Confession to the Lord Christ

Lord Christ, I do not know you. My bones are taking me towards the grave. Soon I will go back to my mother, the earth. Though I do not know you, in my heart I find a small secret hope, hidden like a seed in the winter ground, that at the moment when I die, you will reveal yourself to me – shine upon me, remove by a miracle the sins I cannot remove, and take me into your holy kingdom.

Lord Christ, it is a small hope only. It is a little glowworm underneath the ferns, on the edge of the cemetery. You are like the sun in the noonday sky. You light up the whole universe. I cannot demand salvation. I cannot expect it. If at the hour of my death you say to me – ‘Old liar, old sinner, you wasted whatever I gave you. You are like a pot that has melted into mud. Go into page 563 the darkness where your soul belongs’ – What could I say then, except – ‘Yes, Lord, your judgment is just. I will go where you tell me to go. But – ’.

What is that ‘But’? I think it resembles the voice of a mother speaking for her children. It says quietly and endlessly – ‘But what about nga mokai, the orphans? What about nga raukore, the ones who are like trees that have had their leaves and branches stripped off by the heavy winds of the world? Lord, damnation for this man, by all means – but there was a bargain somewhere, or something like a bargain. As if I said to you – ‘Let my soul and body rot, let me live and die in darkness, but give these ones light, peace, joy, the gardens of Heaven to walk in. I do not know how to say it, Lord Christ. Who can question You? But if that bargain is not kept, I will go into darkness thinking you are unjust. Ella, Warwick, Moth, Clarissa, Norma, Gypsy, Merrilyn, Yancy, Peter, Yvette, Tom, Jeremy, John, Abe, Red Steve, John, Hilary, Jerry, Linda, Colin, Kat, Don, Bernie, Barbara, Ding, Little Steve, Michele, Margaret, Mel, Francie, Ray, Steve, Zeyma, Rosie, Denise, Jo – all these, and all the other ones, and perhaps before the rest, my wife Te Kare. If the tribe of the poor go into Heaven, I have no complaint – the drug-users, the homosexuals, the boobheads, the porangi from the mental hospitals, and in particular the Maori ones who were crushed here on earth like iron between the hammer and the anvil. If my child Manu who had his head busted in the cells, and was filled full of drugs at Lake Alice – if he doesn’t go into Heaven, Lord Christ, then you are not the Lord Christ, for whoever I failed to love, I did love Manu, and put my arms round him when the death sweat was standing out on his body. There was a bargain somewhere – my life for their lives – it cannot mean nothing. . . .’

You understand, my friends, in great ignorance, but in hope, I have staked my life on a certain gamble – that the Lord Christ is a humanist, that he takes account of human pain and love, that he will accept the offer of a mother, even a mother who is full of incorrigible evil, if she offers her life for the lives of her children. This is [. . . ?] – the suffering of the Lord Christ on the Cross gives meaning and value to all human suffering. It is to believe that our suffering is not worthless, not separated from his suffering – because he allows us to be joined to his life and death – that he uses our voluntary suffering, our poor human love, in a redemptive way. It cannot be proved. But if it is not so, we are merely chessmen or draughtsmen on a board that God made. I will know at the Judgment whether it is so or not.

But words have to be entirely honest when we speak about the Lord Christ. It is no good play-acting. So I confess I do not know him. The words of Scripture tell me about him. But my soul is often like a dead man in the grave. He knows me. But I cannot know him except in the measure that he chooses to reveal himself to my knowledge.

My belief is not daylight, but darkness. My soul is like a little chicken inside the egg that has never seen the light of the sun. I have not seen the Lord> page 564 Christ. How then can I believe in him?

Other men may have other ways of belief. There are strong souls, wise good souls, who live in the daylight of Christ and see the whole earth illuminated by his presence. I am not like that. I am spiritually stupid, spiritually blind. And I am also a public sinner.

My people came from the Highlands of Scotland. There they lived in houses dug out of the earth, sometimes very like caves, and walled with slate or with boulders. A man would come in from hunting. The house might be dark. He would say – ‘Are you there, Dugald?’ And his cousin might reply – ‘Yes, I’m here, John’ – and put out his hand in the dark and grip the hand of the one who had come in.

In relation to the Lord Christ, my soul is like that man who came in to a dark house. I say – ‘Are you there?’ And invisibly he grips my hand, and without words he says, ’I’m here.’

Perhaps that is the limit of our actual communication. And it happens by means of nga mokai, nga raukore, the ones who come to me for love and shelter.

I say – ‘Are you there, Kat?’ And my Maori friend replies – ‘Hemi! Yes, I am here.’ And through the soul of Kat, the Lord Christ touches my soul. Very simply. In a very primitive fashion. You see, I am still thinking as a humanist. Man carries God to me. Human love is all I actually know of the Divine love.

So I said to one of your number – ‘If you love people, you will find God.’

And later she told me she had found God. I think it may have been through loving people.

But the Lord Christ is not just this loving, invisible friend hidden in the hearts of the friends I know. He is also my Judge and Creator. I cannot say I know him. He is the one who is. I am the one who is not. Who can know the maker of the night sky? Who can penetrate the judgment of the one who knows all beings better than they know themselves?

So I come to him in that dark house, suitable for me, a blind man, a sinner – and I put my hands between his hands as the clansmen or the Maori tribesmen used to put their hands between the hands of a chief.

Then I say – ‘Lord, I am your man.’ I want to say – ‘Look after me.’ But that is his business, not mine. ‘I am your man’ makes no demand. It is just an assertion of a chosen relationship.

It meant – if the chief were in battle, the tribesman had to defend the chief ’s body with his own body – he had to die before the chief died. The tribesman was not transported out of himself, not turned wholly into another man. He might steal. He might get drunk. He might sleep with another man’s wife. And the chief might rightly rebuke him for doing this. But still the basic bond remained. I translate it – ‘Lord, I am your man. I want to live and die in your company. Not for salvation. Not for any gift. But because I know you are the chief.’

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I cannot change myself. A resolution made today may be broken tomorrow. What I think today I may forget tomorrow. Cold feet, rejection by a friend – these things touch me as the wind touches the water and shakes it into waves. I do not know myself. But Christ knows me. I do not know his judgment on me. At times, being human, I fear it – because he is the Holy One before whom all men are nothing. And this man is a sinner.

I come to him in Communion and say to him – ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.’

The leper, the amputee, a dead man in his grave – these are the images that show my soul to me. He can heal the leper, he can give the amputee new limbs, he can raise the dead. Does he do so? I think he does.

But shame often fills my heart. It is not easy to live in the presence – however hidden it may be – of the Holy One, the one of whom we say truthfully – ‘Jesus is Yahweh’ – ‘The Lord Christ is God.’

I think of Rua, the Maori prophet, who had six wives and called himself the younger brother of Christ. Perhaps I have had six wives – it is hard to know the meaning of one’s life – certainly I have loved more women in my life than the Law of Moses commonly allowed, or the monogamous edict of the Lord Christ himself.

Is Rua in Heaven? I do not know. If human love carries weight with God, it is likely. Rua certainly loved his people.

What about his claim to be the younger brother of Christ? I think it was a true claim. The Lord Christ is the tuakana, the elder brother. We are all teina, younger brothers – or younger sisters. He became our brother by the Incarnation. He became our relative.

Then the Lord Christ, our chief, is also our elder brother. May he, who knows all hearts, judge mercifully, the intentions we cannot ourselves fathom. I put my life in his hands. May he have mercy on us all.

This may seem a strange Confession of faith. I could put it in more formal terms –

You alone are the Holy One
You alone are Lord,
You alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, in the glory of God the
Father. . .

I believe that that is true. But I confess the unique strength and power and love and beauty of the Lord Christ brings a great awe into my heart. The presence of Christ convinces me I am a sinner. I am not aware that he has actually taken away my sins. The evidence of my life seems to be otherwise. I know that he does offer me constant help and that I use it poorly. The longer I stand in his presence, the more convinced I am that I am a sinner. I am not convinced that I am certain to enter Heaven.

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Yet the Lord Christ gives a definite meaning to what I do and what happens to me. Underneath the surface of life, Christ says a different thing to each man – a touch, a pressure, a movement of command. What he says to me is – ‘I cannot use you as an altar vessel. You are not made of gold. You are not pure or wise or prudent or just. Go and be a seed kumara.’

I interpret what he tells me in this way. When the seed kumara has been planted, the young kumaras grows out of him. The one thing he has to be is poor. If he is wrapped in cellophane, the water and the soil cannot reach him. He has to be bare and poor. Then the young kumaras grow from him. They become hard and red and strong.

When the time comes for the feast, for the hangi, they dig up the kumaras with a spade. And the young kumaras are firm and good for eating.

But the old kumara is rotten and pulpy. He has a fringe of mildew round his neck – like this grey beard. His life has gone from him. He is useless for eating. They throw him away across the fence into the brambles.

I think that is my destiny. I have been close to certain people – to nga mokai, to nga raukore – closer than it is the usual fate of people to be to one another – it has seemed as close at times as the mother is to the child she carries in her womb. Their thoughts have been my thoughts, their pain my pain, their blood my blood. I have held them in my arms and stroked their foreheads while they sweated the drugs out. They have opened their deepest fears and hopes to me. Some have called me Father. Some have even called me Mother. Some have slept beside me when they were lonely. I cannot separate my life from theirs.

It seems I have given them the marrow of my bones to eat. Sometimes they might be a bit greedy and careless. They might eat more of my life than they need to eat. But who am I to worry too much about that? I am where I am meant to be. I am doing what I am meant to do. It is not my job to reject anyone.

Health, reputation, intelligence, perhaps even virtue – the old rotten seed kumara loses the fibre of his soul and body. He knows it is happening. What then?

When he is thrown into the brambles, does the Lord Christ pick him up and give him another life in Heaven? I don’t know. It was never part of the bargain. Perhaps in doing what he is meant to do – because he does it so clumsily, so poorly, compelled only by primitive love – he may lose his soul. I have an honest doubt in this matter. What pierces the centre of my soul is an undiscriminating love for nga mokai. If this is holy love, it will bring me somehow to God. If it is not, I suppose it will damn me.

Still, I desire to see the face of that great warrior who walked on the waters of Galilee and died on the Cross. It would be light after darkness, spring after winter, health after sickness, good kai after long hunger. What could I say to him?

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‘E Ariki, taku ngakau ki a koe’ – ‘Lord, my heart belongs to you.’ Perhaps he will make room for me in the Maori Heaven – where the warriors and the kuias and the strong chiefs and the tamariki who died young have gone already.

Te Kooti and Te Whiti and Rua and Ratana may take me in, men with many sins who loved their people – the people I also love. They said: ‘The man on whom the maramatanga shines has to be the doorstep of the people.’

Te Kooti, womaniser and founder of the Ringatu church, was crushed by a cart. Some have said that Ratana died drunk. To be a doorstep. This old pakeha doorstep is nearly worn through. He knows only that God made him, and that his body will go into the ground, and his soul to God to be judged. And the judgment has to be left to God. No man can make it.

When you go into a wharepuni, the meetinghouse on the marae, you are going inside the body of the ancestor. The barge boards that slope above the door are his arms. His head is at the centre of the ridge. The rafters are his ribs.

In the same way, I think, the Lord Christ contains us within himself as members of his Mystical Body. Therefore to say that the love of man and the love of God are one may not be mistaken.

We have to be like him. We have to contain the lives of others in our own life. All I have learnt would amount to this – A man’s body and soul are meant to shelter, to protect, to contain others. It is a curious destiny. What it leads to, I cannot tell. Except that since we die anyway, it is best to die used up by living and an effort to love well.

Lord Christ, I don’t know you. But I know that you know me. I have forgotten how to pray, or how to make rules or keep them. I put my life and my death and my virtues and my sins into your hands, which are like the hands of the sky or the hands of the sea.

Do not forget the creature to whom you gave a body and a soul. Mary, help of the helpless, pray for us.

Christ will have to create in me the power to know Christ.

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