MESSAGE TO MAORIS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 100, 1 May 1933, Page 9

MESSAGE TO MAORIS.

FAITH IN THE SPIRITUAL. BISHOP BENNETT'S ADDRESS. "'Whiti, whiti ora'—'We are crossing now from death to life.' So sings the pipiwharauroa, or shining cuckoo, to the Maori. She is a harbinger of spring coming from a far country." Following this simple story from the Maori by a spiritual interpretation, Bishop Bennett held as eager listeners the mixed pakeha and Maori congregation who were packed into the old stone church at Mangere for the service last evening. He had given a short talk to the Maoris, telling them how their grandfathers had hewn out the stone, block by block, and, having shaped it upon Mangere mountain, had carried it upon their shoulders to build the church; how, for many years, the church had been neglected by Maori and pakeha alike, until it was restored by the latter and had now become a heritage that should be honoured by their loving care, now and in the future. Bishop Bennett quoted a message that an old Maori had sent to the early Church in New Zealand. "Send to our people," he said, "the telescope, that we may be enabled to see the rocks that lie in the pathway of our canoe. As in olden times, when the Bible proved a telescope to show the Maori the snags beneath the dark waters, so it was to-day to all, both pakeha and Maori, who would but use it. Christianity was never given for individual, or selfish benefit, but to bring about the brotherhood of man, under the Fatherhood of God - a.- „f Although the present was a time of o-reat difficultv, Bishop Bennett said, he felt that these difficulties had come as a challenge to refine from our characters the materialism and the love of the thinma visible to the materialist, and that" they would make us realise and love the invisible things of the spirit. The Maoris were hanging on to everything spiritual. People were asking, "Where is that god, money? We cannot find it. It has gone " But in the song of the shining cuckoo, the pipiwharauroa of the Maori people, they might find a song, a symbol, and a true harbinger of spiritual spring time a call to cross over from death to me. \a the birds, gathering together upon the northern shores, await a head wind to outspread their wings for their long migration, so might the people use the winds of adversity to soar above the cross currents of the world into the serene atmosphere of spirit. In conclusion, Bishop Bennett urged the pakehas, who were the stronger brothers of the two races, to sec to it that they so lived that their weaker brothers/the Maoris, would in following them be raised, morally, intellectually and spiritually.