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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The Lion and the Lamb

The Lion and the Lamb

A Talk

I could talk to you about Christian doctrine – but I prefer to talk to you about people. Therefore I will tell you something about my friend Kevin.

Kevin and I met first when I was living in Auckland. I had been airing some views on Christian living among the students at Newman Hall. After the talk, I was sitting down drinking coffee – and Kevin came along and sat by me. He was a spruce young man in his middle twenties – short-haired, clean-shaven, vigorous. He was wearing a military uniform. Since I loathe all wars, just or unjust, this did not cheer me up. I don’t think I cheered Kevin up either. He looked at my long hair and bare feet as if they presented him with a special problem in Christian tolerance.

We talked about life, drugs, young people, war and peace, social justice. Kevin also talked about himself. He had served for three years in Malaya. He liked the Army. He was now a probation officer. At the time I met him in Auckland, he had just come from making parachute jumps.

Now, I’m not an absolutely timid man. But the thought of me or anyone else making parachute jumps makes me curl up inside. They would have to page 189 prod me out of the plane with a bayonet. For some reason I have a great horror of heights. I like to live close to mother earth.

When I knew Kevin better – as I will tell you, he visited me for a fortnight at Jerusalem early in the next year – I came to recognise that physical danger had a great fascination for him. If the road of his adolescence had gone round a few different corners, he might have been a motor bike boy – fighting with his fists – swinging a bottle or a bike chain – loaded to the eyes with gang loyalty and anger towards the police – driving his motor bike at a wall at eighty miles an hour, in order to strive with his whole strength against fear, and be alive on the edge of death.

But as it turned out, Kevin had stayed out of trouble. He was a model of many virtues. I am sure his parents were happy to see him clean-faced and tidy and strong in his uniform. The parish priest would be equally happy to see him kneeling regularly at Mass.

Why should you or I, then, feel anything but unmixed admiration and relief in Kevin’s regard – admiration for his manly qualities – relief that one boy at least had turned into a good Christian man? I am not trying to raise difficulties where none exist – but Kevin’s personality did have hidden areas of strength and weakness which were not evident at a first glance.

In spite of a good deal of initial tension, he got used to me. When he came to visit me at Jerusalem – and I put my arms round him in ritual welcome, as I am accustomed to do with visitors, unless they are policemen or other officials – he did not try to punch me under the impression that I was making homosexual advances to him.

He did scandalise a girl who was staying there, by a three-hour vivid description – absorbing to him, but less absorbing to her – of how you can kill a man with your bare hands in unarmed combat. But I began to understand his approach to the spiritual life.

He explained to me that the Army tests of endurance – long marches, wading through ice-cold water, exhaustion, physical strain – were for him vigils with God, occasions when God and he met together in absolute solitude. And he was quite clear that all Communists belonged to the Devil’s party. Not for Kevin the nuances of Pope John’s Pacem in Terris, with its distinction between persons and the philosophy held by persons. He belonged in spirit to the time of the Knights of the Temple – riding against the barbarous Saracens who so unkindly preferred their idol Baphomet to the Lord Jesus Christ appearing before them with wrath in His eye and a sword in his hand.

Kevin’s spirituality was Ignatian. Partly, I think, because St Ignatius Loyola was a man with a military training who carried this way of thinking over into his Spiritual Exercises. There was no doubt that Kevin saw Christ as the General of a heavenly army – clean against unclean, pure against impure, white against black.

page 190

When Kevin saw me hitting my back with the buckle of a belt – as part of the penance necessary in my own special vocation – he understood this perfectly. He was doing the same kind of thing when he ran for ten miles in the rain before breakfast. But there were other areas.

My view and his view of human sexuality differed – also our views of the value of hard work, cleanliness, ambition and neatness of dress. The point was that my own spirituality – if it deserves that name – is a kind of Maori Franciscanism. When Ignatius in him, and – I dare to hope – Francis in me, met in the cottage at Jerusalem, the lion lay down with the lamb, soldier with pacifist, short-hair with long-hair, side by side. It was a curious conjunction of opposites.

As our love for one another became more trusting and more conscious, we began to discuss poverty. Kevin had come to believe that Christ wished to share His poverty with him. But it was extremely difficult for him to go against the training which had told him that material ambition and success in the eyes of others was essential for a good life. His mind was perhaps a bit blurred by resting in the shelter of the big institutions – in his case, the Army and the Justice Department.

He had some thoughts of serving God by becoming an adviser to managers of firms on how to handle their labour. I suggested a different course of action to him. I gave Kevin the names of three or four firms in Auckland. And I suggested that he might – for his novitiate in poverty – take a job as a labourer first with one firm – being brisk, obedient, punctual and polite, but exhibiting no servility whatsoever – and when, after a week or a fortnight or a month, he was sacked from that job – not from any lack in his working capacity, but simply because of his lack of servility – to take another job with another firm, and act in the same way there – and so on, job after job, for the space of a year, not bowing the head, but just offering his labour, not himself for sale.

‘After that year,’ I said, ‘you’ll understand what makes the Communists – the rage for human dignity burning like hot coals inside them. It won’t turn you into a Communist – but you will understand why their souls are made of iron – because your soul will have turned partly into iron.’

I suggested also that he should give away to needy people all the money he earned, that he didn’t need for lodging, clothing, food and cigarettes.

This kind of thing would be a big step for Kevin to take. But I think he did intend to do it – or something like it. There was a great courage and beauty underneath the more conventional and padded areas of his personality. The school of poverty would teach him all he needed to know. You will understand why I carry this son and brother of mine always in my heart.

Kevin had a built-in need to release his energy in physical action. He found it extraordinarily difficult to relax. I think this was closely related to his view of the opposite sex.

page 191

His feelings towards women were split into two halves – one half was Sir Galahad, idealistic, pure in spirit, enormously sensitive to rejection, looking among girls of his acquaintance for a female ideal, anxious to help and protect – the other half I’m afraid I must call ‘the bastard from the bush’ – another self opposite in almost every way – highly physical, obsessed by the sexual act, loaded with violence, resentment and a desire to dominate – and this self, if it ever went into action, would be extraordinarily boorish.

With some reason, Kevin regarded this second self as his mortal enemy. I think much of his pursuit of physical hardship was unconsciously designed to batter down this self and keep him under lock and key.

This was not so in the same degree of another friend of mine whom I will call Matthew.

Matthew visited the Jerusalem community, accompanied by several friends, riding on a very loud motorbike and carrying a ˑ303 rifle. Soon he had blown the heads off two mating pukekos who lived quietly behind the cottage. One pukeko made good bait in an eel trap. The other went into the pot. But I would have been happier to see them still alive.

Matthew was a ball of energy. He had been in trouble on account of fist fights outside pubs. And his attitude towards women was not exactly chivalrous. He was attracted by Moana, a Maori girl who had recently come out of the mental hospital, where she had been committed on account of her use of sedative pills. At first Matthew followed her round like a pup, sitting beside her wherever she sat down, offering her cigarettes. But then his feelings came to a head. He sat down on a mattress beside Moana, grabbed hold of her, and said – ‘Has anyone here ever had a piece of black pudding? She should go on the bikey’s block’ – which means, translated – ‘Has anyone here ever had sexual intercourse with a Maori girl? She should be subjected to the gang rape which is a ritual among us motor bike boys’ – which means, of course, further translated – ‘Help! Help! I don’t know how to cope with my impulses. To love is a state of pain, self-hatred, and confusion.’

It was a delicate moment for race relationships and the peace of the group. Fortunately Moana was a wise girl, who understood this type of reaction, though she did not like it. She recognised that Matthew was in fact a loudmouthed male virgin. She did not panic or rubbish him. As a result the group was able to take charge and calm him down without giving him excuse to feel even stronger feelings of rejection.

If Kevin had been present, he would probably have beaten up Matthew – and this course of action involves a certain contradiction – since Matthew and Kevin are very close cousins in spirit. They are both – as far as their sexual and aggressive attitudes are concerned – very ordinary Kiwis. Their feelings about the opposite sex are almost wholly bound up with feelings about self. That is the problem. Matthew is Kevin upside down. Kevin is Matthew in reverse.

page 192

I think the core of the problem is dissociation. When some Brother in a Catholic school tells the boys that they should keep their animal impulses under control, he is stacking up trouble for the future. No human impulse, however strong or trouble-making or painful it may be, can be described as animal. It is simply bad theology. Impulses that occur in human beings are human impulses.

The result of successful brain-washing on this score is dissociation – that splitting of the personality into two halves which I think was Kevin’s main problem, and a problem for Matthew also, because half of his nature was gentle and thoughtful – a fact one would find out only after long acquaintance.

Perhaps I talk too much about other people. Let me tell you a small personal anecdote, of the kind people most often reserve for the psychiatrist. And I ask for your tolerance, because I have my reasons for telling it.

One day, when I was about six years old, my cousin Maurice and I were standing in an outdoor lavatory shaded by a large ngaio tree half-way down the section from the house I was then living in. The world of childhood can be very reassuring and stable. There was grass growing beside a shed – and climbing up the stalks of grass, little green spiders with white crosses on their backs. There was a rusty oil drum brimming with water from the roof of the shed. If frogs were put in there, they would swim. It was a hot day beyond the shade of the ngaio tree, but where we were, it was pleasantly cool. The smell from the earth closet did not offend us. It rarely does offend children.

There was a third companion with us – a little girl of our own age. I think it was my cousin Maurice who suggested that we should exhibit our private parts to one another. I remember standing in my shirt and exhibiting my backside to my companions. One’s backside or one’s front side are much the same to a child – they are private areas and they carry with them the sense of a well-known social taboo.

I don’t suppose what is called indecency among children has any actual moral connotation. Children are commonly decent – sometimes indecent. They learn habits of decency according to what is accepted or not accepted in their local society. It is also quite possible they learn something it is necessary for them to know – by fractures of habits of decency. Any relation to moral law would be doubtful and hard to establish. There is no doubt some built-in need for habit and taboo in the minds and hearts of children. There is also a built-in need to know whatever they don’t know.

If children were habitually unclothed, there would of course be no taboo attached to body areas. Then the need to know what one does not know would express itself in other ways – by going into a forbidden railway yard, by climbing a forbidden cliff, by going through a forbidden place where the dead are buried. The fracture of nursery taboos is, I think, one aspect of ordinary human growth. But it does involve fear. And the fear may be out of all proportion to the event.

page 193

To return to my story. As I stood in the lavatory, I heard my mother come rapidly down the path from the house. She was shouting my name. And her tone of voice must have indicated a very high degree of wrong and anger. It meant, to say the least – ‘What on earth are those children up to now?’

The objective happening was trivial. My own reaction was not. Perhaps my mother’s feelings communicated themselves to me, like a blood transfusion. At any rate, I remember going into a state of extreme, even – as it were – cosmic fear. God and all his bulldozers were on the march. It was like being plunged naked into cold water or hot fire – or as if, all of a sudden, the earth had vanished from under my feet and left me exposed to an all-seeing eye of judgment. I don’t imagine I actually thought my mother – a kind woman in most ways, though herself the product of an intensely rigid training – was going to annihilate me. Yet there was something quite absolute about the situation.

Perhaps an absolute disapproval was what I feared. Parents tend to be God-images for their children. ‘Mother is angry with me’ – ‘God is angry with me’ – the words have a similar meaning at the infantile level. When a parent disapproves in an absolute way of a child – thus excluding the child from tangible signs of love – the sun goes out of the sky.

The fear I have mentioned was, quite honestly, the most extreme I have ever felt. Fear does not vanish without reappraisal. And if I were at this moment – at the age of forty-four – still not able to see the fear in its right context, it could very well unconsciously disturb my view of God and man.

I might conceive of God as the Cosmic Disapprover. I might adhere to a personal theology in which a nursery morality of body areas had the first priority, and in which much that seems relatively innocent to man – I mean, to one’s own basic intuition of right and wrong – was frightful and hideous in the eyes of God. I might imagine that people were in danger of going to Hell – or alternately, of losing the life of God in their souls, here and now – because of breaches of trivial decorum – or because of those semi-compulsive happenings which can be interpreted as breaches of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments And I might father this rigmarole on the Church, to my own spiritual confusion and her disrepute.

No contrary argument would ever convince me. I would know – in my bones, inside myself – I would know that the angels weep blood each time a human being says ‘Fuck’ – because my fear would tell me.

Why should I bother you with this kind of comment? Chiefly because I wish to indicate the area in which some of our heaviest problems may develop. Perhaps none of us are ever fully adult. But to be adult means to be emancipated from the fears of an infant. An adult may justly fear lapses into cruelty or dishonest or cowardice – or a mishandling of the relation between men and women. But our priorities should be New Testament priorities – not the priorities of the nursery. The governing principle is that one has to learn page 194 to love well.

Matthew and Kevin had this in common – a tension, a basic disharmony springing from the fact that they hated themselves. They would no doubt clash heavily if they met. And in each of them the good boy and the bad boy were internally at loggerheads. Would the adult man ever emerge? Not, I think, without that deep acceptance by others which breeds self-conceptions.

We have to ask ourselves what we mean by ‘being good’. Do we mean – being a neat child, somebody easy to control, somebody who’ll create no disturbances – or do we mean – being full of an active spirit of love and mercy?

Our Lord indicated the minimum requirement for salvation, when He told us that two corporal works of mercy – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked – were the bare essential. He gave us the Sinners’ Magna Carta – ‘Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.’ Of course if we try to fulfil one Beatitude, we will improve in the fulfilment of others – our hearts will become purer, we will be less prone to rancour, we are unlikely to be rich, our hunger for holiness will increase, we will begin to mourn with those who mourn and rejoice with those who rejoice.

I see no point in the Kevins and Matthews of this world bashing one another – even in the name of morality – or, what is more likely, joining to bash the long-hairs who are not accustomed to solve arguments with a punch-up – and, whatever their defects, do at least try to share their goods and live at peace. I want the works of man to cease and the works of mercy to begin. What could you do about it?

Well, you could put down mattresses on the floor and invite the local drunks or vagrants to lie down there. You could chuck the Pill in the ashcan. When your daughter comes home wearing dungarees and a sweater, you could compliment her on her appearance, and borrow them and wear them yourself. When your son misses his School Cert Exam, you could say – ‘Thank God you’re not the academic type’ – and get his Maori uncle to take him hunting wild pigs – or, if he is a long-hair, give him the one Bob Dylan record he hasn’t got yet.

O.K. I know you can’t do it. But I believe the solution lies in that direction. The lion has to lie down with the lamb.

1970? (622)