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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Jerusalem Community Filled a Social Need

Jerusalem Community Filled a Social Need

(Report by George Sweet)

Having been to the Jerusalem Community, eaten and slept with the residents, and talked and listened to James K. Baxter, I was very disappointed to read the news that the community had been closed.

Jerusalem met a real need in our society, and not just for the handful of folk who lived there. It was a dirty, muddy, untidy place, physically a bit of a shambles. The day I arrived water had been laid on for the first time; power had not been on long, and two electric stoves strained the amps to cook for the twenty-nine of us present for dinner.

I went in through Raetihi. Talking to the local citizenry made it very clear that they were antagonistic to the ‘hippies’ who lived up the river; understandably antagonistic.

Take a small country town of good honest hard-working Kiwis and let it be suddenly plagued with dirty, long-haired, scruffy, bearded dropouts and up will go the anxiety level. It did. They did not like having these people walking their streets and peering in their shop-windows. As the anxiety rose it found expression in antagonism and anger. I walked down the main street at 3.30 p.m. in my tramping gear with a big pack on my back. Nervously giggling schoolboys called out as I passed, ‘Hey! Mister! You a hippie?’

It was the same in Wanganui. The pin-pricking about inadequate toilet facilities and disease at the commune when the condition of the Wanganui River for its last mile is so bad that swimming is not allowed was so hypocritical that it could only be understood as the anxious and angry reaction to nonconformity. In fact it became a stock joke that it was no longer any problem getting a lift to such an out of the way place because there were about twenty inspectors going up and down each day. Weird and wonderful tales of sexual orgies and ‘pot trips’ were quite common from people I spoke with anywhere from Raetihi to Wanganui. People couldn’t paint the place black enough. We were the good clean moral Kiwis; and they the dirty, immoral nonconformists.

If we can believe the whole place is anti-British and unchristian then we page 401 can believe it has to be closed down. I’ve been to the commune and I’d wager there is more immorality any day in your street than in the commune in a month. A couple of the lads related with glee how motorists giving them lifts would almost visibly lick their lips lustily when the lads mentioned that they came from the commune. They felt almost duty bound to make up a couple of lascivious yarns to stimulate the good clean chap.

Opponents of Hemi (he prefers the Maori) Baxter and his followers are obviously threatened by what this trend has to say about our society, and as has happened over the centuries, they seek to blacken it so they won’t have to face what it is saying about us and to us.

I found it a very healthy place to be. Yes, I must define ‘healthy’. Physically it certainly was not much; dirty, and in places filthy. The dog chewed a bone on the old sofa; stacks of unwashed dishes (you only eat if someone raises the energy to wash dishes and someone else prepares food); scruffy furniture; bunks crammed into bedrooms. I slept in ‘Bug Inn’ where there were dirty flea-inhabited mattresses on the floor for visitors, and heaps of old clothes – socks, bras, shirts, jerseys, all pushed into heaps in the corners of the room. Tins and cartons almost empty of food. I scratched for a week after I left. This is what the good old Kiwi sees and with middle-class logic decides that if it is dirty and scruffy then of course it cannot be any good. Well, he couldn’t be more wrong. The Jerusalem Commune was good.

Throughout my brief time there I couldn’t help comparing it with the prisons and borstals I’d worked in for seven years. The immaculate borstal, scrubbed (on hands and knees) from stem to stern each morning; clothes kept spotless; dining room and kitchen checked for cleanliness. But humanity and warmth? Yes, I can remember the odd staff member who managed to convey his humanity in spite of everything.

In the untidy, unclean shambles that was Jerusalem there was a warmth and caring that ran deep and was very therapeutic. People could and did get well there. Take the young fellow who broke out of the security psychiatric hospital at Lake Alice. He got to Hemi at Jerusalem and when tracked down surprised officials by his calmness and the beginnings of warmth and responsiveness to people again. He remained there in Hemi’s care and when I saw him last he was a happy, pleasant and useful member of the community.

The physically clean but emotionally stunted institutions which we provide in our society can never hope to see the response possible in a place like Jerusalem because there is a lack of warmth that all the cleanliness, discipline and efficiency in the world can never overcome – no matter how much goodwill there is among staff.

This was confirmed for me by Hemi when he commented on how much he disliked the untidiness and lack of structure and had to fight within himself constantly so that he would not step in and take the critical decision away from another. So he waited one morning till 10.30 a.m. before porridge page 402 turned up, and later someone else got going with a broom, others did a bit of carpentry and trench digging while Hemi quietly set off to gather some large stepping stones and invited folk to join him if they wished. Some did. When members moved of their own accord they grew – because it was their own decision. That impressed me. People grew because they wanted to grow – not by command or decision by experts but by personal choice.

Because there was no authority there was a risk of failure (and it happened time and again just as a baby crashes time and again as it learns to walk), but most important there was also a real chance for growth. It reinforced something I had learned many years before and my dealings with emotionally deprived people had proved over and over again – warmth and support succeeds where even unlimited resources of equipment, staff, and plant will fail.

People felt that they mattered at Jerusalem, there was a sense of belonging and consideration. The cold wet night I arrived I walked in the door and was warmly embraced by all who were about, given coffee and a chair and made to feel at home while the evening sing-a-long went on. It was good. Nobody pried. Nobody pushed. Several spoke and offered to share what little they had of food, smokes and comfort. Later a plate of good plain food was offered me and a delightful lass, recognising my tiredness from a hard day’s tramping, with my heavy pack, showed me to ‘Bug Inn’ and a place to rest. It was good to be with her, to chat and to share biscuits from my pack, and coffee brewed on my little white spirits stove.

She had been with the community for a long time and with pride showed me over her little room with its wall hangings, posters and bits and pieces that made it quite homely. I worry about her now that her ‘home and family’ have been taken from her. Where will she go? Here at Jerusalem she had found meaning and was a key member helping newcomers to find out the meaning of life for themselves.

It was good the next morning to sit in Big House and listen to Hemi and others sharing ideas and talking of hope and love, of discipline and authority, saying that ‘education’ meant ‘to draw out’ and not ‘to stuff in’. And talk of drugs and police, poverty and purpose. The things they were saying could have been heard any night among groups of concerned young adults anywhere. They were serious young people trying to care about themselves, each other and their world.

If we are to judge the Jerusalem Community, or any future community established by J.K. Baxter (or anyone else) by superficial appearances then it will always stand condemned. Our bourgeois standards of measurement that hold cleanliness as next to godliness, must find it wanting. But Jesus said that a clean heart was the qualification for godliness.

A deep look will show that healing is going on at a level we seldom recognise, and I venture to suggest, seldom will see in our money-centred page 403 society. They talked of ‘aroha’ – communal love. They were trying to make it real at their New Jerusalem in New Zealand’s green and pleasant land. So I find it strange that it was the Maoris, who know about aroha, who were the ones who finally asked them to leave – at least so we are told. Strange that the Maoris were more concerned with appearances than aroha. One can only reflect that the gods of the pakeha must have travelled up the Wanganui River.

I would add a postscript to the trip. The Government could well subsidise J.K. Baxter. I am deadly serious. Or at least his Church should see the point as they too know about aroha. But whoever helped would have to understand that it would be with no strings attached. Baxter was providing a caring, healing atmosphere of great depth and quality that is utterly beyond controlled institutions, and at a cost that is infinitesimal. We need Hemi Baxter and his like in our society. Our technological and industrial way of life is driving us at an ever-increasing rate to a terrible aloneness and to its accompanying social problems.

The message of communal love needs to be heeded, not hounded.

1971 (669)