God is revealed in the legends of the land

By GRAEME FERGUSON*

One of the Meremere crosses is for my step-brother. He was driving north in his van when an articulated truck went out of control and jack-knifed coming round the bend. It slewed across the road. The van had nowhere to go. Ron was killed. His passenger was badly injured.

That bend in the road is full of memories for us. We are glad that it has a taniwha guarding the memory of past tragedies.

This section of road carries many crosses. We and lots of people have a shudder of recognition every time we pass. It is for us an experience of the holy in the midst of everyday. It is a sacred place because people have died there.

Places which recall life and death moments like that are mysterious. People sense that things beyond their control have taken place there. Such places might help people to crack the surface impression and penetrate to a new depth of response to life and death matters.

All countries have their holy places. Travelling in Greece, one is amazed how a quiet, bushclad fold in the hills, or a tiny fall of water into a dark pool, has given rise to stories of the gods that have been handed down for many centuries. The places themselves are ordinary, but their stories are amazing.

In Australia, the sacred places are hidden and guarded with great care, but are pregnant with meaning for Aborigine people. The tribe returns over and over to be re-empowered from their roots of memory that have lasted through the millenniums.

It is powerfully significant that the holy places with their spiritual guardians pre-date the later arrivals in the land. It takes a degree of humility for any colonial power to wait on the people of the land to ask them where the places are which disclose the sacred for them.

They assume that they are above such things. The people of the land have nothing to teach them about spiritual matters.

They also assume that they bring their gods with them and do not need to find out whether God may not have preceded them, to meet them as they arrive. No one discovers where God has disclosed himself until they know the stories of the land.

Geoff Park tells of one such place on the Mokau River. There is a grove of kahikatea on one bend of the river that has never been cut down and never incorporated into a land claim. It has always been a native reserve. No one really knew why until it was remembered that this had always been a burial place for the local iwi.

Tribal ownership might have changed through the years but the memory of the place where the dead rested in the tops of the trees was always honoured. The trees were protected.

This has not always been the case. Many places of sacred memory have been violated through the years. But now we are more sensitive to the spiritual significance of such places.

The guardians of sacred places are powerful and real to those who are alive to the possibility that there is more to some places than their surface appearance.

Taniwha are being dismissed as being like elves and fairies, goblins or ghosts, which are thought of as images of fantasy.

Mythical creatures on the other hand, like taniwha, live in places that convey moments of serious sacred disclosure or memories of life and death issues for human life. They protect places that are dangerous or where terrible things might have taken place. They symbolise places that remind us that there is more than we can tell.

A sacred story as a myth is not an unbelievable fairytale. It conveys sacred truth in the only way possible through reciting stories. The taniwha, or any other angelic beings, are the agents who convey the presence of the sacred. They have no existence apart from their service of the sacred presence, but as its messengers and protectors they have the same reality as the story they share.

Xavier Herbert in Poor Fellow My Country, an Australian classic, includes the story of an Outback grazier and his donkey-driver mate who are on a drunken binge out in the desert, which leads them to talk of solemn things. They admit to each other that they have seen their own personal shades, their aboriginal guardians.

At that point they realised that they were finally accepted in their country. The spirits of the land had accepted them as brothers.

People remain alienated from their own place until they accept the places in the land that disclose the sacred, and the guardians of the land who remind them of life and death memories that open them to God's presence among them.

* Graeme Ferguson retired as senior minister of St Davids Presbyterian Church, Auckland.