My journey from Samoa to this podium has been fraught with drama. I had to confront the question: shall I or shall I not speak tonight? I decided to speak because we, as elders, have a role to play in passing on and sharing with our young their cultural birthrights.
My journey from Samoan politics to Oceania representative on the Pontifical Interreligious Dialogue Commission last year (2005), seemed equally fraught with dilemma. The kind of dilemma found, for example, between Karl Barth’s ‘Godsickness’ and Francis Thompson’s ‘God-chasing’.
I want to approach the general theme of my topic tonight, ‘Advancing Pasifika Peoples in Aotearoa’, by emphasising and exploring this dilemma. I do so first through a series of reflections on my experiences in Tübingen, Rome and Lourdes and then through a brief discussion of Samoan notions of matua tausi (the elderly), faafailele (mothers) and au o mātua (love of parents). What unites these experiences, reflections and conceptual musings is the idea that each involves a search for those meanings, nuances and metaphors that can give substance to life and to learning - whether theological, Western or indigenous Pacific.
John C McDowell sums up Karl Barth’s insight on ‘God-sickness’ by suggesting that God-sickness is about the dimensions of complacency created by theology, religion, Church and culture that prevents one from really knowing (through thinking and feeling) God. He states:
What is most prominent in [Barth’s] infamous work of 1921, on Paul’s letter to the Romans, is the rupturing of all forms of human culture and theological discourse and practice. A krisis [barrier] is pronounced on all human attempts to pass through to speaking of and conceptualising God, the Wholly Other (totaliter aliter) infinitely and qualitatively divided from creatures. In this context, Barth stringently critiques theology, religion, church (as the particular cradle of religion), and culture, claiming that religion is the most dangerous enemy that humanity can have, apart from God, since it all too easily lulls one into a false sense of security and into the complacent belief that one has done all that needs to be done to gain the divine favour. In its ‘criminal arrogance’ it [theology, religion, church and/or culture] produces, thereafter, ‘comfortable illusions about the knowledge of God and union with him’. This is, however, a sign of both religion’s and the church’s ‘veritable God-sickness [Gotteskrankheit]’ and its Tower of Babel. (McDowell, 2002; italics mine, italics for emphasis).
For me, Barth says that there is difficulty in conceptualising ‘God the Absolute’ and that difficulty derives from man’s arrogance, criminal arrogance no less, in his pursuit of finding union with God. God-sickness is thus for me about man’s unhealthy preoccupation with one God, one truth, one way of knowing, thinking, feeling, being.
God-chasing, on the other hand, is about searching for truth, for knowledge of God. Francis Thompson in his poem ‘Hound of Heaven’ alludes to the notion of God-chasing. Here he speaks to the context of God trying to make known his purpose for us. In this we recognise that there is a God and that he has a purpose for us. The difference between God-sickness and God-chasing is that one is about barriers to knowing God and the other is about seeking and finding what God’s purpose is for us. I find Thompson’s point about God-chasing most present in his first stanza. I quote:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter;
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat - and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet –
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
The dilemma between God-sickness and God-chasing lies in the spaces between knowing, doing and feeling; between the spiritual and intellectual; the sacred and profane; temporal and divine.
My grandfather once told me a story about a ‘loony house’. One loony says, ‘I am Napoleon.’ The second loony says, ‘Who says so?’ The first loony says, ‘God did.’ A voice at the back pipes up: ‘I never did.’ My current preoccupation is with the questions: Who am I and is God speaking to me? And, if he is speaking to me, is he speaking through Barth or Thompson or both? I find that the loony story speaks most poignantly to me at this moment.
In fact, it resonates also with my friend Sailau’s current theoretical preoccupation with Amartya Sen’s concept of ‘critical voice’, where she argues that questions of which models of critical voice prevail in certain times and spaces are effectively questions about how we invite, apply and debate meaning (Sen, 1980). Barth’s God-sickness and Thompson’s God-chasing imply a ‘critical voice’ that can feel as well as think, can search without bias and gain perspective and balance without violence.
Theology, religion, science and culture are, as Barth suggests, human tools for living and for living in a just manner. Advancing humanity lies not in advancing tools, but in advancing living. God-sickness emerges where man seeks to unduly control living. To emphasise the importance of life, of living, is to emphasise the importance of sharing, caring and finding truth in the spectacular as well as the ordinary; in spontaneity as well as in habit; in the grotesque and handicapped as well as the beautiful and well-functioning. Advancing Pasifika lies in advancing models of thought, study, practice and truth that can do justice to the aims of living.
In my most recent trip to Europe, my travelling party and I were able to visit with Hans Küng in his home in Tübingen. I was also able to visit the Sistine Chapel in Rome and participate in confession and the ritual of the ‘Way of the Cross’ in Lourdes, France. In each of these places I was poignantly reminded of how the little things do matter.
Hans Küng, a world-renowned theologian, invited me and my travelling party to visit and have lunch with him at Tübingen in September this year (2006). Hans Küng is a close friend of Futa Helu, one of the icons of education in the Pacific.
Hans Küng resides in a four-storey building which serves as office cum home. We were escorted up to the second floor where he was and I noticed that on the wall was a reproduction of a portrait that seemed familiar. I asked whose it was and the gentleman who was escorting us said, ‘It is that English saint.’ ‘Thomas More?’ I asked. He responded, ‘Yes.’ What was noticeable was that the Thomas More portrait was the only outsider portrait, other than family photographs, in the house. Intrigued, I asked Hans Küng, ‘Is Thomas More your favourite saint?’ He said, ‘Yes. Who is yours?’ ‘Augustine of Hippo,’ I replied. ‘Then you’re one of Ratzinger’s gang,’ he exclaimed.
I like Augustine because he lived a full life before he became a priest, although I am aware of the criticism against him. That is, many of the problems that the Church faces today derives from the fact that in his two principal works, the ‘City of God’ and ‘Confessions’, Augustine is addressing the ‘monkeys on his back’ so to speak. ‘Monkeys’ which he inherited from the loose life he led before he became a priest. It has been claimed that when Augustine became celibate he developed a complex about his earlier incarnation, summed up in his prayer: ‘Dear Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’.
To return to my lunch conversation with Hans Küng, before we were to eat I was in full conversation with him and for some unknown reason, maybe because I was absorbed by the conversation we were having, I picked up a piece of bread, broke it, put it into my mouth and started to munch. There was a pause, pregnant if you like, and Küng said in a slow and measured way, almost an incantation: ‘In our household, whether you are atheist, agnostic, believer or non-believer, we say prayers before meals.’ Although I was clearly rapped on the knuckles, in a strange way I felt reassured that in the Küng household they said prayers before meals.
Küng’s ‘critical voice’ has raised many to ask whether he is a believer. Clearly in his household there is belief in the ritual of prayer.
At Lourdes in France I went to confession because it was part of the ritual. I hadn’t been for years. The regimen was quite different from what I remembered. It was more like a session with your psychologist or therapist rather than a confessional for a penitent sinner. From memory the latter seemed more ritualistic, less interactive. My confessional dialogue covered a whole number of things including Hans Küng, where my confessor owned up that one of the main inspirations in his young life was Hans Küng’s book on Thomas More (Küng, 1965).
For my confessor to admit this at confession was new for me and evidence of the new environment in which we live. His disclosure also showed the reach of Hans Küng’s critical voice - one which continues to be expressed in his latest book, recently launched, titled, ‘The Beginning of All Things’ (publicly released 2007). Around the same time the Pope issued a statement on evolution. Interestingly, in my view, Küng’s new book and the papal statement effectively question the literal interpretation of the biblical version of creation. These theological shifts in practice and argument reflect the impact of the ‘spectacular’ or radical (Küng’s new book and the papal statement) on the small or ordinary (my confessor’s youthful reading). A line of influence is clear and the dilemma between imposing and chasing voice finds some context.
In Rome, our travelling party was able to visit the Sistine Chapel. I chose to avoid the VIP sighting of the Sistine Chapel and joined instead the public queue. Along the way to the chapel there is an air of expectation which engenders rapport and camaraderie amongst strangers from all over the world. I am pleased I joined them for they unwittingly provided more ambience and colour to my experience.
When we arrived in the chapel there was a sudden silence, with people whispering ‘hush’ as if to say, ‘please do not intrude into my special moment’. First I stood in awe and wonder and marvel at the genius of the masterpiece, in this crowd of strangers, brought together by the magic of what is our common heritage, where spiritual meaning and nuance can be absorbed individually and collectively. This magnificent work of art literally took my breath away; absorbing critical voices in the sheer delight of being witness to God’s gift. It titillated my senses to the point where I felt compelled to pause, reflect, mull and wonder at what I would take away from the moment. I found myself asking: How does one theologise, rationalise, or make sense of the beauty and music in such a work of art? How does one begin to articulate the feeling and emotion that comes to me through my ears or eyes and touches my heart or soul? Answers to these questions must involve more than just the reasoning of the mind; they must also embrace the reasoning of the body (or senses) and soul (or heart).
The message I took away from my Sistine Chapel experience was that this was God’s gift to man and it was man reciprocating in love, gratitude and acknowledgement. The masterpiece is a prayer. It is irrelevant to me that what is portrayed by Michelangelo, i.e., the biblical version of creation on the ceiling, is theologically or scientifically flawed. It is a man’s prayer to his maker. And, it is no less so when framed from his individual reference or by the reference of others, Küng, the Pope, or otherwise.
Making sense of something is as much an exercise of feeling, of emotion as it is of thinking. Making something knowable and being excited by that knowledge involves both thinking and feeling. Appreciating nuance and metaphor occurs through both thinking and feeling. This is part of the process for drawing substance and meaning; for drawing truth.
In the Samoan indigenous reference, meaning is drawn from allusions, allegory and metaphors. These are linguistic tools that have the ability to make meaning, to privilege beauty, relatedness and keep the sacredness of the other. Academic, especially scientific, study privileges precision and evidence and does so often to the detriment of beauty, relatedness and spiritual titillation.
Allusion and allegory are essential to Samoan religious culture because thesis and antithesis co-exists as synthesis. The contradictory versions of creation are not invalidated by contradiction. They are sustained by the many meanings suggested by allegory and allusion. In that context the cold logic of Augustine and Aquinas is arrogance because it presumes the absolute, which is the prerogative of the Godhead.
To the extent that Samoan language is couched in allusion and allegory, do allusion and allegory lose impact and allure by the scientific attempt to be definitive? Does the suggestion of more than one meaning in allusion and allegory lose power by the attempt to pin down meaning? Are you imposing a restriction that is inimical to the fundamentals of hint and suggestion, both essential ingredients of nuance? Does the potential to titillate diminish when you restrict by specifics the shades of meanings in real life?’
This reflection on the art of experience and meaning reminds me of my friend Godfrey Onah’s comments on seeking truth. Truth, he suggests, is multidimensional; it has many colours, shades and sizes; it has different textures and tastes; and comes at different times and in different ways. But in the end, it is all truth. Barriers to truth, he finds, lie in barriers to our ‘readiness to share our particular “truths”’. He states:
All sincere seekers are really seeking the same thing - the truth. It may present itself to us in various forms, but it is really the same. The contradictions over which we fight may only be apparent in the long run. What is needed is constant openness, especially to the truth that has been discovered by the other and the readiness to share our particular ‘truths’, so that in putting together our ‘truths’ we may get nearer to the truth ... (pers. comm).
Walking towards the truth involves finding meaning and substance in the sharing of our particular truths. The search for truth is a common search, one that embodies difference in all its capacities. Insight into this search may be found yet again in the most ordinary of events.
My final anecdote from my trip to Europe involves the ritual of the ‘Way of the Cross’ in Lourdes. About 10,000 or more people come to Lourdes every day during what is known as ‘the season’. When Archbishop Alapati of Samoa invited me to join a pilgrimage to Rome, Lourdes and Fatima I was not keen because I tended to regard the phenomenon of miracles as largely due to Latin overreaction. My reservations are founded on Augustine’s comment that ‘Doubt is an essential ingredient of faith’ and Ronald Knox’s observation that one can not afford to be ‘too close to the engine’ if one is a ‘bad sailor’.
The advantage of beginning from doubt and scepticism is that once these are allayed, faith is reinforced. The vigils, the prayers, the rituals are part of the twenty-four-hour regimen. Behind the Lourdes Cathedral is a hillock lined near the top with the fourteen Stations of the Cross, representing the notable incidents of Christ’s way from prison to Calvary. The representations of the incidents are carved in wood and stone. The ‘Way of the Cross’ is a ritual of prayer and meditation on the principal message of crucifixion, which is redemption through suffering.
In the beginning of our ‘Way of the Cross’ ritual we were joined by a couple and their handicapped son. The couple were probably in their seventies and the son in his early forties. The couple and the son made slow progress because they had to walk slowly. Every now and again they would stop, bring out the mobile chair, seat their handicapped son and take turns to massage and converse with him.
It was a sight that drew attention. The massaging, the kissing, the conversation, every word spoken, every gesture, every expression of the face seemed to bespeak the definitive expression of a labour of love. So much loving seemed to diminish the handicap to a point where, looking on, I felt denied and disadvantaged because I could not share in this celebration of love. I found solace in the Samoan saying ‘O le au o mātua fanau’, meaning ‘The pinnacle of parents’ affection is their children’.
Our party had to move on but every now and again I felt compelled to look back at the couple and their handicapped son because they seemed to me to live the message of ‘Way of the Cross’ in a way that rendered our gestures and rituals banal and common-place. And, because I saw in their act of loving the face of what I would recognise as my God. During this experience I thought of Milton’s piece ‘On His Blindness’ where he says:
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best."
Milton impels us to recognise that the grace to forebear derives from the spirit to accept our mild yoke, for in the end whether or not our yoke is mild will depend on how we bear. Inequalities or disadvantages may seem harsh, but we do not know that harshness until we ourselves bear it.
The message that I took away from this experience was the sick are given a place of honour; and that the sick, the old, the crippled, the disabled and the infirm are all children of a loving God. They are not an inconvenience or a drain on the moral, material and spiritual resources of society. They deserve special loving. They deserve the time and space to be heard and taken seriously. They deserve the right to share their truths about living.
My observations and experience of the people who joined us along the ‘Way of the Cross,’ their banter, repartee and laughter brought home to me the significance of the matua tausi in Samoan culture.
The matua tausi are the elderly who are either house-bound or their movements are restricted by frailty in body and mind. They are the elderly who have become the responsibility of family and community.
Samoan culture imposes on the family and the community a special responsibility to care for matua tausi. In fact, in many cases they are given precedence over the matai in the apportionment of food and resources. Their role is to nurture the young (faafailele) and to support the family. Faafailele means to nurture in the way a mother nurtures her newborn baby.
Matua tausi have the role of supporting the leaders of the family. They continue to be valued in Samoan culture for their accumulated wisdom, i.e., the tofā mamao (long view), po o le faautaga loloto (deep view), o le toe ‘ulutaia (literally, ‘the wisdom of the old breadfruit tree’).
The qualities of old breadfruit tree timber is highly valued in its ability to accommodate the curves necessary in Samoan house-building. It offers a metaphor into the complexities of the human condition, which is an essential ingredient for resolving issues of import.
Matua tausi are the objects of love and respect. They are not an inconvenience seeking refuge, place or relevance in the community frame.
There is a cultural imperative on the Samoan community to seek gainful employment for the disadvantaged. This imperative is underlined by the disadvantaged or handicapped flaunting the flawed leg, eye or body frame publicly in song and dance as if they are taunting God and man to prove that fate has dealt them a bad hand. As if to say, ‘Yes I accept my lot by celebrating with you my disadvantage.’
In a secular world where the sick and the old are perceived as an inconvenience and worse, a curse, I need a ‘Lourdes’ to remind me of the redeeming power of love. That is, to remind me of the beauty of inviting meaning and sharing truths; and of the fact that the sick and the old are as much God’s children as I am, they deserve love and support.
Pasifika students living in Aotearoa deserve our love and support. Disadvantaged in ethnic terms manifests itself in many different ways. Understanding the systemic and personal disadvantages of our Pacific young people requires listening to them, taking them seriously, hearing the complexities of their living conditions and knowing how to reach them, to speak to them and guide them. The search for meaning in education is, according to Barth, the same as that in theology, religion and culture. It is the search for the way through our experiences of God-sickness and God-chasing. It is the search for ethical action in an increasingly unethical world, in a world where the irrationality of man has overstepped the rationality of nature, of God.
I wish to end by quoting the final two paragraphs in Michael King’s Being Pakeha Now. Here he talks of the image of God that he witnesses through a poignant moment when the forces of time and nature take a-hold of him and he comes to a place where he feels God, where he suggests a knowing of God through feeling (seeing, hearing, being). He talks of a view from two of his home windows. He writes:
It would be possible, from the evidence within sight and sound of these two windows, to deduce much of the surrounding land’s natural and human history. The geological features are visible, and the regenerating flora and fauna. That same view is witness to nature’s capacity to recover from past abuse, for this is also a landscape that has been logged, burned over and mined. In just over one hundred years it has reassembled its elements and reasserted its healing powers. Even a kiwi has returned, and we hear its shrill cry as it feeds in the bush around the house at night. It is in this healing process that I apprehend what I would now call God. Not the image of our childhood: the old man with a long beard in the sky who intervened in human affairs when necessary to unleash floods, deliver tablets of stone or deposit his son. That was a metaphor that sought to make sense of the complexities of the human psyche, an image made in our own likeness. The God I discern now is infused in the host of good and honest men and women who make up the underlying fabric that holds communities like ours together; and in the regenerative power of the natural world.
In the rise of mist from the estuary and the fall of rain, in the movements of the incoming and outgoing tides, I see a reflection of the deepest mystery and most sustaining pattern in all of life: that of arrival and departure, of death and regeneration. And, in seeing them, I feel satisfaction. I am thankful that this piece of earth exists and we upon it, to see and to experience these things: and - thanks to the miracle of human consciousness - to know that we experience them. (King, 2004, pp. 240-241).
Coming back to the theme, what has this got to do with advancing Pasifika in Aotearoa? To tell you the truth I don’t know. Do I care? Yes, I do care. I’d like to think that my vision of God has relevance to Aotearoa and that when I meet up with Michael King he will probably say ‘I can see where you are coming from and it’s not because we went to the same school - St Patrick’s Silverstream.’ God bless.
King, M. (2004). Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native. Auckland; New Zealand: Penguin.
Küng, H. (1965). Freedom in the World. New York: Sheed and Ward.
Küng, H. (2007). The Beginning of All Things: Science and Religion. Translated by John Bowen. Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cambridge, U.K.: William B Eerdsmans Publishing Company.
McDowell, J. C. (2002). Who is this God? The Hermeneutical Significance of the Doctrine of the Trinity for Christian Theology. Retrieved October 31, 2006, from http://www.geocities.com/johnnymcdowell/ST2B_1_Trinity.htm.
1This was a public address given to the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Office of Pasifika Advancement (OPA) Public Lecture Series, 14 November 2006.