A SPIRITUAL CRISIS

 

Another murder in Kaitāia highlights the growing spiritual crisis in our rohe where we clearly have a problem.  Those of us with eyes can see that Kaitāia has become a place of new tribes full of young Māori.  But these tribes have more to do with gangsta culture than with Te Ao Māori. 

 

We now see rangatahi who identify themselves more readily by the colour of bandanas and hoodies rather than by hapū and iwi.  In fact some nights Kaitāia looks more like East LA than Aotearoa, and each week the growing list of reported crime committed by young offenders bears that out.  What must we do to change that? 

Finding and locking up the criminal offenders is one approach.  But New Zealanders are already among the most jailed people in the world, and young Māori men make up more than half those numbers.  Calls for more police, increased sentencing and making the parents of young offenders accountable, is another approach.  But this continues the trend towards criminalising and jailing more people.    

I suspect that the main value in calls to make the families of criminals accountable is that if crime were classified by family, we’d find that most of it could be traced to a dozen or so.  I also suspect that most of the tragedies that make the headlines could also be traced to those same families. 

It’s a known fact that there are some dysfunctional, sick families amongst us.  They exist under almost visible clouds of fear, anger and distrust.  They live under deepening shadows of substance abuse, family violence, sexual depravity and hopelessness.  It’s another known fact that it is actually adult offenders from amongst these families who are doing the worst crimes of murder, rape and assault.  A superstitious person might call these families cursed.  Either way, they need broad-based interventions, but they do not need more jail. 

They, like all of us, are engaged in the age old battle between good and evil which modern psychologists interpret as the struggle between love and fear.  In our responses to their offending, we can be angry and afraid, feed the darkness of fear and evil, and fail to transform them or ourselves; or we can meet them with an opposition that offers love-based answers. 

I know from personal experience that transformation for Māori offenders is possible only when they are able to validate whakapapa, revive kaupapa, liberate tikanga and reconnect to Te Atua.  And I know for a fact that any intervention that is not based on those building blocks of Te Ao Māori is unlikely to succeed.   

If we have a spiritual crisis, and we do, doesn’t it make sense to then apply spiritual solutions?  Kaua hoki to koutou ahua e rite ki to tenei ao: engari kia puta ke, ara kia whakahoutia o koutou hinengaro, kia whakamatautauria ai e koutou ta te Atua e pai ai, te mea e pai ana, e manakohia ana, e tino rite ana.