A Ringatu Meeting At Ruatoki

Te Ao Hou, March 1963, Page 38

Mr Paul Delamere (Paora Teramea) has been President of the Church since 1938. A Ringatu Meeting At Ruatoki In the Ringatu Church the two most important religious meetings are those held each year in the first days of January and the first days of June. At these times, as well as at smaller monthly meetings, the people gather together to give thanks to God for having looked after them since their last meeting; to ask forgiveness for their sins; and to pray for His blessing in the future. Last January ‘Te Ao Hou’ was a guest at a Ringatu meeting held, as it is each six months, at Ruatoki. We learnt much about the Ringatu faith from the kind explanations of the President of the Church, Mr Paul Delamere, and from many of the other people there, and it was at this meeting that Ans Westra took the photographs on these pages. The Ringatu Church was founded by Te Kooti. Te Kooti is, to say the least, a controversial figure, and partly because of this, outsiders' attitudes towards Ringatu have sometimes been rather puzzled, even disapproving. In the past, much of the district in which the followers of Ringatu mostly live (the Bay of Plenty, the Ureweras, and parts of the Gisborne district and East Coast) was rather remote from the main centres of population. Many Ringatu followers led rather isolated lives—isolated, that is, from pakehas; Maoris do not lead lives isolated from each other. The people of the Ureweras, in particular, had retained many of the old attitudes and customs, and this made some outsiders suspicious of their religion. In past years this

suspicion was sometimes mutual; many of the people in this district had a substantial distrust of pakehas. However it is not necessary to like pakehas in order to worship the God of the Christian Bible. The old distrusts have mostly gone now, Ever since 1938 the Ringatu Church has been organised according to a constitution which established it as one of the legally accepted churches of New Zealand, and later, a register of those Ringatu ministers (‘tohunga’) authorised to perform marriages brought it into line with the requirements of the Marriage Act. But even today, despite the special romantic, imaginative appeal which the Ureweras and their inhabitants have always had for so many New Zealander, not many people other than its 5,000 members know much about the Ringatu Church. It has few written records, does not actively seek converts, and has very little desire for publicity. There is one good book on Ringatu, ‘The Upraised Hand’, by William Greenwood (published by the Polynesian Society, 1942), but even today most of their sacred texts and prayers are kept safe from inquisitive persons with notebooks and tape-recorders; the long, complex medleys of Bible passages are committed to memory in the old Maori way, and no books are used during religious services. During our conversations with Mr Paul Delamere he made two points in particular which, we felt, explained a great deal about Ringatu to people who are new to it. ‘The great thing about Ringatu,’ he said, ‘is

Some more of the people at the Ringatu meeting at Ruatoku meeting at Ruatoki on 1st January.

that it is a New Zealand religion. Every country has its own religions, its own denominations. Ringatu and Ratana; they are the main religions that grew right here in our own country. They belong here.’ The sacred texts of Ringatu, the inoi (prayers), waiata (psalms), panui (scriptural passages) and himine (hymns), are all taken directly from the Old and New Testaments; Ringatu beliefs are very literally derived from the Bible, and definitely do not, as is sometimes conjectured, include what is vaguely thought of as ‘old heathen magic’.