Extracts from ‘The Jerusalem Community’

The Jerusalem community. I think you may want to hear something about it. Not just out of curiosity. No – you have your own troubles, your own problems – and most of you will be wise enough to know that there is no simple formula to make the soul peaceful and the sky blue.

Therefore what I have to say may have some relevance to your own problems – with yourselves, with your families, with your neighbours. One point about the Jerusalem community is that at present the vast majority of those who come there are young adults between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five – and though there are some Maori members, the majority are pakeha. I would prefer it otherwise. I would prefer a largish sprinkling of people of my own age, or older – to be the kaumatua, the elders in the community. Some who are about twenty-five are on the verge of being this. They have their own stability and insight. But I would still like to see older people.

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But older people – even if they wanted to adopt a community style life – already have their financial and social and domestic obligations which their conscience will tell them must have the first priority. So it is mainly the young ones who come to Jerusalem. When older ones do pay a visit, the young ones treat them with love and respect – they say perhaps to an older woman, ‘You are like our mother – when will you come to stay here’ – and they are sorry to see an older one depart.

I would prefer more Maori members – since the Maoris are the hardest hit in the towns – twelve times as many go to the jails, and I don’t know how many more per head of population go to the mental hospitals, but it must be considerable. But the Maoris, though they do come, are slower to come. Of course their communal approach to life – which many have not lost, in spite of the total bias of pakeha education – is an enormous asset to the Jerusalem community. It is the Maori members who have usually the strongest rapport with the local pa people, who have given us use of their land and houses, and on whose goodwill the whole community depends. It is often the Maori members who know how to catch eels, shoot goats for meat, dig ditches or lavatory pits, make taniko headbands, play the guitar, and do those little things that help towards a good relationship with others. It is often the Maori members who have the greatest capacity to accept and console and even heal those who are mentally or emotionally disturbed. It is the Maori members who most readily adopt the practice of sharing their material goods.

The pakeha members do learn from them – and certainly the pakehas do have their own kind of love and help to give. But, to be quite honest, I am least happy at Jerusalem during the varsity holidays, when the place may look like a student holiday camp – and no work can be done because the students have been taught only to read, write and talk. The students do need to come there. Their hang-ups are often enormous – they need a situation of retreat to sort out their lives – and quite often their brains are scrambled because the universities are the centres of the LSD cult. We have been successful in keeping drugs out of Jerusalem. But the students are the weakest ones. And while I do love them, I often breathe a sigh of relief when they begin to depart.

One or two students have become semi-permanent members of the community. They were able to contribute. But it was very hard for them to lose a certain basic intellectual arrogance. I remember a girl student in her early twenties telling the wife of a local Maori farmer that she (the student) knew more than the Maori woman did, because of her degree in Sociology. You can imagine the explosion! All I could say was – ‘I apologise for my people. They make me feel ashamed every day of the week. But remember, they need your help – they need your pity. The students are the weakest ones. Their god is their books.’

But it would be terribly hard for the girl to recognise her own ignorance and weakness. She had a boyfriend. But even in relation to him, she had to page 271 keep her hard intellectual shell.

I asked her once about her home life. She told me that her own people were well-off, respectable, very much in favour of Higher Education – and that she could remember no time in her life when communication about anything that concerned her deeply was possible between her and her father or mother.

I think she may have been one of the walking wounded. Some come to Jerusalem because they are lonely to the point of desperation – a few because they have serious problems with drugs – a few because their mental state is poor, or because they have had clashes with the Law – there are various reasons. I am not clairvoyant. I cannot be certain of other people’s motivation. If flight from the town life is one motive, I can understand it – especially when I have visited the town vagrants, who are in and out of jail and have little hope of better things – or when I have visited the students, with their battering elephant dances, their glass-breaking grog parties, their syphilis and their LSD. It is sometimes good to go away from what is killing you. I have not seen promiscuity at Jerusalem. I have seen it among students, and to some extent among the vagrants. I think it comes from loneliness, and the demoralisation of feeling one is like a truck in a shunting yard – running on rails already laid down by other people. The power of choice, on which all moral values depend, tends to become amputated.

I remember a girl who came to Jerusalem. She had a convent education. She had had several jobs. She had slept with perhaps fifty men, without any sense of biological or spiritual satisfaction. She had swallowed a good many pills, either got illegally or else legally by medical prescription. She told me she was an atheist.

‘What did they teach you in the convent?’ I asked her.

‘Sin, sin, sin,’ she replied.

Her answer may not have been objectively just. It is hard to imagine that a Catholic school would not do better than that. But I think it was subjectively true. What she remembered was this iron world of sin.

Then you were badly instructed,’ I said. ‘Our religion is the science of loving well. The centre of it is the love song of God to the human soul, and the reply of the soul to God.’

I asked her to pray for my son Hoani who was coming up in Court in Auckland the next day. She agreed to do this. Now, according to my book, atheists don’t pray. I asked her if she would like to come with me to Mass. She did come. She did not go up to Communion. After I had gone up, I would go back and sit beside her and hold her hand – to share Christ, to share the meaning of the Communion. This may have scandalised the priest. I couldn’t help that. After a while she began going to Communion herself. Some might be afraid that her Communions were sacrilegious. I don’t know about that. As I have said, I am not clairvoyant.

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She had an overwhelming need to be loved. I discussed this with her. Later on, she did acquire a boyfriend and seemed to be happy with him. No doubt she will have plenty of problems, plenty of brambles to make her way through. One doesn’t expect miracles. But her very powerful love for the group at Jerusalem undoubtedly helped her to see her religion in a more positive light.

I think of the girls chiefly because they have the heaviest conflicts, probably because the social pressures rest most heavily on their backs.

I remember Teresa, a girl of sixteen, the daughter of a Catholic family. She came to visit Jerusalem with her parents’ permission. I will not take anybody under seventeen without their relatives’ permission. The point is – at seventeen they become socially mobile – they may go out and get jobs – they may go to varsity – they may live in hostels – they may live in flats. The police don’t intervene unless they are in obvious trouble. Therefore, it seems to me, I cannot close the door to them at Jerusalem.

Teresa was a quiet girl. When she came to Jerusalem, she was unhappy. But after a week or so, she relaxed, and began to help in sweeping floors and cooking and so on. And, as is very often the case, she showed no sign of wanting to acquire a boyfriend. She was content to accept the friendship of the group.

Her parents changed their minds about letting her stay at Jerusalem. They told me the police had rung them up. I suspected that the police had rung them, and said –

(a)	that free love is practised at Jerusalem;
(b)	that people there use drugs;
(c)	that the community is a den of thieves;
(d)	that venereal disease is present.

The police are not liars on any conscious level. How then did they arrive at these conclusions? Partly, I think by clairvoyance, by use of the magic crystal. Everybody knows that unless you stop them, young people will spend most of their time sleeping together. Everybody knows by clairvoyance that the Jerusalem community is a crowd of weirdos, no-hopers, drop-outs, crimmos, mad people, thieves and junkies. Therefore, somehow or other, they will get drugs and use them. The police adopt a thoroughly conventional view.

What about V.D? Well, a girl in her twenties who was living with her boyfriend at Jerusalem, with loyalty and fidelity, in a state that bore a remarkable resemblance to marriage, found she was pregnant, wanted to have the child, and was afraid she would lose it. She went to the Wanganui Hospital, where they gave her tests, including V.D. tests. The V.D. tests were negative. They could of course have been positive. V.D. is a very common disease. However, they were negative. But the police found out the tests had been made, and assumed – by clairvoyance – that they were positive. And it is almost impossible to convince some policemen that they are not clairvoyant.

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What about theft? Well, there was a house in Wanganui where some of the Jerusalem people would stay when they were passing through. Some boys committed theft from this house – and two of them had visited Jerusalem. Well, in the course of a year, a thousand visitors may call at Jerusalem. If two of them commit theft, it is not an unusual statistic.

The police officer said to me, ‘At Jerusalem you are giving them a disregard for private property.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I advocate the sharing of goods at Jerusalem – not the taking of other people’s goods.’ The point was too delicate for him to follow.

When I heard of the shop-lifting, I did a rave in the group meeting at Jerusalem. I said that the ones who had stolen goods were saying – ‘I want, I want, I want’ – just as much as any millionaire who is hungry to make his second million. I said that it sickened me to see people who had an ethic of poverty and sharing, start to grab stuff from other people. I pointed out that the leader of the shop-lifters was an affluent student who had grown accustomed to luxuries and apparently could not do without them. I said the community might as well fold up if the shopkeepers in Wanganui were going to say, whenever they saw us – ‘There come the brigands out of the hills!’

The point was accepted by the meeting. There were no more thefts that involved community members. But the police, like the elephant, never forget – their memory is their filing cabinet. I often wonder what my own file consists of. I have heard it is a gigantic one.

Teresa’s parents were not to know that the police practise clairvoyance. They arrived at Jerusalem. Teresa was away up the road walking with a friend. I called a group meeting – to discuss Teresa’s situation, and two or three other matters – and asked the parents to participate. They decided not to. I told them roughly where to drive, up the road, to find their daughter.

Later on, they did find her, and a family row started, because Teresa didn’t want to be shifted. . . . Now, I think I do understand what was driving Teresa’s mother up the wall. In the first place, she was genuinely terrified that Teresa might lose her virginity. In a sense, this fear was misdirected. Teresa already had lost her virginity to the boyfriend she had while still under her parents’ roof. But she had not felt able to confide in her mother about it.

Personally I do not lack respect for virginity, male or female. But to put it very bluntly, if the virginity of a Catholic daughter from an affluent middle class home is regarded as the Kohinoor Diamond – as the reason why the Church exists, and why Catholic homes and Catholic schools exist – I think we might as well give up trying to practise our faith. Personally I would feel I was caught up in some kind of fetishist cult. There have to be other priorities.

A Catholic girl recently was talking to a certain priest I happen to know, about a school photograph of sixth-form girls that hung on her wall. ‘All but two of them had lost their virginity before they left the convent,’ she said.

Teresa was in a majority situation. Jerusalem had nothing to do with it. page 274 She had come to Jerusalem to get some peace and quiet to sort things out.

I’m not rubbishing the Sixth Commandment. I’m just talking about priorities. If Teresa were to stay with the Church, and practise her faith in a reasonable and charitable way, it would not help if the main point of tension were for her parents to be worried about the possible loss of a virginity she had already lost. No doubt she might still be chaste. But it would require a different approach to make this possible.

The second reason why Teresa’s mother felt so bad about Jerusalem was because her daughter was beginning to shift away from her – and she had a strong, though intensely possessive love for her daughter.

Its obsessiveness was alienating her daughter. I think Teresa’s mother was much nearer a breakdown than Teresa had ever been. The real problem might be – How could Teresa’s mother avoid going round the bend as her daughter became a young adult?

As a father of two children, the solution I have been obliged to adopt is to change gear as my children become young adults. I had to start back. I had to say – ‘Look, make your own decisions. I hope what you’ve got already from me and your mother will be of some help. If you want to discuss things, I’m available. I’ll be more than happy to have your friendship. If I don’t like your decisions, I won’t rave about it. If you want food to eat or a place to lie down, it’s always here – because you are my children. If you bring friends to stay, I’ll try to accept them. But if I don’t you’ll have to put up with it. Not everybody likes the same people.’

This was a big shift. It had an almost magical effect. My adult children began to regard me as a possible confidant – and though I could no longer tell them what to do, I could influence them by honest conversation.

It depends, I suppose, on our view of free will. Certainly our consciences have to be educated. But in the long run, conscience means making one’s own decisions, under God, and, one hopes, with a regard for the welfare of other people. . . .

*

No doubt the young ones have many defects. They do require a parent – but a parent, after seventeen at the latest, who is genuinely detached, unpossessive, friendly, ready to discuss but not to issue comments. We have so much to learn from them – these idealistic, honest, curiously chaste, adult children of ours – who try to love one another and even us as well, in the terrible social graveyard we have helped to construct for them. Perhaps you can see what my role at Jerusalem is – a parent who is not a parent, a parent who has the job of responding to needs instead of making denials. The authority is not me – it is the group meeting – it is the group conscience. But they have to have freedom in order to use their consciences at all. And the freedom of choice God gave page 275 us is of course what you and I fear most. If we are Protestants, we tend to be Calvinist – if we are Catholics, we tend to be Jansenist. As Cardinal Newman did, we tend to regard the wild living human intellect as the enemy of God – a sad phrase and a sad fact. Newman was right on a thousand points, but not on this one. Our intellect is darkened, our will is weak, our passions disordered – but once a genuine altruistic love enters the picture, the picture itself begins to change.

Ko te aroha i te Ariki – ‘Where a true love of another person is present, there the Lord also is present.’ Let us not imagine that our own children are destitute of the capacity to love. To love a person leads to a broken heart. To love God leads to a dark night. To love God and a person together leads to the Crucifixion. Despite appearances to the contrary, I believe many of the young ones I meet are capable of enduring broken hearts, dark nights and crucifixions. But if many of us do not mend our ways – if we do not practise the works of Mercy fully and frequently and well – they will be doing it outside the Visible Church. To go to Mass is only one of the Works of Mercy – that is, to pray for all people, for the living and the dead. If our adult children show any sign – however uncouth, however disorganised – of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and consoling the afflicted – we should back them to the hilt, without trying to run the show – because that is the road to Heaven, that is the road of Christ – and money or respectability or education are little more than stones on that road.

Te Wairua Tapu ki runga i a koutou – may the Holy Spirit dwell in your hearts.

1971? (642)