Him who sent me.’

What is my meat and drink? Dullness, chaos, weakness, the faults of the flesh, garrulity and awkward love to strangers, incapacity to distinguish good from evil in my own life, lamentation, outcry, a tired peace, a road that is not a road. Is this the will of God for me? I doubt it. Only in stabilitas, thereness, in being where I am, can I claim to be fulfilling his will.

So I am not a saint. Truly, I know Christ is crucified in my soul. But that is a knowledge common to all sinners who are Christian.

Yet He makes my tree flourish. In my life the saying is fulfilled, that the wicked shall flourish like a green tree. One day He will lay the axe to it. This is my joke against myself. Yet what I say joking may well be true. I pray only that nga mokai, whom I love, will not be felled along with it. Let Him see to page 276 that, because they deserved a saint, and He sent them a sinner.

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Ten Catholic housewives, ten cops, ten nuns, ten priests, ten good businessmen and fathers of families – my execution party is approaching. I can see them in the distance.

What can I say to them? Their complaint is both violent and just. ‘You are a source of evil. You are corrupting the young. We even have evidence of your unchastity.’ Again I make my own wry joke. But how does one answer the accusers?

To say, ‘God sent me to this work,’ is no good. What is good comes from God, what is evil from myself. They too come from God. They are honest, decent people.

What can I say? Only, I think – ‘I love you. I think I understand you. You are doing your job, as I have done mine. Do it then, so that I can be alone with God. Perhaps you are my best friends in disguise.’

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Advice to relatives: After they reach seventeen, commend your children to God, as Monica did once with Augustine. It didn’t prevent him from committing many sins. But eventually it made her a saint and him a saint too.

A soul that relies on God is a peaceful soul. Peace communicates itself to others and attracts them. That is the only secret of Jerusalem. The rest is an open matter. Why cannot souls be peaceful, even in a suburban house? Are the young to have all the tolerance and the old to do all the raving? Let us at least keep our human dignity.

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Nowadays many of the young ones believe in demons, not in God. They sit in the ruins of the Victorian civilisation – since no new civilisation, in any true sense, has sprung up to replace it – and turn up the music loud to shut out the demons.

A training-college girl attends a séance. When she returns to her room, a voice keeps talking to her from the corner. It identifies itself with an Arabic name. She is terrified. I give her a Palm Sunday palm. I don’t know if it is any help.

A hard-headed capable Arts School student tells me that things are all right with her, except for the demons that trouble her at night. I give her a crucifix and tell her to hold it and say – ‘O my Jesus, help me to accept my own faults and the faults of others.’ The demons stop troubling her.

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There are other occasions. No doubt it is nearly all fantasy. But the fear is strong, and fear can be endemic. I discourage séances among nga mokai and encourage meditation, works of mercy, and Mass-going.

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Separation from family is the hardest weight to carry. People say to me, ‘Why do you leave your wife and family to look after deadbeats?’

My daughter is with me. She would not be with me if I were sitting in front of the TV set with a box of cigars, waiting for the undertaker to arrive.

My son was with me for three months. He left for Auckland. After three days he was arrested. Now, after three months in jail, at eighteen he lies on his back in a house in Auckland, with a twelve months suspended sentence. I cannot help him in the towns. But I can help him at Jerusalem, since he loves Jerusalem. His thinking is almost entirely Maori.

I stay with my wife regularly when I am in Wellington. She is Maori. It is possible I can make a mat for her to stand on here at Jerusalem. In Taranaki, where she comes from, the last of the land has been sold. There is no mat to go back to. Only the marae and the graveyard are left. The Taranaki tribes fought on the Government side in the Land Wars. After the Wars, their land too was confiscated. They did not send their children to the Government schools for two generations.

The accusation of being an unloving father and husband is always difficult to answer. Yet men who are conscripted in war are not held to be unloving to their relatives. Can God not conscript a man? Is the only war in the world the one fought with guns and bombs? Who is going to win the peace?

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It is not wise for a man to imagine himself an oracle. I don’t expect to see things sorted out in this world. If God boots me on the backside and shifts me fifty yards to do things that seem unusual even to myself – like going barefooted, or praying in bus shelters, or putting my arms round people when I meet them – that is no doubt his business. I may well be porangi, clinically insane. If so, it seems to me I am an honest madman.

In my view, since all things depend on God, the most valuable thing I do may well be to say the fifteen decades of the Rosary daily, and go to Mass when I can. A tent without a tentpole is no shelter at all. . . .

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Lucky is the jewel in the ring of the community, the great diamond. He can chop wood, light fires, cook a good meal. He has some skill in carpentry. He page 278 is gentle and wise. He never loses his temper. Now he is going to work for six months for Poutini, and give half his pay to the upkeep of us feebler ones, the ones who can only read and write and talk. Why? Because he loves us.

In the world at large, Lucky has been severely rubbished because he cannot read or write. This moral giant is regarded as a dwarf. At Jerusalem he finds his proper place, at the apex of the pyramid, one of the givers.

Kat is another jewel. In town she would die at twenty-five, with a hole in her head made with the amphetamine pills. The brain turns to yellow cheese with bubbles inside it the size of a fifty cent piece. If she told the doctors that her uncle’s ghost had visited her, they would call it an hallucination. I would call it an aspect of matewa, the night life of the soul.

Here she might live to be an old woman and bear children. After the first fortnight, when she could not sleep at night, but kept laughing her high shrill laugh, she has become quiet, happy, stable, a source of love and peace and wild robust humour. When I come into the room, sometimes she seizes me by the waist and whirls me round and round, with my rosary beads flying out like a flail. Kat is herself again.

Frank is another jewel. In the world at large he is a tenth-rate citizen, because his temperament is bi-sexual. He said to me when he came here, ‘Hemi, I am tired of alienation.’ On the whole he is a chaste man. The man and woman mingled in his nature give him great powers of perception and intuitive love. He is intensely loyal. When I go away from Jerusalem, I can leave him standing in my shoes.

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Friends, what do I know. I know nothing except that God exists – that God became us – that we share both his death and his life. In front of the altar, or in front of you, who are his living tabernacles, I confess my ignorance. I live my life like a blind man who feels his way around a room by holding on to the backs of chairs. A Cistercian monk said to me, ‘Faith is not walking in the light, Jim. It is walking in the dark.’

Yes; but perhaps I am the blindest man in the world. When I fasted for twenty-seven days, I was looking for light – but I found myself standing peacefully in front of God like a blind child. Perhaps He will not open my eyes till after my death – perhaps He will not open them at all. This is his business. Pray for me. I am a blind donkey who has to carry Him on my back. When the journey is over, my hide may be sold to make shoes. Shoes are useful.

God exists – God is good – by the Incarnation, God is us. That is all I know. Forgive me then for babbling in front of you.

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My son Hoani wrote to me from jail – ‘The old canoes had good tohungas / Yours will pass the whirlpool too.’

The community is the canoe, and the whirlpool at present one of stupid controversy. Am I the tohunga, the lay priest who recites the prayers in the bow of the canoe? I suppose I am.

Why does God pour down blessings so continually on the community? Why does the rough water not sink the canoe? Why does it not hit a boulder and sink? Not because of skill or virtue. We have carpenters now, and people who work. God sent them. I think Te Atua covers us with his wings because we share our goods, because we try to love one another, because we speak the truth, because we do not lick the boss’s rectum, because we try to learn from the Maori side of the fence – but, above all, because we are poor. He said – ‘Blessed are nga raukore, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Nga pohara – the poor.
Nga mokai – the fatherless.
Nga raukore – those who are like trees that have had their leaves and
branches stripped away.

Three kinds of poverty – and all are present in this community. Te Atua protects us because we put persons before property, and He is a Person. He protects us for the same reasons He protects the birds of the air – because He loves us, and we have no other protection.

The Kingdom of Heaven is already here – in suffering, ignorance, poverty and love. I see it when the souls rise to the surface of the faces of nga mokai. It is his Face I see in each of them.

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