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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Extracts from ‘Notes on Community Life [2]

Extracts from ‘Notes on Community Life [2]

*

To be poor is not to become good. It is to be that void, that nothing, on which the Holy Spirit moved at the beginning of the world. This old man is incapable of being good – his soul is a mass of faults and contradictions – but he can know he is nothing, and through the eye of that Zero, God can do what He wants to do. It is when I think I am something that my life backfires on me.

*

It saddens me to see the clever ones come, the students and ex-students who have an intellectual answer to every problem. I can’t blame them. They are the children of our civilisation, walking always among the grit of the ash page 280 pit, without peace in their hearts, tormented by attachment and the desire for non-attachment. Whatever they eat becomes ash in their mouths. When they arrive the Maori souls, the ones who have simplicity, and the pakehas who are most like them, go quietly away. I am left in the middle of a crowd of hobbledehoys – men in boots who clump through the house, boys who curl up with books because their education taught them nothing except to read and write and talk, girls who worry if somebody else takes a dress of theirs, people moving in a cloud of half-developed theories, activists or quietists, but people not yet capable of peace. They are attracted by poverty but cannot persevere. They think too much in terms of conflict – with parents, with teachers, with bosses, with the police. They are not drug-users, but nearly all of them will have used drugs at one time or another, because their civilisation, legally or illegally, peddles drugs to them for a profit. They have eaten the poisoned fruit of materialism from the time they began to see and speak. Only God can cure them. I can’t. But I believe He will, if He wants to. He does in fact quite often do so. The one thing they have to learn to be well is a genuine love for one another.

*

God have mercy on us – the middle class, the drug-users, the workers, the non-workers, nga mokai, the fatherless, and nga raukore, the ones who are like trees who have their leaves and branches stripped away. I see no solution for myself but to go on walking on the track where He has put my feet. May He give light to all of us.

*

The least anxious see me perhaps as a friend and fellow-rebel against the rigidities that come from fear. But is a man sitting by a hole in the wall really a rebel? I doubt it. It is my job to believe in God and man, whatever the failures may be – in God because He is God, and in man because God made him and holds him in his hands.

I sympathise with fear. I have many radical fears myself, deep as a pit, heavy as a ton of lead. Still, my job is to move against fear, to put my trust in the human potential for love, for honesty, for generosity, for cooperation. My one enemy is despair. Despair is the one wholly useless situation.

The ones who come to me are neither better nor worse than myself. They have the same human material inside themselves to build on. The trap would be to suppose I could make their decisions for them. One has to have an infinite respect for the power of choice. Without it, neither faults nor love are possible. By loving them, I have to lead them into loving one another. Usually it has already begun. If I died today, God would provide for them just as well, page 281 without me. But while I am here, he uses me as a kind of shelter for them, as the Maori rafters in their meeting houses meant for them the ribs and embracing arms of an ancestor figure.

Ah well – it does make a certain peculiar sense. But it can be damned uncomfortable. When I feel myself walking on hot coals, my temptation is to say – ‘To hell with it!’ – and head off for a steady job that would be perhaps a hundred times less uncertain, less demanding. But then I remember that, as far as I know, He wants me to be here. So I have to stay put. When I am no longer needed, He will make it pretty plain.

God have mercy upon us – as we say in the Mass, take away our sins along with our anxieties, and give us peace. Without peace nothing can grow.

*

A woman said to me at Waverley – ‘Mr Baxter, I believe that at your community people sleep together.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘At times some of them do pair off.’

‘How do you reconcile that with a Catholic conscience?’

‘They have free will,’ I said. ‘And I won’t take anyone under seventeen without their parents’ permission. On observation, I’d say the situation in this regard is about five times better than the average in the towns.

She still wanted to hear more.

‘There’s one point,’ I said. ‘We live alongside a pa. We pakehas have an inveterate habit of shoving our noses into other people’s bedrooms. It does no good whatever, but we can’t cure ourselves, it’s too deeply engrained in our conditioning. The Maoris are different. Their life in the pa teaches them how to stay on good terms with their neighbours. Their marriages are often more stable than ours. A Maori boy is ten times more likely than a pakeha boy to marry his girlfriend if she’s pregnant. I think their sexual morals, broadly speaking, are better than ours. But they don’t moralise, and they stay out of situations that they can’t improve. We pakehas are socially far more clumsy. We don’t value freedom enough in our own lives to respect it in the lives of others.’

I doubt if she was happy with this reply. Yet it would square pretty closely with the view of old Thomas Aquinas, that human virtue lies somewhere on a middle road, at the balance point between opposing tendencies. I have never felt that those who lay the primary emphasis on physical chastity, and demand it brusquely of others – whether the others are Christian or non-Christian, deist or agnostic – really have a detached love for those whom they criticise.

These high-powered moralists will ostracise divorcees, put homosexuals into clink, and harry young lovers, without suspecting that half their motivation comes from a dualist belief that sexuality is animality. They page 282 would be quite prepared to smash the boat at Jerusalem because some water does leak in between the boards. When will they start building their own boat? – or if they are already building it, when will they start baling it out? The young always react to them by getting as far away from them as they can.

1971? (644)