Madness and Sanity

I sometimes think that only the mad can understand well this apocalyptic century. Especially I thought it recently when I heard our sane Prime Minister give a long speech, and every word of it was about money. He was sane. He knew he was right. Every sane man knows that money is the basic and ultimate security. And I, thank God, am mad; I fear that money could turn me into the enemy of God – God, the poor child who was born between two beasts; God, the man of thirty-three who died destitute between two criminals.

The kids who shared that crumbling house with me were mad. They put their faith in dreams and one another. They would sit and meditate for hours, with their eyes turned upwards, chanting – Om mane padme hum – ‘The jewel in the lotus.’

What jewel? What lotus? The lotus is the creation – or alternately, the human soul – and the jewel is the Divine Truth shining at its centre, which can only be known by a mind that turns its back on the security of rational concepts and goes into darkness.

What insanity! Of course. But let us not forget the words of Tertullian – ‘Credo quia absurdum’ – ‘I believe because it is absurd’ – or that the theologians define God by negations; or that the mystics touch God’s essence in a cloud of unknowing.

Let us not forget that we who believe our God died destitute on a Cross seem quite mad to a great nation whose god is money. They are, however, on the whole polite people. They are too polite to tell us they think we are mad, as long as we dress and talk like them.

Why weren’t these kids Christian? Well, a few of them were. A few of them had been Catholics, for example. The girls knew what being Christian page 127 meant. It meant wearing tidy clothes and not swearing and keeping your virginity till you were married. The boys knew too. It meant having hair cut an inch above the ears and getting a job where you were paid plenty of money. They weren’t particularly interested in Christianity. But they were very interested in poverty and meditation and experiential contact with God.

I told them this was more than half of Christianity. I don’t think they believed me. Not, at any rate, if they had a Christian training. But they would sit quiet and shining beside me – these scruffy-bearded boys and girls in old jeans and jumpers – these pure souls who desired the poverty of God – on a patch of grass in the middle of the town, and hold a flower beside me, while I who am mad, sat cross-legged under a tree and recited the Mysteries. And the flame of joy would spread from one to another. They knew perfectly well what I was doing. I was meditating. They knew a person is born to meditate as a bird is born to fly.

And when I gave meaning to the colour of the flowers they held, they understood that immediately – green for truth; red for aroha, the love of friends; golden for the Divine radiance; white for the pure heart that desires no possessions; blue for meditation, the colour of Mary. And I let them see that the hibiscus flower has a theology of its own – the green stalk of truth; the spread petals of the creation; the towering golden stamens of the Divine radiance springing from its centre; but higher than that, springing out of that radiance which is like the sun itself, the fire red stamen tips, the Divine and human love that overflows, that reaches out to us in the wounds of Christ. That was a Christ they could understand – a Christ of fire and beauty, the Christ of poverty.

They knew the man Jesus. I think they honoured him, for they often had his picture on their walls, above the bright collages and the tattered wallpaper – Veronica’s napkin, a head of dark hair with piercing compassionate eyes that looked at you wherever you were. I never heard one of them speak a word against him.

I said to the kids – ‘He was a poor man. He loved his friends. He said he wanted friends, not slaves. A slave has been bought. He obeys out of fear. But a friend obeys out of love. The fuzz (the police) nailed him up. That was their job. The fuzz do their job. The god of the fuzz is the state. They obey the State in all things and go by the rulebook. That is their security. But, as usually happens with the fuzz, they went a bit beyond their job. They knocked him about for a while in the barracks before they took him out to nail him up. That was their little bit of extra, to relieve the boredom.

‘The hard core of the middle class, most of them, though not all, wanted him to be nailed up. He was menacing their security. The god of the hard middle class core is money. He had overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. He didn’t work and he didn’t have a change of page 128 clothes. He should have stayed with his head down working as a carpenter. And he was not respectable. Their other god is respectability. So his very existence made them angry.

‘The religious authorities, the Church of the time – the only Church then was the old Jewish Church – most of them, though not all, wanted him to be nailed up. One of their gods was education. He hadn’t been educated in their religious schools. He didn’t have a diploma. Their other god was their picture of themselves as religious people. He interfered with that picture. He tried to break it down. Therefore they simply had to get rid of him in the name of religion.

‘But the bums and the streetgirls and the winos and the unemployed who saw him go past carrying his Cross were sorry for him. They didn’t worship the state, or money, or respectability, or education, or their picture of themselves as religious people. They said – “Yes, poor man, he had it coming to him; you can’t stick your neck out too far in this world; they get you in the end.” But they loved him because he had made it so plain that he loved them, and their only security was love, the little they could get and give of love among themselves. That was what kept them going. They shared what they hadn’t got. And so they knew what he was talking about when he spoke of the love of friends. They were able to love him because in their way they already loved their friends. They took the view that he was one of them, one of the poor, because the rest of the world treated them like garbage and he treated them as friends. So they were bitterly sorry when they saw him going up the hill to his death.

‘And it’s still the same now. It would still be the same if he was being killed today.’

The kids had no problem at all in understanding this view of Jesus.

Some of the kids used drugs, because the drugs knock an imaginary hole in the wall of the mental world we have made for them – a world where money talks, and people are judged by what they wear, the depersonalised, desacralised, centralised world the Holy Father is continually telling us to change.

I told them they could get off drugs if they held the head up and refused to become slaves, if they shared their food and money, if they loved one another and spoke the truth to one another – that if they did this, the soul would come to the surface of the friend’s face like a fish to the surface of the water, and a great beauty would shine out, and they wouldn’t need drugs to kill the pain. And some of them did this and got off the drugs. I told them also that addiction to money is even worse than addiction to heroin, and addiction to prestige is even worse than addiction to morphine, because these addictions turn the soul into wood or stone, whereas the drugs can’t kill the soul as long as some love remains, though drugs are a useless escape and can kill the body.

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These are of course the word of a madman. And I think I will stay mad till the day I die. There is something free about it.

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