Extracts from ‘Jerusalem Journal’

2

. . . The relation of the host to the guest – of the tangata whenua, or home tribe, to the manuhiri, the stranger – is the sacred door between the Jerusalem community and the world outside. I say within the community – ‘The guest is a sacred person. Old, young, mad, sane, drunk, sober, male, female, Maori, pakeha – whoever comes here must be greeted warmly, and given kai to eat and coffee to drink, and a place to lie down, if they need it. Otherwise we exclude God from the house. The stranger is his representative.’

I think the view is traditional. Consider the balls-up the moralists have made of the old story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In my Church, a boy looks at his catechism, and sees – ‘Sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. The sin of Sodom . . .’. He makes some enquiries and gets his knuckles rapped. Eventually he works it out that God has a special hatred for homosexuals. Either he holds on to this belief, or else he abandons it later on, when he throws his religious training overboard to become a relatively sane agnostic humanist. He has been too well brainwashed to dream of looking for a genuine theist and hominist meaning in the story. Yet, if he did, he would find it all right.

Three angels, looking like handsome young men, visit the patriarch Lot in Sodom. The patriarch extends to them the fullest degree of manuhiritanga, because they are strangers and unprotected, and therefore come with God’s protection.

Some of the townsfolk surround the house. They insult the guests very badly. The fact that the manner of insult includes homosexual propositions is not the main issue at all. They insult the guests. And this is the fault that cries out to Heaven for vengeance. It is an offence against hospitality. The stranger, because unprotected, was held to be under God’s protection, and God, as it were, guaranteed to avenge any injury done to him.

The same is true of the next fault listed in the catechism – defrauding the labourer of his hire. In Biblical times there were no trade unions. The labourer who was defrauded by his boss had no redress except appeal to God. And God, as it were, made a promise to answer the appeal.

No doubt a city was swallowed by an earthquake, and afterwards page 283 the people made a midrash, a theological fable to get at the meaning of the event. But the meaning had little to do with a morality of body areas. In a crash pad, the host may be camp. That is not a problem. As long as there are mattresses on the floor, God will enter along with the guest.

8

Perhaps the whole point of the community is freedom. People become very young adults at twelve or thirteen or fourteen. And in the majority culture they have no tribe of which they can become members. They are stuck in a gap, socially neither children nor adults, till an unspecified age. We create the phenomenon of adolescence.

The law decides for me the painful issue of acceptance or rejection. The police won’t shift them from Jerusalem if they’re seventeen or over, unless they’re in some obvious kind of trouble. But under seventeen they are minors and everybody can take a turn at telling them what to do.

If minors come to us, without their relatives’ permission, I say to them – ‘Bugger off! I can’t fight your battles for you, not even if you’re being hunted down with steel whips. Come back, if you like, when you’re seventeen.’

It doesn’t make me happy.

*

Teresa’s parents have come and taken her away. Teresa was a quiet little dark girl of sixteen. She had her parents’ permission to visit Jerusalem. But they changed their minds. The police had rung them up and advised them to collect her. . . .

Teresa’s parents were not to know that the police practise clairvoyance. They arrived at Jerusalem. Teresa was away walking. They declined an invitation to attend the group meeting I called to discuss Teresa’s problems.

Later on, Teresa came back, and she and her parents had a thundering row. I had decided to stay well out of it. But Teresa came weeping up the track to the house where I was. I put my arms round her, and explained with some gentleness precisely why she had to go. I said – ‘Your mother feels I’m corrupting the whole world.’

Teresa’s mother appeared in the room like a magical apparition. I had not seen or heard her enter. ‘Here I am,’ she said.

‘I’m glad you’ve found your daughter.’

The bad play ground its way into another act. Teresa and her mother began a property dispute on the verandah. The girl had her possessions in a big leather hold-all bag. Apparently it was not the one she had brought with her. There was also some uncertainty about the ownership of a woollen garment.

At Jerusalem the members commonly share their goods. As a result we page 284 almost never quarrel. I felt depressed, as I heard the dispute continue, and Teresa began to speak with a snarling whine I had not heard before –

‘It belongs to Veronica, Mum!’

‘Where’s the one I gave you, then?’

‘I don’t know. We swap things here.’

‘But the other one was mine. I gave it to you . . .’.

Teresa’s father sat on the edge of the verandah with his head in his hands. He had shaken hands with me when we first met.

They moved away, round the bend of the path, behind the trees. There was a sudden new loud lamentation and outcry. I thought – ‘Hell, Teresa’s blown her lid!’ But it was not Teresa. Teresa’s mother stood on the path, calling down curses from Heaven on me and the other members of the community. She expressed the conviction that her problems would not be solved until she had cut our throats.

This episode also depressed me. Yet I did know what was driving Teresa’s mother up the wall. She was genuinely terrified that Teresa might have lost her virginity. The fear was misdirected. Teresa had already lost her virginity some time before, while still under her parents’ roof. At Jerusalem she had shown no desire to acquire a new boyfriend. The love of the group seemed sufficient.

*

9

Dark brown leaves rattle on the trees around the wharepuni. When they fall on the paths they make a necessary carpet to cover the mud. They save us from slipped discs and broken necks.

Bradley came yesterday with a wife, a son, a daughter, and a vanload of LSD. The new picture began to take shape when Moana freaked out in the cottage. She was knocking her head on the walls, and weeping as if in total despair. ‘Hemi! Hemi! I can’t ever be right again. I’m only three inches high! I’ve died! I’ve died!’

The tears kept pouring down her face. For several hours I kept my arms round her, sitting on the floor. I felt I could have been better occupied. Drug-induced despair is not something I groove on. There is enough real despair in the world already. But I did feel sorry for Moana.

Next morning Moana was quite chirpy. But when I came down the path by the convent, Hepa was freaking out in the long grass. He kept thumping his head in the ground, and shouting – ‘Hemi! Why didn’t you tell me this world existed? Hemi, you old cunt!’ Hepa was not happy. And several of the local Maori people were standing near him, drinking in this new kind of floor show.

Bradley was sitting by Hepa’s head. He kept repeating in an irritable voice – ‘You’re just a bad actor, man! Come out of it! You’re just a bad actor!’

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I greeted Bradley warmly. He is a sincere man. The LSD experience is for him the modern miracle, the great transcendental experience. He doesn’t sell it. He gives it away. The evangelist is very strong in him. ‘Brother,’ I said, ‘I recognise your principles. I’m inclined to agree with you that people should be free to turn on if they like. And the drug laws are worse than useless. But I’ve got one tiny problem of my own. If you give away LSD in town, that’s all right. When the fuzz arrive the people just shift on to another pad. But here it’s a little different. It’s taken a year and nine months to get this land and these houses.’

‘You’re trying to limit the freedom of the community.’

‘Not exactly. A community that doesn’t exist can hardly have freedom. When people go down to Wanganui, and open their mouths a yard wide, and tell everybody what a fantastic trip they’ve just had at Jerusalem – then the fuzz will be up here with their meat wagon, and this place will be closed down. Or else the local Maori people will beat them to the jump. They don’t want any drugs round here.’

‘How can they have a transcendental experience without LSD?’

‘Saint Francis walked barefoot on the stones. Sakyamuni held a flower in his hand for half an hour. They had transcendental experiences without drugs.’

‘You seem to be afraid of something.’

‘Not really. I do appreciate your ideals. But I don’t like to see Hepa freaking out. He’s never touched LSD before. It’s like seeing a girl on the block who has never heard of the facts of life. I know you’ve got a big job to do. But just to solve my own little problem, if I see one more person freak out on drugs here, I’ll ring the fuzz in Wanganui, and when they arrive, I’ll point you out as the distributor. A broad man like you shouldn’t mind a spell in Wanganui Gaol. I’ve visited there often enough, and they’re good company.’

Bradley slowly gathered his family for the road. I felt a trifle guilty. It is bad ethics among nga mokai to threaten anyone with the fuzz. And it is not my conscious ambition to be a dictator.

‘Look,’ I said to the others, ‘you’ve heard what I said to Bradley. If you don’t agree with it, hold a group meeting. And if you decide by a majority that you want us to be a drug-using and drug-distributing community – O.K., I’ll go along with you, and I’ll stay with you the two weeks or three weeks before the boat sinks, when the fuzz close us down or the Maoris turf us out. Then we’ll each go our separate ways.’

They didn’t hold a group meeting.

12

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 page 286 out the demons.

When I was sleeping in a house in Auckland, a deputation from the house next door came to my bed. ‘Hemi, somebody is putting black magic on us. They’re crucifying a cat under Grafton Bridge.’

I went through to the other house. The young ones were crouching in a ring, their eyes dilated, either by fear or by amphetamines. The moon was sailing high in a cloudless city night. It is hard to dissipate the fear of black magic when the moon is shining.

‘How do you know that they’re putting black magic on you?’

‘Aussie Jack is doing it. He’s evil, man!’ Aussie Jack had a squint. He was a hard gear user, and a gentle enough person. But his squint of course would prove he belonged to the Devil.

‘I had a dream,’ a girl said. ‘They were standing in a circle. They were wearing the skins of animals. Aussie Jack was the leader. And his eyes were like blue fire. Man, they went right through you.’

‘Yes, there’s bad vibes here tonight,’ said another one.

I gave each of them one of the small crucifixes I kept in my pocket, and held one in my own hand. ‘Repeat the Apostles’ Creed after me. If they’re bad spirits, they’ll go away. If they’re good ones, they’ll stay.’

We repeated the Apostles’ Creed. But they were still not satisfied. So I took my shirt off and undid my belt and knelt on the floor. ‘All right, if there is a makutu, I take it on myself. It won’t trouble you now.’

I hit myself about twenty times on the bare back with the buckle of my belt. That night they went to sleep. But I lay awake, with cold prickling sensations travelling over my body.

No doubt such happenings are nearly all in the imagination. But fear is strong, and fear can become an epidemic. I discourage séances among nga mokai. I encourage meditation, works of mercy and Mass-going.

15

The Divine life among us, even though it may emerge like water from a blocked and muddy spring – or, it could be, precisely because of these human difficulties – has either to express itself in communal love or sink back into nothingness. And demonism, in its serious unconscious parody of the movement of the Spirit, has in contrary fashion either to find an enemy or perish of self-strangulation.

To my mind, demonism must always involve hatred, and what is most readily discernible in this hatred is that it springs from fear. Fear of the loss of an imagined security. Security in possessions, material or mental or spiritual; security in self, security in the favour of a God with whom one can strike no honest objective bargain – ‘I’ll keep the road rules, and You won’t hit me with an axe.’

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Christ is my peace, my terror, my joy, my sorrow, my life, my death, but not my security. He is the dark winter sea whitened by whirlwinds. ‘Ko Ihu taku aroha; Ko Ihu taku mate’ – that I understand, the wounds of the soul opening towards his wounds, in the night of an accepted death, but not this matter of spiritual security. Are lovers ‘security’ to one another? I think not. There is no terror like the terror of love, resisted for the sake of love. And this can be as well learnt in the bedroom as in front of the altar. Let us love God as we love the other ones who, like Him, force us to cast off cowardice.

21

Jerusalem is ordinary enough. But people have a built-in desire to see it as demonic and extraordinary. I have written a ballad, one of my Molotov cocktails, to illustrate the point. In the ballad, a Kiwi householder is talking to a friend in the pub:

It is well known, brother, that the valleys of Jerusalem
Grow acre upon acre of the strongest kind of pot,
And the hippies run there naked with nobody to control them
Except that madman Baxter – the bugger should be shot!

I had a decent daughter, she could bake a spongecake lightly,
And she’d won First Prize at English – but she stayed there for a bit,
And the next time that I saw her, she was walking in her nightie
Down the streets of Wanganui with an ugly long-haired shit.

Well, I went up and I grabbed her, and I said, ‘Thank God I’ve found you!
You must come home to your mother and put on a proper dress,
She can’t sleep at night for worry that the hippies may have drowned you,
And there’s no future for you in a life of idleness.’

And she said then, ‘Dearest father, I don’t want to hurt your feelings,
But Gregg and I are happy with the life we’re living now –
Why don’t you bring your spade up, or lend a hand at eeling?
Jerusalem is lovely, and we never have a row.’

Well, I know that prick had fucked her, but I couldn’t bash his head in
With the people standing round us – but I’ll tell you, brother, what,
Jerusalem’s a shit-tank that I wouldn’t be seen dead in,
But to smash the hippies’ drug-ring we’ll need all the brains we’ve got.

Let you and me together go pig-hunting up the river
And ask that bugger Baxter to go walking on the grass –
page 288 For the sake of my poor daughter, I’ll do five years for manslaughter,
And I think he’ll look quite pretty with a shotgun up his arse! (Uncollected)

As Jerusalem haunts their dreams, as a sign of the activity of Satan, so the faces of the local paranoiacs haunt mine. . . .

*

I go to sleep at ten o’clock in my upper bunk at the wharepuni. Some time in the early morning I wake again. There are loud voices. An impromptu play is being acted out in the next room, the one where they play guitars or sit and talk, or drink beer on the rare occasions when somebody brings some.

A female voice is saying, ‘No, no!’ There is giggling, shouting and thumping. I lie awake for an hour. Somebody runs out the door, slams it so strongly that the whole house shakes, and then stumps back again. The female noises resemble those made by a hen squawking and trailing her wings in front of a group of roosters. I have never heard this drama before among nga mokai. Their women don’t do this. It comes straight from the world of the suburbs and the night-long grog party and the bikey’s block.

My paranoia begins to take over. I have images of a gang rape. I remember a story I heard a day or two ago about a girl who agreed to go on the bikey’s block for kicks. After five boys had been through her, she departed and rang up the police. The boys all received long sentences. Their girlfriends decided to hold a kangaroo court of their own. They took her out to the beach, and left her half-conscious, beaten-up and naked in the sandhills.

The drama is not new. It lies directly under the threshold of the normal New Zealand mind. And when it is acted out, it proves infallibly to the police and the suburbanites that Calvin was right, and that their own tense order is the only possible safety.

To me it shows something different. It indicates that man can easily deform himself, especially in a vacuum of boredom, and that the civilised and the yahoos are two sides of one bad coin. I have seen at times the beginning of a working alternative.

I decide to get up. I go to the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee. I sit on a chair, sharing it with a sleeping cat who does not like the winter. The cat gets down. And the little noisy bird comes through to visit her ambiguous father figure. I put my arm round her. She begins to quieten down. She is thin and tousle-haired, with long bare toes and a dress to her ankles and several silver wrist-bangles and a nose-ring set in the pierced gristle of her septum.

‘How old are you, Robin?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Do your people know you’re here?’

‘Yes. My father and my mother let me come up.’

page 289

I relax. It is unlikely that we will have a police visit or a father with a shotgun or a mother screaming on the doorstep.

Robin opens the oven door. There is bread baking inside. It has a black burned crust. ‘The bread’s no good.’

‘It’ll be all right. They’ll eat it.’

Later she brings me sweet brown bread on a plate, and a cigarette she has scrounged. The drama has subsided entirely. Perhaps it was unnecessary for me to get out of bed.

I put my arm round her again. ‘You’re a good girl, Robin.’

‘Yes, of course I am.’

Now they sit together amicably, munching bread. Perhaps the whole crisis was invented by my paranoia. It is often like that.

*

Norm is washing up a great pile of dishes. ‘The dishwashers will get in the Pearly Gates first,’ I say. ‘But I’ll have to wait outside.’

‘Perhaps the dishwashers will have to go on washing dishes in Heaven.’

*

In the morning it is raining. Red Steve and Don put on their coats, and tell me – ‘We’re going up to Poutini’s. For a bit of scrubcutting.’

Red Steve did not go to Sydney. That was a false rumour on the grapevine. Instead he is back with us, working for us, and in ill repute with his probation office.

My heart warms towards the workers. Don is not physically vigorous. And Steve is still as skinny as a bit of bamboo. But no doubt they will cut scrub till their hands bleed, and give us a portion of their earnings. Don wants some money to buy a birthday present for his father. Their courage makes me want to weep, these ones who are labelled as social garbage by the doctors and the police. Better, though, to go on quietly, trying to be of some use. I am lucky to be among them.

22

There was a period when I lay awake for six nights, like a potato roasting on hot coals. I am not a man who sees visions, nor do I have a telephone line connected to the throne of God. But for that period Te Atua was with me in a new mode, like a hawk tearing at the guts of a dead opossum. And certain images impressed themselves on my mind.

It was necessary for me to go to Hiruharama. A wholly unfamiliar notion. So unfamiliar that I took it to be either nonsense or a thing I was meant to do.

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The little seed, te purapura iti: I had to become poor, to be a seed in the ground from which a tree could grow. One does not wrap a seed in cellophane before planting it. Poverty is essential to make oneself wholly available to one’s neighbours and to Te Wairua Tapu.

The old kumara, the one who has to rot so that the new ones can grow from him: this image I find in measure terrifying, because it is painful to foresee one’s own disintegration. But when I become useless, Te Atua will find means to remove me. Nga Mokai will remain in an integrated tribal state, able to look after themselves.

Te hoiho o Karaiti: the donkey who carried Him into Jerusalem. He had long ears and a loud bray. He did not know the meaning of his journey, but the Rider knew well enough. No doubt he thought the leaves and branches were scattered for him to eat. All he needed was a back strong enough to carry the weight.

The dead body, the one that stinks in the ground. This is the man who retains his possessions, who expresses his opinions as if they were worth hearing, who orates about art and society, who gets money to keep the community pot boiling. The students and the businessmen’s wives think a lot of him. They read his verse and ask him what it means. This poor man, Hemi, is the live one, and the other is the dead one. It is unpleasant to have a corpse for a twin. But it seems that his presence is necessary.

The blank card in the pack, the one whom children call the ghost. He can belong to any suit, but essentially he belongs to none. A pakeha is a ghost in the pa, unless he has a Maori friend, an elder brother, to throw his coat over him and give him warmth and life. Hana Jackson said to me – ‘Pakeha and kehua are similar words. The pakeha is a ghost in the pa.’

Te teina, the younger brother. The pakeha is always the younger brother, because of his poverty in matters involving suffering, group love and the theology of immanence. But the younger brother is arrogant, and tries to rule the roost. This is imprudent of him.

‘Ko te maori te tuakana; Ko te pakeha te teina’ – the younger brother has his own kind of love to contribute to the relationship, but it cannot be suitably expressed unless he is willing to bow the head. The solution to bi-cultural problems is buried somewhere at the heart of this proverb. Myself, I have looked for a tuakana to stand beside me. The Maori prophet told me – ‘He is already with you. He is in the room with us.’

‘He can’t be Peter.’ (Peter was the pakeha boy who had accompanied me.) ‘He is like a son to me, but he is not Maori. It must be yourself then.’

‘No.’ And then he intimated to me that the Tuakana was Te Ariki in his Maori aspect. I understood that; yet it left me feeling bereaved. I had wanted to be able to share kai with my tuakana, and lean on him and speak with him. Te Ariki’s strongest presence is often shown by his absence.

I saw the image of the Lord on his Cross. He had two faces. The pakeha page 291 face looked like that of a dead man, the eyes closed, the face covered with a kind of rigid glaze engendered by complacency and the desire for money and prestige. The face was not dead, but its coma resembled death.

The Maori face was hideously smashed and bleeding. But the eyes were wide open, and the soul looked out of the eyes. I understood that it was not my personal business to try to waken the pakeha face, but to wash the Maori face, if not with water, then with tears of reparation. I understood that Te Ariki did not desire Te Morehu to be led like bullocks into the slaughterhouse of souls, our contemporary possession-centred culture. I had to make an alternative, a mat for them to stand on, if they so wished. But my role in this matter would be passive, not active. A pot does not create the water it carries. Yet even a rusty leaky pot can be used to carry water.

Well, it seems to work out in its own way. These images and ideas have all proved valid at the testing point. The chief theological point is perhaps that Te Morehu have a right to an image, in liturgy, in art, in language, of that Maori Christ whom they are, just as we have a right to our pakeha image of Him. Christ is multi-cultural in his mystical body. They have never been given such an image, so te hahi Maori has been torn apart in the womb, as if by forceps.

Why then are so many of nga mokai in fact pakeha. It may be that many of the young are capable of acquiring a Maori heart. They too dread the slaughterhouse in which they see their relatives expiring.

To accommodate the Maori Christ, our theology would have to change its emphasis, in matter of property morality, in matters involving the relation between the sexes, and in matters of work morality and physical style. I doubt if this will happen.

I may of course be porangi. If so, then I am at least an honest madman. If I am not porangi, it is possible that Te Atua has given me a charism. That is why I doubt if I will ever get to Heaven. To mishandle one’s private potato patch is one thing. To mishandle a farm of many paddocks is a graver matter.

I have gone without food for a month. I have walked barefoot forty miles over stones. I have slept wherever there was a place to sleep, in strangers’ houses, under flea-infested blankets, on the wet grass beside the road. I have often stayed awake while nga mokai got rid of their inevitable tensions by card-playing and shouting.

I have encountered many people who thought they hated me. I have accepted with patience their view of my character. It may indeed have been correct. I have lain in front of the altar in many churches, with my arms spread out, asking Te Atua to give me grief and give nga mokai joy. My feet often burn like fire with the cold. When I hit my back with the buckle of my belt, it makes me grit my teeth.

All this is pride and nonsense, unless I let Te Atua love them through me. And if the hair of the head of the soul of one of nga mokai is harmed by me, I desire to burn in Hell for ever.

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I do not desire the last stage of my journey. When the old kumara is thrown over the fence, with a ruff of mildew round his neck, what will be there to keep him company? I think only his sins. So be it.

*

Community life turns many into misanthropes. They come to Jerusalem with the hopeful illusion that here at least there will be harmony and love. They find themselves confronted, without insulation, by themselves and their fellows, awkward, weak, discordant, chaotic, pain-causing. If one can bear that truth, it is possible, I think, to begin to love. But it demands a patience God has to provide us with. Without God I would be a misanthrope.

The example of Te Ariki is cheering. He did not despair of his friends. He thought them worth dying for. Since Te Ariki is God Himself, none of us need ever feel that God despairs of human beings.

I think my friends worth dying for. It is myself I might despair of, since I know my own impenetrable chaos and darkness and weakness. But in that matter I have to accept the verdict of Te Ariki, who thought otherwise, and continue on whatever road He opens for me, or stand still if He shows me no road.

*

It is not wise for a man to imagine himself an oracle. The bamboo gets broken by the wind. The grass grows closer to the earth. It can bend and then stand up again when the wind has passed over it.

I don’t expect to see things sorted out in this world. If Te Atua boots me on the backside and shifts me fifty yards to do things that seem unusual to myself – like going barefooted, or praying in bus shelters, or putting my arms round strangers when I meet them, or walking through Auckland with a woman’s dress on in the company of camp friends – well, that is no doubt his business. If He makes me a fool He must look after the fool He has made.

Since all things depend on Te Atua’s protection, the most valuable thing I do may well be to say the fifteen decades of the Rosary daily, recite the Canticle of the Sun, and go to Mass when I can. A tent without a tentpole is no shelter at all. . . .

Sister Boniface, the Mother Superior of the Order to which the local Sisters belong, writes in reply to a discursive but necessary letter I had written to her. . . . [She] is polite but explicit about the things that have disturbed her. . . . She is referring to the unproved but likely fact that some of nga mokai sleep together. Inevitably she takes the view that any sexual act or relationship outside of public marriage is a serious breach of the Sixth Commandment. . . .

Many Catholics are aware that something is wrong with the way their page 293 priests have been interpreting the meaning of the Sixth Commandment. The area is like a sludgy racetrack torn to pieces by many slow horses and bad jockeys. The simile is apt, because in my view of it, Eros is the horse and Agape the rider. It is a poor solution to shoot the horse and travel on foot.

Sister Boniface is an honest woman. I trust I am equally honest. We happen to differ on certain points of moral theology. But the difference is like the difference between the oak and the totara. They cannot be grafted together. And their leaves and fruit are different also. Because of the difference, there are some priests I cannot confess to because their counsel would be couched in terms I could not follow. Because of the difference, there are times when I go to Holy Communion with a doubtful mind. Because of the difference, the Sisters cannot embrace nga mokai. They have to see them as souls lying at least half on the rubbish heap, even when Te Ariki is looking out of their eyes. Because of the difference, a boulder rests on my heart whenever I go to Mass. Because of the difference, the pa and the Church stand on either side of a great crevasse.

I think Sister Boniface is certain she is in the right. She knows what is sin and what is not sin. I am less certain of my own orthodoxy. But I am certain enough to have no other choice than to follow the road I am walking on. On that road, the same act may be sinful in one case, not sinful in another case, according to motivation. It is a road strewn with terrors, though lit from time to time by interior miracles and the shining of the souls that rise to the surface of the faces of friends. I am gambling on the assumption that all people are basically good, at that point where the soul touches God, its Ground of Being, and is continually being turned into Christ by Him. I am gambling on the assumption that no human love, if it implies, however dimly, the Love of the Many, is separated at its root from the love which is Christ given to us to love one another with. The Judgment Day will give me my answer. Sometimes I envy Sister Boniface. God cannot reject a soul who sees God’s Law as simple and obeys it simply. . . .

25

. . . The least anxious visitors see me perhaps as a friend and a fellow-rebel against the rigidities that come from fear. But is a man sitting by a hole in a wall really a rebel. I doubt it. It is my job to believe in God and humans, whatever the failures may be – in God because He is God, and in humans because God made them and holds them in his hands.

Ah well – it does make a certain peculiar sense. But it can be damned uncomfortable. When I feel myself walking on hot coals, like the cat who burnt his foot the other day beside the wharepuni, my temptation is to say – ‘To hell with it!’ – and head off for a steady job that would be a hundred times less uncertain, less demanding. But then I remember that, as far as I know, page 294 God wants me to be here. So I have to stay put. When I am no longer needed, God will make it pretty plain.

32

‘Ka whakaiti tuku mana, ka whakanui te aroha’ – As my prestige is broken down, so the group love will increase. That is the way it should be. I am the doorstep of the house, not the house itself.

I saw the double rainbow shining over Wanganui. The outer arc, which encloses the inner one, is arohanui, the Maori love. The inner one is our pakeha love. In this country the pakeha love is shattered like a light-bulb that has been thrown on the ground. It is broken into a thousand tiny fragments.

The Maori love is like a plate that has been broken. You can still see the pattern on the broken surfaces. But it is steadily being pounded into smaller bits.

I want to see the double rainbow shine among us. It is possible that Te Ariki will let me see it before I die.

33

In the Greek story a girl was left chained to a rock, to be eaten by the dragon that came out of the sea. I think the soul of my country is in the same predicament – and in particular, the Maori soul, te wairua Maori. The dragon is the dragon of materialism.

I am a most unlikely hero. Yet I am prepared to die for that girl, even if I have no magical sword or winged sandals. Perhaps others may do the same. ‘Kia kaha, kia toa, kia maia!’

1971? (645)