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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Letters to a Priest [first series]

Letters to a Priest [first series]

(1)

Dearest Father,

You know how unsystematic my thinking is. What you will get from me, as a layman’s view of the priest’s vocation, will be at best a few points unstated by others, a few anecdotes and muddled clues. But perhaps the Spirit who rules our souls will make some bricks for others out of my bits of straw. (I have to put the black tom kitten out in the washhouse. He has a bad habit of biting my bare feet. Now he is wailing like a steam whistle. And aerosol has the flies roaring round the room. They are now quiet but not therefore happy. So theological meditations, however unruly, banish nature from our lives.)

I begin with some notes I made just after waking up in a presbytery.

page 80

Notes made at the time on a pastoral dream.

In the dream the ladders and jetties I had built above the river had been broken in the night by the force of it, and all that was left was hanging vertiginous ruins and ice covered by brown slushy snow.

Full of dismay, just beginning to wake up, I said to a priest I love, who was beside me in the dream – ‘I have handled authority wrongly, Father, misusing the virtue of epikeia.’

Instantly he answered – ‘Everybody knows that when one of three personalities is handed over, the Spirit takes charge of that personality. That’s how we know that it is you.’

ME – inner wild me.
ME – conventional me.
ME – choosing and deciding me. To obey the Spirit is to be oneself.

The reddish face and bulky body of a Kiwi football player.
The eyes of suffering, inflamed and lidless, of a man who has kept vigil
over our comatose souls for two thirds of a lifetime.
A love that has gone beyond the bounds of sleep. The mother grieving by
the dying child.
Sympathy is too weak a word for it.
The sword of wisdom that pierces the heart.
No compromise with the dodger in us.
Never an ounce of rejection.
His truth is hard to bear. His love makes it bearable.
And such men have shown me gentleness and respect!
Christ known in Your priests. I kiss Your hands and feet!
(My brain foggy as the ditch of Gehenna, after a twenty hour day, too
many cigarettes, late conversation and four hours’ sleep. These notes
therefore almost totally subconscious.)
In the eyes of the world, failure; in the eyes of the Spirit, success.
On the wall of the presbytery here I read this:
Please use other phone for ringing.
Collect bread from Maypole. Mon-Friday.
Fish from Tony’s on Friday.
The Boy Scouts’ Waste Paper Collection. Monday (wet or fine).
A diary in the office says: ‘Marriages 1969 . . .’

I do not for a moment claim, Father, that any early morning dream of mine constitutes a private revelation. What it does show is one layman’s subconscious view of the priesthood.

Let the priests remember that even the saddest of them – the most page 81 intellectually bankrupt, emotionally decrepit and spiritually mediocre – are still our Christs and fathers, irreplaceable, like the clowns Roualt painted, visible on the inner walls of the disgusting and terrible caves of our hearts where we are alone with ourselves, all-but-atheistic, planning to destroy all love because it hurts too much, yet desiring in the long run nothing except to be loved and delivered. If our priests do not love us, will we dare to believe that God can? A woman might love me because her father had a beard like mine; a friend in the pub might love me because I praised and understood his verses; but a priest with any eye at all will see my leprous destitution, and worse, the rags of vanity with which I try still to hide so obvious a state, even in the Sacrament of Mercy. If he can love this man, I am content to believe God can do it also; it must be God who is doing it through him.

If a priest has a love for his flock – however massive his defects may be otherwise – they will love him in return and devour him with their demands. He will be left eventually a bleached and smiling skeleton like the Curé of Ars. This is to become what you and I, Father, both recognise and fear – at least, I fear it, and I know you recognise it – the bread that is eaten and the wine that is drunk. We become Him. We open our veins for those whom we love to drink; we carve off our finger-joints and toe-joints for them to roast, hoping it won’t be the heart that is needed just yet – when the heart is eaten, one starts praying for a transplant – but knowing that we can’t refuse it if that’s what they need to make them bonny.

A priest who shows even a nuance of contempt for a penitent does more harm than if he visited a hundred brothels.

Let the priests remember they are our Christs. We can love a discouraged Christ; we can forgive an irritable Christ; we can understand a foolish Christ; we can embrace a drunken Christ, or even one who has our own faults of carnality – but it’s very hard to know how to react to an absent Christ, one who has gone away very civilly to discuss his golf score or get married. Marriage is a problem, I know. For the flock it means a certain type of absence.

A sinner who loves is greatly preferable, dear Father, to a saint who loves the liturgy.

A priest who is not in some degree of moral turmoil has not yet identified sufficiently with his flock.

Oh you priests whom I love – fellow beings so terribly touched by the hand of Christ – no better perhaps than I, yet asked to represent Him to us – I know that some of you are tortured by the loneliness and triviality and monotony of presbytery life. I know that some of you sink into that life, and wrap it round yourselves like a cocoon, hoping by a calm routine to avoid the insatiable demands of us who are plague victims, perhaps to avoid being crucified at all. Dear ones, you become Sadducees. You desire to make a comfortable life out of religion. Better to be tortured. Then when we approach you we find you wide awake and shuddering like ourselves.

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And what do you do, dear Pharisee, my brother, so much attached to the perfection of choral singing in your church, when a housewife approaches you and tells you that she must either be sterilised or commit suicide? Do you explain to her from the book that both are mortal sins? Or do you put your arms round her and weep – for her, and for our hideous pattern of society that is driving the most ordinary people insane?

We expect of course your total honesty. If it is accompanied by a strong enough love, we may go away, but will come back to listen again. We do not mind whether or not you are radical in doctrine, as long as your heart is a sun that shines in our direction.

If your chief preoccupation is building a new church edifice, best you should give all the money to the poor and say Mass in the present hovel till it falls down on your head. The poor will come to your funeral. Perhaps some of the rich will repent and give away their goods and come too.

So I begin, dear Father. Tomorrow I will write you another letter. I am tired tonight and find it hard to stay awake. May God guard you.

Arohanui –

Hemi

(2)

Dearest Father,

I tried to write this morning after Mass, but found myself spelling ‘obtain’ as ‘botain’ and so on every second minute. If the nervous system is exhausted, sleep; so I slept till after midday flat out on a mattress. To sleep irregularly was what I learnt, among other things, as a practising drunk. The tom kitten is purring and licking my heels. Soon he will try to eat them. No, he has ascended my trouser leg and is biting my knee instead. Why do I love him? Because he needs me, Father. He is undoubtedly one of my parish. He requires a loving attention vastly more than he requires food. We are like the animals – not in our lusts (though cynics say we are) but in our inexhaustible desire to be loved. Now he is hiding under my beard, alternately purring and yelling, and chews that foliage most passionately. Old Wehe said to me – ‘A black kitten. You’ll be lucky.’ But to write I have to put him down. I do not agree with Pascal that sickness makes man know what he is before God, namely a miserable wretch. At best it is a poor half-truth. No, I am the kitten in His beard, yelling and purring by turns. (Now the convent bell rings midday and I must kneel to recite the Canticle of the Sun and the Angelus.)

Two ‘hippies’ called while I was away. They left this message, along with an unlighted stick of incense stuck in a bottle cork:

A soft hello to you in your beautiful solitude. The whispering breeze may sing of our quest. The stars may shine many times page 83 before our paths cross. Peace. Roger and Anastasia.

They desire only to be permitted to love me.

In myself I resemble the man in Edgar Allen Poe’s story, who was hypnotised at the point of death, and remained alive month by month, held together by that word. When God de-hypnotises me I will fall apart like a year-old corpse. It is only His life that keeps me in existence. And who would want it otherwise. The pact is made and sealed and there is no going back on it.

When I returned to the garden it was loaded with green weeds and thistles, even after ten days. I was sad and worried about this. My property sense had begun to develop! Then I realised that, like everything else, it is God’s business, not mine. I will clean the garden up tomorrow, if I have no visitors, if I am not exhausted, if it doesn’t rain. Weeds or potatoes, the garden belongs to God. So it is with my life. God teaches me by means of the garden. Now I am happy again, a newborn child resting freely at its point of origin, wrapped in God’s overcoat, as Francis knew – wind, sun, stars, fire, earth, water, and the love for which even love is too weak a name. Why be sad even about our sins? Let us give them to God along with everything else. I am too small and stupid a creature to avoid sin; and God does not cease to love me.

Let the young priests not be too discouraged. Rivers of fire are flowing from God’s face. God speaks to us through our calamities. God, not us, is renewing the Church, purging her of triumphalism, simplicism, dualism, Pharisaism, Sadducism, and the chronic coldness of Christian hearts. Let them only love their flocks with a burning love. God will not reject any man who has one spark of charitas inside him; and if it is not there, God will put it there, if we ask for it from the depths of our souls.

The devil of dualism is a subtle devil. In running to avoid him one may stumble into faults of impurity, as I have done, and I do not count it a light matter. Then he shouts – ‘Ah, you see, you’re off the track, man! Get back on the safe road. It may be boring, but it’s better than being pulled to pieces by the sinful flesh!’ He is never the least bit obscene. His trick is to smother charity by making us uptight and prudish with our friends. And when we finally explode into some violent fault, he says, ‘Ah, tut tut, you hadn’t wound yourself up tight enough. Here, use my hand winch for a change.’

I doubt if any young priest in his seminary days can avoid the shadow of dualism. Good friends and directors may mitigate this. But still the Blessed Virgin is ‘spiritual’ and one has to struggle against one’s ‘animal’ impulses. What meaning then do they ascribe to the doctrine of her Assumption? Is it a triumph of the spirit over the flesh? The devil of dualism loves that word, ‘flesh’ – by using it to refer to our physical nature, he shatters half the wisdom of St Paul and creates a huge tribe of half-men and half-women.

A priest once said to me – ‘Jim, I have never in my life committed a fault of page 84 impurity.’ The purity he possessed was not the purity of Pope John; it was the obsessive purity of dualism. He undoubtedly thought that Satan had private parts. I wished silently that he had at least six months of failure in his solitary battle. Then he might have understood his penitents better.

The core of dualism is a refusal to recognise that love plays some part in all sexual impulse and activity, even if the love is wholly muffled and subconscious, like that of a six-months child grabbing for the breast. God’s aim is to purify our loves, not to destroy them. But the dualist fears too much the undeveloped half of himself. He does not see it as a potential element in mature love, but simply as an enemy.

When priests abandon celibacy, it is generally the devil of dualism they are fleeing from. Who can blame them? They had thought it was their vocation to live without love.

I have seen the Catholic Vice Squad in action; and I have seen the results of its ministrations. Boys who think they are likely to be damned on account of their physical reactions to stress and loneliness. Women who can never love their husbands wholeheartedly and live in an agonising psychological vacuum. These casualties come to my doorstep, Father. I put my arms round them and tell them I love them. Sometimes I can lead them by the hand to Mass. More often they will not return to the Church that has tried to dismember them – I mean the Devil’s bold parody, Father, the Church of Fear he labours to create, never wholly successfully. And if some dualist warns me of occasions of sin, I will reply – ‘Yes, brother, yes! I agree. Thank you for relieving me from sentry duty. Here we are. You put your arms round them for a change, as a penance for having driven them half mad; and I will go and sleep and eat and walk and pray and write letters. But remember to hold them tightly. They may have ceased to believe in the possibility of love.’

Sometimes I pray to Maria Goretti to obtain from God the purity I lack. Since she had great charity to the poor boy who assaulted her, she will have mercy on me. But what will the devil of dualism make of her? A plaster figure warning convent girls to keep their legs crossed when they go to dances with boys. I have no clear opinion how Catholic girls should behave with their male friends or fiancés; except that they should sell their cars and give their money away, and give three-quarters of their wardrobe away, and go on foot. Then they would be closer to Christ in His poverty, and their souls shining on the surface of their faces might simultaneously draw their men to them and strike them with awe. I suggest, though, that they should not imitate the Sisters who teach them, too exactly, not even if they intend to be girls who believed that when they had lost their virginities they had no right or purpose to remain in the Church. Priests may be able to get rid of this fetishism. But they will have to shatter the convent decorum a little to do it. The true opposite of dualism is not ‘permissiveness’ but sanity.

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‘Ah, but, Lord!’ – the litany of the middle class; I had forgotten it, Father. They mean they will not cease chasing money and take time off to love one another. They mean they will limit the size of their families in an absurd degree so that the children they have can all go to the university and be bureaucrats or marry bureaucrats. They mean that even the beginning of honesty would shatter their lives. They mean, God help them, that their fears are great. Well, St Paul, St John and W.H. Auden have all said we must love one another or die.

I suggest, Father, that you dredge up from somewhere Herod’s meditation before the Massacre of the Innocents. It occurs in W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being – a dramatic poem about the Incarnation. You could suitably append it to this letter. It gives a bureaucrat’s reasons for being a bureaucrat.

Arohanui –

Hemi

(3)

Dearest Father,

Some valid questions tentatively answered.

(a)

Is the priesthood falling apart?

No; priests are becoming human. It is a delicate procedure to restore people from a state of suspended animation. They may get up suddenly and shout and run away. But any priest who stays with the Church is likely to find his human range of communication vastly increased in the next few years. Most of the laity are glad about this.

(b)

Is it a crime to play golf?

No; in my first letter, in the dream, I recognise Christ the Priest in a Kiwi football player. It only troubles me that our priests come out of the Catholic middle class and go back to minister to the souls of the Catholic middle class without a sideways look. Undoubtedly it is right they should be labouring in that great plague pit of the nation. The hippies and the ‘criminals’ will get to Heaven without going to Mass because they give one another love and food and clothing and shelter and money. They are in Christ’s arms, despite their obvious disorders. But even to drag the middle class into Heaven, along with the station wagon and quarter-acre section and bitching sessions and bank balance and bucket full of contraceptive pills, will ask more love and wisdom of any priest than he will get from the values of the middle class themselves. He will have to stop playing golf for a little and take his holidays in mufti among the unemployed to have the experience of being harassed by good page 86 Catholic cops and insulted and ejected by good Catholic restaurant owners. This will refresh him in the science of the Cross, and if he has ceased to love anybody, he will learn again. But let him stay as quiet as a little mouse, to learn all he can.

(c)

Are the young difficult to handle?

No; only the ‘good’ ones who go into a coma of fear or complacency at puberty and never emerge. But a great many of the young are rebelling in the name of love and truth against the worship of the Dollar Note, Respectability, and the School Certificate Examination, which their elders are teaching them as a substitute religion. Hell rejoices when they succumb. Priests can join their resistance movement and learn rapidly from them. They may also be able to convey some truths as yet unfamiliar to the young – that Christ likes us to be poor, that He frequently behaved in a disconcerting and unrespectable manner, that neither He nor any of His disciples had passed an exam in their life, except perhaps in Scripture (and that orally) and that the young are naturally religious unless throttled by materialism.

(d)

What about purity?

I wish the Church would declare a ten-year truce; no sermons or instruction on purity whatever; and concentrate her whole force on encouragement towards voluntary poverty and works of mercy. She might even get some of the results (less hanging around in the back seats of cars) that she is failing to achieve by her present methods.

(e)

How can a priest put up with authority as it is commonly exercised by immediate or remote superiors in the Church?

There are sedatives; whisky, or pills by medical prescription, which are cheaper. To move strenuously against authority when it seems to hinder human communication may be a help. You may be penalised, but you can hardly be sacked, not if you can produce conscientious reasons that hold water. Join the rebels, man; you will have many friends. But don’t get sidetracked onto stratospheric intellectual issues. Your people need your big heart more than your big head. Never sack yourself from the priesthood, even if you are in a minority of one. Remember Athanasius and push on.

(f)

Do priests actually die of loneliness?

Yes; some do. But the darkest hour of the night is before the dawn.

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(g)

What should priests do with their handbook of moral theology?

They should leave it in the presbytery lavatory for visitors to read. After the usual seminary training, Paul and the Gospels, with a smattering of Karl Rahner, should supply most of their needs.

(h)

What is wrong with our catechetics?

We put the cart before the horse – doctrine, the Sacraments, and works of mercy as a poor third. It should be – works of mercy, the Sacraments, doctrine – all of us will need the Sacraments to give us the strength to go on performing works of mercy, and our doctrine will explain what is already happening.

(i)

Should priests be married?

I doubt it; though I wouldn’t want to prevent anybody who felt he couldn’t live without it. A broad spread of lively female friendships could keep the heart active. The broader the spread, the less the desire for a genital relationship is likely to take charge. How is a priest to love the One and the Many at the same time? Monsignor Knox seemed happy with his maternal country house owners. Nobody can legislate against a priest loving a woman. Even Rahner, in his letter on celibacy, admits it as a formative experience in his own life. But as things stand the flock must have priority.

(j)

What if I am homosexual?

Be a Spartacus, brother. Stick up for your harried and down-trodden tribe.

(k)

What if my Parish Priest is a monster out of the black lagoon?

Love him, man. It will be a subtle revenge. If you can’t manage that, kill him! Remember Pope John in Bulgaria – ten years of impotent palace-pacing; yet the meditation prepared him to be Pope.

(l)

Why be a priest at all?

You’d have to answer that.

(m)

Where does the Mass come into it?

The Mass is already going on in the lives of your people, in their well-hidden experiences of sacrificial love. The Mass you celebrate brings this hidden Mass to the surface. You stand at a key point, between objective page 88 and subjective. If your own love is wholly sacrificial, the pattern will be strengthened a thousandfold.

(n)

Should priests be a separate caste?

No; the separate function is itself communal in meaning. When priests come out of the communal womb of the seminary, let them look for friends among the laity, while retaining a special love for the priestly tribe. Why should priests share their inner life only with other priests? One can be a whole human being without marriage (Our Lord was) but not without friends.

(o)

Where would you go to get a muddled mind clear?

To the Cistercian monastery at Kopua.

(p)

What does the Church need most?

Communities; communities; communities. Let every presbytery become a community with at least ten of the laity helping one another with their ‘problems’ and contributing to the material upkeep of the community if they can. Then the priest won’t have to become a Sadducee worrying about his salary. Put up Army huts if there’s not enough room. And the priest won’t become a Pharisee, because his friends will keep his heart warm and supple.

Father, if they want to dig further into these matters, tell them to come up and see me. Or better, you come, since I have always a longing to see your face.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(4)

Dearest Father,

I have been absorbing vast quantities of material about the Church in America. My brain, that poor old juice-extractor, has turned into grey putty. But that is also partly on account of the weather, which has shifted from hot to cold to hot again with startling rapidity. I lay awake last night with cold feet and knew

(a) that I was mad, clinically so, always had been, always would be;
(b) that my nocturnal erection was wholly painful and undesired;
(c) that my dreams were nearly always infernal rather than paradisiacal;
(d) that my life was a plate of rotten meat;
(e) that some kind of insect more energetic than the flea was taking over my entire body; page 89
(f)that without a modicum of peace human beings can’t survive long.

I prayed that Prayer of Total Supplication I have previously mentioned to you – the total outcry of the child in the dark, which is invariably answered speedily by God our Mother if the need is total. My prayer was –

Holy Spirit, give me Your peace!
Holy Spirit, give me Your peace!
Holy Spirit, come to your child!

And the Holy Spirit, who normally shows me no evidence of His Presence whatever, arrived in less than twenty seconds, producing a gentle tingling sensation which began at the crown of the head and ended at the soles of the feet. And the Spirit alleviated my condition sufficiently for me to sleep.

One does learn from these encounters. Being alcoholic, I am familiar enough with the negative side of them. At regular intervals, usually at night, I have felt that life is actually unendurable. One is alive, yet a dead man in the grave. This would be terrifying to a young man. If he were married, he would think – ‘I’ve married the wrong woman. There she is, showing off, and if I wake her she’ll be damned irritable and think I’m a sex maniac!’ If he were a priest, he would think – ‘I should be married. At any rate, I shouldn’t be a priest!’ Yet the occasions do pass. God induces them or permits them for a definite purpose.

Naturally the Holy Spirit’s maternal response to my outcry cheers me up enormously – chiefly because it removes a feeling of dereliction which is a fairly permanent undercurrent in my life.Ithink to myself – ‘How useless you are! Your life is never really in accordance with the will of the Spirit; or if it is, the Spirit gives you no indication that this is so.’ But a Divine reassurance is water in the desert. It gives me the heart to go on for many miles.

It makes me think well also of the Pentecostals, Catholic or Protestant. In these days of the ‘Second Pentecost’, when the Church is in turmoil and crisis, they are wise to call out aloud to the Comforter.

I went out in the sun this morning, a greyish Lazarus, and stood there like an old man warming my bones, and recited St Francis’s Canticle with sincere feeling.

One could be easily misled by these negative interior crises. As I say, I am used to them, and accept them ordinarily as part of the Crucifixion of the Mystical Body. But we could easily say – ‘This shouldn’t be happening at all. Something must be severely wrong. The Christian life should be joyful and resurrected!’ But ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ are silly words – the Lord Jesus decides these matters, and He does not prevent the Crucifixion of His Mystical Body any more than he prevented His Crucifixion on Skull Hill. The thing to remember is that the crises have a communal value for the whole Tribe, though they may appear wholly solitary.

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It is my prayer that we continually supernaturalise what would on a natural level be intolerable, not just seem intolerable. Nearly all marriages would break up, and nearly all priests cease to be priests, if there were no supernaturalisation. And one’s sins have very little to do with it. He is interested in us, not our sins. You know at least a portion of my deplorable history. One’s sins only make it more obvious that it is not us, but Him acting in us, that saves the day. I was not born to be neo-semi-Pelagian. In that respect, my heart is with Augustine and Luther. Except that Luther did not allow for the natural will. I recognise in myself a supernatural will (God calling to God’s self from the depths of my wretched soul) and a natural will, just perceptive, yet very real, the vehicle that makes itself available, the step over the threshold, the heart stirring itself to act mercifully or to pray.

After I had prayed and been relieved last night, I switched on the light and opened the Scriptures (perhaps superstitiously) and read at random – the passage was the account of Our Lord eating grains of wheat with His disciples on the Sabbath – ‘The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Don’t you know yet that it is mercy, not sacrifice, that finds favour with Me?’ A cheering passage. It coincides with my own preoccupations.

Yet not even the priests say that the Holy Sacrifice should ever come before works of mercy. Our Lord identifies this attitude as Pharisaical. Father Groppi knows that the first thing is to identify with his Negro parishioners and fight their battles alongside them; and he’s fortunate in his Bishop, who commends him, though with a few minor reservations. The liturgy will never renew the Church if we are not abundant and fruitful in mercy to our fellow human beings.

After this Our Lord proceeds to heal the man with the withered arm. He clinches the matter with miraculous intervention. I take that sick man as being a type of myself and the Church at large. We have belief but lack the resurrected joy, the song of the new Adam. It is on the way, Father; it is on the way, if we are bold in our works of mercy and cry out to the Spirit with confidence for deliverance. Not us, but the Spirit; not our works, but the Spirit’s works done in and through us.

I have mentioned Father Groppi. In the next letter I will say what I think on the main problems of the North American Church. They will be our problems soon enough, since we have in microcosm a similar society.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(5)

Dearest Father,

The kitten is also glad of the sun. I think he resembles his master, who is a fair-weather friend of God, bellowing in the darkness, smiling in the day- page 91 light. God forgives this most readily in us, knowing how huge trivial matters seem to us; and we should not forget that God too is a man. The nails of the Cross are trivial in comparison to the eternal daylight of Heaven; but for one not yet in Heaven they are larger than the self; and God knows this in experience, not only in idea. Without the Incarnation and creaturehood I doubt if we could learn to trust God and lean our tired, thick, aching heads on God’s breast.

To bellow is not to murmur. There is a difference. I accuse myself too heavily, as usual. That is a net of one’s own making.

The kitten wanders through the grass after me, wailing, as I say the Rosary. He wants to be played with and petted. A desire more constant than the desire for food. When I pick the green burrs off his furry fat stomach he objects, but not seriously. It is, after all, attention. He leaps and swings on my rosary beads whenever they are in his reach. He is fascinated by the crucifix as a plaything. This is highly appropriate. He lives in the freedom of God.

I say twice to him – ‘You poor wailing melancholy creature!’ He responds with louder wails. He is not actually unhappy, but stridently communicative. I call him ‘Melancholy’ – as if it were his name. This is not a lack of respect for a fellow creature. It is quasi-paternal love. My heart burns when I look at him. But I do not continue to respond to his wails, because I know he will forget his ‘sorrow’ and do something else. He is not at the moment enduring an absolute need.

I would stress that as I am to the kitten, so God is to me and to us. We look for condemnation when there is none. The theology of love can only be learnt by loving. . . . God cherishes us, ‘plays’ with us, through this abundant, astonishing Creation and by the unpredictable gifts showered on our souls. An idle man wandering through a meadow, looking at slate-blue butterflies, laughing to himself and leaping up spiritually like a kitten to touch God’s hand, is more pleasing to God than a world of working human bees, because that man is wandering in the freedom of God’s love.

Our spiritual paranoia turns God into a Pharisee. This delusion is condemned in us simply because it frustrates the loving, free contact with God for which we were born. Equals may condemn equals, though not without paying a heavy cost. But why should the Infinite Father, the Maker of rainbows and mountains, strive to condemn one of the creatures he loves? Our condemnation of others proceeds from fear that our ego will be injured. We can’t injure God, as God; and when he became a man, He proved He preferred being injured to condemning us. All He demanded was that we should crack our paranoia and love Him in return. If we once begin to love Him, He will not let a million sins stand between Him and us. His ‘hatred’ of sin is on our account as much as anything, because sins do obstruct love; but all He wants to do is to remove them and continue the dialogue of love and joy forever.

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He did not command us to love our neighbours in order to lay a burden on our backs – no, He was providing us with a wholly available means of release from the prison of ourselves. Therefore we should forget the tension of solemnity and embrace our fellow beings and laugh with them – laugh on account of the astonishing liberation provided by the Master of the Sabbath, who is not jealous regarding the Sabbath – as if He desired to ‘possess’ the Sabbath – but only jealous of our welfare because He loves us.

How can people learn the extraordinary secret that the Lord Jesus loves them? Only by daring first to love one another. This is not even difficult for us if we can once overcome the fear of loss and rejection, if we love inordinately (not excessively, no love can be excessive – if excess were inordinate the Lord’s infinite love for us would be inordinate, and this is nonsense); moreover, lack of harmony diminishes love. If we love without harmony, without the free intuitive order which is part of love, then we will purify our love, not destroy it, only purify it. This is the meaning of the Parable of the Vine. As Aquinas told us, virtue is the ordering of love

Love has led me away from the discussion of the Church in America. The kitten is wholly to blame for this.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(6)

Dearest Father,

The American priests have a strong lobby to push for a married priesthood; and apparently the number of priests over there who, for one reason or another, simply go and get married is catastrophic – for the Church through loss of priests, for them – and of course they too are the Church – through ostracism and resentment and a sense of failure.

Frankly, as things stand, I think the vow of celibacy should be made optional. Then those who were celibate would have made a much freer sacrifice – and those who married would have a better chance of erecting honourable and stable marriages, while remaining priests. I don’t think the divorce rate is high among the Protestant clergy. Personally, in those circumstances, I would go every time for counsel to a celibate priest, on account of his probable greater objectivity, greater accessibility and greater personal freedom of outlook; but I’m sure many of the laity would take an opposite view. If the Church is finally ‘coming of age’ – and it looks like it, the post-Johannine spiritual universe looks totally different from the post-Tridentine one – then optional celibacy for the priesthood would seem a suitable recognition of a new degree of human freedom within the Church.

Thus I am myself nowadays in favour of this change. Some say we shouldn’t bow to negative happenings – that it’s alright to have optional page 93 celibacy because a marriage is good, but not alright to have it because priests are being spiritually slaughtered – but there too I’d disagree. A wise general will withdraw his troops and shift them on to different ground if too many are being butchered.

Nevertheless the whole question is closely related to the Cross of sex and loneliness which many people, priests or laity, married or single, have to bear. I think I have carried it long enough – from ten to forty-three – to be able to summon up some relevant thoughts on the subject.

If a priest came to me, who was troubled, for reassurance or even counsel – it has happened at times – one question I might ask, after I’d demonstrated fully that I loved and respected and accepted him, might be ‘How often do you masturbate, Jack?’

If he said, ‘Not at all, Jim’, I’d say, ‘Well, glory be to God!’ and pass on to other topics. If he said ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Frequently’, I’d stay on that topic for a while, because his view of the matter might well be haywire.

I remember a young priest, a magnificent social worker, saying to me with big, hurt serious dark eyes – ‘There should be a Masturbators Anonymous, Jim.’ I think he was talking about himself as well as other people. I didn’t dig into the topic further, because we were in public among other people, and because of my strong sense that priests should be handled very gently and with total respect.

Broadly, I think the Church has handled this problem badly. When an adolescent was being crucified on the Cross of sex and loneliness, he would be told he was in a state of mortal sin. When an adult was in the same situation, he would be told, not quite perhaps this, but that he was regressing to adolescence. I think the honest men who talked like this were bound by an almost Manichean system of moral theology, and had misplaced the realities of the situation, leading to muddle and further depression all round. And the Devil scored, by an increase of discouragement.

Traditionally the Church associated our sexual faults – masturbation included – with the Mystery of Our Lord’s scourging. His pure body was damaged to pay for the sins of our impure bodies. I would now associate that Mystery rather with our faults of violence, physical or spiritual, which would of course include sexual violence. I would definitely associate masturbation with the Agony in the Garden.

The disciples slept while He suffered. It is noticeable that He rebuked them very gently. He knew it was a matter of ordinary human weakness. Their hearts were with Him but their natures were divided.

For myself I know the temptation to masturbate is almost identical with the desire for sleep. The inner pain will mount, and then at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. I will think, ‘This is impossible, man, you can’t stay awake all night and suffer like this!’ Yet if I then masturbate, certainly this tension will drop and I may sleep soundly. But I know I have failed – I have failed to share my God’s pain, page 94 to keep awake with Him. If this happened, though – I trust I know Him a fraction better than I used to – I would not anticipate a sharp rebuke from Him – only the gentle – ‘Could you not have stayed awake till dawn with Me, you who say you love Me?’ And I would receive Communion next morning without any notion that I had to go to Confession first. If a priest were unwise enough to shove a book of moral theology under my nose, I would tell him that Augustine got that idea from the Manichees – the idea that the sacred seed was the core of the matter.

My fault would not be the fault of Onan. Onan’s fault was to opt out of the human community by refusing to give his brother’s widow – I think that was her status – a child. He sinned against the tribe, like people nowadays who shove the tribal elders (our pakeha elders) into the ghastly and ‘cheerful’ death-houses we call ‘Old Peoples’ Homes’. He said – ‘I am I; the tribe is none of my business.’

The Cross of sex and loneliness is pretty permanent for the human species. Priests may have it, simply because they are human; the married may have it, accentuated by physical proximity to a spouse. It is particularly distressing for a husband who desires sleep to masturbate without shaking the bed, so as not to rouse his tired wife, and make her in turn humiliated and angry.

In Europe and America I believe men often visit brothels when they feel like this. But then – though the situation is technically ‘natural’ – there is the fault of exploiting the poor women who earn a living in this way – and for a single man it is fornication, for a married man adultery, for a priest an open breach of his vow of celibacy. I think brothels are blasphemous because they are money-based and loveless.

But I fear a priest might think he could climb down from this particular Cross by getting married. I see no reason for this at all. Part of the ordeal of any given marriage may be to hang on the Cross and accept it. It is connected basically with the human impulse of need-love; the love which is a need for love, a wish to be comforted, enfolded, reassured, as a child is at the mother’s breast. When this is strong in a human being, and God does not allow him the comfort he desires, it is fatally easy to rebel.

The disciples slept. That was weakness, not rebellion at all. They loved the Lord, but they could not bear to suffer His pain with Him any longer. Thus indeed they cheated Him of something; the share in His pain that a fuller love might have given. They could have stuck thorns under their eyelids. I have sometimes – I speak in metaphor – done this myself.

If, on the other hand, they had got up and gone away, saying among themselves – ‘This is nonsense! We’re leading an unnatural life, sleeping here on the cold ground while He prays half the night. It’s just not what men were intended for. And moreover it’s humiliating’ – then I fear, Father, their need-love would truly have triumphed over their gift-love.

If a priest were to reply to me – ‘Yes, Jim, I do masturbate quite often. I’m page 95 very unhappy about it. I’m really breaking my vow of celibacy. And there’s a girl I love dearly –’ then, I’d say – ‘Brother, to marry the girl would by no means be a certain release from this problem. The Cross of sex and loneliness is a part of most men’s lives. Personally, if you go and get married – or have the girl as a mistress – you’ll keep my sympathy and the normal respect I offer to others, but you will have broken your vow of celibacy at a time when the Church has decided not to open the gate for people like you. If, on the other hand, you stay as you are, on the Cross, at times awake, at times using a sexual anaesthetic, you’ll have my almost infinite respect. And in my unclouded opinion you’ll be keeping your vow of celibacy.’

This will not be relevant to all, Father. But I know for a fact it will be relevant for some. When they emerge from the seminaries, they are out of their flying saucers – they have to walk on the bare cold ground. May God cherish them.

Arohanui–

Hemi

P.S. I do not see why the celibate priest should not have his share of good and tender female friends. It is possible to love women without sleeping with them. So too if his temperament is homosexual. There’s no such thing as a neuter, though. If the training does neuter priests, it is a bad training and does harm to them and to the Church.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(7)

Dearest Father,

My last letter was probably coarse in texture – but how can one speak otherwise about these matters and say precisely what one thinks? It is dangerous to hover in the stratosphere. So much writing on the subject (sex, I mean) is supernaturalised in the nth degree. A married person cannot recognise his or her squalid yet God-loved henroost when it is hidden behind a towering stack of supernatural potatoes.

I remember I was always too polite when living with my own wife – not that I now live with somebody else’s! We can never communicate on any issue well, least of all sexual wishes, because of excessive politeness. I am sure it was more from my side than from hers. I had been brought up to respect women to the point of madness. Those things are faults of the bourgeoisie.

When writers on religion – and what topic is not religious? – hit a rough patch, they usually get on their supernatural bike and peddle like mad. Thus, in imitation of them, a priest who was abandoning his sentry-post might be unable to tell anybody, if part of his problem was sexual, whether it was page 96 adultery, fornication, homosexual acts, masturbation, or just sheer depression about being celibate – it could be all five, I suppose! – but the famous frankness of the Catholic Church at this point seems to melt away.

Imagine an actual soldier leaving his sentry-post. He is challenged by an officer, bumbles round, clutches himself, makes various explanations, and gets shot because the officer thinks he is deserting in the face of enemy fire. His dying words are – ‘You’ve got it wrong, man! I was only going for a leak.’

The harshness of the Catholic lay population towards the so-called lapsed or lapsing priest is of course proverbial. I myself, though not entirely a timid man, go in some fear of this herd of man-eating pigs. I wrote a roaring satire once about an imaginary episode where I have been caught in flagrante delicto with a Catholic girl –

. . . and her brother had a gun;
Clean and bull-faced from Waiouru, brainwashed by the business State,
Five years at St Anselm’s College trying not to masturbate . . . (Uncollected)

In the landscape of the satire this horror figure was accompanied by a nun and a priest. None of the good people know that the physical relation between the sexes could be occasioned by love. Graham Greene mentions the problem in several of his books.

On the natural level a celibate man is a man whose chief problem is bound to be an effort not to masturbate. (I talk as I would to one of my fellow-drunks, Father.) Masturbation is the sexual aspirin of the weak and the sad, meaning the human race, and should be regarded with warm, brotherly compassion. Yet the voluntary celibate is not necessarily very weak or sad. The analogy of the Army is good enough; he has entered Christ’s army as a Catholic soldier, and has to put up with the problems of barracks life and the danger of being shot at.

If a priest, now celibate, wishes to marry his secretary or one of his parishioners, I would say, ‘O.K., man; if that’s what you actually want, go ahead.’ But I’d suspect that, being human, he might have fallen into the trap of supposing marriage would be a pleasanter state than celibacy. It rarely is; God is just. Knowing both states, I can say both celibates and the married have their moments.

Here I have the freedom to put my arms round a friend, to go to bed without pyjamas – I am free of the essentially matriarchal order of marriage. Men leave their mothers, and have a painful freedom – limbo, perhaps – and then marry women who are essentially like their mothers. I’ve rarely met a woman who didn’t regard her husband subconsciously as her eldest child. It’s a heavy yoke for the man.

A mistress is different. A man can dominate his mistress if he is tough enough. He can come and go without her say-so. Therefore, naturally, page 97 men dream of having mistresses and mistresses dream of becoming wives. Occasionally wives dream of being mistresses, but not if they have ever been in that twilight state.

If a priest marries his mistress – his treasure hidden from the angelic cops, his secret stair to the tower room, his vulnerability and his fiercely-held joy, his single sign that life is not a dish of cold stewed prunes – then he is back in society, married to society indeed, and the cold stewed prunes are sitting there on the plate. I have known good compassionate priests (not many) who had mistresses, but they had in a sense refused both the Cross of celibacy and the Cross of marriage.

In present circumstances, if a priest marries his mistress, he is like a layman who makes a second marriage while the first wife is still alive. He is building a house in a graveyard, and the ghosts will grab at him.

Priest’s mistresses of course will urge their man to marry them. The poor girls want a morally and socially ordered marriage, as far as this is possible; they want children; they want to be free of a submissive role which never really makes women cheerful. But they may find, once married, that they have bought themselves a double cross – a husband, and also a man who has real regrets for his previous state of mobility.

Father dear, I rummage round in the sexual bag, don’t I? It is not sex per se that interests me; it is sex as the key to the subconscious mind. It must be my vocation. Nobody else will say these things. I hate to talk through a hole in my neck. And I know perfectly well that the suffering of the priests I meet is primarily a sexual suffering. The genitals, male or female, are not mere drainpipes, as some theologians would lead us to believe; they are the sign of the soul. Nothing else accounts for the permanent human preoccupation with such matters.

I would like to see some Catholics, though, develop beyond the morality of the nursery. Living close to a convent, I become well acquainted with the nuns’ Devil. He is hairy; he never washes; he swears a lot; and he is sexually aggressive – as you can guess, there is always a danger the good Sisters may mistake me for him – I have to shunt them onto a branch line, talking vaguely of St Joseph, who wore a beard, or St Francis, who probably didn’t wash much. And of course I never swear at them. This is the Cross of courtesy.

The image of the good Catholic boy does indeed at times horrify me. I have met him so often among the cops. His hair is clipped short; he is scrubbed with wire wool; he does not swear, at least in public, and certainly never in front of his wife; and his sexual aggression has transferred itself to crushing peoples’ fingers in doors. This archetypal Fascist hates everybody who is not exactly like himself – or rather, who is not like his ego-ideal. This is because he both loathes and dreads his own bodily functions. Sex is dirt; life itself is dirt; Jews, Negroes, Asians and hippies are dirty people. Contact with them will corrupt his own cleanliness. A mother’s voice echoes for ever in his earhole – ‘If you page 98 touch yourself down there, Kevin, the Devil will come and get you. It’s dirty!’

This poor self-persecuted lad has never heard that love transforms all things – that the saliva of the friend is part of the friend – that women who smell, smell good to men who love them – that one can take an innocent pleasure in defecation, looking at signs of spring from the lavatory door – that God made us, body and soul, and saw that both were good. No, his Heaven is a shining whitewashed jail where the prisoners have all been converted by the wardens to believe their sentences are just. His God is the Super-Cop.

My God, as you know, is the Super-Convict, the sinless sinner. His long hair matted with blood and dirt and other people’s saliva, perhaps unable to control His bowels, who has not held a job for three years but wandered round telling fables and talking theology, Himself certainly immune from sexual faults, but not bitterly conscious of them in others and accustomed Himself to express love by an embrace. He is being executed for not fitting into the nursery morality of the Pharisees.

‘Which of us is right – Kevin the cop or me?’

Indeed I love this Kevin. I wish to deliver him from an excessive fear of himself. But he will interpret my approach as corruptive. If I speak tenderly to him, he will look at me with hard black shining eyes that do not see me but an image of me – the nun’s Devil come to life and trying to beguile him. If I even put my hand on his shoulder, he will interpret this as a homosexual advance. So I have to pretend to see life from his viewpoint, since he is quite incapable of seeing it from mine.

He will tell me he really likes people that other cops beat them up, never him, unless most savagely provoked. He will speak of the need for ambition among the young. He will repeat like a record player whatever misinformation he has been given about drugs. He will speak at length about the advantages of Army training for the young. He will say we have to kill the Chinese before they come over and kill us. He will say he has known several good Maori people, but all Maoris are like children, they don’t grasp the adult pakeha virtues of cleanliness and ambition and hard work.

I would like to help this boy lost in a world not of his making. But what am I do, Father? He would even shoot me some day – say, after a war if we had acquired a fully Fascist Government, and the asymmetrical citizens were being wiped out. That is not really much to fear. We all die. I would of course have some fear, and with it, sadness towards Kevin – ‘Brother, I have always loved you. I wanted to share the human freedom with you. But you wanted your own security too much. Pull the trigger quickly, brother. I know you have to kill meto stay safe. Your hands are clean because you are really a terrified boy.’

Let us suppose that Kevin becomes a priestinstead ofbecoming a cop.How will he end up? A ritualistic man, I think, heavy on the Sixth Commandment, strongly devoted to teaching the local lads football, with a cut-and-dried method in the confession box. He will not outgrow the use of the young page 99 priest’s crutch, that little black book of moral theology they give them in the seminary. His fear of God is not filial fear; it is the fear of the Super-Clean One who can detect dirt in the soul which a man thinks he has laboriously scrubbed away.

He will be much troubled by the ‘flood of filthy books’ entering the country. His view of other races will be essentially xenophobic. He will have anxiety dreams in which a large, hairy, smelly animal is sitting on his chest.

He will feel that obedience to the Bishop absolves him from the need to use his own head. If he is intellectually minded, he may have a highly developed scholastic vocabulary which he uses on all occasions.

His early conquest of the habit of masturbation did not leave him with any extra self-understanding. He will lay great stress on the need to use one’s will-power.

He may want to ‘get ahead’ – to climb the ecclesial ladders. When a fellow priest leaves the Church to get married, and says that he is doing it out of pity, he will reply – ‘You can feel sorry for a woman without getting into bed with her.’ His own female parishioners find him a very dry rock.

Basically, the growth of charity in him is obstructed by massive nursery fears. Does he love anybody? Yes, he loves his mother. It might have been better if he had learnt to love her in a different way.

This is the Fascist priest. I think we have all met him. Would the Church be better off without him, Father? Perhaps; but he too has a soul to save and the Lord, who knows best, has called him to the priesthood.

If he steps away from his rather rigid track, there will certainly be a landslide. He hasn’t got a clue about how his own mind works.

He could be the all-powerful druid among the Irish maybe; but nowadays his time is running out. Most of his parishioners do not share his cut-anddried cosmology. He is only really powerful in a theocracy.

This is the man the younger priests are nearly all trying not to be. One should bless them for it. Perhaps for the man himself one should pray for a calamity that will kindle in him the spirit of love; since love can change the apparently unchangeable. If he learnt to love his housekeeper, and lived with her, then, however unhappy, he would be better off than the way he is; but she would find herself with a grown-up child on her hands.

I trust these semi-psychiatric sketches are of some use.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(8)

Dearest Father,

In America the ‘Negro problem’ apparently dominates the world of the Church. A tiny minority of priests are marching with the Negroes, holding page 100 hands with them, and not infrequently getting hauled over the coals by their Bishops. Three factors emerge from this melee – the issue of racism, the issue of clerical obedience, and the issue of Gospel Charity exercised towards the deprived.

If a priest in this country were feeling hemmed in, frustrated, despondent and alienated, I would suggest that he should look for social work – in the jails, among the destitute, in marriage counselling, and so on – staying off committees as far as possible, and extending personal love to the deprived. Of course he would need some call from the Spirit to make this move – but even in a highly respectable parish (or most of all there) you have only to lift the lid to find people in all degrees of despair and bewilderment and emotional deprivation. Let the priest shatter his loneliness by entering the loneliness of others. Let him attend the local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting – not once, but frequently. They will welcome him because priests are contact men for drunks. Anywhere is a start, if only he can get started.

If he is under a Parish Priest and the Parish priest objects, he should press Gospel charity to the point of a head-on collision, but yield to authority when he absolutely has to – withdrawing, waiting, then trying another tack. The same if his authority is the Bishop – let him go to collision point, then withdraw to keep the virtue of obedience intact. ‘He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day’ – no good wasting his energy in minor skirmishes, or in resentment at ecclesial authority – he will get bruised, but the Church in this country will be nudged forward a little each time. Let him think positively about it.

To follow one’s conscience, against authority, on one’s own, is little use to the Church or the local flock. The issue should always be communal; one should be a battler on behalf of others. Then one will have many friends and an interesting life.

The priests are right who say that Gospel charity must take precedence over obedience; but the best of them recognise that their Superiors also are human, and exercise some patience. If it is really Gospel charity, they will find they have the Holy Spirit on their side. Their mistakes will not destroy His work. They can learn from their mistakes.

The racist issue is with us here too. The Church’s approach to the Maori people, up to now, has been paternalistic and basically condescending, though not without sympathy and some glimmer of understanding. But the Church will rapidly lose its Maori flock in two ways – either they drop into that urban, haphazard, Maori-and-pakeha ‘tribe’ whose ports of call are the borstals (male and female), the jails and the mental hospitals, and whose members are definitely not welcome among our middle class congregations – or else, they go up the social ladder, pushed on by nuns and priests and Government officials, into the middle-class dungeons where most of them very naturally imitate their pakeha neighbours by practising birth control, page 101 having no neighbours, making money hand over fist, and abandoning the Faith, which is superfluous if one already worships material security.

I have a notion Our Blessed Lord is not wholly contented with this state of affairs. The Maoris are not choosing unbelief. They are having it forced on them, directly by our society, indirectly by the Church. The settlers in the last century took from them the land they held sacred and killed them directly with muskets, indirectly by despair and disease. Today the Government laws regarding Maori lands are a wringer through which the Maoris are passed again and again like cloth, squeezing from them the last drop of tribal blood, the last graveyards and meeting grounds, the last scrap of tribal land.

Our Catholic teachers, though reasonably friendly, are still paternalistic towards the Maoris. We will rid them of their ‘dirt’ (voluntary poverty), their ‘laziness’ (communal habits of work), and their ‘immorality’ (identification of sexuality with tribal love), while paying some lip-service to the virtues of Maori art and the combativeness which has made them good footballers and soldiers. Meanwhile Our Blessed Lord sits in the pas, with a Maori face, with a Maori mother, with no Sacraments, and secretly spreads His radiance in the hearts of His people. We certainly do not deserve His company; but this does not mean He will reject us if we seek it out.

As far as I know, in the course of a century the Church has ordained five Maori priests, four of them pretty recently. Three of the Marist Maori Mission pakeha priests can speak Maori, and one or two of the Mill Hill Fathers. Here, again, my statistics may be inadequate. But I know the Maori priests have in a large degree to be de-Maorified to become priests.

Let some of our priests put a bomb under our endemic hidden racism by smashing through the structure of the pakeha Church to the Maori Church that groans just under it. Let them ‘become Maori’ as far as humanly possible, and abandon the vice of paternalism. They could become the happiest men in the country. But they would have to have eyes in their souls as well as eyes in their heads. Above all, they would need to practise voluntary poverty.

There are also the young people who are leaving the Church in droves, in flight from Jansenism and the rigours of what seems to them a wholly irrelevant scholastic education. Could not some of our priests move boldly among them and take up the cudgels on their behalf? Why should the Lord be perpetually scandalised by a system of religious education which devalues His humanity? Why should a girl feel obliged to leave the Church if she loses her virginity? Why should a boy no longer be a Catholic because he chooses to wear his hair long? I mention these things with a sense of subdued rage which I hope is pleasing to God.

Let your priests be revolutionary inside the Church, not outside her. A priest can be disciplined; but I doubt if any will be defrocked for zeal in works of charity. The thing could spread. The Church would catch on fire and shine before the face of God.

page 102

Pope Paul said there were men of the present, men of the past, and men of the future in the Church. The ones who leave the Church are often those who could have been the men of the future.

Let the priests be bold and imaginative in works of charity. They will get enough support from the laity, enough friendship, to keep them going.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(9)

Dearest Father,

I confess that solitude and loneliness are always for me the Cross, the thing I would dearly like to be without. My faults flourish when I run from it – to chatter, to words, to the company of women, to the flattery of others, once upon a time to alcohol. Yet God is present in that solitude I try to avoid. God is felt as the steady Hand within the substance of the soul; dark, painful, incomprehensible, cold rather than hot, immobilising.

If a priest or layman could learn detachment of the will, then many ‘problems’ would dissolve. My daughter tells me she will have my granddaughter adopted by foster parents who will be unknown to me. From time to time she sees this as a solution to some of her problems; and she tells me each time; and each time my soul is bruised. That my grand-daughter should grow up not knowing her blood relatives; that she should mourn in the world perhaps on account of this; that my wife should mourn, who is looking after the grand-child; that my daughter perhaps should mourn too, later on, for other reasons than these she mourns for now – these things are heavy to me, this strong chain of mourning seems intolerable. Yet the world is bound continually in chains of mourning.

How can I cease to mourn; since this kind of mourning weakens my soul and takes away the joy of the Holy Spirit and lessens charity?

I can say – ‘Lord, I accept, let it be so.’ My daughter indeed is the mother of the child and has the right to choose its environment for it. Let her so choose. She knows my opinions on the subject. I have exercised my right of opinion. From now on it is the Lord’s business, who can bring final joy out of an ocean of tears shed in mourning, as the sun rises out of the sea.

We are never short of occasions for grief – or for anger, or for rebellion, or for an illicit intervention in the affairs of others. But if we are to be spiritually fruitful, we have to rest in the Lord. An old Cistercian told me that; and he was right.

So I wash the face of my soul, and leave my grand-daughter in the hand of God. My daughter knows God. I beg God will direct her to the best choice. I think the best choice would be no choice at all. She makes rapid far-reaching decisions one day, decisions that affect the lives and hearts of others most page 103 deeply – and the next day, she may change them, reverse them. I accept that. That is her nature. I don’t know what the best choice is, anyway. By God’s grace, she may happen to strike on it.

Our wellbeing depends not on the will of others but on God’s will; their wellbeing also depends on God’s will. One cannot make choices for other people. One would not assume their choices are wrong because they cause suffering, because one would oneself have chosen otherwise. If I respond as fully as possible to God’s grace in my own heart, then love and truth will shine through me, without my knowledge, and give light to others.

To imagine my will can preserve those I love from mourning is nonsense. Only God can do that. God may have decreed that they and I should mourn. Blessed be the Name of God!

Now I am cheerful again, Father. God is looking after my family. God always was, anyway; but detachment is to know this and accept it and perhaps rejoice in it. God is the sole cause for our rejoicing. Father, that is the only way I know to banish sadness. To remember the Lord’s total protective power – so hidden from our eyes – and rejoice in it. At midnight we rejoice in the light of the hidden sun.

The will of superiors, his own defects, the ingrown calamities of the world, the endless chain of mourning, the monotony of labour, will make many a priest sad. I know no other way for him to lose his sadness but the way I have done by casting his burdens on the Lord – by throwing them freely into the abyss of God’s protective care.

Then he is a child again, not childish but childlike, and can laugh as he walks across a field because God exists and sustains all things. He can embrace his friends and smile at them. He can cheer his friends without putting new burdens, his own burdens, on their already overladen shoulders. Only the Lord’s shoulders are broad enough to carry all burdens.

Oh, yes, it is a narrow road. As John of the Cross said, ‘Our bed of love is made among the lions’ dens’ – yet this sinner can lie there, in the Lord’s holy arms, an inch away from the teeth of the lions. He can rest in the Lord.

Tomorrow I may be sad again. I may take back my burdens. But still, to lose my sorrow, I will have to take the same road as before.

This is my folly, Father – to laugh on the Cross, to laugh in the Lord’s presence, to say what I think and then forget about it.

Through life and death all creatures wind home to the Lord. Let us pray to be delivered from the nets of our own making – the burden of sorrow we lay on our own back.

I ask for your blessing and give you my own. In either case, it is God who blesses both of us. Our love is the means by which God loves us.

Arohanui–

Hemi

page 104
(10)

Dearest Father,

When my friend P— was arrested last year on a charge of smoking marihuana, he received four punches in the gut on the way to the station. P— does on occasions smoke marihuana. On this occasion the police had found none, and so they ‘planted’ some – that is, they hid some marihuana in his lodgings and ‘discovered’ it. P— received a three month sentence – (a) for being a member of the vagrant class; (b) for letting the police plant marihuana on him. He is a conspicuously gentle person who would certainly not offer violence. My belief is that he received the four punches in the gut for being a Maori.

It would be entirely possible that the policeman who punched him was a young Catholic man. Certainly there would be Catholics participating when the marihuana was planted. I must ask seriously how far the Church is responsible for this amorality and racism. She is, I think responsible in several ways. And I must stress that the occurrence with P— was by no means unique.

The Church has been too easily content with the unexamined ethics of nursery morality – wash yourself, dress well, work hard, keep the Sixth Commandment, don’t use dirty words. Emphatically I must describe this as crude Pharisaism. The answer to it is unequivocal – mercy, not sacrifice, is pleasing to God. If the young Catholic cop goes to Mass on Sunday (he probably does; he may even read the Epistle) then he is acting in an unconscious spirit of Pharisaic blasphemy. His hands have been washed; but it was his hands that punched P—. P—, who was baptised a Catholic (I suppose this, to strengthen the argument, and it is probable), has not been to Mass for five years. Why? Because of people like this spruce young Catholic pakeha. P— has sheltered the homeless, fed the hungry, given his coat to a man or a girl who had none. Who is justified before God?

The Church assumes there is no racism in the country. It is true that well-polished middle class Maoris who live in the pakeha style will receive the awkward courtesy from their middle class pakeha neighbours. This is because they have ‘bowed the head’, they have all but ceased to be Maori. But the hospitality of P—, a distinctive Maori tribal trait, which will make the doors of Heaven swing open joyfully for him, is absent from the house of this Maori suburbanite.

Maoris find it hard to get lodging. Maoris find it hard to get jobs. Maoris get convicted more often than pakehas if the arrest rate is the same on similar charges. Where are our Father Groppis? Where are the priests in there, holding the hands of Maoris and battling for them? Which presbytery should a Maori boy, Catholic or not, ring up if he wants help and counsel when he is arrested for being poor and a Maori, and for existing? Why are our pakeha page 105 Catholics, when they are not prejudiced, still intolerably clumsy in their dealings with the Maoris? In how many Catholic schools is Maori taught as an option instead of French? (Maori is as easy to learn as French; and for one of us who goes to France, a hundred will find themselves in circumstances where a few words even of Maori would smooth race relations.)

Yes, Father, I want to see ten Father Groppis in our towns, battling and learning – not battling to make Maoris into pakehas, as we have done for a century – oh no, battling so that justice will be done, and the great rainbow of charitas, the sign of the new Covenant.

The young cop who punched P— was objecting to the melanin under the surface of P—’s skin. It seemed to him a sign of theological and social reprobation. What should P— do about it? Should he go back and ask God for a new skin? Or should he throw a bomb in the door of the cop shop?

This problem will increase. I want to see fifty or a hundred Catholic priests in the pas, speaking Maori fluently, helping the Maoris to keep alive their disintegrating tribal culture – not smoothing the ‘transition’ by which they become brown pakehas. I want the Mass to be said in Maori throughout the pas.

Father, you are Irish. What would you say if I made an appallingly bad joke about the I.R.A. – said that the Easter rebellion was an unnecessary fiasco that happened long, long ago – enquired tenderly about the pigs, and how a pure potato diet had affected your health – rhapsodised about the beauties of the Ulster landscape – spoke five words in incomprehensible Erse – made a savage attack on a real or imaginary Irish Jansenist bias, implying that all Irish people had this ailment – and ended by saying I had known some very clean, very sober, very well-read Irish people?

I think I would be less a friend of yours than I am. Though you are undoubtedly charitable, you might ask the Lord to afflict me with a curable fistula for the good of my wretched soul – and (not in Erse) – ‘May the High King of Glory permit him to get the mange!’

You will now understand the precise feelings of the Maori person who has been subjected to a bout of communication by an average pakeha. There is a clumsiness in communication which stems from unconscious racism, and which is so great as to constitute a major objective breach of charity and justice. I do not see why good racial manners could not be taught in our schools. But I know it is the homes that are most to blame, and in the homes those dear ethnocentric Mums who think their local library committee is the universe. I call them scrubbed flour sacks! They do more harm to the Church than a regiment of the Viet Cong.

Well, let some of the priests undo the harm.

Let churches in Maori areas be built with statues of Our Lord and Our Lady as Maori people, carved by Maori sculptors. Let the walls have tukutuku weaving and the roof show the rafter paintings. And this can be done. It page 106 requires only human knowledge and work and imagination and a mind that has not made a god out of our somewhat hideous contemporary pakeha culture. Then the Maoris would welcome us into these Churches because we had helped them to build them.

The priest is a key figure – let him be an ariki, a leader.

Arohanui–

Hemi

(11)

Dearest Father,

Here are a few more questions for priests to consider. My answers are not intended to be a form of brainwashing.

(a)

In the justified retreat from mariolatry, have you come to regard Our Lady as a back number?

Our Lady is like the moon in the dark sky of the soul, reflecting Christ the Sun when Christ seems absent. Truly, for some the Novena may have resembled a bushman’s bargaining with his tribal deities. But a mature and scriptural marianism can strengthen one’s whole devotional life. The fact a prayer is simple does not prevent it from being profound.

For myself, my chosen roads to God are through the Rosary and the Angelus. We come to the Resurrection through the Passion and Cross – not just ‘by means of’ – we participate continually in Christ’s salvific action.

(b)

A few words – salvific, kerygma, eschatology, semantic – the words make sense, no doubt, but multiplied by a thousand they cover a great deal of paper. What should one do about this?

I would suggest, don’t read books or articles that have too many of them. Karl Rahner can write lucidly and profoundly about Our Lady without using many of them. There is a stratospheric emphasis in much modern Catholic writing. It can make the brain tired. Personally, I read as little as possible.

Conversation is better for the soul than reading. Remember, Pope John was a garrulous man.

Talk with people who have small vocabularies. They manage by intonation – ‘Yeah, shit, man, that’s cool! I groove on that, man!’

Here the speaker affirms his statement, his biological entity, the existence of another person as a ‘Thou’, and the suitability of a given mode of procedure which will not expose anybody to unnecessary – possibly metaphysical – dangers, and then proceeds to say that the whole proposition is subjectively congenial to him, that he can follow it is a road into action – not ignoring a page 107 very real contemplative element much as he would derive satisfaction from music or the company of a girl. He ends by a second affirmation of human identity and brotherhood.

A theologian, especially since the Second Vatican Council, would take several pages to get the point across.

Therefore I think one should give up reading and start talking and listening. Except, perhaps, for a daily chapter of Scripture.

I don’t think Our Lord ever educated anybody except orally – which means, by word of mouth. The Word spoke words; He did not write them.

Anyone who’s been through a seminary has an overloaded brain. Alcohol can help to simplify this.

(c)

Why don’t you start a Catholic Pentecostal group rolling?

A great cure for sadness and aridity. Even a cow won’t come from the field till you call it at milking time. The Holy Spirit has poured out joy and love and wisdom on the Council Fathers. Why shouldn’t we have our turn – have a religious ball for ourselves – crack the old wool-blind paranoia. Come and see me and we’ll start one together.

(d)

If you still masturbate at thirty, what should you do?

Stop worrying about it; laugh, go for a swim in the creek, and ask God to give you a more active charity towards your neighbours. Alternatively, write an article on Jansenism for the Tablet.

(e)

Do you sometimes wish you had joined the Quaker Society of Friends, so as to be free of long-range guns of ecclesial authority? I mean, just to have friends instead?

The Catholic Church is beginning at least to decentralise herself – miracle of miracles! In a sense her emphasis on centralised authority may have been illicit, because borrowed from the secular power structures.

The Rabbi Jesus (whose Person is God) when he founded our Church relied greatly on personal contact and friendship. The first Bishops knew their congregations by their first names and spoke to them personally in letters which are now part of our Scriptures. They weren’t putting an abstract authority on their friends; though their messages and decisions were authoritative because of their sacramental office.

Get a circle of friends, engage in discussion, prayer and works of mercy, and you may not feel too different from the Quakers. There’s nothing to prevent you from sitting in silence, just like them, and waiting for the Holy Spirit to inspire one or other of you.

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The laity, freed from an excessive awe of priests, are now ready to make friends with them. You may get a few knock-backs; but faint heart never won a fat turkey.

(f)

Are you praying for your Bishop or parish priest to die?

If so, have no remorse. It is an act of charity to pray for calamities that are spiritually advantageous to the object of prayer. We are frequently told that a paschal death is the best thing that can happen to us.

(g)

Have you still got that little black book of moral theology (first published in 1372) which they gave you in the seminary?

Burn it. Or put it on a nail in the lavatory for visitors to read and use at leisure.

(h)

Are you in reasonably good mental and emotional health?

If not – why not ask for a fixed period of leave of absence from the external duties of the priesthood, and go out to manual work in surroundings where you can be freely gregarious. Do what you want to do for a while – within the limit of obedience to the Commandments – and see how you feel at the end of a fixed ‘holiday’.

Like teachers in schools, too many priests go through a tunnel – Catholic schools (as pupils there), seminary training, ordination, whatever comes after that – like men in a train in an Alpine valley who see mountain, gorge, trees, sky, river, only through their brief windows in the rock. I suggest, if you are not well – if you feel intolerably enclosed, locked in a tomb – getting off the train for a fixed period.

Too many of us lay-people reject the protests of a burdened mind and soul till some crisis or breakdown forces us to change our tune. It is a poor sense of duty that neglects the state of the whole person for the sake of the temporary fulfilment of tasks.

(i)

How do you interpret the notion of being a shepherd of souls?

The core action of the priesthood is always pastoral. He is a priest for the sake of his flock. He serves Christ in them. He represents Christ to them – particularly, Christ in the Church. His joy can be to discover and learn from the hidden Christ in their hearts.

It would be stupid to worry about being an inadequate shepherd. If you love them, you are doing your job as Christ intends, whatever your deficiencies. If you don’t love them, certainly nothing can make up for this lack. Then you page 109 would have to ask Him to plant this love in your barren heart, as this poor sinner does, though a layman. Our love for others gives Him a bridge to walk on.

Christ is the great Shepherd. You are the wire that carries the current of His love. If your human fear prevents you from loving your fellows – man, woman, boy, girl, Bishop, priest laity – by word and gesture on a human level, then the wire is disconnected. Your Masses then are magical – in the negative sense – and your shepherdhood a mere formality.

Only the incapacity to love can paralyse your priesthood. The rest, in comparison, is scrupulosity.

Who told you that you were to be the Levite of the Law? No; you are to be that sorrowing, joyful prodigy, the Levite of Love.

(j)

Are you a bucket or a fountain?

Your education – particularly in the schools and the seminary – will probably have conditioned you to be a bucket, one who receives truth passively. The Pharisee has always got a bucket mentality.

Now is the time to put off that shroud. Use your own poor intuitions of what is good for others. If you make mistakes, they will be in the right direction. As newly married men learn to love their wives and communicate with them, so you can learn to love and communicate with your flock. Now experience has to be a teacher. The clogged fountain has to learn to flow. The water itself shifts the boulders.

If your self-purification is the polishing of a bucket, an empty bucket at that, what use is this to you, even if the metal shines? Better a dirty creek than this. Those who are dying of thirst can drink from it.

(k)

You have to feed and bless others. Who is going to feed and bless you poor shepherds who are also sheep?

It is not enough to ask Christ to do this invisibly. Bless and feed one another. Cherish one another with personal love, as Paul cherished Timothy, and the hierarchy don’t matter. The priest knows the heart of the priest. Laymen who love you as friends will also do this. There are always some. This poor sinner is one of them.

Love is interested in you, not in your faults.

(l)

Why do you not truly love your Bishops?

It is the protest of the unloved child. The child who thinks he is unloved can only be healed by learning to love the parent as a human equal who also suffers and has needs. This also gives freedom from legalistic obedience and page 110 its inevitable confused rebellions.

(m)

Are you angry about Vietnam?

If the anger is felt as confinement, imprisonment – anger either against the Communists or the napalm droppers – it is an intellectual projection like a projected lantern-slide, if an imprisonment, a frustration already felt in personal relationships. Sorrow and holy anger are the twin children of charitas in this inhuman world. Holy anger is wholly ‘on behalf of’ – it is not against persons, it is on behalf of persons who are being injured. Its effect is liberating.

Love has to purify itself on the personal level before one’s view of public life can be free of these disturbing projections. Holy anger leads to peace. The anger ‘against’ hurts the soul and is part of the syndrome of war.

Our unloving peace breeds wars as a dead body breeds maggots. It is unloving because we look for our security in our possessions – material, mental, spiritual. Love can hardly be threatened by loss, since it wishes to give away whatever it has. If you want to work for peace, to improve our unloving peace and so remove the cause of war, become first as poor as is humanly possible. Then God will begin to make your road clear.

(n)

What more is there to say?

Patience. Abandonment of the heart to God.

Why should we be so afraid of knowing the mental fog-belt, emotional meagreness, moral destitution, and a spiritual condition like poor staggering drunks dressed in filthy sacks – when God already knows all this and does not reject us? Why be afraid of knowing the liberating truth? What spiritual surgeon has clean hands? We are not therefore disqualified. God, who already loves us as we are, behind all our shields, only wants us to begin loving one another.

FINIS – but the dialogue of love never ends, here or in Heaven.

Arohanui –

Hemi

1969 (598)