MEMORIALS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21473, 22 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

MEMORIALS

SOME REFLECTIONS

BY HILDA KEANE

Tho painter liked his literature with his lunch. He was wont to remark that ho found out more about the world's doings from his lunch wrappers than at any other reading. He did not mind the news being " a bit behindhand." " What's this shrine business? " he asked. " I thought the Jap.?, had something of the kind, but this is for Australia—a war memorial sort of thing;." "Place to pray in! " said the carpenter shortly. After a he added, " And it's about time a few of us did take to praying. When I see placards stuck in our decent streets inviting 1110 and you to hear some buster lecture^ —' auspices of Friends of Soviet Union ' —l feel sick to think that I've got this ghastly illness always tripping mo up, and you've got that twist in your leg for nothing! Making the world safe, they told us, and then they let these blank upsetters loose among the crowd to breed trouble. Wo could well do with a few shrines, where men could go and do some quiet thinking now and again. Ileal thinking, I mean, instead of being pulled and pushed every way by anyone who happens along." " Thinking? " queried tho painter, " you said " "Place to pray in! Well, praying is thinking if you tackle it properly." " But," and the knight of the brush inspected his picture again, " what are the churches for? Got plenty of them, haven't we? " " Of a sort; and war memorials of a sort, too. A jolly sight of money in them, too. If I had my way, I'd " The conversation was interrupted here by an agent who had a line of special door and window fasteners to sell. He was invited to have a cup of tea and a sandwich. They talked of jobs and prices, wages and unemployment, and it fell out that the agent was a British ex-Tommy. It further came that the three had been in one engagement together. This seriously impressed them and tho agent and the carpenter held a good parley. " This Anzac Day of yours," remarked the agent, " I suppose you'll always have it? " They supposed so, and tho talk got back to the painter's shrine. He was not too satisfied with his mate's explanation. Old English Churches " Did you go into any of our old English churches when you were over there?" asked tho ex-Tommy. "Now, I call them real shrines. Not just little two-penny half-penny things by the side of the road like the foreign stunt, and not ugly little wooden boxes such as you two hammer together and plaster up with paint. Churches! " He picked up a good-sized chip and fired it at an unoffending bird to show his contempt. " Why, you haven't got a proper church in Auckland! I don't believe you've got one in New Zealand! Why the dickens your people couldn't take a bit more trouble to make them beautiful is more than I can understand."

" Who did make yours? " asked the painter.

" Now you ask." The agent mused a while. " There's one dead cert," he said, " that they were built on no contract."

" I fancy," interrupted the man of wood and nails, " that I saw evidence of shoddy filling in some of your ruins. And why are they ruins? Bad building? "

" Not always," asserted the Briton. " Don't forget Cromwell. He did some of the damage. Knocked off carvings, too, while he was about it. You saw some mutilated tombs? " " I wish wo had a Cromwell," said the carpenter sourly. " I could point out a, few war memorials, so-called, that he might like to trim." " Pretty awful, some of them," the agent admitted. " But I suppose the people who paid for them like them." " I wonder," said the carpenter, and he laughed. " They're all right," argued the painter, " but I guess some chaps just went round with pictures, plans, you know, and gave quotes for concrete and sculp affairs and told the people how nice they'd look and they ought to have one." He was so serious that they left him with this view of things. Ideals in Building The agent told of monks who built through the long, long years at their cathedrals, of the carvers who chiselled and the artists who decorated until aisles, dreamlike in their grace, stretched away into space, and arches whose every line delighted, soared up and the hesitant tread of penitents was lost on the cool mosaic pf floor. The light filtered in through windows of rose and purple as men and women and children dropped on their knees to pray, while somewhere choirs chanted, incense burned and the robes of priests swayed as they moved about their olHces.

" I was telling Tom," said the carpenter during a pause, " that we need more praying these days. It seems to me that if each town coidd have had a large sort of very fine cathedral—they might have put all us returned men oil to build them—up on a rise somewhere in the heart of the city, it would be a great place to go to to be quiet in. I call thinking and being quiet about it the best sort of praying." " Of course, you know," the agent said reflectively, " that museum of yours gets there just a littlo. It's quiet and cool and large. I fancy that it's space that gives the right feeling." " You couldn't say your prayers there," asserted the painter. " Not even if you went to that Hall of Memories. You can wander round and look at names and havo a gaze at that little part they call a—they do call that a shrine, don't they? I've been wondering all the time where I'd heard of the thing. That's it. Uinph! Now, what do you say would happen to mo if J went there and said my prayers? If the Johnny who walks round didn't lug me out, everybody who came in would think I was mad. Wouldn't they stare, too? " The Muddled World " Well," said the carpenter, " we've got to como back to the church idea. I don't believe the man who tells mo he has no religion and doesn't want any. That's all pose. Peoplo say a thing like that once and seem to think thoy'vo got to go on saying it. It's puerile, just a silly kind of kid's rebellion against discipline. I think we need church, and by jovo, it needs us at present. It doesn't seem to be doing anything; seems to be rather lost among the lot of us. But aren't we lost? Did you ever see such a drivelling lot of muddled idiots as we are to-day? No leaders! No followers! All pulling everywbich way. No one having any particular ideal! Listening to fools! Being fools! Yet we have the cheek to wonder why the church does nothing* -It's time some of us did find a few shrines to sit in and straighten up our minds; and it wouldn't do us any harm if we made some use of the churches we've got for that purpose." The agent tipped out his tea leaves, brushed the crumbs from his clothes. " I must be getting along. 1 suppose we can have your order? "