Three Kinds of Christian

We are here to discuss and consider problems of world justice – or that, at least, is the main sign under which this Conference is gathered together. There are several large matters, already well known to you, which I could explore.

The first is the matter of the Vietnam War – prolonged, atrocious and dubious. It is not through lack of a firm personal position regarding that war that I choose not to make it the theme of my discourse.

In Hamilton I joined in two student marches of protest against the Vietnam War. One of the students who walked with me had had his nose broken by a policeman’s boot at a similar march in Wellington. I shook hands with the Mayor of Hamilton, and joined my voice to that of other speakers at the War Memorial. At that time I used as my tuning-fork a text from Scripture: ‘Weep and howl, you rich men, at your miseries that are coming upon you . . .’.

That is to say, I connected the rise of Communism in the East with the page 547 enormous disparity between the rich and the poor in Asia, and the further disparity between our own affluence and the poverty of the Asian nations. Thus a second matter was connected with the first – the issues of poverty with the issue of war.

My relationship with the Mayor of Hamilton did not remain undisturbed. The students had put up a poster which stated very baldly – ‘Fuck the War’. Perhaps this statement was a measure of their sense of desperation and frustration as the war continued and our Government was able smoothly to set aside the protest of a strong minority as a thing of no importance. Perhaps the statement also indicated a revolt against the standards of middle-class decorum which can muffle both personal and public anguish, and which derive, one has to admit, in part from notions of Christian modesty and courtesy.

Modesty and the naked bodies of napalm victims – courtesy and a broken nose – these are contradictory signs. I found myself agreeing with the impulse of desperation and even ostentation behind the student poster. The Mayor of Hamilton had spoken strongly in public about the need for student discipline. He had not suggested any way of equivalent verbal force by which the students might have relieved their sense of frustration, rage and concern.

Therefore I wrote a poem called – ‘Ode to the Mayor of Hamilton’. It was not addressed to Mr Minogue, the private individual – nor, I think, to the thickset person with whom I had shaken hands and exchanged looks at the War Memorial.

The poem used four-letter words tersely but certainly not pornographically. It was a simple act of solidarity with the student manner of protest. Later they published the poem as a broadsheet.

I did not want to upset Mr Minogue. I did not wish to alienate people who value decorum greatly, including many of my fellow-Christians. I had long become tired of putting my head under the chopper to support firebrand friends.

Yet I knew the student reaction was subconsciously right – the only speech to answer vast atrocities is swear-words or silence. And the very decorum that some of my neighbours value so highly can act as a cloak for the polite butcher.

The verbal bomb is better than gelignite because gelignite can kill people. That’s what I say to friends in the PYM. But the point of what I have just told you lies nearer home than that. I had learned to love the students. I had told them that fear is always the worst motive. Therefore I had to put my own head under the chopper, and develop further my reputation as one who swears in public and has always a foot on the wrong side of the fence. And I think no apologies are needed, even to Mr Minogue. That good man had the last word by forgiving me on the grounds that I probably would not give up my psychopathic tendencies.

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Now, I want you to consider the possibility that there are three kinds of Christian. The first kind is essentially a man of prudence. He pays his taxes. He goes to church. He brings up his children to dress neatly, speak politely, and avoid masturbation. He loves his wife, and treats her with respect and tenderness. The core of his religion is the family.

I am not rubbishing this man. He is my brother. But he is – I must emphasise – essentially a man of prudence. In various ways he may try to alleviate the sorrows of his neighbours. But he has a deeply noted semiconscious conviction that the status quo is mainly good, and that the moral law is best served by fitting in with the status quo.

The second kind of Christian is committed to some cause connected with issues of social justice. His concern demands that he should put himself again and again to the test. I suggest that Martin Luther King is an obvious example of this kind of Christian. He was probably a saint. He certainly became a martyr. In certain respects his home life and his social attitudes may have been identical with those of the first kind of Christian. But the love of Christ and his neighbour – Negro and white, both – took him beyond the boundaries of prudence. It took him to death, because the things he found it necessary to do conflicted very directly with the status quo.

In the life of a man like Martin Luther King there is no moral contradiction, except perhaps that he was obliged to put the needs of his people before the needs of his family. I imagine he was wholly chaste and wholly honest. What he presents to us is the searchlight of a moral example. Above all – like Gandhi – he endeavoured not to harbour rancour towards those who regarded him as an enemy.

He put his body in danger of death. No doubt he rarely had full peace of mind. But as he conformed himself to the image of his Master, Christ, the power of love and truth became increasingly evident in all his actions. I suggest that we may suitably take Martin Luther King as a type of the Christ-man – the man who inevitably retains certain faults and limits and imperfections – but in whose life Christ does shine forth, good against evil, light against darkness.

The first kind of Christian, the basically prudent man – and also the third kind of Christian, whose mode of life I will discuss in a moment – are inclined to look at the Christ-man with a touch of sadness.

‘How marvellous that such men exist,’ we say to ourselves. ‘How sad that there seems to be a gulf fixed between us and them. We lack that courage, that purity, that honesty, that clear spring of Divine and human love. We are shambling creatures, creatures of compromise.’ And the fact that Martin Luther King would emphatically class himself as one of us is no consolation. For we cannot imitate even his humility.

Thank God for Christ-men! Thank God for the heroes! Yet I speak to you as a sinner. And this may mean one of two things.

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It may mean that I am a sinner in the sense that I share with you the effects of the Fall of Man, and have also certain personal defects that I labour to eradicate – such as impatience, laziness, or periodic bouts of masturbation. Or it could mean that I am a sinner as Borgia or Te Rauparaha or the town drunk or the town adulterer are sinners – sinners in a more open and helpless sense, the sinners whom St Paul advised his flock not to sit down at the table with.

I think I am the second kind of sinner. It would be unsuitable for me to enumerate one by one the various scars and ulcers I carry inside me – except to say that it seems to me there is not one of the Commandments I have not at some time broken. If there are, I would be very glad to hear about it.

It is good to be a poor man standing before God – one of the poor of Yahweh – the anawim, as the Jews called them – nga raukore, as the Maoris call them. When I spoke of nga raukore to Whetu Tirikatene-Sullivan, she said to me quietly – ‘Yes, I have heard that word.’

It is not so good to sit down on the carpet on the church side of the altar rail – in the evening, when the children from the pa are shouting outside, and the blowflies are buzzing inside – to sit down with one’s back to the tabernacle, so as to rest the muscles in the back, and say something like this to God –

‘Holy One, I am glad You have taken away my money. I am better off without it. Everything comes from You. You can take away everything I think belongs to me – my health, my possessions, my peace of mind, my freedom to sleep at night, the company of my children, the company of my wife.

‘You can have my mental possessions. The man who worried about his literary reputation was carrying his gravestone on his back. Much better to give somebody the only copy of a poem and tell them they are free to pin it on the wall of their flat or use it as arse paper. It’s a relief to get rid of kudos.

‘But Lord, Holy One, You who hide Yourself from me, I can’t stand losing my virtues, poor and undeveloped as they may be. I think this community life is killing my soul. Don’t let the girls who have been driven mad by lack of love regard me as their sexual saviour. Don’t let the thieves bring their loot to me and ask me to share it.

‘At the very least, let me keep a semblance of reputation. Think of the honour of your Church. Don’t let my fellow Christians look at me, and say – however justified their view may be – ‘That pile of dung! That evil old man!’

‘Above all, don’t let them start to idealise me – that terrible process of unofficial canonisation. First, they’ll do it, and like doing it, though it will be very unpleasant for me. But later on will come the decanonisation process – and that will be painful for them and me.

‘I don’t really have time for that kind of thing. You know that nga raukore need to be comforted and brought to life every hour of the day – let alone the curious ones, the critics, the visitors, the ones who want to discuss theories of page 550 sociology. The ones who are coming off drugs have to shout and sing all night to relieve their tensions. Canonisation and decanonisation are both irrelevant.

‘Lord, certainly I am joined to nga raukore, to the tribe You have sent me. Only too well joined. Now their ulcers are my ulcers.

‘Do You want that, Lord? I can’t see how You would want it. Then heal me and heal them as well – or else give me my marching orders. My King, You know my radical moral incapability. Let me go away, and send them a saint instead, one of your Christ-men. They deserve better than an old crocodile with his memory banks blown out with the booze.’

The answer that comes to me from the tabernacle is unending silence. A silence deep enough to drown in.

I ask you – what happens when there is a shortage of Christ-men in the world – when sinners are driven out of their burrows by the lash of inward concern – to try to feed and clothe and comfort and embrace, and even most inadequately instruct their fellow sinners – not from a sense of competence, but because the capable men are occupied in war-making or committee work or their own necessary financial concerns, or some other matter of obvious public importance?

The Christ-men, the Martin Luther Kings of this world, are always few in number. What happens when the Borgias and Te Rauparahas and town drunks and town adulterers are seized with a spirit of concern – when the bomb of love bursts under their backsides – and they shamble out to try to heal the wounds of their fellows? God does not automatically relieve them of their defects which are perhaps in this world incurable. Yet I would dare to call them a third type of Christian, even if they do not ever call on the name of Christ.

If I am a Christian, I suppose I belong to that peculiar battalion. I think of the occasion when I was living in Auckland, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a friend’s house. My friend Trix was a Buddhist who played the drums remarkably well and shared his house with anybody who came there. He had travelled through South-East Asia, sleeping in temples. From him I learnt nearly anything I know about the meaning of poverty.

There was a Maori girl I had met quite often in the streets of Auckland. Her boyfriend was in jail, taking the rap for a drug charge she would otherwise have had to take. Her child was being looked after adequately by her parents.

She was one of nga raukore, often hungry, usually without lodging, rarely holding a job, living off the land. Quite often in depression she would use sedative pills – as more affluent women do in the suburbs – to take away the mental pains.

I remember once her standing with me on Grafton Bridge, looking at the town, and saying – ‘I hate it, Hemi! I hate it!’ She hated that gigantic inhuman market which had no place for her except a police cell or the mental hospital.

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Then she said – ‘I love Trix; I love Norma’ – and so on, through her list of friends. It was her litany, her song of praise, if you like. Then she said – ‘I don’t even hate the fuzz’ – meaning the police, who had often oppressed and humiliated her.

Then she made a strange remark. She said – ‘You and Trix are God.’

I said – ‘No. People aren’t God. God is present in us if we love one another.’

She still maintained that Trix and I were God. I think she felt that a certain disinterested love which came from us to her was God, or a quality that belonged to God. Though she had been brought up a Catholic, I don’t think she connected God with the Church. The Church was rather the House of Law.

Later on, she came where I was, wanting help in getting off the barbiturates. She had been off drugs for a while, but returned to them to alleviate anxiety when her child was having a throat operation. It is hard to get off the barbiturates because one tends to have convulsions.

It would have been useless, however, for me to call a doctor. The doctor would have automatically called the police – and she would then have had either a jail sentence for use and possession of drugs, or a long term in that mental hospital whose Superintendent has on occasion publicly described the drug-users as social garbage. No cures have ever come from that hospital.

I gave her kai and coffee and a shirt I had from a Cistercian abbot, and put her in my bed. Just then she was in a state of semi-coma and also had her period and a dose of gonorrhoea.

It was a cold night. Among nga raukore, people often share beds, since the alternative is to lie on the floor without covering. I did not want to do this. I thought too that I might keep her warm, and help her to avoid convulsions, since her skin was clammy and intensely cold. Given a period, gonorrhoea, and the effect of pills, I thought the danger to chastity would not be great.

As it turned out, I was mistaken. At 2 a.m. she woke up and proceeded to show her affection in the way that seemed best to her. Perhaps also she wished for a reassurance that she was still a woman.

When I went to Confession later the priest said to me rather irritably – ‘Look, you’re right out of your depth, Jim. You’ll have to give up this kind of life. These things are best left to the institutions to handle.’

I thought he was probably entirely right. But when I looked round at the institutions with which my Maori friend had frequent contact – the Justice Department and the Health Department – I changed my mind.

On occasions the police had interrogated her with violence. And she was not happy about a particular policeman who used to tell her she would not be charged if she agreed to sleep with him.

In the mental hospital the doctors had told her she was insane. Personally I never observed any signs of insanity in her attitudes or behaviour. Perhaps she had told them about the time her uncle’s spirit came to visit her, not speaking, page 552 but with a prolonged rustling sound. Maori people are often visited by the spirits of their dead relatives.

I concluded that no institution was doing anything constructive – and no one was doing anything outside the institutions – so, with my sins on my back, I went on trying to be of use to her and others of nga raukore. Fortunately from then on, my relation with my Maori friend was celibate. She used to say – ‘I love Hemi in a different way.’ Indeed I loved her very dearly, myself.

Again, as I attended the V.D. clinic, I remembered the words of another Maori friend, Tane. I had once remonstrated with him, saying – ‘Some of the girls who come to your flat have V.D.’

He had replied – ‘When I accept them, I accept their diseases along with them.’

His answer would not have delighted anybody in the Health Department. But I did begin to see what he had meant. To reject the disease might imply rejection of the person – and that, for Tane, was the thing one could not do.

Tane himself had had a Christian upbringing. I think, at some level, though, he took it for granted that religion was not for him. It belonged to the region of innocence – to his boyhood when he spent his time breaking in horses. Now he did not belong to himself. He occupied the position of protector and tribal chief among nga raukore.

He had had a number of jail sentences. He had had at least one dose of syphilis. He used morphine occasionally, because it is gentler in its effects than alcohol, but he had not developed an addiction. The only drug he commonly used was marihuana.

He was one of the quietest men I have ever known. When I knew him well, I realised that he regarded himself in some ways as a lost person. It was impossible for him to be a chief among nga raukore and simultaneously keep the moral law as the Church had propounded it to him. Therefore all he could do was to live and die with his people, and then go to Hell. I think he accepted his destiny.

His relation to his tribe was like that of a mother hen to her chickens. If the police were harrying them unusually hard, he would take them down to his home area near Lake Taupo – the whole tribe, Maori and pakeha both – and teach them to catch opossums and live in a Maori country style – until the police became less hungry for convictions, and they could return to his flat in Auckland.

I never heard him speak disparagingly about anybody, I never saw him reject anybody.

A friend of mine called Eve left her husband and four children and came to Auckland. There is no point in going into great detail regarding Eve’s domestic problems. They resembled those of many other housewives. The husband had a job that took him up and down the country. From time to page 553 time he acquired a mistress. I think Eve was able to accept this – but she found herself increasingly isolated with her children, the TV set and the household tasks.

When she came to Auckland she had a gun at her head. I thought she would probably have to go into a mental hospital.

Tane began to look after her. I do not think it was because he found her particularly sexually attractive. She was a woman in the late summer of life, gaunt and ridden by various demons. I think it was as if he said to himself – ‘Well, here’s another one. I have to take her on board too.’

In the course of a year, living with Tane, she recovered her mental health, her sense of being a woman, and found a purpose in life as a mother and sister to nga raukore. She wanted to get her children back, but naturally enough her husband objected. He said he did not want his kids corrupted by a Maori syphilitic drug-taker and jailbird. No doubt his view was objectively just.

Eve wrote to me recently – ‘I have my troubles – but, thank God, Tane is still with me. Thank God for Tane. Without him I would be a dead woman.’

To be in Tane’s presence was to share in an extraordinary tranquillity. He had no possessions, because he shared whatever he had. In a sense he had no virtues, because his life belonged not to himself but to nga raukore. Perhaps he had one virtue only – aroha, the group virtue, which made it impossible for him to withhold himself from anybody, Maori or pakeha, who was in a state of need.

What is corruption and what is virtue? I find it hard to determine. Aroha is a hard master. Where I live at Jerusalem, I am the doorstep of a house where nga raukore gather to heal one another’s wounds. God is present, because – ‘Ko te aroha, I te Ariki’ – ‘Where love is, there the Lord is.’

The doorstep gets worn down. Whether the feet that tread on it are muddy or clean, what difference does it make? The prayer of the doorstep to God becomes increasingly simple – ‘Lord, have mercy on the souls of all men.’ When the doorstep breaks or gets worn out, what happens to the house? And what happens to the doorstep, who happens to be a man? Is he chucked out on to the rubbish pile? He knows that in a fundamental sense he already belongs there. Increasingly I tend to say – ‘All that is God’s business.’

To be a Christian and a sinner is a strange thing. I can’t really make head or tail of it. You must forgive my incomprehension.

Calvin said that Our Lord Jesus Christ lived his whole life in the wrath of God. Once I would have rejected that contention. Now I do not reject it. How could Christ become us and not share our condition of alienation? How can we be with Him and not share the darkness of each other member of the human race? To follow Christ means to search for God and not find Him, and accept his absence as the sign of his Presence.

For myself and others one desires mercy, not justice. But I do know where the wounds of this country, the wounds that violate justice, are chiefly located. page 554 They are chiefly located in the Maori area. The Maori Christ is being beaten up. He is being humiliated. He is wearing the crown of thorns.

Perhaps our discussion could circulate around these wounds. It may help us to have a clearer view of world justice if we have a clearer view of justice at home.

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