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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Jerusalem Daybook

Jerusalem Daybook

A Note to Tim [Dyce]

You said we needed a theology of communality. Very likely you are right. At the time you were trying to cope with the problem of explaining to people in the Visible Church, or to others who saw no reason to change from a non-communal style of living, just why change might be necessary, if not for them, then for their children. Yet I doubt if I am the man to make explicit the science of loving well that is implicit as possibility in even the most fragmentary and haphazard community.

It is one thing to have ideas. It is another thing to change one’s style of life. When Nebuchadnezzar grew talons and ate grass with the beasts of the field, it was an affliction and a portent. The practice of visible poverty is the same page 295 kind of thing. Communities cannot be founded without a spirit of poverty, that is, a spirit of detachment that expresses itself in the sharing of material and mental possessions. The core of it lies somewhere in the Eucharist. I remember thinking, as I saw the Host raised in the early morning in the Cistercian monastery chapel at Kopua – ‘Yes, we have to become the Bread and the Wine. We have to let ourselves be eaten by our neighbours.’ Yet to demand a total visible poverty would be unjust. Let each one choose under God in what degree that person can practise poverty. The one essential thing is to accept the principle of sharing and so avoid all property quarrels.

It is the same with regard to the physical expression of group love. Some find it easy to embrace. Some find it difficult. Undoubtedly it is our experience that the physical expression of love within a group, by touching, by embracing, by the sharing of kai or drink or cigarettes, promotes peace and trust, diminishes the sexual tensions that rise from loneliness, and can on occasion heal the mentally disturbed. Yet here too, detachment has to be learnt. One has to be clear about one’s own motivation. Rather solemnly, some echo of St Paul comes to my mind, telling me that the freedom of the Spirit should not be made the cloak of licence. It is a delicate area to walk in. One’s own need for love should never have first place. Otherwise there is a constant danger that Eros the horse will buck off the rider Agape. Here too each member of a community must be free to move gently and learn by mistakes.

A theology of the Holy Spirit is what we need. When we discover the communal Christ, he does become our teacher. But since he teaches us by love far more than by explicit knowledge, I doubt if we can usurp his function, and instruct others in the science of loving, except indeed by loving them as he has loved us. In this daybook I offer only a bundle of anecdotes, intuitions and conjectures – points where the shell of my own egocentricity has been broken through by the occasions of communal life. These points may be felt as wounds. But wounds are necessary.

A certain man decided that life was too hard for him to bear. He did not commit suicide. Instead be bought a large corrugated iron tank, and furnished it simply with the necessities of life – a bed to sleep on, books to read, food to eat, electric light and heating, and even a large crucifix hung on the wall to remind him of God and help him to pray. There he lived a blameless life without interruption from the world. But there was one great hardship.

Morning and evening, without fail, volleys of bullets would rip through the walls of his tank. He learnt to lie on the floor to avoid being shot. Nevertheless, he did at times sustain wounds, and the iron walls were pierced with many holes that let in the wind and the daylight, and some water when the weather was bad. He plugged up the holes. He cursed the unknown marksman. But the police, when he appealed to them, were unhelpful, and there was little he could do about it on his own.

By degrees he began to use the bullet holes for a positive purpose. He page 296 would gaze out through one hole or another, and watch the people passing, the children flying kites, the lovers making love, the clouds in the sky, the wind in the trees, and the birds that came to feed on heads of grass. He would forget himself in observing these things.

The day came when the tank rusted and finally fell to pieces. He walked out of it with little regret. There was a man with a gun standing outside.

‘I suppose you will kill me now,’ said the man who had come out of the tank. ‘But before you do it, I would like to know one thing. Why have you been persecuting me? Why are you my enemy, when I have never done you any harm?’

The other man laid the gun down and smiled at him. ‘I am not your enemy,’ he said. And the man who had come out of the tank saw that there were scars on the other man’s hands and feet, and these scars were shining like the sun.

The Daybook

There are two dreams I had long before I came to Jerusalem. In the first dream I am an engineer in the engine room of a ship. The ship is moored in a northern estuary. Her crew are wild men, Maori and pakeha. My wife Te Kare visits us. She feels uncertain of the rough milieu. But there is a sense of vitality in the air, and the engines keep on drumming.

When I sit in the kitchen of the wharepuni, in the early hours of the morning, with sore eyes from lack of sufficient sleep, I am in the engine room. Not the captain. Just the engineer. It is my job to watch the engines and keep them oiled. I do not know where the ship will go to. Perhaps I will never know.

In the other dream I am walking down a bare path beside a church. It is the barest place in the world. A sense of endless grief and waiting permeates the dream. One or two flowers grow on worn heaps of masonry. The path leads into an absolute solitude.

The hermit dream also fulfils itself. Between the engine room and the solitary path, my life uncurls like rope let free from a lifesaver’s drum. That’s the way one lives. I live among nga mokai. But I think I may die without company. All our fables blow away like smoke before we come to God.

*

Commune or community. Communes are the work of Mao Tse Tung. I don’t rubbish them. No doubt they have their own vitality. But the works of Caesar are sub-personal.

Communities are seeds planted by Te Wairua Tapu. In a community, I becomes Us. God becomes Us to share our destitution. When I becomes Us, we are joined to God in a hidden fashion, and persons are more themselves, not less themselves. Therefore I prefer to say community, not commune.

page 297

Community life turns some people into misanthropes. They come to Jerusalem with the hopeful expectation that here at least they will find a garden of harmony and love. They find themselves confronted, without insulation, by themselves and their fellows, no doubt prepared to love, but radically clumsy, weak, discordant. If one can bear the pain of that truth, it is possible, I think, for the first time to begin to love. But it asks a patience God has to provide us with. Without God I would myself be a misanthrope.

The example of Te Ariki is cheering. He did not despair of his friends, faulty as they were. He thought them worth dying for. And since Te Ariki is God Himself, none of us need ever feel that God despairs of man.

I think my friends are worth dying for. It is rather myself I might despair of, since I know my own impenetrable darkness and weakness. But in that matter I am obliged to accept the verdict of Te Ariki, who thought otherwise of all of us, and continue on whatever road he opens in front of me, or stand still if he shows me no road.

*

The corpses of Hamburg. The corpses of Vietnam. By a massive displacement of conscience we do not have to carry the weight of them. We antipodeans are an innocent people. Yet I think our peculiar absence of guilt may be a heavier burden to carry than the guilt itself.

There are those other corpses that lie under our fat green fields. The corpses of the Land Wars. The three hundred fighting men of Tuwharetoa faced the cannon with muskets at Te Ngutu o Te Manu with the same legendary death nimbus as the Spartans at Thermopylae. Te Whiti said to one of them, touching his face where it had been half shot away – ‘You have been singed already. Do you want to be burned entirely?’

Our forgetting is too like amnesia. I think the god of death takes charge of us in spite of our innocence. We are unable wholly to opt out of history. By a process like osmosis, like the seeping of water through gravel, the calamities in which we have not participated reach into our dreams. Those peaceful New Zealand towns, centred upon a Post Office, a grocer’s store, a petrol station and a War Memorial, are strange places to sleep in, if you stretch out on a bench in your oilskin, before the dawn shows itself above the scrub hills like a terrible unhealed wound. Nowhere have I felt more strongly the atmosphere of the graveyard. The dead move in their concrete cabins. They want us to weep a little, to let them know that we know they have died.

Suffering can be creative if it finds a voice. But our innocence denies us the privilege of religious suffering. The sterile plastic flower on the tombstone slab signifies an anguish blocked off from self-understanding. The young ones feel it too, though they do not know its origin. Their poems are full of graveyard symbols. Perhaps their demonstrations and protests are an effort page 298 to regain communal sanity, to take on their backs the guilt of history which their elders have tried to bury beyond reach of the spade.

*

I know by experience that to talk about the formative or destructive areas of sexual love, from one’s own experience, is to invite immediate martyrdom at the hands of the Jansenists, if the Calvinists have not ripped out one’s liver first. I do not wish to scandalise anybody. Yet I found one flicker of light on what is otherwise a very dark road when I visited the Maori prophet at Taumarunui. I asked him about his gift of healing.

‘It comes from the aroha,’ he said.

Then I mentioned that from time to time I had had certain difficulties with women.

‘That comes from the aroha also,’ he said. Then he closed his mouth as if to indicate that no further comment should be made.

I should make none either. Yet I would like one day to write a modern version of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the man beat-up by the roadside was not a man but a woman. Half the priests I know would have a simple solution to the Samaritan’s dilemma. He should ring the ambulance and take to his heels smartly, for fear of an occasion of sin. The other half go round as I do, waiting for a bludgeon on the back of the head from somebody who thinks they are trying to corrupt people.

Meanwhile the wicked world goes on healing the wicked world. Women who think they have ceased to be Christian shack up with dying alcoholics and wash their piles with warm water. Men who think the same extricate the head of their neighbour’s wife from the gas oven and find they have a new woman to look after and another mark on the crime sheet. I can hardly claim to know the answers. But I dare to hope sometimes for a theology of sexuality that does justice to the human situation.

*

In the course of the community’s existence three persons have had to go from here to the mental hospital. It’s not a bad record, considering the fact that at least fifteen hundred people have passed through the community, and some who were well out of their skulls when they arrived were able to recover.

But Wehe has her own opinion about it. She said – ‘It’s because you people don’t keep the houses clean enough. The people who were there before you were always clean.’

She is not referring to matters of hygiene. She believes that lapses from the Maori code of living disturb our relationship to the dead who are buried in the graveyard alongside the wharepuni. I am inclined to agree with her.

page 299

Sister Boniface, the Mother Superior of the Order to which the local Sisters belong, takes another view. We have vacated the nuns’ cottage, lent to me by Sister Boniface for the rehabilitation of drug users. She writes to me in reply to a discursive but necessary letter I had written to her. She tells me that deviations from an accepted social code do not make her dubious, but breaches of the Divine Law are another matter.

I gather that she is referring to the likelihood that some of nga mokai may sleep together. Sister Boniface is an honest woman. I trust I am equally honest. It is not possible for us to carry out her prescription for virtue. A surprising number of nga mokai do, for one reason or another, adopt a life of celibacy. The fear of the pains of emotional involvement is probably the strongest reason. But I could never make celibacy a condition of community membership. It would have to be a democratic decision, since the community is not an institution but a voluntary assemblage. The issue is one of freedom. Even if my views were identical with those of Sister Boniface, I would have no right to enforce them on my fellow adults.

The main problem, however, is that Sister Boniface and I interpret differently the Church’s theology of sexuality. I cannot accept a theology that equates the situation of some visiting motorbike boy who follows a girl round, saying – ‘I want a fuck’ – with the situation of a couple who pair off with any degree of mutual tenderness and responsibility. In my interpretation, the same objective act may be sinful in one case, less sinful in another case, or even not sinful at all, according to motivation. I am gambling on the assumption that no human love, if it implies, however dimly, the Love of the Many, is separated at its root from the love which is Christ given to us to love one another with. Sister and I cannot both be right. The Judgment Day will give us our answer. Meanwhile I suspect we must agree to disagree. And I continue to assume, unlike Sister Boniface, that there are many marriages, true though incomplete, which the Church has never blessed or the State ratified.

We are able to follow Wehe’s prescription for a good life. The wharepuni was cleaned today from top to bottom. They even climbed into the roof in their zeal and dislodged several boards in the ceiling. The old ones should be satisfied. In the Maori area, the dead never seem troubled by the love affairs of the living, unless these are smashing up the tribe itself. Probably they look hopefully for the appearance of new shoots on their genealogical tree.

*

A Cast-Iron Programme for Communal Activity, at Jerusalem, in Crash Pads, or in People’s Homes

Feed the hungry;
Give drink to the thirsty;
page 300 Give clothes to those who lack them;
Give hospitality to strangers;
Look after the sick;
Bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when they
come out of jail;
Go to neighbours’ funerals;
Tell other ignorant people what you in your ignorance think you know;
Help the doubtful to clarify their minds and make their own decisions;
Console the sad;
Reprove sinners, but gently, brother, gently;
Forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself;
Put up with difficult people;
Pray for whatever has life, including the spirits of the dead.

Where these things are done Te Wairua Tapu comes to live in our hearts and doctrinal differences and difficulties begin to vanish like the summer snow.

*

People warn me that the community is likely to bust up. Nga mokai may use drugs. They may commit thefts. They may let the dogs worry sheep. They may fall out with the local Maori people who have let us have the use of their land and houses. They may be unable to pay the food bills and the electricity bills.

The ones who warn me want me to be anxious. They want me to ‘take things in hand’, get a set of rules, turf out the least capable or the least cooperative. It is their own anxiety that speaks. They want me to share this anxiety, to be worried along with them.

But where does worry end? When I spent my life worrying, I also spent it drinking grog, to alleviate the anxiety. In the long run all I did was to make a hole in my head.

I live in an uncontrollable universe which is, in a hidden fashion, under the control of God. If he wants the community to survive, then it will survive; if not, then it won’t. The canoe takes water on board every day of the week. Each time I think it will fill up or capsize. But it doesn’t.

Certainly one has to bail. But it has not sunk yet. So rickety, so full of holes, how does it float at all? I think Te Atua is keeping it afloat. All he requires of me is my availability, my limited human response to whatever happens. He doesn’t require my anxiety. And I have noticed that anxiety impairs one’s judgment.

The most anxious critics see me as a threat – but not just me or the Jerusalem community, the whole universe is a threat to them, with its earthquakes, storms, death, sickness, failure, evil, its succession of unpredictable, uncontrollable disasters. If I died tomorrow, their anxiety would remain.

*

page 301

Plucking Geese

The goose they cooked for dinner had a thick black gravy,
The best kai we’ve had, – Sandy kissed my head

As she went past in the crowd at the kitchen counter,
And there was soup as well. Mrs Poutini’s geese

Were plucked by five of us in the middle room this morning,
Packing the feathers into a box

For her to make pillows, – it brought to mind those early
Pictures of Mother Goose flying above the clouds,

Something done well together. I don’t expect
Goose more than once a year, or ever to be

A child again, but the kindness of Te Whaea
Shone among us today. My heart was at peace,

An old man nodding his head and laughing
While the goose down stuck like wool to our coats and jerseys. (CP 495)

*

Before I go inside the broken fence to the graveyard, I speak to those who are inside it – ‘He manuhiri au, ko taku haere e te haere o aroha.’

It is the salutation of the poor man at the gate of the pa, the one who has no credentials. This is the pa of the dead, and I think they do receive me. I kneel on the wet grass, beside the concrete tomb of the kaumatua, the Maori elder who lived in the house before us, and say prayers, both in Maori and in English, praying that the souls of the Maori dead may have light and peace, and asking them to bear with our stupidity and put the coat of their aroha over us.

‘I am a stranger. My coming here is motivated by love.’ The people of the pa may permit my body to be buried in this place. Then, when Te Atua raises our bodies from the dead, I will be able to look for a moment at the faces of those who were bone of my bone and soul of my soul, before entering the fire reserved for those whose love is earthly and not heavenly. At any rate, the graveyard is the place where I erect a necessary tentpole of meditation.

‘Ko te aroha i Te Ariki’ – ‘Where love is, there the Lord is.’ It is so also among the dead. And we cease to fear the death of the body as we slowly page 302 recognise that to love is to die the deaths of all people along with them. Yet I am a timid man, and the three burdens he requires our souls to carry – great pain, great cold, great darkness – do quite often make me afraid. But to ask for it to be otherwise would be to ask not to be a member of the human race.

*

Winter Monologue

One has to die here on earth,
My beard has got the stink of the ground already,

The opossum thuds in the roof like a man dropping bricks,
My belly is content enough

With two cups of tea and two bits of cake
Wehe gave me today as I sat on her doorstep,

But the night comes like a hammer cracking on an anvil
And all nga mokai huddle in the big house,

Playing the guitar, lighting up the little stove,
Not finding fault – one has to die

In order to water the roots of the tree with blood,
Guts, nerves, brains – once I was a word-maker,

Now my bones are buried at Hiruharama,
But the bones talk, brother. They say – ‘Winter burns us like black fire!’

Ah well, soon I will go up the hill
To where the drain and the ditch and the new pipe

Are tangled in the dark – How cold it is!
The plumber has laid on running water

From the spring above the road – water, water,
That has to be added to porridge or coffee

Before we can eat or drink – water is the sign of God,
Common, indispensable, easy to overlook –

page 303

How cold it is! Death will kill the cold
With one last stab, they say, and bring us to the sun-bright fields of Canaan,

But I must stay outside till the last of nga mokai
Straggle in – time then to soak myself in the hot springs of Heaven! (CP 495)

*

Christ is my peace, my terror, my joy, my sorrow, my life, my death, but not my security. Are lovers ‘security’ to one another? I think not.

Who is harsher than this God of ours? Who is harder to love or be loved by? The God they imagine, and pray to very often in the churches, is a God of sugar compared to the terrible One who grips our living entrails, who drives both good and evil from our souls, as if both were enemies, and fills us with anguish and darkness. I would not advise anyone to follow God. God comes like the sandstorm out of the desert, or the avalanche on a mountain village, or tons of black water from the depths of the sea.

You think God might take away your health or your happiness or your sanity, but God will always leave you your morality. Don’t count on it. Remember God told Abraham to kill his son, and made Jeremiah curse his own countrymen, and made Paul wish to be damned so that the same people might be nourished and cherished. It is possible that God drove Luther against the Church and turned Lenin into a revolutionary. God may shatter your morality as you yourself step on a snail alongside your doorstep. What is our morality to be but God?

God turns this man into an old coat and a broken stick. God makes him the nuns’ Devil and a bad smell in the noses of good churchgoing people. It is not a pleasant vocation.

If we claim to love God we have to love our own death. Blessed be God. No god we can create is like God, not even the image we create for our orthodox comfort, out of what God has told us about himself. May God save us from himself. I think he has already done so. He lives our life and dies our death for us and within us.

Christ is the winter sea whitened by whirlwinds. He is also the albatross floating at the centre of endless calm.

*

Why do I go barefoot? Why do I have long hair and a beard? Why do I wear old clothes till they become unwearable? Every time I meet people in the towns they ask me these things. It is not enough to say that appearances don’t matter.

Poverty is the actual answer. All people are required by God to have a spirit of poverty. But God may touch a man here or there – no less a sinner page 304 than his fellows – and say to him –

‘It is your business to be visibly poor – to do without everything you can do without – shoes, a barber, a house of your own, a fire to sit at, a desk to write at, some varieties of food and occasionally all food, the approval of your neighbours, your own certainty of being in the right – but, above all, the sense of comfort. A comfortable servant might begin to serve comfort instead of serving me.’

To be poor is not to become good. Poverty is availability. It is to be that void, that nothing, on which Te Wairua Tapu moved at the beginning of the world, and still does move. I am incapable of being good – my soul is a mass of faults and contradictions – but when I know I am nothing, then through the eye of that needle God can do what he wants to do. It is when I think I am something that my life backfires on me.

*

The woman who said to me, when she came to Hiruharama to drag her daughter away – ‘You think you’re the Thirteenth Apostle’ – may have hit nearer the target than I thought at the time. The actual Thirteenth Apostle is Judas, the one who carried the bag. And I carry dollar notes in my top pocket to pay the community bills for food and waterpipes and electricity and old boards bought at half price from the demolition yard for renovations. It’s all justifiable. The money does not belong to me. It belongs to all of us.

That’s what Judas said to himself. And one day he went out and hanged himself.

There is also the matter of mental poverty. The man called James K. Baxter, who is like a dead body in the ground, swells up and gives off a stink of words. I suppose he does it for money and kudos.

It is absurd to say I am really a poor man while I keep on putting words together. Words set in order are mental possessions. Well, best for me to write my words, and then forget what I have written. Dead leaves do not clog a stream forever. The smoke of rubbish burning can be shifted by the wind.

*

The Moon and the Chestnut Tree

1

The chestnuts that fall on the grass beside the community house
Have for protection a hedgehog bundle of spikes,

Green when young, brown when old, that pierce the naked foot
page 305 And make your fingers bleed when you tug them open

To get at the nut – the nut also can
Put slivers of shell under one’s fingernail,

And all this is appropriate. I tell my Catholic visitors
The chestnut explains to us our own religion

With the nut of love well hidden under spikes of fear
In case we become rash – call it God’s joke perhaps,

I can laugh at it even when the blood runs!
The chestnut, as it happens, can be eaten raw

But many prefer their nuts boiled for an hour or so
And served up with butter spread on the knife blade.

2

If that great boulder on the back of the pa
They call the church is ever to be shifted

It will take a delicate crowbar. Somebody said once,
‘It is time to drive the devil out of the pa,’

And somebody replied, ‘It will take two generations
To make them Christian’ – that boulder blocks the well

The Maoris call Te Whaea – not the blue and white
Lady of our adoration,

But a woman built like a tank (both senses of the word)
Who swears in English at the pakeha truck driver

And says to me, stroking my beard gently,
‘I can’t help feeling sorry for you.’ Up at the wharepuni

She said, looking at new planks, ‘The old ones will be pleased,’
And broke with her heel the spiky chestnut shells.

3

The clear moon in a clear sky
page 306 Offers a kind of peace, after a day of visitors

Who wonder, ‘Will they be able to readjust
After this kind of life?’ – or else,

‘Where do they sleep?’ Tame, Ria, Wehe,
Have taken their worries to Wanganui,

And the nuns are catechising in another place;
The cops are asleep, I hope. So I go barefoot

Along the grass tracks below the church,
That shrine of hard work and cleanliness,

And say to the moon, ‘Mother, remember us,
Heal for us what we cannot bring together,

‘The bright and the dark, the vagrant and the Pharisee,
The pa’s love and the church’s law.’ My feet are very cold. (CP 496)

‘Ki te ingoa o Te Matua, o Te Whaea, o Te Tama, o Te Wairua Tapu’ – The Maori prophet has changed the blessing. When I met him at Taumarunui, he said to me – ‘I do only what I am told to do. If a man changed the blessing, against God’s will, how could he live for another ten minutes.’

To bless in the name of Te Whaea, the Source, as well as in the name of the Trinity, is a bold step, both socially and theologically. There would be reasons for it. Te Whaea is certainly Mother Mary. There is no reason to suppose that the Maori prophet thinks that she is God.

He spreads the coat of his charism over the broken tribes. He heals their arthritis and their insanity. He removes the makutu. If somebody loses a son by drowning, he will tell them from a hundred miles away just where they will find the body, caught in the roots of a willow tree. His coat is over us too, the fatherless ones, Maori and pakeha. Poutini knows that I travelled north to get his blessing. That is why he continues to shelter us, even though some of the local pakeha farmers would not be sorry to see us go.

Without the earth, nothing can grow. Without Te Whaea, our knowledge of Te Ariki remains abstract. She actualises Christ for us, not in the past only, at Bethlehem, but here and now, since God lives solely in the present, a present that includes both past and future. Maori theology is not linear; it deals with the everlasting present. One could say that what we see as present is the back of the fish showing itself above the water.

Te Whaea is the sign of the perfected creation, of the pa in its spiritual essence of group love, and of te hahi Maori, the unborn Maori Church page 307 that has to struggle against the weight of our worship of commerce and technology.

Why did I visit the prophet? Hope would be the reason for my journey. To break the ordinary spiritual deadlock – eyes that are blind yet want to see, ears that are deaf yet want to hear.

That humorous, humble, lion-hearted man, who carries in his soul the weight of the Maori Christ we are so painfully putting to death, said to me – ‘I had very little education.’

‘Thank God for that,’ I replied.

How would he have been able to hear the voice of Ihoa and equally the voice that speaks from the ground, the voice of Te Whaea and Te Morehu, the people, if his brain had been filled with the rubbish of our schoolrooms? Ratana himself did not go beyond the fourth standard.

Te Whiti once said – ‘Don’t send your children to the pakeha schools. They’ll come back and steal the shoes off your feet.’ And they have often fulfilled his prophecy, through the Maori Affairs Department, squeezing the last remnants of land from Te Morehu, as a cloth nearly dry is squeezed in the wringer to get out the last drops of water.

I needed badly to find a spring of water alongside the wharepuni. I had dug for water without success. Remembering his undoubted clairvoyance, I asked him about it.

‘The spring is inside you, not outside you,’ he said. ‘You won’t find any water near the house. The spring you will find is te wairua.’

‘Te wairua Maori?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need to find a tuakana, a Maori man of my own age to stand beside me.’

‘He is here already’

‘Where?’

‘Here in this room.’

I looked round me. The Maori prophet, myself and Peter were the only ones in the room. ‘It can’t be Peter. He is like a son to me. But he’s a pakeha. It must be yourself.’

‘No.’ Then he intimated to me that the tuakana, the elder brother, was Te Ariki himself, the Lord in his Maori aspect. I understood what he meant, yet it left me feeling bereaved. I had wanted to share kai with my tuakana, and lean on him in human friendship. Te Ariki leaves us often to stand on our own two feet.

There was thunder in the air when I came to his house. As I walked back across the paddocks big drops of rain were beginning to fall – ‘He roimata ua, he roimata tangata’ – the sky sheds tears in sympathy with the grief of man.

*

page 308

Empty Bellies

We have no kai except for black coffee,
The sacks and the mud look pretty much the same

On the track to the wharepuni – Up there, though,
Gregg is fixing his motorbike on the front verandah

And in the middle room they sit in chairs
Discussing this or that – ‘Is it exile? Is it a place

Where the love of Te Whaea can join our hearts together?
I don’t know. The winter sun is lying

Low on the hills. Dildo tells us that the new bridge,
A bride in white concrete, has begun to tilt

As the taniwha throws his weight against the piles,
And no road gang will ever get it level, –

The thought pleases me. If we have no kai,
Potatoes, flour, onions, milk powder, soya beans

Will come on the transport tomorrow. The bills can’t be paid
Unless God decides to rain down dollar notes,

And that is precisely why my heart feels clean
As a fish in running water – Poverty, man,

Is a word that skins the lips, the Prior of Taize said,
But when the gut is empty and the house is crowded

With forty visitors, then Te Whaea throws her coat
Over the lot of us, and nobody goes hungry. (CP 498)

*

Three kinds of poverty –
nga pohara: the poor;
nga mokai: the fatherless;
nga raukore: the trees who have had their leaves and branches stripped away.

page 309

All three kinds of poverty are present in the Jerusalem community. In a sense the young people become orphans when their parents are unable to adjust to their motions towards independence. But it is nga raukore, according to the Maori Scripture, to whom God opens the Kingdom of Heaven.

God protects them because they have no other protector. It is them whom our critics urge me to expel from the community – the sick, the unemployable, the habitually vagrant, and all those who are preoccupied with the science of being and not the science of doing. It is the old dispute between Martha and Mary. But I will never take their advice. If nga raukore were pushed out, the blessing of God would go away with them, and the fountain of the community would be blocked up with stones.

*

The County Council are unhappy about our standard of living, our crowded lodgings and the dilapidation of the buildings. How can we exercise the virtue of manuhiritanga, unlimited hospitality to the guest and stranger, and not be crowded quite often? What is wrong with a broken house, if it can keep the rain out?

God pours down mercy on the community. It is apparent when the sick get well, when the dead soul comes to life and appears on the surface of a friend’s face. Yet the County Council do help us. If they had not put pressure on, we would not have built bunks or painted the outside of the wharepuni. The community responds to immediate needs and immediate pressures. Longterm projects seem to be beyond its reach.

Just as well. If we made a plan of action it would be a pakeha plan. It would leave the soul out of account. But the community rests in the lap of the pa. It is the latest child of the pa, Sarah’s child, the one she gave birth to when she was past the age of childbearing.

*

A photograph of Charles de Foucald is beside me. He looks like a Zen Buddhist monk, with his big sandals, his knotted hands, his rough beard and head half bald, his loose robe with a belt below his gut. He lived among tribesmen in Algeria, doing nothing, unaccepted by them, in poverty, weaving a few baskets, if I remember rightly. He wanted to convert them. He had no converts. The day arrived when some of them came and killed him. Now they are pouring into the Church.

And what follows is the beginning of the prayer of this poor failure, this man whose tree had no fruit in his lifetime –

‘Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you. I am ready for all, I accept all.

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‘Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. . . .’

It is the prayer of poverty, of a man who is becoming the void. My friend Charles, pray for me. Ask God to give me the peace of poverty.

This poor man has got a little fruit on his tree. Most of it is doing well, but some has blight. Charles, detachment is the hardest thing. Ask God to give me, from the Heaven of the poor, the holy indifference that does not mind whether it has a splinter in the heel of its foot or not, or whether there is rain or sun, or whether people are friendly or hostile, or whether they do or don’t go into mental hospitals, or do or don’t hang themselves in a borstal cell, as long as God’s will is being done, as long as the door is open to God. Whatever the books may say, the will of God is darkness within darkness. My poor friend Charles, the source of your anguish is not hidden from me. You poor old bugger, let us embrace! We can do nothing. God can do everything. Ask God to give us the peace of God. Amen.

The night sky is full of stars. The stars are made by God. God sustains them in existence by a continual act of creation, from the Now which is God’s only dimension. My soul wants to go into God, into the night sky, and be lost there. It cannot happen yet. One cannot yet be entirely poor. That is where the pain lies.

*

[The Ikons]

Hard, heavy, slow, dark,
Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea

Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later
When the heart has lost its unjust hope

For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket
Over the paddocks of young grass,

So delicate like fronds of maidenhair,
Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them,

Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots,
But they’ll do to add to the soup. It’s a long time now

Since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry,

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Whatever one uses as a bridge
To cross the river that only has one beach,

And even one’s name is a way of saying –
‘The gap inside a coat’ – the darkness I call God,

The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate
The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through

Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand,
Into something else? I go on looking

For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing
Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see. (CP 499)

*

The main problems of the Jerusalem community are not community problems. To put it bluntly, we get along all right. We eat, drink, work, sleep, play the guitar, pay our bills and don’t quarrel. All our main problems come from outside.

It is extremely rare for any drugs to come here. There are logical reasons for this drug shortage in a country otherwise inundated with pills. There is no chemist’s shop at Jerusalem. If there were, the community would hardly last a week. But as it stands, anyone who wanted drugs would have to travel at least thirty-four miles over bad roads to get them. Booze can occasionally be a problem. But it’s not a legal problem, since booze is a legal drug.

If we did have drugs, we wouldn’t be able to pay our food bills. The community would break up. If we did use drugs, the local Maori people would turf us out. They don’t want their kids growing up in a drug culture. Even if the local people took no action, the police would inevitably get to know of it, and they would insist on our disbanding.

These things are obvious enough, but they have to be explained time after time to members of the majority culture. Our main ‘drug problem’ comes from the cast-iron assumption, in the minds of our remoter neighbours, that we will be using drugs.

The same goes for our sexual ethics. Couples do from time to time pair off at Jerusalem. They will pair off anywhere. These unions may nearly all be marriages that lack a public statement of intention. But the imaginary vision of a free love orgy haunts the minds of the members of the majority culture. It is this assumption we have to contend with, not any explosive sex problem of our own.

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At times it seems that one is up against a kind of national paranoia. Jerusalem is ordinary enough. But people have a built-in desire to see it as demonic and extraordinary. Just as Jerusalem haunts their dreams, as a sign of the activity of Satan, so the faces of the local paranoics haunt mine. I would give them a polite welcome. But you can’t change the minds of people who have already filled in the blank cheque for themselves. I do not exactly blame them, except for their assumption that they have a God-given right to interfere violently in the lives of others. There are times when I have traces of paranoia myself.

*

The Holy Neighbours

You will understand, when they approach –
Three nuns, two priests, nine or ten policemen,

And an assorted group of Catholic business men
Along with their wives – you’ll understand I won’t

Be able to say much. Talk is for now, not then.
Regretfully they will remove my trousers

And begin to look for the devil’s mark,
The blocked sweat-gland in my groin

That the doctor dug a tablespoon of muck from
Up in Auckland. The Sisters will turn their eyes away

Repeating the Salve Regina. The housewives will stare in grief
At the horn of Satan, my bifurcated penis

Hanging his head, like a bit of old rope,
Not able any longer to stand up for their daughters, –

The tongs, the whip, the brazier and the iron boot
Will be brought on stage, because pain must be made public

Before it can be given the shape of a true legend,
And the ceremony will start. How otherwise can their crops

Be fertile, their doors be firm, or their prayers be heard?
Give it ten years from now. I have some ditches to dig,

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Some trees to plant, some problems to unravel,
Before I can say – ‘Thank you, neighbours,

‘Do your job as I have done mine;
I acknowledge your good intention. Your devil is outside you,

‘My devil is nearer to home. Without your gift of pain
How could my freedom be separated from pride?’ (CP 499)

*

I am a coarse man by intention. Perhaps it is a way of safeguarding my particular brand of purity. People may feel hostile or friendly towards a man who seems to be stitched together from old sacks. But they are less likely to idolise him.

This morning I climb down with a sore back from the top bunk in the main bunkroom of the wharepuni. Movement dislodges the gas in my bowels. I bend my knees slightly, point my hand stiffly at the ceiling, and fart four times, very loudly, in rapid succession.

‘I’ve shot four angels,’ I say.

Dildo laughs. The biological and theological joke tickles him. And he is the one who shoots goats for the family pot.

(There it is. I intended to write ‘community’ but my pen wrote ‘family’ – it is probably the more exact word. And a father who cannot plunge into lavatory humour – or, on occasions, sexual humour – will never quite have the unclouded affection of his children. Nga mokai are not my children. I am not their father. Yet I do stand in the shoes left unoccupied by the parents who have been unable, on account of their anxieties, to shift gear, as their children grow up, from the role of authority to the role of friends. These ones don’t want a boss. But they do want a parent who doesn’t reject them as soon as they are independent.)

‘Do you know why I shoot angels?’

‘No,’ says Fred. He is a newcomer. The others already know my jokes and fables. But they are tolerant and prepared to hear a story many times over.

‘The Church Fathers used to say that the Fall of the Angels left room for the human race to go to Heaven. So, if I knock off a few angels it makes more room for human beings up there. I do it on behalf of the human race.’

The joke is against angelism, against the stained-glass religion many of them grew up in and reacted against. They know I believe in God. Some of them go to Mass with me, to pray, or just out of friendship. But they consider my style untypical of Christianity as they have encountered it.

I began shooting angels two years ago, in Auckland. I would go down the street with Bon, herself very much like an angel, with her neat clothes, her page 314 neat rucksack loaded with fruit and dates and kosher food, her brown hair combed neatly on either side of the smooth strong Jewish face. Yet she was a woman of twenty-two as well as an angel. Love rose inside her like an endless fountain.

She was guilty about not hating Erichman. ‘I tried to,’ she said. ‘I used to have his picture on the wall. But then I found out he had a wife and children. And I couldn’t hate him, in spite of what he did to us.’

I think she identified me with Father Abraham, or with some of the long-haired rabbis she had met in her childhood. Her love towards me was a passionate family love. As Maori people sometimes do, she was able to include me in her life by an act of symbolic adoption.

Sometimes on a Friday evening I would visit her solitary flat on the North Shore, and she would light the holy candles for the beginning of the Sabbath, and I would hold her hand and say the only Hebrew words I know – ‘Alleluia! Adonai!’ I am a Jew because Bon is a Jew. I am a Buddhist because my son Hoani is a Buddhist. We do not only understand the essence of a religion other than our own, if we see it through the eyes of those we love, who are members of it. Mystically we do become members of it, without betrayal of any doctrine or principle of our own. That is the meaning of ecumenism. Father Abraham will welcome me when I die, because I love his daughter Bon.

She was that spring of pure water that the prophet saw flowing from under the Temple doorstep. Yet Bon had one little fault, one little bias. She found it very hard to overlook any backsliding, any possible betrayal of love in those whom she loved.

‘You’ll make a tough wife for some poor man,’ I’d say. And she would nod.

So I would shoot angels outside the Auckland Post Office, to make this Jewish angel a little less angelic.

‘I’ve shot an angel, Bon.’

‘You’re a terrible old man.’

‘Do you know what they do, when I do that?’

‘No.’

‘They go to the Father, and they say – “Father, that man down there is shooting our tail-feathers off. What are you going to do about it?” And do you know what he says?’

‘No, Hemi.’

‘He says – “Fuck off! I’ve given that man his freedom.”’

These jokes and fables are a dramatised theology. I think sometimes they cut right to the bone.

*

One thing Te Atua told me, among several I need not mention, when he gripped my soul as the hawk grips the rabbit –

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‘Be te tutua’ – ‘Be a nobody’ – ‘Be that chaos and void on which Te Wairua Tapu can rest.’

And in the same breath – ‘Be aroha’ – ‘Be love among them.’

To be a nobody is not to be a good man. It is to open yourself to the will of Te Atua, even if he chooses to let you die in your sins.

To ‘be aroha’ does not imply the role of an ethical instructor. I leave that vocation to those who are given it. To ‘be aroha’ is simply the movement of the mother hen spreading her wings above the chickens. She may have many lice in her feathers. But the chickens come to her for shelter because they know she will die first before letting them be killed.

*

God lives among us. When we share our kai, it is often like the meal of fish and bread Te Ariki prepared on the lakeshore for his friends. God also dies among us. The faults of the community are like the dogshit on the paths. Each day there is more of it, to be spaded over or spaded under. I contribute to those faults. I am like a dog who drops his dung where others have to walk.

Perhaps I should go away and leave them to God. But how then would my poor soul learn to love – this paralytic, this leper, this groaning idiot I carry inside me? I believe that in his mercy Te Atua does hear the prayers of this imbecile he is trying to teach the alphabet of love to. And he has not given me permission to leave.

*

Love is crucified on the Law until the end of time. The Law is necessary; without the Law there would be no Cross. That is the meaning of the crucifixion of the Son of Man and the continued martyrdom of his Mystical Body. Let us accept the hammer-blows of the Law as he accepted them.

*

[Extract from ‘He Waiata mo taku Tangi’]

What can a man do then
but put on his coat,
say the Hail Holy Queen
and have a long fat shit
on a cloudy morning,
talk with one or two,
eat, walk, meditate,
page 316 and hit the sack again? –

like a crab on the seabed
under the bladder-weed,
not able to shift the pain
of being what he is, –
the avidya of Adam
gripping the wounded reason,
so that even by love
he milks bitter resin!

I drink the blood of Christ
for my daily poison,
from brambles underfoot
that jag into my heel,
from heads of summer grass
that throw me out of Eden,
or the night sweat of a friend
whose dreams go back to prison,

or his mother’s ghost
asking him to die –
‘Haere atu, haere ra’ –
I get him to say –
‘Farewell, go to God!’
But scabbed blood is on his head
after sixteen months
where they crowned him with a club.

When the sweat dries out,
we lie back and smoke –
‘He pai te tikareti’ –
‘The cigarette is good’ –
and if his soul is tossed
from the leather-coated gangs
to clink to bin to clink,
so be it. Now I make

a rollcall of the tribe:
Clarissa, Norma,
who danced at Muller’s Farm
in an old fur coat and jeans,
my flax plait of words
page 317 must gather them in,
the pill and needle heads
who have nothing but their skin, –

while days are puffed like grass
I remember them, –
my son Hoani
who gave me the greenstone
I wear at my neck,
my daughter Hilary
among the night talkers
who has so straight a back –

a thousand and one,
the tribe of nga mokai,
why should I spell it out?
Franciscan Mike, Red Steve
who played the flute so sweetly
on the riverbank last week, –
he’s gone to Sydney
to be a hard gear freak

on the gridiron of King’s Cross, –
Katrina, Zema, Rosie, –
Kat wears my T-shirt, –
Hefo the Islander
who was the boat’s anchor, –
yes, they are the vines
that grow at Hiruharama
and wrap around my bones, –

a thousand and one,
the tribe of nga mokai
who put their fingers
inside my ribcage
like the flame-red flower
of the nasturtium
on the rubbish-heap
below the pa, –

take it from there,
it’s where I’m at,
more like, I’d say,
page 318 the bones of a shot goat
than a proverb-maker, –
I groove on it,
just to feel the wind shove
under my collar. (CP 508)

*

There’s dogshit on the paths around the commune. Too many dogs. Rooter, Trash, and three others, including two pups Clay left with us. I have a loathing for walking with bare feet in dogshit. I rationalise this private phobia by saying it gets into blankets, into food. Hydatids.

When I did a long rave about it, Kat said to me – ‘Why don’t you eat it, Hemi?’

‘Not without salt,’ I said. ‘I’ll eat shit, but only with salt,’

Kat was the voice of the communal conscience, rebuking my hunger for a private cleanliness, a private comfort, a private warmth. She does not like the cop and the irritable mother who are lodged inside me.

I suffer the dogshit. Yesterday I asked Jeff to help me spade it off the paths. He did all the work and I did all the talking. Today there is new dogshit, some of it well trodden down.

I say – ‘Shoot the dogs!’ I swear at them when they come into the houses, bringing each his own load of fleas. It is hardly the attitude of a Franciscan. Yet the prophet Rua kept dogs out of his pa.

When I went into the middle cottage, Tim had Trash sleeping beside him. I said to Trash – ‘You’re under protection, brother.’

Tim looked at the statue of St Francis they had put on two bricks in the corner. ‘The animals come because of him,’ he said.

*

Jeff meets me on the path. He is wearing working boots. He looks at my feet, bare and muddy and red with cold. He say to me – ‘Have my boots, Hemi. You need them. You’re older than I am.’

I put my arms round him. I say – ‘God wants me to go barefoot. Cold feet are a good penance. But he doesn’t want you to go barefoot. You wear your boots.’

He is still uncertain. I think he loves me as he did his dead father. By a miracle, he is still with the Church, and finding out the love religion hidden like a nut inside the spiky husk of a fear religion. But fear is still with him like mental rheumatism. At times it clouds his eye.

He comes to me to open out his fears. These young hawks of the Church page 319 – hawks, not doves, they are born to use their freedom for the sake of others – they are my love and my joy. Slowly, very slowly, they reform this old sinner. But he is a difficult case. Their unrejecting tenderness is the agent of my reformation.

*

The Problem of Keeping Dogs

1

Cold feet, sore teeth, a stupid mind,
The misery gets inside us

Like the grubs that tunnel in wood – easy enough to say,
Down at the church with five others,

‘Clouds and showers, bless the Lord’ –
But even the dogs hunch their backs and grumble,

Waiting for the hydatids inspector
To come and say, ‘Dog, for being a dog

‘I’m going to shoot you!’ That feels better;
I needed to laugh a bit –

Laughter is therapy
Against God’s enmity,

The One we imagine, the homicidal Father
Who wants to see us tidy, tucked up and lobotomised!

2

It’s no good my raving on about it;
The dogs amble into the wharepuni,

Rastus, Trash, Rooter, and the ones who have no names,
Lollop on the beds, drop shit on the verandah,

Shove their noses into the flourbag – well, I don’t like fleas,
And I shout at them, boot their arses,

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And meet the astonished eyes of twenty-five dog-lovers
Saying, ‘What’s wrong with you, Hemi!’

I’m not St Francis; I don’t want to run a dog farm;
I plot against the lives of our animal companions –

Last night I heaved a rock at a cat
That climbed through the broken boards in the cottage,

And shame sits on my back – even to raise my head
To the winter stars, is to hear them saying, ‘What’s wrong with you, Hemi?’

3

Brother Wolf, you will have to accept my apology;
Manwolf I am, as Hopkins put it –

My hair bristles, I have forgotten how to speak,
I wanted to shoot the cop who planted Hoani in clink

On a dud charge – and when my fellow Catholics complain
About the lack of an electric fence

Down the middle of the commune, separating He-
bodies from she-bodies, and me patrolling it

With a loaded shotgun – yes, I do my bun
Inwardly, inwardly! The ugliest sheep-worrier

Is kind compared to me – Pray for me, Brother Wolf,
In your excellent soutane that the Maker gave you,

And if you howl at the stars, man, so do I –
You are warmblooded – Come to my mattress – I accept your fleas!

4

Lorraine has cooked a full pot of porridge
And the sleepers begin to wake in their blanketed bunks

Like air raid shelters – so many faces
And the soul alive in each, that unknown quantity

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I stake my life on – after the bombed-out night
Te Ra is hoisting up grey tons of river fog –

Birds and cats tread the mud, the bell in the steeple
Is clanging me to Mass – Do you think I should pray

For life or death, brother? Neither. One can only offer
Shit, fleas, wet, cold, birds, dogs, pain, love,

Along with the white disc Father Te Awhitu raises,
And share a cigarette on the steps outside,

Warming one’s legs in the sun – When the old kumara
Stops fighting the frozen soil, he does get a blessing. (CP 502)

*

‘Let my head be a fountain of tears, and my eyes two springs of water, so that I can weep both day and night on account of the death wound of the daughter of my people’ –

These words from Jeremiah, the tenderest as well as the most terrible Prophet, have been ringing in my ears, ever since I saw them written up on the wall of a crash pad in Wellington. They have a precise and painful meaning for me.

A girl sits in a chair in a pub near one of the northern universities, half drunk, with a fur coat on. She is waiting for a man to turn up, a man she hasn’t met, any man who will treat her as a human being and not as a garbage disposal unit.

A man does turn up. They go to his flat. But he does not treat her very well. He has his family on his back. He has his exams to pass. He has his records to play and his tabs of LSD to swallow. He has his future career to think about. He is prepared to spend the night with her but he is afraid of getting too involved.

The next night she is sitting again in the pub, her face just a little more like a skull, with eyes that show a curious deadness, yet with pain just under the surface, like the look we see in the eyes of the photographs taken of people in Belsen. She has a dose of syphilis she doesn’t yet know about. She is still waiting for somebody to turn up.

She is a Catholic, but the Mass and the doctrines of the Church don’t mean much to her. She has never seen Christianity practised. She has not seen the hungry fed and the poor given clothes. In her home there was no occasion when a man just out of jail stayed as a guest while he looked round page 322 for a job. The convent training told her chiefly that if she lost her virginity she would become a tenth-rate person. Therefore when she lost her virginity she ceased to go to Mass.

Her daddy has promised her a new car when she gets her degree. There is plenty of money and social prestige in her home. It is her job to add the kudos of education.

If she came to Jerusalem there would be an enormous hullabaloo. The priest and her mother would come up the bad roads in a big car to take her away again. They would claim I was preventing her from getting a higher education. They would feel Jerusalem was a place where she would get in the company of the wrong kind of people.

Yet I would not have dragged her here by the hair. And if she did come, at the very least, she would be among people who would treat her as a human being. She might become celibate. Many do. She might give her fur coat away for another girl to wear, and spend her time cooking food for thirty people and standing on a muddy kitchen floor. And this would be counted as corruption.

In my cowardice, I thank God that such ones rarely come. I am basically a timid man. I doubt my mental capacity to survive the head-on collision with the strongest juggernaut of our times, an affluent respectable Catholic middle class family. I prefer to let them deal with their young as they see fit. But the words of Jeremiah keep on ringing at the back of my mind, like an unanswered telephone.

*

The problem of the students is that many of them are not free. They have not chosen to be where they are or do what they are doing. To love either God or people one must be able to make free choices. What use is a priest who has not freely chosen, from the depths of his own subjectivity, to be a priest? – or a married man who gets married by a shotgun wedding, or a doctor who becomes a doctor because the signposts of affluence and prestige point in that direction?

I am glad to see the hunger for freedom that exists among the young. They want to get free of the web of bad motivation. Frequently their education at home and at school has been an education in cynical self-interest. They have to turn themselves inside out to get free of it.

No doubt they have all the human defects. But what terrifies them most in us, their elders, is the lies we tell them for the sake of a supposed safety. I think their negative intuition is correct. The practice of lying, for whatever reason, leads eventually to a crippled deadness of spirit. By lying, we cease to be able to help them, mistake bogs for solid ground, and lose our own way in the dark.

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For myself, if I am totally honest with nga mokai, I find no difficulties of communication. It is never a one-way process. One has so much to learn from them, so short a time to learn it in – 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.

To love people leads to a broken heart. To love God leads to a dark night. To love God and people together leads to the Crucifixion. Despite various appearances that may seem contrary I believe many of the young ones are capable of enduring broken hearts, dark nights and crucifixions. Their apparent negativism often hides a profound honesty and hair-trigger receptivity.

*

Clear Light, Blue Chair, Purple Haze, Strawberry Alarmclock – the names are magical, and perhaps the effect is too. I am not in favour of chemical solutions to spiritual problems. But one has to recognise that by using LSD the young ones conduct an interior revolution, and try to smash the world their elders have implanted in their heads, without an aggressive outward confrontation with the elders whom they still painfully love though they have ceased to respect or trust them.

Education implants a logical lens in the skull. Whoever looks through the lens can see nothing sacred. The Mass is an event in comparative religion. A Maori tangi is an event in comparative anthropology. Sex is a physical union of parts of the body. Death is a statistical occasion.

LSD smashes this lens. It restores a sacred universe. The river spirit is back in the river. One’s grandfather’s ghost may pay one a visit. God too can return from a hiding-place between the stars. No wonder the students keep on swallowing tabs of LSD!

The practice of poverty and meditation can open the same doors without injuring the body. But who remembers nowadays that such a road exists?

*

I am lying on my back in a pad in Hamilton, listening to the siren voice of the town. Music and comfort and little dolls who rub ointment on my scabies and bring me coffee. My soul is like a drowned man under water. The love of the students leads me into their despair, the despair of the weak, who cannot confront relatives and instructors, and say – ‘Look you are demoralising me. I didn’t ask to be here. I do neither what you want nor what my heart tells me. Let me go out and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Let me start a good crash pad going. At least let me choose my own direction.’

They don’t confront anybody. Instead they have endless discussions. Yet page 324 many of them do love one another. And they love this old man because he loves them. But the agony of their impalement on the stake of an undesired education – accompanied from time to time by syphilis, LSD, and glass-breaking grog parties – is hard for me to bear. It is easy to drift away on a cloud with them.

But God sends me my angel. Tom, who came to me out of the borstal, a Maori and a Mormon. He sits by the wall, cross-legged, his hair a huge black halo, the peace amulet hanging from his neck on a leather cord, his face carved out of gentle rock, like the Love that gave birth to the Law. He refuses many offers of cigarettes. And he says to me – ‘When do we go back to Jerusalem?’

I say – ‘Tomorrow.’

But the next day it is pouring with rain. So I say – ‘We will have a korero.’ And we sit together, the students and Tom and myself, and two Maori girls from the training-college who are separated from their people, and some good things are said.

The next day is fine. We start walking towards Jerusalem. A priest takes us a few miles, and leaves us with some cream buns and cigarettes and a little money at the roadside. I am tired from a month’s lack of sleep. I say to Tom – ‘Are you tired, man?’

‘No.’

‘Do you mind watching while I sleep in the grass.’

He doesn’t mind. My Mormon angel watches for cars while I put down my head on a bed of wet wild mint and fall into chaotic dreams. Then he rouses me – ‘Hemi! There’s a car here!’

We bludge rides to Te Kuiti and walk through the town. A Maori girl whose sister is a friend of Tom’s comes up to us in a milk bar. She has no money. We get her some kai with the money the priest gave us. Already the cloud is lifting. I am back among nga mokai, the tribe God gave me as the instrument of my slow and difficult reformation.

A cop car stops as we go out of Te Kuiti. The young policeman questions us – ‘Where are you two going?’

Somebody has rung the police station to complain that two peculiar characters are walking through town. The police are obliged to investigate.

‘That’s a pretty thing you’ve got there,’ says the young policeman, fingering Tom’s peace amulet. And – ‘What’s this for?’ – he asks, touching a battered flower a student stuck in the lapel of my coat the night before.

‘Just for decoration.’

‘Oh, yes’ – he is mocking, but not too mocking. He tells us to get a move on out of Te Kuiti. The cop car swings round and leaves us. I burst out laughing and begin slapping my knees. Police interviews always seem to affect me in this way. Perhaps it is the uncertainty, whether or not one will be up on an I. and D. charge, for being poor, for having no work, for having long hair.

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But Tom is unable to avoid committing the fourth and most heavy offence. His face tells the whole world that he is a Maori. And various experiences have left him deficient in charitas towards the police. He swears for a while and mentions the time he was beaten up by the cops on the pavement, three houses from his own house.

‘They did it for nothing,’ he says. ‘Just because they felt like doing it.’ The incident seems to have left a deep impression on his mind.

A car of long-hairs picks us up outside Te Kuiti. They bring us all the way to Jerusalem. In the cottage I embrace nga mokai one by one. Some I already know. Some have arrived during my absence. Too many for me to know all their names. But I do know their faces. God gives us faces. We give one another names.

That night I sleep well, on a bed they have made for me at the wharepuni, and hear the opossums cough in the trees. The waters of te wairua Maori begin to rise inside my soul again and give me peace.

Next morning I go down to the pa and have a conversation with Wehe and Toro Poutini. She is the Maori mother of the community. He is the chairman of the Tribal Marae Committee. Because of them we have the use of the land and two houses. We discuss omen dreams and practicalities and the providence of Te Atua. The tribal love transfused into my veins begins to give me strength.

But that day Tom goes away to Auckland. Angels do not have to remain after they have done what God requires them to do.

*

Through a theology of kenosis Buddhist and Catholic stand on the same ground. Kenosis means self-emptying, always with the provision that one hopes to make more room for God and one’s neighbour.

Te Ariki emptied himself by his suffering and docility to the unknown will of Te Matua. Let us not imagine that the Father instructed the Son as the skipper of a coastal boat instructs the engineer. The will of God is rarely explicit. One learns the theology of kenosis not out of a book but by tramping forty miles with sore feet in the rain. It is a different man who takes his coat off at the end of the journey.

The soul has to be wounded as well as the body. Wounds are like fountains in the soul. Through our wounds we achieve availability. Today, on my forty-fifth birthday, I walk on a cold muddy track between the cottages, meditating as usual on his union with our haphazard calamities and butchered by my longing for the apparently impossible harmony which will come at the end of all things. We know it now as a naked seed in the ground. Blessed be God.

Four fantails play around me, fluttering up and down, almost brushing my page 326 feet in their boldness. The fantail is for the Maoris the bird of death. Perhaps they come to tell me I will die soon. The thought provokes no sorrow, only the sense of an expected further emptying.

*

I do not march happily in the student demonstrations against the Vietnam War. I march only out of love for the students. My father lived and died as a militant pacifist. He is undoubtedly one of the best men I have ever known. But I do not concern myself much with the endeavour to educate people in opposition to war. I am concerned about the peace.

A dead peace breeds wars as a dead body breeds maggots. How can we avoid war while we continue to idolise material or mental possessions? A man without detachment sees enemies behind every bush. They are enemies because they might want to take away his possessions.

A spirit of poverty, as Gandhi showed us, removes the contradictions that are written so large in this century in terms of military aggression and military defence. My own answer to the war makers is – ‘Let me nail two boards together, with the help of a friend, and share kai with strangers, while you fight to keep the possessions you should have long since given away. Your quarrels seem to me illogical. If you wish to join me, though, you will be more than welcome.’

I do not intend to quarrel, not even with the war makers.

*

One should not prophesy too readily. Only God knows the future. But what I see in the Jerusalem community is a house half built. The foundations were contributed by the Church and the pa. These foundations may seem at war with one another. Yet the deepest traditions of the Church do not contradict the communal life of Maori people. It is only our Western cultural emphasis that makes it seem so. Bernard and Francis can live at peace with Te Kouti and Te Whiti and Ratana.

The floorboards have been laid down by nga mokai. The floorboards are uneven, yet they are strong enough to walk on. Exuberance, honesty, idealism – these are the positive qualities of nga mokai, and they imply a basic willingness to love and share that outweighs a thousand faults.

I will be interested to see what the walls and the windows and the rafters are like. I hope they are mainly in the Maori style. I hope that tukutuku panels and painted rafters are part of Te Atua’s plan for us. I hope that Te Ariki and Te Whaea will stand in the middle of the house, and look at us with Maori faces. God builds the house. I do not build it. I am its unimportant caretaker. Only God can build with living timber. We build with planks. page 327 God builds with souls, and our own doubtful souls have a place somewhere in that unknowable design.

*

Teresa’s parents have come and taken her away. I am sorry about this. Teresa was a quiet little dark girl of sixteen. She had a convent training. At first her parents gave permission for her to visit Jerusalem. But then they changed their minds. The police had rung them up and advised them to collect her. As far as I can gather, the police had told them four things;

(a) that the people at Jerusalem practise free love;
(b) that the community is a den of thieves;
(c) that we use illegal drugs;
(d) that some of us have venereal disease.

The police are honest in their own way. How did they arrive at these conclusions?

By clairvoyance, I think. They have a crystal ball down there at the police station. Everybody knows that young people, unless they are under rigid control, will spend most of their time exchanging sexual partners. Everybody knows that the Jerusalem community is a crowd of weirdos, no-hopers, dropouts, mad people, crimmos, thieves and junkies. Once a thief always a thief. Once a junkie always a junkie. The crystal ball of the police is called popular opinion. What everybody knows they know also, and believe it implicitly.

After a couple of lads out of the fifteen hundred who have called in at Jerusalem had appeared in the Wanganui Court on charges of shoplifting, a police officer said to me – ‘You teach them a disregard for property. That’s why they do these things.’

I did not quote the words of St Basil, the founder of Western monasticism – ‘Property is theft.’ But I did say – ‘I teach them to share, not to steal. They know quite well that I’m opposed to any theft, because it shows a lack of consideration both for the Jerusalem community and for the way of life of people outside the community. Sharing has to be voluntary. I don’t think any of them really think they have a right to force shopkeepers to share their goods with them. All the ones I’ve met who made theft their way of life seemed to be gripped by a kind of left-handed capitalism.’

He was unable to grasp the distinction.

A girl who was living at Jerusalem, in a state of unofficial marriage, became pregnant and feared she might lose the child. She went in to the Wanganui Hospital. They gave her a number of tests, including tests for V.D. All the tests were negative. But the police found out that the tests had been made, and their crystal ball told them that the tests must inevitably be positive.

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Teresa’s parents were not to know that the police practise clairvoyance. They took their daughter away. My attempts to explain matters were useless. Teresa blew up like a bomb, since she was aware that no harm whatever had come to her at Jerusalem. And her mother expressed the emotional conviction that the only way to solve their problems with their daughter might be to cut all our throats.

One could only be quiet and accept things. Yet I did know what was driving Teresa’s mother up the wall. She was genuinely terrified that her daughter might lose her virginity at Jerusalem. The fear was misdirected. Teresa had already lost her virginity while living under her parents’ roof. At Jerusalem she had shown no desire to acquire a boyfriend. She came here to lick her wounds. The friendship of the group seemed sufficient.

Teresa’s mother was not behaving unnaturally. She had a strong though intensely possessive love for her daughter. It hurt her deeply to see the girl showing a preference for other people. But the possessiveness of this maternal love was alienating Teresa. I think the main problem of Teresa’s family was not – ‘How can the daughter be kept under control? – but – ‘How can the mother avoid going round the bend as her daughter becomes a young adult?’

*

‘You will have bludgers and parasites,’ the critics say to us. But all who come here come with gifts. Bread or sausages perhaps. But equally the invisible gifts – a spirit of courage, a sense of humour, or even a sickness to be healed. And the greatest gift is the person. No person is replaceable.

The bludgers and the parasites are God’s gift to us, our sacred guests, jewels hidden in a ball of mud. Some of them will later on be our personal friends and working companions.

*

The Workers

The house is full of loud-voiced strangers
Who clump in heavy boots. Pick, spade, shovel,

Stand upright in the garden. The drainage pits are dug;
The bramble is chopped down. I hear them playing darts

And talking about the money they’ve earned,
The bosses they’ve fronted, the chicks they’ve screwed,

The beer they’ve drunk. Now, man, we are normal
page 329 Just like the world outside. The skinned goat lying

On the kitchen table does not make nonsense of
St Francis’s hooded statue with a sprig of white flowers

On two bricks on a post at the elbow of the track,
Because men have to eat. Yet today my thoughts are sad.

Jerusalem, where has your treasure gone?
Your gold of poverty, your jewels of peace?

Now we are normal. There will have to be a fistfight
Sooner or later, and a couple of smashed windows,

Idiocy of anger, two kegs in the middle room,
Because the stars, the trees and the night sky

Are the enemies of homo fabricator,
Man the builder. Our critics can rest their minds,

Light a new cigar and watch the telly, and say –
‘Jerusalem is normal. They want what we want. They guard
their purses. They solve their arguments with a punch-up.’ (CP 504)

*

‘Kaore te taima, kaore te moni, kaore nga pukapuka’ – no time, no money, no books. It is an ideal, no doubt. Yet how can nga mokai learn the Maori oral traditions if their noses are continually stuck in pakeha books? The frame of reference is the problem. We each of us have to break our way out of fictitious worlds, and kenosis is the key that our friends smuggle to us from the outside.

The dollar note deadens whatever it touches. Here I carry money in my breast pocket, a dangerous load, but it is for communal use, to pay the food bills. Time is measured by the sun hoisting up the valley fog.

I find it impossible to meditate with a radio voice bulldozing its way through my head. When I lived in their cottage, the nuns suggested to me that I might need a radio to drive away loneliness. But I find that the frame of reference provided by the mass media twists my brain and makes my thinking both confused and shallow. I tell nga mokai that the day they install a TV set in the wharepuni I will take an axe to it.

Even electric light seems to diminish the capacity to think well. I notice Magnus has begun to build himself a platform, high up in the chestnut tree, to sleep on. He objects to the electric light which turns night into an artificial page 330 day. If he succumbs to our collective notion of normality, his schizophrenia may return. I hope it doesn’t. We would be deprived of his wisdom and biting ironic humour.

*

The poor are freer than the rich. In Delhi, when I was there, the poor lived in chambers of the Mogul tombs, raising families, cooking food, behind curtains of sacking. The police did not interfere with them. There were too many. They kept their jails for genuine lawbreakers.

In this country they would all be in jail, or have the Health authorities and the Child Welfare Division on their backs. Here, first of all, the River people had their lands taken from them by a Government that represented the hungry pakeha settlers. Now, in their broken pas, they are plagued by pakeha bureaucrats if the roof leaks or a child has a sore on its leg. Naturally they tend to sympathise with the Jerusalem community. Who is more free, the poor Indian or the potentially wealthy New Zealander?

*

This book resembles more a bucket of water taken from the creek than a logical explanation of a mode of living. It is one thing to propose a philosophy. It is another thing to try to found a tribe. When the Roman slaves escaped from the barracks and the market and the gladiatorial cages, and reformed themselves under Spartacus – or, for that matter, when the broken tribes joined Te Whiti – for many of them the change would be felt not as metanoia, but as a return to a point of origin. One could criticise both movements for their apparent rejection of civilised values. Yet a free man gets back the use of his tongue and his eyes and his hands. What he does then will depend on what he chooses to do. I even dare to think his choices are more likely to be good ones.

Am I another Spartacus? I doubt it. My role is more passive. The community tends to find its own shape, and the opposition is not military. Yet I find in myself an underlying sense of total commitment. One has to judge the tree by its fruits. The tree at Jerusalem is a good tree, and I am glad to become manure to help its roots to grow.

*

Night Clouds

The light-filled wombs of cloud in the night sky
Signify for me the peace of Te Whaea;

page 331

The stars look between them and beyond them,
And when I die I will come to that place,

But now I go up the hill, uncertain
Whether the ones I love, love me or not –

My bare feet slide on the cold mud track,
And I think, ‘Perhaps they don’t need a father,

‘My right place is out here where the stars and the freezing grass
Teach me so plainly that man is less than a shadow –

‘To interrupt them at their music is the folly of an elder
Who has not perceived the young are occupied quite well

‘Without his intervention’ – I go in like a ghost,
Exchange a couple of words while the guitar strums out –

‘The times they are a-changin’ – then go to my sleeping bag
Where this old kumara has to rot slowly –

Night, cold and memory,
Are his instructors, teaching him how to let go of life,

Accepting the dark unknowable breast
Of Te Whaea, the One who bears us and bears with us. (CP 505)

The paths are like rivers of mud. Mud comes into the house on all our boots. The plumber has fitted pipes and the water from the spring a quarter of a mile up the road is running through our taps. The girls are happy. Now they can wash their clothes.

I meet Toro Poutini down at the presbytery and ask him up to have a cup of coffee with us. He declines the coffee, but sits in the kitchen, half on, half off the table, and discusses community matters. I understand very well his problem in finding a place to sit. A Maori does not rest his backside where food is to be served. That would be to mix noa and tapu.

After a while he accepts my chair. One of the boys is swabbing the mud off the floor of the middle room with a mop. Fred comes in and sits on the table where Poutini would not sit. It doesn’t worry me, just as long as I myself never sit on a table in a Maori house. You can’t teach young pakeha townsmen Maori tapu regulations. It is water off a duck’s back.

I introduce them – ‘Fred, this is Mr Poutini, the Head of the Tribal Marae page 332 Committee. Because of him, we have the use of the two houses. Without him, we’d be nowhere.’

Fred takes the point. So do others whom I introduce in the same way.

Poutini does not wish to visit the bunkrooms. I think on the whole he is glad to have us here. But he has always in his mind a fear of discovering something that might oblige him, as virtual ariki of the district, to complain about our style of life. Very wisely, he avoids being what he would call ‘nosy’ – thus we can co-operate in peace.

He would find nothing in the bunkrooms but bunks. There are no couples at the moment. The entire community is celibate. But he is still a prudent man. He doesn’t want to shove his nose into other people’s bedrooms. It is a life-giving prudence bred by a thousand years of communal living. The Maoris rarely try to meddle with what they cannot improve. They know the human limits. We pakehas are socially far more clumsy. We don’t value freedom enough in our lives to respect it in the lives of others.

After an amicable talk we say goodbye to one another on the grass alongside the verandah. Poutini is glad that the water is laid on, that there is a forty-gallon water heating cylinder being installed, that the garden is dug and fenced, that tank-stands are being put up.

‘I think the old ones will be pleased,’ I say. I am echoing the words of Agnes, who visited the house a month ago. The old ones are the dead who lie in the graveyard to the right of the smaller chestnut tree.

Poutini is a farmer. He suggests that the fruit trees, whose branches are laden with trailing beards of grey moss, could be cut back so that they could bear fruit.

‘I like to see progress,’ he says. ‘You are making progress.’ Then – ‘Kia tau te rangimarie’ – ‘May peace be strong among us.’ We have not had a quarrel at Jerusalem in eighteen months. Perhaps Poutini’s blessing is one of the causes.

*

Men out of the clink
come here to share their kai
at Hiruharama
in the coil of the taniwha, –
when mouths are peeled by thirst
they have to get water, –
it is good to see them come,
the burnt and the lame,

but my own soul at length
will lie in the dust
page 333 like a dead cicada, –
God makes a man,
we give him a name,
he goes back into the womb
of the earth and is lost
unless God lifts the stone!

One tooth is left only
at the back of my bottom jar,
there’s kapok in my beard,
my guts are shrunk with fasting
among the Tamatoa,
I don’t get sleep, –
this body falls to bits
like a mattress that gapes open, –

it would be nothing, man,
if the soul burned softly
like a candle that’s lit
in a windowless whare
to give us good dreams,
but if I come to God
it will be by a road
where there’s not even starlight, –

only the voice of rivers,
Rakaia, Rangitata,
Ohau, Clutha,
and now the Wanganui
who washes my body
before its burial,
will say nga karakia
mo Hemi te tutua,

the one who has become
a gap in a wall, –
like holy mothers
who speak for the child
who has lost his breath and voice
under the waterfall, –
and if they hold a tangi
at the wharepuni,

page 334

a river stone will do
well enough to hide
what lacks identity,
the kumara they throw
across the fence to rot
in the middle of the brambles
when the clean red ones are gathered
to cook in the hangi, –

and my wife Te Kare
is the one I give
stone, seed, breath, blood,
because Te Atua
joined us together, –
may she be the bird
on a branch by the river
who sings in joy forever. (Extract from ‘He Waiata mo taku Tangi’, CP 507)

*

I wade into the water above the rapids half a mile down from the pa at Hiruharama. I am wearing no clothes. My body is still thin after a long fast. But I think I am still strong enough to swim through the rapids with my friend Dave, who has done it before.

Nudity can be a problem. Some of the community of which I am a member developed the custom of swimming with no clothes on, at the swimming hole in the river just below the pa. Once or twice I did go in naked myself. That was when the pa people were away on holiday. But when they came back, one or two of us were stupid enough to undress in their presence, on the bank of the river, and plunge in like elephants taking a bath.

It showed a lack of social sensitivity. It gave me a big pain in the arse. And several of the local Maori people – and pakeha farmers as well, who were in the habit of bathing at that hole with their children – objected very strongly.

I called a meeting of the community in the middle room of the wharepuni. There I explained one or two things – that our houses and land are held as a loan from the pa people – that Jerusalem is not a wilderness, but an inhabited area, in fact long inhabited – that the local people had a right to choose how they brought up their children – that Maori people, at least in the Jerusalem area, had long since let go their pre-European way of life, and were particularly sensitive to humiliation by way of the mass media, such as newspaper headlines about their tolerance of ‘naked hippies’ – that, at any rate, the pre-European Maoris had their own rigorous pattern of modesty.

I cited the case of a pre-European chief who married a young wife. While page 335 she lay sleeping he took in several of his friends to admire her. He pulled back the mat that covered her, and showed her to them, naked. She woke up. Her modesty and dignity were affronted. She climbed on a high rock and leapt to her death into the sea, singing a waiata in which she cursed and blamed her husband.

I think this point of view was new to the community. There was an intelligent perceptive discussion about the problem of nude swimming and various other facets of our relationship to the local people. We decided to adopt a compromise solution, already suggested to us by the pa people, of swimming with togs or jeans on at the water hole, and – if we so wished – swimming naked only at the rapids, where our bodies would be too far distant to be clearly visible to a bystander.

It was an instance of the use of the korero, that mind-clearing and problem-solving mode of discussion which is traditional among Maori people. It needs a group to make it work. I think it can solve many problems otherwise insoluble.

I am not the rangatira of the Jerusalem community. Authority is vested in the group itself. I do not tell them what to do, though I may frequently express my own opinion forcibly. But the process of the korero, the group discussion, is open for any of us to initiate. It relaxes tensions. It stops the formation of factions. And quite often real pragmatical wisdom can emerge from it.

A moment ago I was wading into the water. The water is cold and my feet slip on the stones. But then I start swimming breaststroke, out into the river, and the water carries me.

Dave knows where to swim. He tells me to keep clear of the rough water. The current catches up and takes us quickly down past logs and broken branches towards a place of whirlpools where the river turns round and round on itself.

I feel the water boiling and plucking at my body. I associate it with the taniwha, the water dragon, the personified spirit of this area of the river. I ask him to protect us, to extend to us the relation of manuhiritanga, the sacred relation of the host to the guest or stranger.

I would not urinate in the river, or throw cigarette butts into it. That would be to show a lack of love and respect for the taniwha.

The taniwha at Jerusalem has his home beside the bridge that goes over a small tributary. If people build the bridge directly over him, he breaks it down. When he arrives there, the water becomes muddy and discoloured. He is the protector of the people. There are three taniwhas on the river, and he is the good one. There has never been a drowning in his vicinity.

The white trout who swim in the river are his relations. While I have been at Jerusalem, a boy from one of the pa families caught a white trout. There was discussion and upset. The boy had to throw the fish back. His mother said that he had avoided misfortune only because her family was spiritually page 336 related to the taniwha. They belonged to his special clan.

I think the taniwha is an atua, a spirit, a principle in nature and in the human soul. His existence belongs to matewa, the area of dreams and omens and hidden spiritual relationships to the dead and the living and our nonhuman environment. When the jet boat roars up the river to Pipiriki, it is no friend of the taniwha. Its noise deafens him. Its waves drive him into hiding.

At one time the Government were thinking of building a hydroelectric dam on the river. It would have drowned many maraes and graveyards. An old Maori lady expressed her opinion on the matter. ‘If they build the dam,’ she said, ‘the taniwha of the river will destroy it.’

I think she was quite right. I would not expect to see a huge water lizard rise up to push the dam over. But when the sons of the bureaucrats and engineers who built the dam were swallowing countless tabs of LSD, and when their wives and daughters were getting shock treatment in the mental hospitals, it would be precisely the disappearance of the dimension of matewa that would be shrinking their skulls and driving them crazy. Those who turn the world into a desert have to suffer the pains of the desert. The revenge of the taniwha, the desecrated life principle, is invisible but no less potent on that account. If the peace of the soul is lost, what can one do but go mad?

I climb out at the edge of the river, and walk back up the opposite bank. My feet sink in the mud. My body is cool. I say to Dave, ‘Man, you know, this world will do me. When I was a child I loved the world, the one God made, water, air earth, trees, what have you. Then it seemed I had to die outside it, sitting with a box of cigars in front of the TV set and waiting for the undertaker, stuck in a million worries like an old horse in a bog.

‘But, thank God, I’m back in the first world again. It’ll do me, brother. It’s bare as a pig’s arse, but it gives me a sense of peace.

‘All the same, nobody can be a child again. The pain won’t go away. We’re joined to the others, the ones we love. We have to share their troubles and live and die with them.’

Dave puts his arms round me and hugs me to his chest. It is not a sexual embrace. It is an expression of arohanui. Then he says – ‘It seems nobody can help anybody else – on a deep level, that is. But in fact to love is often enough. People get back their hope if they feel you love them.’

This korero produces peace in my soul. Dave is eighteen or nineteen. And I am forty-five. But we seem to have no difficulties in communicating.

We swam down river again from the shingle point. It is a long swim, though the current is with us, and that’s a big help. Again I invoke the protection of the taniwha, along with Te Whaea, the Mother of God. Flocks of thistledown roll over the surface of the river. They always seem just about to get caught in my beard.

As we climb out of the river again, close to the rapids, Alison is dressing herself and Red Steve is playing the flute. It is a strange sight, like Tutanekai, page 337 or the legend of a Greek shepherd. But there among the brambles he was walking, with his back bent, his ribs showing through the skin – the diet in Mount Eden jail does not seem to have fattened him – with an expression of wild, joyful absorption on his face, and this irregular, babbling music flowing from his flute.

I grant my mind is often full of pain for many reasons. But it was good to see Red Steve on the river bank. I knew I was looking, for that moment at least, at the rarest thing in the world. A free man. Freedom is intensely beautiful. It is the purpose for which we were made.

*

If I say that contemporary society is unfree I do not mean simply that one can’t do what one feels like. Communal freedom itself is never absolute. To be free from the commercial and technological and military obsessions of modern society would mean only to enter a gap, a limbo, an area of unrelated personal isolation, if there were not also the freedom to co-operate with and relate to other human beings.

Certainly in contemporary society our personal freedom is absurdly limited. We can be jailed, for example, for swearing in the street or for having no job and no money. But the terrible aspect of our lack of freedom is the fact that we are not free to act communally, when communities are everywhere ceasing to exist, and only a desacralised, depersonalised, centralised Goliath remains to demand our collective obedience.

I do not relish the role of David, in confronting that Goliath, who numbs the soul wherever he touches it. But I find myself curiously, perhaps absurdly, cast in that role. And the five water-worn stones I choose from the river, to put in my sling, are five spiritual aspects of Maori communal life:

arohanui: the Love of the Many;
manuhiritanga: hospitality to the guest and the stranger;
korero: speech that begets peace and understanding;
matewa: the night life of the soul;
mahi: work undertaken from communal love.

I do not know what the outcome of the battle will be. My aim may be poor. But I think my weapons are well chosen.

*

Ko Ihu taku wai;
Ko Ihu taku kai;
Ko Ihu taku mana;
page 338 Ko Ihu taku moni;
Ko Ihu taku aroha;
Ko Ihu taku mate.

This prayer chops through a great deal of the stupidity inside me, as Father Te Awhitu splits a log neatly from end to end with blow after blow of an axe. Since I first made it up in Auckland I have used it constantly. It is the prayer of kenosis:

‘Jesus is my water; Jesus is my food; Jesus is my prestige; Jesus is my money; Jesus is my love; Jesus is my sickness and my death.’

It signifies a blood transfusion. It means that one accepts whatever happens as the gift of Jesus. But in Maori it means more than that. It means what it is.

*

Two alcoholics come to visit us. A man and a woman. They lie in bed and drink sherry. They urinate and wet the mattress. The community members fuss over them like a hen with chickens. They say – ‘We’ll have to take some kai up to the alkies.’

Now their bout is over. They are drying out from the booze on the mattress alongside my own. Since I too am an alcoholic, though a dry one, we converse together without reservations. If God wishes, they will get well; if God doesn’t they will die with wet brains. They love one another very deeply and show great mutual tenderness.

I fall asleep and dream that I have to pay a food bill but have lost the coins in grass and earth – or that I am flying like a giant bird down over Wellington from an old dark ruined house inhabited by vampires – or that a fair-bearded student is accusing me again and again of having raped a girl during her menstrual cycle.

These are the familiar dreams of the alcoholic limbo. I know them as well as I know the back of my hand, and the unlimited sense of guilt and sorrow that comes with them – but I have not dreamt them for many years. These dreams are the gifts the alkies bring with them. ‘Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn’ – they bring me their grief and chaos to share, as my mind opens itself to theirs, the gift of the Cross itself under dark coverings.

Thank God for them and their gift. I had almost forgotten I am an alcoholic. I wake to see the light at the door of the broken cottage, and it is a rich living light, green among the leaves. The alkies have joined me to myself again. Blessed be the wood of the Cross from which our health comes!

*

page 339

When I fasted for twenty-seven days I had some expectation of a spiritual breakthrough. There were other good reasons for fasting but this was one of them. Instead I found myself standing like a blind child in front of God. That may have been a valuable happening. It taught me patience and took away a dark cloud of sadness that had hung over my spirit for more than a year.

People come here with a hunger for peace. But they find a total peace is inaccessible because of the radical human deficiencies – darkness of the intellect, instability of the will, disorder of the passions. This is in itself a discovery. To become Adam in paradise one has to go the long way home, back through the eye of the needle, through the gap at the centre of the soul. It takes a lifetime. What makes the journey bearable is that one travels always in company.

Because God is, we are able to be.

*

Clear serene light from candles they made themselves in cup-shaped moulds. Peace sits on the heart. It reminds me of the Mass for the Dead. Nobody is forbidden to come in the door. The dead come here also, to a smoky room where we talk and eat and play cards.

Taraiwa comes up from the pa and makes a hangi for us. When they shovel off the earth and lift the wet towels, the food is there like a newborn child. We eat it by the light of an outdoor fire and one torch. The pig’ heads and goats’ meat has no toughness left in it.

*

In Praise of the Taniwha

Te Ra is on his throne; the girdle of clouds is lifting –
E koro, you who lie in your nest below the bridge,

In my old coat I wander out to walk on the river bank and praise the world
Te Matua is making,
The ancient One, whose sign is that pure disc in the sky –

E koro, generation by generation you have seen your children come
To open their eyes, small and weak in the whares, amazed at the light,
leaning day by day on the warm breast

Of a Maori mother, then standing, shouting, playing
page 340 On the roads of the pa, under the high green trees, fig or black shelled
walnut,

Always within the circle of your love,
Old uncle, atua, friend, father,

You hidden spirit, dragon of the river –
‘She is like a crocodile,’ the half-grown girl told me, upright, wide-eyed,
herself like a young tree in leaf –

You have seen them sweat, weep, smile; you have seen them go to their
graves –
Now the pa is all but empty, the children are few, one elder is left,

The men are scattered like seeds to look for work in the towns,
Some in the jails or the borstals, some in an office, some cut steel on a
lathe,

Only the graves and the ghosts remain at Hiruharama
And the river that floods from the hills and the gorges, swollen with mud,
carrying down the dead and the green branch!

E koro, my friend Peter was able to catch eels
Beside your home where the water boils under the dragging willows,

Because his heart was pure, because he spoke to you
As a father and a friend, – I too, old one,

Not knowing who I am or where my road is,
I stand on the worn-out bridge and ask you to protect us,

These pakeha hermit crabs who are climbing into the shell of the pa,
Some stupid, some wise, and the Maori souls among us

Who are salt in the porridge, yeast in the new bread –
E koro, our eyes are dark, our pain is great, we are sticks broken to light
a bonfire,

Yet endlessly the water rises in the deep hole under the willows,
Moving, coiling, whirling, at the moment when the world is made,

And your sign is in our heart, – the shape of our lives together is your own
shape, –
page 341 Therefore, great angel, bless us, bring us to Te Whaea, to the Mother of
all men, to the Void and the Beginning, – only the very poor have eyes
to see you. (CP 513)

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