I am the river and the river is in me

One of the interesting things about sitting in international conferences is realising you know more than one spiritual language. My spirituality has not only been shaped by the English Anglican tradition and its evolving manifestations but also by Maori understandings of life and faith. Often in international debates those of us thus schooled see issues with a ‘double vision’.

Outside the rear of St Matthew’s Church are two large trees – an English oak and a native Pohutukawa. Our environment nurtures the trees, and the trees in turn nurture others. Both trees also influence, shade and protect each other. English and Maori spiritualities are like those two trees. We have learnt and are learning to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of both ‘trees’; and being patient when they brush up against one another.

I want to name some of the aspects of Maori spirituality that have shaped and influenced me. In doing so I am interpreting aspects of a spiritual tradition that is essentially not my own. So I do it tentatively, conscious that it is my interpretation and not definitive.

English spirituality usually begins with the individual and then expands out to encompass family, then community, and then environment. Maori spirituality works the other way round. It begins with the land, then the community and family, and lastly with the individual within it.

The word for land is whenua. It is also the word for afterbirth. Traditionally your placenta was buried in the land belonging to your tribe. This land is an individual’s turangawaewae - one’s place to stand. It is the basis of one’s mana or spiritual power. The intimacy with the land is also expressed in its mythical name: Papatuanuku, earth mother.

Depending on the location of a particular tribe this intimacy with the land can also be expressed in terms of connection with a mountain or river. The people along the Whanganui River, for example, talk of their interdependence with the river in a proverb, “I am the river, and the river is in me.”

Unlike the common notion that land belongs to people, Maori understand people as belonging to the land. The idea of selling or polluting one’s ancestral land has therefore the same appeal as selling or polluting one’s mother. The materialist approach to land of ‘take, use, and go’, is countered by the spiritual approach of ‘give, nurture, and stay’. When a tribe has given land, for example when Ngati Whatua gifted nearly half the Auckland isthmus to Governor Hobson and the settlers, it is for the purpose of building relationship, for the good of both donor and recipient.

Maori spirituality is therefore, first and foremost, rooted in an intimate connection with the land and environment. It gives rise to an ethic of treating the earth and all that is sustained by her, gently and with respect. It is a mistake therefore to assume that the loss of land, as has happened repeatedly through the processes of colonization and neo-colonization, is primarily an economic loss. It is a spiritual loss.