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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Six Faces of Love

The Six Faces of Love

1. Love Creating Love

Not so long ago I looked through the glass of the window of a room in a hospital, and saw a new face look back at me – a face I had never seen before, like a flower that had just sprung out of the ground. It was reddish in colour. It was just learning to breathe. It was not It. It was Thou – a person who had just begun to be, fresh and new and amazing. It was the face of my granddaughter looking back at me.

And when I saw that face, my heart was changed by it. A relationship had begun which would never be terminated – not by time, death, evil, forgetfulness, or any other happening. I would call that relationship Love. A great mystery – not to be nailed down by any theological or psychological equation. As I remember them, my thoughts were – ‘I want this relationship to continue. I want to suffer her pains for her. I want to provide for her, if not physically, then spiritually. I want to be part of her identity.’

Because we are human – even at our best, limited, weak, undeveloped, fluctuating in our attitudes – because of this, I do not feel the same piercing desire to protect and provide, nowadays, when I see my grand-daughter’s face. If our feelings were always at full strength, they would burn us up, like weak filaments in a light-bulb. But the moment of recognition was true, and the relationship does continue.

Let us consider the Christian story. God made the world out of the deep night. And He looked upon it with a love compared to which the love of a parent or grandparent is only a pale, tiny flicker. He looked on man, and He thought – ‘I want this relationship to continue. I want to suffer his pains for him. I want to provide for him, both physically and spiritually. I want to be page 236 part of his identity.’

It was an I-Thou relationship. God made us out of love. He preserves us by means of love. According to the Christian belief, He suffered our pains with us, preferring to carry on his own back the effects of our misuse of freedom, rather than to remove the freedom which is the source of our capacity to love Him and love one another.

In a very faint and limited way, I believe He allows us to think His thoughts after Him – to share in that relationship of love which is the foundation and meaning of the whole universe. We don’t have to be bright, knowledgeable people. There are no degrees in the science of loving at our universities. To love is to be a human being.

An old Church Father said once – ‘Virtue is the ordering of love.’ I would prefer to say ‘the harmonising’ because love is not a logical, mechanical order, but a relationship like that of the notes in a tune. We play the tune of love over to ourselves until the notes come right.

‘He mea hanga na te Atua i te timatanga te rangi me te whenua’ – In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth. That is the first note in the tune. It is played over and over – the beginning of love – the birth of a child, a new plant coming out of the ground, the first meeting of man and woman. But among us, love can grow tired and forget its origin.

A girl who had had a religious upbringing said once to me – ‘What I learnt about religion was sin, sin, sin. Religion was all about sin.’

She had ceased to believe in the existence of God. I said to her – ‘If that is the case, you were wrongly instructed. Religion is the science of loving well. The centre of religion is the love song of God to the human soul, and the reply of that soul to God – like man to woman, like woman to man.’

I asked her then if she would pray for a friend of mine who was coming up in Court the next day. She said she would pray. In fact, she had not ceased to believe in God. Her belief was like a river that had gone underground. It came up again as soon as she began to love and to pray for another person.

Many of the older generation say – ‘I would rather do a good turn than a bad turn to anybody. That is my religion – that is enough for me. It is all that Christ wanted.’ But I have noticed there is a slight hesitation or challenge in their voices as they say it.

Many of the young people say – ‘Religion is a drag. Love is sufficient.’ Yet their love may lack harmony, and they become disappointed and confused.

Both the old people and the young people are right, of course. Without love, without goodwill, without works of mercy – religion becomes a useless parody of itself. At the same time, we know that goodwill can fail, that mercy dries up, that there are times when our souls are too exhausted or barren to even begin to make the effort to love other people.

We all want a love that doesn’t fail – mercy and goodwill that keep on flowing like an inexhaustible river. We want, then, a Power of love, a Source page 237 of love, both inside and beyond ourselves. One way of describing this is to say, we want God.

People say to me sometimes – You talk of God. I can’t find this God of yours. Where is He? He’s not in the sky. He’s not on the ground. Where is He?’ I can only answer in the words of the same Church Father I quoted before. He asked himself – ‘How does a man in his ordinary life experience God? How does he know God?’ And he gave a simple enough answer – ‘A man knows God by charitas – that is, by brotherly and sisterly love. When charitas is present in the soul, God is present there – because God is charitas.’

Yes – a door opens.

Two friends are together. One has a hang-up. And the other one says – ‘You have your trouble. But there’s a trouble on my mind too heavy for me to carry. I want to share it with you.’ Then he tells his friend some secret matter – some burden – a sin perhaps, some terrible or humiliating act of weakness that he thought he would carry to the grave inside his own breast. And a door opens – because of love, because of honesty – and the two friends put their arms round one another, and the heart of each man is lightened.

In those circumstances the words of the Beatitude are fulfilled – ‘Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.’ God has given his own life to the soul of each man because they had mercy on one another. In forty-four years I have not found any other answer to the problem of pain and evil.

When the hippies bring out a banner saying ‘Make Love, Not War’ some of us might be inclined to rubbish them too easily. It is well known that to make love can be like a dud cheque – if there is no real love or mercy or responsibility in the heart. At the same time, the critics of the hippies may seem quite often to be saying – ‘Make War, Not Love.’

There are delicate problems in the relationship between men and women. Anybody who doesn’t know that is naïve. Nevertheless, the desire to love and the desire to be loved are closely intertwined. Until we are loved, we are unable to love. Those who are apparently loveless are the injured people. In some way or other, they have not been well loved, and so they cannot love.

But the centre of religion is to know – that whether or not we have been well loved by other people – we are loved in an infinite and absolute and total fashion by God. Therefore religion can make the loveless able to love.

The worst contradictions come, however, through a mistaken approach to God. A man might say to his religious neighbour – ‘Look, it is quite simple. The core of my philosophy is this – God exists; God is good. Therefore I can be happy’.

But his neighbour might reply – ‘I believe in God; I believe God is good. But God is also holy. He demands perfection from us. Every day I tremble at the thought of meeting this holy, perfect, invisible God of ours. I try to avoid any kind of evil. But I am just a man. Religion is a burden I carry, because of the holiness of God.’

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The man who makes this kind of reply is a sincere man. But he torments himself and may drive many other people away from religion. And he has to be answered. I would say to him – ‘Brother, you are making a mistake. True, man is radically imperfect. But this God of ours both gives love and is Himself everlasting Love. He is like the sun that shines on the earth and melts the ice on the rivers and makes the trees grow.

‘His love creates love in the soul He shines on. All He wants from us is love – and He creates this love in us, so that we can give it back to Him and give it to one another. Certainly, what He wants from us in the long run is a perfect love. But love is still love when it has only just begun to grow. Love is like the little seed in the ground that can grow and become a gigantic tree. The seed is not to be blamed because it is not yet the tree. At any given moment, progress, not perfection, is what He wants from us.’

These are no doubt religious problems. But whether or not you believe in God, the problem of loving well is still the central human problem for you and me:

Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or police;
We must love one another, or die . . .

Since I am a Christian, I offer Christian explanations. But the problem cannot be solved by any intellectual diagram. It can only be solved by loving.

2. Love and the Law

If a man came to my door, at the cottage where I live in Jerusalem, on the Wanganui River – and if the police wanted him on twenty-seven charges – well, brother, I might not ring the police to tell them to come and arrest him. I might feed him and clothe him and give him shelter.

If I did that, I would be practising the difficult virtue of equity. Equity is the virtue by which a man judges when to break the law and when to keep it. It is not inevitably moral to keep the law. It is not inevitably immoral to break it. All the same, if the police arrested me for harbouring a wanted man, I would hardly complain. It’s the job of the police to administer the law of the land.

The moral law, as such, is not their province. The moral law is the province of conscience. In fact, when the police make serious mistakes, it is usually because they are trying to administer their own conception of the moral law as other people ought to fulfil it. It is doubtful whether the moral law can suitably be regarded as an objective legal pattern – a science of moral traffic rules, as it were, given us by the Divine Head of the Universal Traffic Department. In practice this approach can lead to some peculiar contradictions.

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One can argue, for example, that the Commandment – ‘Thou shalt not kill’ – was intended only to apply to possible instances of private murder, and not to public killing on behalf of the State. Then one can argue further that wars can be morally justified in which whole cities are wiped out by firebombing or hydrogen bombs. Thus hideous, chaotic, and terrible happenings are covered by the blanket of a legalistic code.

At the other end of the scale – granted the indissolubility of marriage – then if a girl marries a husband who abandons her after five days – and if ten years later, without the death of the first man, she gets married to another man and lives pretty happily with him and bears a number of children – well, many people would state, however reluctantly, that the woman in question was committing adultery, since by definition the second marriage could not be regarded as a true marriage. There’s no answer to this problem as long as you use a legalistic approach.

I can understand, though, that people aren’t too keen on situational ethics. They don’t want a situation where some people can say – ‘It feels right to me, therefore it is right.’ No doubt it felt right to Hitler to massacre six million Jews. We could claim he had an erroneous conscience. But if his conscience was out of joint, there has to be some objective moral code, applying to all men, which it was out of joint from. Once you start taking the road of situational ethics, you have to go on to a point where you say that what Hitler did was right because, as he saw it, his own situation and that of the German people demanded he should massacre the Jews.

I think very few people would want to carry a theory of situational ethics to that extreme. Perhaps they want to have their cake and eat it – they want to apply situational ethics in some circumstances, but not in others. But who is to decide the circumstances? That is pretty close to the centre of the problem. Conscience may be, in a sense, the voice of God – but consciences are notoriously easily clouded by strong subjective impulses of fear and anger and desire. And part of the function of the objective moral law is to guarantee that our reason will not be swept away by prejudice or passion.

The case in which people most commonly resort to situational ethics is when love is involved – particularly sexual love. A man may say, though not perhaps quite so bluntly as I am stating it – ‘This woman is not my wife. But I love her and she loves me. Love is something higher than the law. When we sleep together, love absolves us from guilt.’

It would be easy to pull this statement to pieces by pointing out that the love in question is irresponsible – that it would be interesting to ask the wife’s opinion of the set-up – or, in religious terms, that to commit adultery shows a lack of love for the God who gave us the Ten Commandments.

All the same, I think there is a real intuition which people try to comprehend or express by situational ethics – in religious terms, a genuine collision between love that deserves the name of love and obedience to the page 240 clearly expressed will of a loving God. The conflict is so common that I feel it would be wrong for me to neglect it. Love and the law seem to conflict more often in this area than in any other.

It may help to give examples. Supposing a traveller in soft goods is sitting in a hotel bar. He has finished his assignments for the day and he feels ripe for entertainment. He notices a fairly attractive woman in her late thirties absorbing gin and squash in the corner. His thoughts run something like this – ‘She’s a bit long in the tooth. But sometimes that makes them easier to get. It’s nearly a month since I last went to bed with a woman. My wife is a bitch. If she treated me properly this kind of thing wouldn’t be happening. It’s her fault it does happen. I think I’ll go over and buy that doll a drink. But not too many drinks. She’ll get weepy if she has too much. And I’m not made ofmoney.’

He buys the woman a drink, and tells her a number of quite plausible half-truths. He gauges her degree of loneliness accurately, since he is a lonely man himself. He manages to spend the night with her without giving much of himself away. In the morning he leaves her politely, giving her a false address. He finds the whole episode in some ways jarring to his semi-Christian conscience – he labels his own feeling mentally as ‘lust’ – but he reflects that a man is only human after all.

Take another example that might seem identical. In another hotel bar another traveller meets another woman. He also buys the lady a drink. His thoughts, however, follow a different track – ‘Man, she looks pretty hung-up. I’ve seen Sheila looking the same before she divorced me. Well, she had good enough reason for it. My drinking would certainly drive an angel up the wall. It might be better not to get too close to this one. If I sleep with her, she’ll feel more hung-up when I shift on in the morning.’

Later, however, because the second traveller is a genuinely friendly man, the woman herself decides to accompany him to his room. At this stage, his thoughts include this one – ‘She has a great need to be loved. If I don’t sleep with her, she’ll think she’s not attractive. I’m probably in too deep to go back without hurting her.’

They spend the night together. Much of the time is spent in exchanging their respective life histories. The second traveller tells the woman that he loves her. This is true enough – though the word might have a different meaning for each of them. A feeling of painful friendship might be the best name for what is in his heart.

The next day he thinks – ‘It might be better not to see her again. For me, anyway – I’ve got enough trouble in my life already. But she is going to feel let down.’ He cancels his business engagements for the morning, and spends the time walking in the gardens with her. They have lunch together at a restaurant and part company quite tenderly. He leaves his address with her, telling her to write to him if she feels like it. He goes away with a feeling page 241 that he has handled the whole situation rather badly. He asks the God he sometimes remembers to have mercy on both of them.

Now – I think there is a genuine ethical difference between the situation of the first traveller and the second traveller. As I see it, both have committed a breach of the objective moral law that requires chastity outside marriage. But the difference in motivation cannot be ignored.

The first traveller establishes an I-it relationship with his female companion. He wants to ‘have sex’ with the minimum of involvement. He has to lie to the woman more than once to fence himself off from any possible loss of security. At best, she remains a very casual acquaintance. At worst, she would be left feeling she had been used as a garbage disposal unit.

The second traveller establishes in a limited degree an I-Thou relationship. He is led more by his estimate of the woman’s needs than by his own needs. There is honest two-way communication. And he is prepared to sacrifice his personal convenience and security – again in a limited degree – in order to behave in a human fashion.

I am not claiming that the second traveller is a model of the Good Samaritan. Nevertheless, he does recognise the wounds of his companion – and his response to her includes an effort to heal those wounds by showing love and respect. No doubt he might fool himself regarding the value of acceptance and help given in this way. It is notoriously difficult to achieve disinterested love in a relationship, in or out of marriage, that includes sexual behaviour. But at least we may say that his heart has been turned in this direction.

A Christian friend might well say to me at this juncture – ‘All very well, Jim. But you can’t make black white. Both of your hypothetical travellers are adulterers. And God can’t live in the soul of an unrepentant adulterer.’

No; I am not calling black white. I recognise that the objective breach of the moral law is the same in both cases. But the subjective factors are different. I suggest that charitas – the love of person for person – is present in a struggling fashion in the soul of the second traveller. To acknowledge this, one has to distinguish between two different kinds of evil – the first is to sin against love itself, as when one person regards another as It, not as Thou; the second is to sin not against love itself but against the completeness of love.

Where men and women are concerned, the first evil can occur in or out of marriage. There is nothing to prevent marriage partners from regarding one another as meal tickets or garbage disposal units. In the case of the second traveller, he offends against the completeness of love, which requires that a sexual relationship should be permanent and responsible. Still, according to my book, he does love his companion – however imperfectly – and so God is able to be with them, in a limited manner.

‘Ko te aroha, i te Ariki’ – Where love is, there the Lord is. I think it is rash to suppose that the Lord does not have access to human hearts – if they love one another – even in relationships that are morally defective.

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3. Love and Suffering

Not long ago I was talking to an adolescent girl who would sometimes starve herself for several months. She was a generous person, and I think her fasting was undertaken mainly in order to make herself more spiritually perceptive and sensitive to the needs of others. All the same, I did test her out a little. I said – ‘Look, Kathy, when you fast I think you might be marrying Death. In a symbolic way of course. Life seems too involved, too painful, too difficult – so you go up the mountain to get away from it.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘But it’s not up the mountain. For me, it’s like standing on a beach at night. You see the waters flowing endlessly – and you want to go in and become part of them – not to die, not to drown, just to be lost in the water.’

Her fasting, then, was in some degree a spiritual luxury. It may have helped her, all the same, to become less involved, to get some distance and perspective in her relationships with other people. And it certainly helped me. I needed to fast, myself, for various reasons – and I lacked the courage. After thirty-five years on cigarettes, it can seem like death to do without them. But I thought – ‘What are you? Are you a man or a mouse? If this eighteen-yearold girl can do without food completely for a fortnight, why can’t you, – the head of the tribe – live on a restricted diet?’ She made me feel ashamed. And she was not a professing Christian.

Many of the young adults I know well, react very sharply against the civilisation that says to them – ‘A hundred dollars is twice as good as fifty dollars. Your first business in life is to get money and prestige – and pass as many exams as possible, so that you can get more money and more prestige.’

They vomit up the materialist frame of action that we try to foist on them. This in itself may not help much – but at least it is a beginning. Then quite often they turn to Buddhism or Taoism or Hinduism – to get some clues about poverty and meditation and the meaning of pain. This may seem peculiar, when we remember that Christ lived in poverty – that prayer and meditation are a big part of the foundation of a Christian life – that the Cross, which means pain endured for the sake of love, is absolutely basic to Christian life and behaviour.

It may seem peculiar if a fair proportion of the young adults turn to the non-Christian religions for guidance. But you have to remember that Christianity has been presented to them in a peculiar fashion.

Their spiritual advisers – that is, parents and teachers – have said to the boys – ‘Get a short back and sides. Get a good job – that is, a job with a good salary. Dress neatly. Speak politely. Play football. And go to Church if you can.’

And they’ve said to the girls – ‘Dress neatly. Speak politely. Above all, don’t swear. Get a new perm whenever your hair looks untidy. Keep your page 243 virginity till you’re married – or if you can’t manage that, at least make sure you’re on the Pill. And go to Church if you can.’

Nothing about love. Nothing about mercy. Nothing about the sharing of material goods. Quite often the young adults have been presented with a set of mediocre social rules as a substitute for Christianity by instructors who are, in a muddled way, Christian. No wonder they turn to the Oriental religions in order to break a hole in the wall.

The Oriental religions do give an answer to the problem of suffering. Buddha, said, in effect – ‘We suffer because we desire what we have not got. The craving is not abolished by getting. It can only be abolished by seeing the illusion of what is called reality. When the desire goes, the peace begins.’

Devout Buddhists – in Thailand, for example – do eat, procreate, produce works of art, plant and grow crops, and so on – so it would be false to say that Buddhism is in practice a philosophy of retreat from life. But the King of Thailand spent a month with his head shaved, carrying a begging bowl. I wish some of our leaders had done the same.

I am a Buddhist, in the sense that I reverence the Buddhist saints, and believe that the phenomena of fear and craving originate from the projection upon things of mental images that we carry in our own minds. I am also a Christian, and use Christian modes of prayer and meditation. The two approaches are in no way contradictory. They supplement one another.

But there are two points where Christian and Buddhist differ. One concerns the existence of God. Buddhist teaching side-steps the problem. The Christian Churches teach that God is the Reality behind all created phenomena. Does it matter much? It matters because of the second point – Buddhist love means, as far as I can grasp it, universal detached benignity. Christian love means to experience the lives of others – to be with them in their joys, and most of all in their pains.

In practice, of course, it’s not just like that. The Buddhists have a strong bodhisattva tradition – tradition of the saints who turned back from the road of self-perfecting in order to share the pains of mankind. And many Christians bury themselves in activism and forget to share in the inner life of others.

Still, a Buddhist follows not any one of the many Buddhas, but a road leading to the recognition that the ego is an illusion. A Christian follows the God-man Christ. The Person of Christ is essential to his way of life. He discovers Christ hidden in the hearts of others and in his own heart. But underneath the surface contradiction there are secret similarities. Christian and Buddhist both recognise that one has to die in order to live. It is a matter of loving well or not loving well.

Let us compare the lives of two married couples. The first couple are plainly living in the greatest harmony. When they are together in a room you can feel the rapport between them, like hands gently joined together. They are sexually compatible in the highest degree. They hardly ever quarrel. Their page 244 house is beautifully decorated with things they have each chosen – and their taste is similar. Their children are cheerful, active and intelligent. They quite often entertain a circle of admiring friends.

And here is another couple. The husband is alcoholic, the wife subject to various other maladies. They frequently quarrel. Sexually they seem maladjusted. Their friends are inclined to pity each in turn. Their house is a bare place and their children have many hang-ups.

Yet, I suspect that the second couple – if they continue with the dangerous and difficult adventure of marriage – may learn to love as the first couple could never love. They are like two thieves who have chosen to be crucified together. The surface of reality is shattered by the pains of their relationship. They may be very near to the heart of Christ.

I heard one such husband say – ‘I could never leave Joan. I have been in Hell with her, and I know her as I could never know another woman.’ To be in Hell together – that is at least one meaning of Christian love – not to exclude oneself from the pains and faults of the other, while recognising that one’s own faults may add to the pain.

I do not like war. It is an evil happening. But I have never been able to forget a poem by Day Lewis, about a fishing trawler sunk in the Spanish War by the gunboats of the other side. After a useless battle, when all the men on board are dead or wounded, and the single gun is out of action, and the boat is in flames, she goes down. As the poem puts it – ‘She sunk by the stern in the hushed Cantabrian “Sea”’ – and there is another line, that comes like a chorus – ‘Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico’. And it always pierces my heart. I cannot say it without weeping, because it represents for me the comradeship of those who gladly suffer death together because they love one another.

There is another scene, dear to the mind of the Christian. Thirteen men sit and eat in a room together. None of them are of importance as artists or statesmen or scientists or leaders of industry. Some of them have serious faults of character. But they love one another.

And the thirteenth man, who is also the God of the Christian, gets up and says – ‘You must love one another as I have loved you.’ Then he goes out to his death in their company – and his manner of dying is such that he does not exclude himself from the pain or the faults of any other member of the human race.

It is not virtue as we know it. It is not a process of self-perfecting. It is the expression of a love in which the respect is so great that he is not prepared to rubbish the weakest or the worst of the human race, or take away their freedom. Instead of that, he shares our Hell with us and calls us brothers. As a result, the weakest and the worst – to whom I belong – get up and want to die with him – not in order to reach Heaven, no, that is quite irrelevant – but in order to share his pains as he shared ours.

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Then this love flows out to everyone, particularly to those who suffer most. There are many kinds of love. But Christian love is above all, compassion – suffering with.

4. Love and Freedom

There is a prayer used in the Anglican form of morning service – which refers to God as the One ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. And many have felt, whether or not they say so, that the expression carries an internal contradiction. Service means obedience. And how can obedience – the condition of subjecting one’s own will to the will of another – be called, at one and the same time, freedom? That is a question I ask both of you and of myself.

It is not an abstract question either. When children grow up and come into their teens, the elders – and I include myself in that category – make a gigantic effort to persuade them that what they had done before because we made them do it – like being hard-working, polite, chaste, clean in their habits – they should now continue to do of their own accord. It never quite works. The kids think – ‘Yes, we had to do that because you were standing over us – or else because we thought you were some kind of god. But from now on we’re going to work out our own style of behaviour. And whether you approve or not is somewhat irrelevant.’

And the elders – including myself – are upset – because we think the kids are in for a rough time of it, because they are too young to have the wisdom to look after themselves. And we battle unsuccessfully, for control – and we lie awake at night, worrying.

If, at this stage – having had a Christian training – we turn to the Scriptures for comfort and help, the answer may not be to our liking. We may, for example, strike a passage in the New Testament which has troubled many commentators. It tells how the boy Jesus, at the age of twelve, went up to Jerusalem with his family for a Jewish ritual celebration. And when they went back to Nazareth, he stayed behind without permission. And when – after three days of searching and anguish – they found him in the Temple talking with the Rabbis, he simply said – ‘Why are you worried? – You should have known I had to be occupied in my Father’s business.’

It could be argued that Jesus was a special case. And indeed I think he was – but, all the same, the incident does shed light on the difficulties that occur when any child becomes a young adult.

A girl of thirteen heads off with the motor bike boys. A boy of fourteen starts to wear his hair long and smoke and drink and listen endlessly to long-playing records – paying little or no attention to his formal education. We can easily say ‘They need more discipline.’ But what kind of discipline? The discipline a child can accept? A discipline that comes wholly from inside oneself? Or a discipline adults will accept – some of the time – from their page 246 own consciences or the working community or their family obligations? The childhood discipline can only be applied to a child. The adult discipline requires a full adult status.

Perhaps the whole matter of discipline is somewhat irrelevant. The problem can be stated in a different way – ‘How can they – or we, for that matter – learn to use our own free will wisely and well?’ One thing is fairly certain. A good use of free will can’t be imposed from the outside. Nor is there any certainty that we will agree with the choices our adult children make.

The Gospel occasion of Jesus’ visit to Jerusalem has been called ‘The Finding in the City’ – it could equally well be called ‘The Losing in the City’. And every day of the week teenagers float away from their families – spiritually if not by actual leavetaking – and are lost in our cities. When we find them again, they are in the company of others They have begun to say ‘Us’, not ‘I’, in a group other than the original family.

I am not suggesting that parents should sit back happily while their daughters join the motor bike boys or their sons give up school. In a tribal situation it would be simpler. The young adults would have passed out of the control of the parents into the control of the tribe. There would be initiation ceremonies to mark the occasion.

But we require of our young adults a prolonged latency period, when they are treated neither as adults nor as children – and so we create the phenomenon of adolescence. No doubt we have to try to cope with it in terms of our existing society. Nevertheless, it may be a help to us to remember that our children belong to God, and to the world at large, before they belong to us. They are lent to us, on trust, as it were, until they grow up. At twelve years old, the boy Jesus said to his family – ‘I belong to God, not to you’ – and God’s business meant associating with a group who were strangers to his family.

To move into that gap – to move out of the family into the world – can be a terrifying and demanding experience. The desire of the young adult, if it could be expressed, would run something like this: ‘Get off my back. I want some elbow room. I want to become spiritually independent. It may look like total egotism, but there is something quite different behind it all.

‘You offer all kinds of advice. But there’s a voice inside me that tells me what to do – not very well yet, not without static – but I want to listen to it and let it develop. Your good advice prevents me from listening to it.

‘It doesn’t tell me to be safe. It tells me that I have to belong to other people – to share their pain and share their happiness. Every now and then – when I’m sitting with five or six friends in an old untidy house – or riding my bike with the others on the road at the edge of the harbour – or holding hands with my girlfriend – or something else like that – every now and then I seem to break through a sound barrier – “I” becomes “Us” and the world is a different place.

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‘It’s hard to be like this – going on in the dark, halfway between two worlds. Often I’d love to be a child again, but when I turn back to the family, it feels dead, it’s not my place, it’s the shell of the egg I’ve broken out of.

‘Your solutions often disgust me. They seem so timid and second-rate. On the other hand, my own solutions are often makeshift. They don’t always please me either – but I have to go on making my own decisions.

‘I still love you. I don’t want to hurt you. But get off my back. This is my job I’m doing, not yours.’

In a confused way no doubt – but in a very authentic way, all the same – the young adults are demanding the freedom to respond to what they consider the reality of their own situation.

The TV ads won’t help. The wars of the past fifty years won’t help. The materialist philosophy shouted from the rooftops won’t help. The schools won’t help much, as long as their curriculum is geared simply to exam-passing. The homes can’t help, as long as parents regard the young adults as rebellious children.

God will and does help.

A remarkable number of young adults do in the long run learn to love wisely and well. I think the tragedies are greater among those who let the inner voice get muffled than among those who get cut to pieces by handling their choices in a clumsy fashion. The dollar note is a heavier drug than pot or alcohol. A hunger for social status can be more damaging than irresponsible sexual behaviour.

To obey God is to enter freedom, because God is Love, and his service is the constantly renewed effort to love well.

I remember a girl I knew at university. She had had unhappy and damaging experiences with several boy-friends. When an older man offered her marriage, she accepted, though she didn’t love him. She wanted peace. She wanted material and emotional security. When I met her again, ten years later, she hated her husband. It was a tragedy – but I think it was inevitable, because the marriage was built on the wrong foundation. She had chosen marriage for fear of a worse alternative. She had not truly chosen a person. If she had chosen the worst man in the country as a partner, freely, because she loved him, they might have got on better – simply because the choice would have been free, and therefore perhaps loving.

Free choices do not necessarily lead to the avoidance of tragedy. When the boy Jesus talked with the Rabbis in the Temple, he was setting his foot on a road that would lead him to the Crucifixion. But it was the life he was meant to live. Nobody except the Father could tell him what to do.

True enough, he went back to Nazareth and obeyed his earthly parents. But the new obedience which meant freedom to love everyone had been planted inside him like a seed in the ground. Without freedom, love is not possible.

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5. Love and Evil

Again and again in life, we hear this kind of thing said – ‘I did my best with him, but it was no good. I’m afraid I’ve got to consider him as a write-off’ –

Or – ‘Stay away from her. She’s a bad influence. You’ll have nothing but trouble if you associate with her’ –

Or – ‘There’s one kind of person I can’t stand – and that’s a liar’ – or a thief, or a boaster, or a womaniser, or something else.

These attitudes are very far from the Christian approach to evil – though indeed we may hear them expressed any day by people who profess to be Christian – and perhaps most of all from such quarters.

The Christian attitude to evil is derived directly from the behaviour of Christ.

Evil is the absence of good. That definition might make us think that evil is not likely to be very troublesome.

But the absence of flesh on someone’s face can be a very hideous ulcered wound – and the absence of ground in the middle of a footpath can be a hole twenty feet deep – that you fall into, and break your neck – and the absence of life can turn a person into a corpse. In the same way, absence of honesty can ruin all communication – and the absence of courage makes it impossible for a man to be a loyal friend – and the absence of love and justice among nations can mean the end of life on the surface of the globe.

Absence can be a very terrible thing – or, if you like, a very terrible nothing.

The Christian believes thatthe being wecall Christ is himself the response of God to the absence of love and truth among us. God’s response to evil is to overcome it with good. Christ is our lover. He touches the leper and the leper becomes well again. He speaks to the dead and the dead come to life. More than that – he puts his arms round the sick soul and makes it well – he puts his arms round the dead soul and brings it to life. This is what we call the mystery of redemption.

People in their lives often show successive changes in the way they cope with the problem of evil. Here is a little girl. She is standing inside her parents’ gate, and she sees the town drunk go past. He is staggering and swearing to himself. He looks rough and he smells of methylated spirits. The little girl is frightened. Her father does not behave like that. She has a feeling that order is being menaced by disorder. She runs to her mother, and says – ‘Mr Jackson went past, and looked awful. He had a nasty smell. I don’t like him. He said bad words.’

Her mother, if she were wise, might say – ‘Mr Jackson’s not well. He can’t help being like that. We ought to be sorry for him.’

But the little girl keeps on with her own approach. She says to her mother – ‘I don’t like Mr Jackson. I wish he would die.’

Whether alcoholism is a sickness or a moral evil is not the point I want to page 249 discuss. Probably it is a sickness like schizophrenia. But the little girl wants to abolish what she feels to be dangerous by abolishing Mr Jackson.

This is the first primitive human reaction to what is felt to be evil. Many people never grow beyond it. They say, or think – ‘Lying is bad. John is a liar. Therefore I cannot have him as a friend.’ Or, ‘Sex crimes are very bad. X— is a sex criminal. Therefore he should be killed in an unpleasant way.’

There are two great correctives for this way of thinking. One of them is self-knowledge.

The little girl grows older. She is going to school. A classmate whom she doesn’t like much filches the flowered pencil case that her uncle gave her. At first she wants to denounce the other girl to the teacher. But then her mind changes. She remembers vaguely that she herself is not always strictly honest. In a dim way she recognises the other girl’s motives – a desire to make up for lack of love at home and lack of approval at school – a desire to be able to say – ‘At least something is mine.’ So she goes to the other girl and gets back her pencil case without too much fuss. And she shares her lunch with the other girl.

This would be a rare happening. Normally the little girl would be swept away by the desire to denounce – to put herself in the right and rubbish the offender. But if it did happen the way I have told it, then it would be a great step forward in social and moral development.

The Christian definition would run like this – ‘All humans are sinners. I am a sinner myself. Therefore it is not suitable for me to rubbish other sinners.’ But I’m afraid most of us, most of the time, react at a more infantile moral level.

The second great corrective is love itself. Let us suppose that the little girl has grown much older. She is a woman of fifty – and her son, aged thirty-five, has just been arrested for the twentieth time on charges of violence and false pretences.

She sits opposite him in the visitors’ room of the jail, with a grille between them. Her eyes are full of concern. But she does not criticise her son. Everybody else will criticise him. But she knows who he is, as well as one human being can know another. She knows his generosity, his exhibitionism, his trouble with alcohol, his trouble with women. She does not expect that he will miraculously change his way of life. Her job is not to try to change him. Her job is to suffer for him – to suffer with him. The door of her heart is never closed to him, though each time he enters he brings pain along with him. As a result her son knows what it is to be loved.

I am not sentimentalising. Perhaps the love of the mother is too protective – perhaps it prevents her son from growing up. All the same, she has learnt the lesson that the little girl did not learn. Her son has become very like Mr Jackson. And she does not want him to die. She wants him to live.

People often argue about the origin of evil – what it is, and how it entered page 250 the world. I do not intend to discuss that. I am only interested in the solution. The solution to the problem of evil is to love the person whose actions are evil – with an understanding, receptive, unpossessive love – which is prepared to suffer any degree of pain rather than reject the person who is causing the pain.

At this point the matter of condoning may enter the picture. People say – ‘Ah, yes, you may love the sinner but you have to make it plain you hate the sin.’ I’m not sure if it is necessary. There are fourteen major works of mercy, and the last of these is the rebuking of sinners. It is the one work of mercy that nearly everybody seems to find congenial. Perhaps one should concentrate on other works of mercy – feeding the hungry, for example, or clothing the naked, or consoling the afflicted, or visiting the imprisoned.

Rebuking sinners is a hard thing to do well. If, for example, you are driving a beautiful new bomb at eighty miles an hour along the highway – and you see a hitch-hiker – a long-haired individual, so that you’re not certain whether it is a he or a she. Well, of course, if you’re going at eighty, you might be half a mile beyond the place before you decide to pick that person up. And then you might say to yourself – ‘To hell with it! These hitch-hikers are just high-class bums. They should get a job, and buy cars for themselves – or at least get the price of a bus ticket!’

But I’m afraid – if you feel that way – you can’t just crash on and feel morally justified. The disappearing tail-fins of a large car can mean anything or nothing. No – if you want to perform your work of mercy for the day by rebuking a sinner – then you’d have to reverse half a mile, and very courteously tell the hitch-hiker just why you weren’t picking him or her up.

It’s a delicate job to do well. It might be simpler to opt for one of the easier works of mercy – sheltering the shelterless. Just take the hitch-hiker on board – and then, with little effort, you get the blessing reserved for those who share their goods with others.

You could go further than that. To get the gigantic blessing – the one to end all blessings – the Maori blessing, I call it – you’d have to pick up ten hitch-hikers and arrive in the next town singing together and bulging at the doors. The blessing that God pours down in those circumstances has to be felt to be imagined. It can turn atheists into believers and frigid strangers into friends in the course of half an hour. It’s like being a child again, in your bathing suit, standing in a shower of rain after a long hot day.

Quite simply, the only answer I know of, to the problem of evil, is mercy. It is good to be merciful to those who do evil, because they are wounded, they wound themselves as well as others. Moreover, love does create love in response.

That way, you also solve the problem of the evil you and I do every day of our lives. Christ said – ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’ Personally, I call this the Sinners’ Magna Carta. God will look after us if we page 251 look after other people. I intend to hold on to it with both hands – and with my toenails as well, if necessary – until the day I die, because it makes life possible, for those, like myself, who do evil as well as good.

6. The Love of the Many

There is a story in a book by the Cretan writer Kazantzakis. An old saint gets to paradise. And the Lord smiles when He sees him. He leads him into a beautiful garden – more beautiful than anything the world could offer, yet very human all the same – and lets him wander there. A day or two later, the Lord finds the old man sitting under a tree. His face is full of trouble. And the Lord asks him – ‘Why are you troubled, my friend? I gave you this garden to walk in. I prepared it for you out of love. This is my gift. Why aren’t you happy here? I wanted you to be happy!’

And the old man answers – ‘How can I be happy, Lord, when there is that fountain in the centre of the garden, out of which flow perpetually the tears of the damned?’ Whether or not one believes in the possibility of damnation, the story is an excellent parable of Christian love.

In the story God does not suffer. But the old saint is an image of Christ. And the Christian believes Christ is both God and man. There are two ways of looking at God.

A man or woman may feel that beyond all creatures, beyond our fellow beings, beyond the roots of trees and the orchard of the stars – a phrase, incidentally, that I owe to my friend, John Weir – beyond everything, God exists, and He is the beginning we come from and the end we go to.

Yet God is not only alive in thereness, beyond us – God is also alive in hereness, among us.

A deist may see God as a Power behind the universe, unconnected with man. But a Christian believes that God is also our kin – that God became us, by becoming a member of the human race – and this profoundly alters our view of human love. When we love our neighbour, we are also loving Christ present in our neighbour. This love is not self-love. People absolutely on their own – supposing it were possible – might turn their thoughts to God or to the visible non-human creation. But to be a practising Christian, they would require the company of other people to love – since charitas is the love of community, the Love of the Many.

Again, there is a particular kind of love that springs up between man and woman, or sometimes between special friends of the same sex. Two people only are involved. I call it the Love of the One for the One. This is a delicate and special kind of love. In all ages people have valued it greatly. But it can also be fragile and subject to jealousies and misunderstandings. I doubt if it is ever strong enough on its own for any person to hang his or her life on. The cord is too thin – it can very easily snap.

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To say this is not to rubbish either official or unofficial marriage – for the very thing that distinguishes marriage from a liaison is the decision of the couple that their love should be communal, something shared with their neighbours and the world at large.

In our times many marriages fail precisely because our society is non-communal – because married couples don’t invite people to share their meals with them, or let strangers come and sleep on the floor if they need a night’s lodging.

If we are looking for God on the human level, it is in the Love of the Many that God hides and is revealed. The Love of the Many is like air or sunlight. It is understanding, peaceful, unpossessive, tolerant, prepared to suffer for and suffer with. It may contain erotic areas. But in the ordinary way of things it does not express itself genitally. The genital expression of love is reserved for the relationship of the One to the One.

I have been engaged for some time, with the help of God, in an experiment that involves the Love of the Many. In the haphazard community that has grown up where I live, there are one or two principles that seen necessary and permanent.

It is necessary for us to share our material possessions. Without sharing, it is extremely easy for people to quarrel with one another about items of property. I may like my coat with leather cuffs, or my boots, or my sleeping-bag – but if somebody else uses them, I have to remember that they are actually ours, not mine – and therefore accept gracefully a transfer of communal property.

I would take the matter further. If a boy comes into a room, with a packet of twenty cigarettes – and if there are nineteen other people in the room – and if he gives each one a cigarette, and takes the last cigarette for himself – then, I believe, the empty cigarette packet is a sacred object, a kind of sacramental, containing the life of God, as a water-pipe contains water. I would not be surprised if it became radioactive, and shone in the dark, on account of its connection with the Love of the Many.

If we are to rebuild the sacramental universe our civilisation has shattered to pieces – I see no way of doing it except by sharing the things we possess. Then we are using them as God wishes them to be used. Of course, we cannot share our wives or husbands or sweethearts, because they are persons, not things. But we can be glad when they display friendship to others, and this is a kind of sharing.

Another principle is that people should love one another, and display love in a physical manner. There are good reasons behind this.

A child who is picked up and held by its mother knows for certain that it is loved. If the mother instead spoke to the child, saying – ‘You are a nice child. It is a pleasure to be with you’ – this would have some effect, but not so much effect, since a human being is both body and spirit. I think there is a level in each of us where we are still young children, subject to feelings page 253 of loneliness, anxiety and alienation if we are not made certain that we are loved. And I have noticed in the community of which I am part that people with mental disorders recover much more rapidly if their friends embrace them. The embrace is the chief visible sign of the Love of the Many.

Some may fear that the physical embrace, between members of the opposite sex, may lead to unchastity. I grant that the danger exists – but I think unchastity is much more prevalent in social areas where people show no sign of physical affection to one another. Then the genital relation may be the only channel by which love is being expressed physically. There is, as it were, a pileup of water behind the dam – and when it is released it may overflow the banks. This danger is less where the love of friendship is expressed freely. Then the creek can run at an ordinary level.

A third necessary principle is that friends should speak the truth to one another. Words are made to convey truth. To hide one’s heart from one’s friend indicates some measure of fear or distrust. One has to take the risk of being misunderstood. But understanding grows if communication is truthful and also frequent.

A fourth principle involves the manner in which the community receives its guests. The guest is a sacred person sent by God. It is my opinion that if we turned away any guest from the door – mad or sane, drunk or sober, male or female, young or old – then we would be excluding God from the house. The guest should be welcomed with signs of love, and given food and drink – even if there is very little to eat in the house – and given a place to lie down. If guests choose to stay for any length of time, they should not be asked to contribute money or perform tasks – though their help should be welcomed if they offer it.

What about the bludgers and parasites?

Well – we all live in a house God made for us – this earth with its rivers and trees and mountains and oceans. And we cut down the trees for no good reason, and fill the rivers with sludge, and destroy through greed the fishing beds of the ocean and carve up the mountains to make roads for tourists who will give us money. We ruin the ecology of the world because of our frantic pursuit of the dollar note, which is in a sense the god of our civilisation. And we kill our fellow guests in wars, or let them starve to death while we stuff ourselves with mutton and pork and alcohol and ice cream. We are very bad guests indeed, unruly, destructive and parasitic. But God does not turf us out of the house made for us. Instead God suffers our presence out of love, and continues to shower us with gifts. I think it proper that human beings should try a little to imitate the hospitality of God.

There are several other principles – that one should not take jobs that involve servility, because servile people become incapable of friendship – that, in this country, the pakeha should try humbly to learn from the Maori communal culture – and so on. But the principles I have outlined will do for page 254 a beginning. The most important principle is the sharing of material goods – because when we say ‘Ours’ instead of ‘Mine’ we are beginning to love in a thoroughly practical way – and because poverty lays the soul open to God and gives great beauty to all that one looks upon.

None of these principles involves a formal statement of Christian doctrine. Yet I think that when people love one another, and speak the truth, and share their goods – Christ comes to live in their hearts, whether they believe in Him or not – because Christ is the Love of the Many incarnate among us.

These things are possible to sinners. The bread of friendship can be eaten even if it is spotted with fly dirt. And the fact that these things are possible gives the man who is speaking to you a real hope and a real sense of meaning in life.

To love means in the long run to die for one’s friends. There are no exceptions to that rule. The seed has to die in order that the plant may grow. Christ says to the human soul – ‘What can I give you, my sweetheart? I want to give you something so that you will know I love you. Tell me what to give you. Tell me what will give you the most joy.’ And the human soul replies to Christ –

Death and life are yours, my Love,
And both the same to me,
But if there is one thing that might
Make our love greater be,

Then give me that red coat of blood
You wore upon the tree,
And give me a death like your own death
In pain and poverty.
(Extract from ‘Two Dialogues of Christ and the Soul’, CP 477)

It is a strange reply, but comprehensible in the context of the Love of the Many. We learn to desire to die for our friends.

I do not quarrel with that destiny. To be a human being is to live always in the shadow of sorrow and death. But if we carry the Love of the Many in our hearts, both life and death will have a meaning for us.

1971 (636)