Another World Is Possible Series : Introduction – James K. Baxter
I’ve recently felt challenged to start a series of posts on Christians who have served as both inspiration and as signposts to a deeper, simpler and raw form of faith. People who have never really earned major publicity but have quietly and consistently tried to mold their lives on the character of Christ and his teachings. I’m calling this series ‘Another World is Possible‘ based off the initiative started by Christian activist and author Shane Claiborne.
The first person I’m writing about is a poet called James K. Baxter who died in 1972. During his life, James was one of the first people who really experimented with Hippy Communes in New Zealand, being a founding member of the Ngāti Hau or Jerusalem commune. He was one of the first people in New Zealand who authentically took his identity and language increasingly from the Maori people who had before then lived alongside white settlers but seen little to no exchange since settling. Throughout James’s work he adopted Maori’s language into his poetry believing that the culture of New Zealand’s settler community’s cultural dominance resulted in an arrogant ethnocentrism that left that culture spiritually impoverished.
‘Ko te Maori te tuakna. Ko te Pakeha te teina …’ The Maori [sic] is indeed the elder brother and the Pakeha [sic] the younger brother. But the teina has refused to learn from the tuakana. He has sat sullenly among his machines and account books, and wondered why his soul was full of bitter dust – James K. Baxter via John Newton from his book ‘The Double Rainbow‘
This contrasts quite sharply with the recent speech given by David Cameron’s perception of Christianity, England and the Bible given his recent speech marking the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
The other driving influence on James’s life was his Catholic faith, which developed through his life and drew him deeper in to a form of ascetism in the face of what he saw as the culture of individualism, selfishness, ‘spirtlessness and meanness’ in the wider non-Maori zeitgeist. Baxter’s experimentation with communes came out of drawing on Maori culture and the communes Baxter was involved in were places where individuals of Maori and Non-Maori heritage lived together. This is what makes Baxter somewhat unique amongst poets in that he was not comfortable in simply commenting on the social norms of his time but actively tried to change them, a prophet and a poet. He saw himself as a Catholic, a Christian humanist and someone aspiring to fully embrace the dual heritage of his homeland. He was a Catholic who through his work in the Jerusalem Commune (and its various offshoots) was also trying to repair the damage that colonial minded mission had wracked on first people communities where it encountered them.
Baxter through Jerusalem sought a form of utopian experiment, seeing that ‘white’ culture had failed the youth in the communities and created an environment that not only provided material shelter but acted as a political theater that signposted what he believed to be a move in positive change. The tension Baxter found with this however was the more popular Jerusalem was the more burden it placed on the community which could only tolerate so much. The Jerusalem commune continued after Baxter’s death in 1972 but did eventually disperse, instead creating a network of houses and places to crash that took the Jerusalem spirit back in to urban contexts with mission in mind.
The thing that makes Baxter stand out for me is the fact that his poetry, when you read it and what he achieved in life very much seemed to go actively hand in hand. There was a consistency in James K Baxter the poet, James K Baxter the activist and James K Baxter the Christian. When I first heard about James K Baxter it hit me at a time when I was busy reading, I was also busy talking, but I wasn’t doing much. He was someone who said and acted on what he believed in who united his faith in both tradition and a contemporary setting and fully embraced multiculturalism at the same time. Not even just embracing it but making it his own and communicating through it from a authentically grassroots perspective.
I think even today someone like Baxter would look at the spirit of our age, our zeitgeist and comment on its emptiness and overt individualism present in this our media saturated enviroment. The challenge, if he gave one, I think would be to rediscover the authentic, to not be scared of something that is different but at the same time to be willing to call aspects of our society and ourselves in to account and to then go and do something about it.
