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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Poet Warns against Seeking Possessions

Poet Warns against Seeking Possessions

‘The desire for bread (material possessions) is consuming this country as heroin is consuming the drug addict,’ said Catholic poet James K. Baxter in a recent talk to students at Newman Hall.

He said the search for bread, and the search for prestige and authority, is perhaps a worse drug than heroin. When people today speak of security they mean possessions, he said. ‘People who have possessions do not necessarily have security. Possessions can be like a bed of fleas. All people need is enough food, clothes on their back and a clean shirt,’ Mr Baxter said. After that all they need is love and kindness. ‘For a couple of remarks about impurity, Christ must have made one hundred and eighty about possessions. We worry about the Chinese Communists who want to come and steal our possessions,’ he said, ‘so I say let’s be poor and then they will not want to come.

‘I have been singing the praises of poverty but poverty is not beautiful,’ he said. ‘If you have cold feet, you would like to have warm feet. If you sleep in a bed of fleas you would rather have one without. Nevertheless, I think there is something to be said for it.’

He said that he did have some income and that he would soon be hearing from the Inland Revenue Department about some money he owed them. But, he said, he had given this money to the Biafran fund.

When the Department asks him why he has done this with money which belongs to the Government, he intends to quote St Ambrose who wrote that if any man sees another starving and does not help him, he is a thief. And if that man dies he is a murderer as well. Mr Baxter will tell the tax men that he has used the money to help the Government. ‘I’m saving our country from being robbers and murderers,’ he said.

Commenting on the Church in New Zealand, Mr Baxter said it has not helped the Maori. ‘The Church is Catholic – universal – for all people, yet it has given the Maori a European God. They will lose the Maori as they lost the working classes in France.’

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He said that there are two faces of Christ in New Zealand – the pakeha face covered with a mask of money and the Maori face ‘rather torn and broken and covered with mud. I would like to take away some of the mud.’ Asked if he would like to see the Vatican become like a Maori village, Mr Baxter said: ‘Certainly, I think it would be admirable. It may be more like that than you imagine. Many of those old men love one another, I’m sure.’

Asked what is his concept of God, he said: ‘The Man on the Cross, the Man who died. That is my concept of God.’

1970? (625)