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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Relevance of Ordinary Christianity to Human Concerns

The Relevance of Ordinary Christianity to Human Concerns

Dear friends, I come to talk to you about Christ. Not really about anything else. And that may seem to some of you a strange choice to make, here at a graduation service.

‘Leave Christ to the priests and the parsons,’ you might say. From a poet we expect poetry. From a man of the world we expect news of the world, something to bite, something topical, above all, something relevant.’

But I choose to speak of Christ because the strangeness of the love of Christ is my own terror and my own joy, and if Christ is irrelevant among you, then I am irrelevant, for I am nothing if not a sinner and a Christian.

To speak about Christ may not be the best way of obeying Him. When I was getting this talk ready, sitting at a table in a cottage at Jerusalem, a woman was peeling walnuts and offering them to me, and a Maori friend was striking loud chords on a guitar about ten feet away. That is the beauty of communal life. You don’t belong to yourself.

But it almost drove me crazy because I was trying to think about Christ. page 175 And then of course I stopped being stupid, and accepted walnuts from the hands of one Christ and listened to the joyful noise and singing of another Christ – Hehu, Karaiti, the Maori Christ whom I follow and serve before any other.

That is the Christ of communality, the One who makes my heart want to burst with grief and shame and joy, grief at His wounded face, shame because of my sins which render me incapable of serving Him well, joy because of His welcoming love that obliterates my foolish scrupulosity.

The secret of the Christian is an extraordinary knowledge, knowledge that Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of Mary, has died and come to life again and lives for ever, and cannot be withheld from transmitting His resurrected joy to us.

There is no other secret. It may come first from a Book but it does not end in a book. It is experiential knowledge.

And sometimes we sing love songs to Him. If we are able, we transfer the perpetual dialogue of Him and each human soul into words –

The Lord says to the soul:

My true love and my darling,
You are so small, so small,
So ugly and so thin!
Yet you are that great treasure
I gave my crown to win.

Then the soul replies:

What You say is true;
Once I wandered free
But now I can know nothing
Unless you tell it me.

The Lord speaks again:

I left my Father’s garden
On a warm day in spring
And came to this desert wild
To save you from the bandits,
My true love and my child.

And the soul replies:

Where are you, my King,
I am content to be;
page 176 In your arms I find a darkness
That wraps and covers me.
(Extract from first of ‘Two Dialogues of Christ and the Soul’, CP 477)

Or in another song – the Lord says to the soul:

Tell me again, my little bride,
There must be one small thing
To give you from my treasure-house
Of the winter and the spring.

Then the soulreplies:

Nothing, nothing I desire
In this dark sanctuary
For here I am at peace, my Love,
And nothing troubles me.

The Lord says again:

Tell me again, my little bride,
Is there no other thing?
I had it in mind to give you
The world for a wedding ring.

And the soul replies:

Death and life are yours, my Love,
And both the same to me,
But if there is one thing that might
Make our love greater be,

Then give me that red coat of blood
You wore upon the tree,
And give me a death like your own death
In pain and poverty.
(Extract from second of ‘Two Dialogues of Christ and the Soul’, CP 479)

These songs, these babblings, contain the only point of our religion. Yet when they are said aloud they have a peculiar sound, as if two married people, or two unmarried lovers even, were obliged to listen to a record of what they had said to one another after making love.

The words would contain the inner meaning of their relationship – Love, page 177 nothing but Love – and that is the only reason why men and women have served and continue to serve Jesus, the Son of Mary, and why even this old man would consider it an inestimable privilege to die for Him.

Yet in the marketplace, in public, we use other words out of a shamefaced feeling, out of a wish not to shout the words of love across a dusty street, and so people who are simply lovers pretend to be theologians or hard-headed welfare workers or foul-mouthed rebellious poets, and we often carry out the impersonation well enough to deceive ourselves.

But in our hearts we are abandoned persons, poor creatures who don’t know who or what we are, except that the Daystar shines for us, that the Love who made us out of the elements has appeared among us as Jesus, the Son of Mary, and brought us to life and given us strength so that we, against all expectation, may be His beloved friends and have the privilege of being crucified along with Him.

What a fate for a creature who is almost nothing – a poor, trivial, dull creature, often a burden to itself and others, an old opossum with its fur full of fleas, climbing up inside the wall of a Maori church! To be allowed to forsake itself and follow Him, still no less blind, no less trivial, but irradiated, brought to life, set free to stand and walk in the meaning and the warmth and the penetrating beauty of the pattern of His Love.

We expected to die – and He told us to live. We expected condemnation – and He made it entirely plain he was interested in us, not in our sins. This is the only Christian secret – that we have become aware that we are loved by Christ.

Well, friends, you have had to put up with me. And some of you may say: ‘It’s all very well for him to spout about Christ. I’ve heard that before. But I am not a Christian. I have no particular wish to be one. This man may be consumed by a private religious enthusiasm. But Christianity is hardly relevant to my own circumstances. If it were relevant, I might take some notice.’

Well I have no wish to convert people, and I certainly have no wish at all to reform anybody. My efforts at self-reformation over the past twenty-five years have been so far conspicuously unsuccessful. On the whole, I prefer my friends unreformed. Whatever God intends them to do, certainly I can’t advise them.

Yet I find ordinary Christianity highly relevant to ordinary human concerns.

There are certain Mysteries on which I meditate every day of my life. If I did not meditate on them I would not only fall flat on my face – that can happen as it is – and I would lack the capacity to get up again. Meditation does make sense to me.

The Church to which I belong calls these Mysteries Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious. And in one of the Joyful Mysteries we meditate on the occasion page 178 when Jesus went up as a boy of twelve to Jerusalem. A poor village boy. Probably He had never been to Jerusalem before.

In Jerusalem – the Temple, the Roman garrison, the houses of the wealthy and the civilised. Also the grog-shops, the brothels, the complicated alleys of finance, the prostitutes, heterosexual or homosexual, the rouseabouts, the destitute people, the people also who made a living by robbery or murder.

Well, it was His town, the capital of the province of Judea. And He stayed here for three days, a boy of twelve, while His parents travelled home without Him;

How peculiar! How bloody inconsiderate!

When they asked Him, ‘Son, why on earth did you do it?’ He said: ‘You should have known I was occupied with my Father’s business.’

This is the Mystery of adolescence, the Mystery of self-determination under God.

I have never met a university student, male or female, who was not in some degree of conflict because of an ambiguous relationship with parents or guardians. This is particularly true of university students because of their excessively prolonged period of economic and emotional dependence. But it is also true of all people. At twelve or thirteen the child becomes an adult. Nothing can stop it happening. And then the pain begins – the pain of the struggle for self-determination.

Obedience is no answer to it. Obedience to other human beings cannot in itself tell you who you are. It cannot tell you your vocation.

I look at those among you who are going into the professions and I wonder: ‘Have you chosen it? Did the choice come from your heart?’ Or was it foisted on you in the name of obedience?

The Trinity we New Zealanders worship is not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. No, it is a different Trinity – the Dollar Note, Respectability and the School Cert. Examination.

Of those who enter for the School Certificate Examination, twenty-five per cent will infallibly pass and seventy-five per cent will infallibly fail. That, at least, is the information I have received about it.

What of those who fail? Are they worse or stupider than those who pass? It would be absurd to imagine it. But many do imagine it, and pass on the absurdity to their children in the name of that very cruel false god, Education.

Perhaps the true God intended some of you to be sculptors or song-writers. Perhaps He intended some of you to work in poorly paid jobs in hospitals or on farms. Perhaps He intended a few of you to be bums like myself.

How will you ever know? Only by obedience to Him.

The job of children may be to obey their parents. The job of the adult is to find God and obey Him. The voice of God is the voice of conscience, and that applies equally to Catholic, Protestant and agnostic.

The vocation He gives us is always a vocation of love, whatever form it may page 179 take. If you are entering a profession out of love, out of the desire to make use of the unused areas of your personality on behalf of and in contact with other people, OK, I have no complaint.

If it is otherwise, if you are led by habit or avarice or the desire for prestige or a false obedience to the opinions of others, get out while the going’s good, and find yourselves! The direction you are going in is one that leads to spiritual paralysis.

Remember the Son of Man talking theology at twelve years old with the rabbis in the Temple. True, He returned and was, as they say, subject to His parents. But His final choices were undoubtedly His own.

Then there is one of the Sorrowful Mysteries – the occasion when, in His early thirties, He was being punished and humorously ‘interrogated’ in the barracks of the Roman garrison.

Consider the kind of occasion it was. A very ordinary occasion. From time to time a Maori or Islander gets his guts kicked in in the police headquarters of our main towns.

Don’t say it isn’t your business. It is your business.

I suggest you make contact with groups other than those you were brought up in. Then you will not be adding to the weight of apathy and prejudice that makes such things possible. And whether or not you believe in Him, you will have the joy of discovering the Son of Man in those who suffer for your offences, and mine, and perhaps their own.

The Crowning with Thorns, however, is essentially a Mystery of mental suffering.

I remember visiting the head doctor of one of our mental hospitals, a dear friend of mine. And after we had embraced, I said to him: ‘I know they have to wear the Crown of Thorns here. Are they beaten and mocked as well?’

‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘not if I can help it.’

Yet what he could not remove would be the inner suffering by many of his patients, a communal suffering, because our habits of life are making many people mad through an agony of spiritual frustration. Our civilisation is riddled from top to bottom with this kind of obscure and intimate agony.

A bureaucrat finds that his work has finally become wholly meaningless, but he stays put, so as not to upset his family, and for the sake of the superannuation.

A headmaster gases himself in his garage because the police have found out he is a homosexual. Such problems, of course, were never mentioned in the highly respectable college where he had his training.

A housewife goes out to the bin because she has been driven mad by loneliness. Her kids, the local grocer and a tired husband are her only sources of communication, apart from the TV set.

A worker in a factory realises that the reason why he has no peace of mind is because the servants of the industrial power structure demand servility, as page 180 well as work, from him. He realises also that he cannot find another job.

A couple who love one another watch their final separation approaching and can do nothing about it.

It finally sinks into one old woman’s mind that nobody cares whether she lives or dies.

These, and a million other agonies, belong to our heartless, depersonalised, desacralised, centralised society.

Since we also, on occasions, wear the Crown of Thorns, it may help us to remember the Son of Man – a Jewish artisan and preacher nearing the end of His time among the iron-handed servants of the State who do not lighten the weight of that Crown, but hammer it into the scalp.

One might at least learn gentleness from this.

But when the casualties are too many, when the worship of Money, Respectability and Education is driving a fair proportion of the population mad, it may be time also to think about some kind of inner detachment from that peculiar type of idolatry.

I suggest that the Churches should bow their heads and admit they are the worst offenders, my own Church among them. How many girls have abortions as a private and terrified sacrifice to the Moloch of Respectability? And how many parents prefer this to the possibility of scandal, while calling themselves Christian?

Well, it is not my intention to reform anybody. But I hope this private and rambling address has at least conveyed the notion to you that Christianity may provide a lens through which one may look at the contemporary world and see some meaning there.

Nevertheless, a Christianity without Christ is like a body without a heart. Without Christ I certainly would not be a Christian. Perhaps I would get hold of a gun and go and fight and die fighting for the oppressed and the destitute who look for help, largely in vain, from their more affluent neighbour nations.

Are we to become tired, stale, ritualistic people? My father, Pope John, indicated that this was unnecessary, even among the very old. He was a poor man. Perhaps that gave him vitality. The practice of voluntary poverty may be a sign of contradiction in the modern world, where material affluence is too highly regarded, yet I suggest that some of you might consider it as a Christian or a non-Christian possibility.

I have found that to do as far as possible without money or books has brought me to the fringes of a new universe, a universe of great beauty and powerful involvement in the lives of others. Poverty has not made me chaste or wise or humble. Yet it is a beginning. It opens up roads towards other people.

One planet said to another planet: ‘Brother, your orbit is pulling my orbit out of shape.’

‘Sister, what you say is true,’ said the second planet. ‘I think, though, we page 181 should consider our Father the Sun who is being offended by both of us. If our orbits are ever to be disentangled, we will have to take our centre from Him.’

I think I am like the second planet. My orbit is not often regular. But I look to the Sun for help.

Somebody said once: ‘If your sickness is Jesus, then it cannot be cured.’

I think my sickness is Jesus. Therefore, in a sense, I would ask for your compassion. It has very little to do with morality. Judas and Peter both had the sickness that is Jesus. Both died of it. They died in different ways. None of us know in which way we will die.

In the middle of my sins my sickness is Jesus. Therefore I ask for your compassionate prayers.

1969 (618)