What Te Reo Māori Taught Me

I worked for a few years in a fairly rough area of Christchurch doing youth and kids work, and then in South Auckland briefly. When I began, I was a 16-year-old pākehā from a small town: my boys were half Māori and half Pasifika.

They taught me a heck of a lot. How to cry. How to hug properly. How to hongi with actual human warmth. How to visit properly, how to love a very different context, full of basketball and gospel hip hop and conventions I didn’t really understand. I caught fish and peeled potatoes and kumara and chopped taro, and learned all I could. But it wasn’t until te reo Māori arrived in my life that my exposure to te ao Māori gelled into something really and permanently life-changing.

Every Anglican priest has to learn basic Māori, and I learned it for a year and a bit: enough to get me through the Communion service and basic vocab and structures (“Arana has an orange. Arana’s orange is delicious. Wash your hands, Arana, says Nana”). But I also learned words that have much narrower and shallower equivalents in English. Aroha, for instance, means love. But it also means affection, to pay attention, with generosity or abundance. So it stands in for the English “mercy” and even for “forgiveness”, as in “Kia aroha mai”: the “sorry” we say to God. Whānau means family, but it also means “wider kinship”, and people joined by place, love or kinship. So, the homeless at the City Mission called to each other “mōrena whānau”: not just blood family, but street kinship and friends. 

I have learned bucketloads about my own faith seeing it through Māori eyes, and in Māori words. The English “forgive us our sins”, we repeat in the Lord’s prayer is  “Murua ō mātou hara”, “strip us of our sins”, which recalls the pre colonial custom of punishment and confiscation, a ritual punishment for offenders—but reminds me all the time that not only are we stripped and exposed before God, but that our vulnerability is seen and shared and loved. The Māori word “awhi” (“help”) also means “embrace”, “cherish”, adopt, and brood over, like a hen. A good description of large parts of my job! And “kahui wairua”, the te reo words for Chaplaincy, literally mean “company”, “flock” or “constellation of stars” of the spirit: people of faith are supposed to be shining stars.

Even the te reo words describing my cerebral palsy, “hokai nukurangi”, mean that when I walk around campus banging into things, I think of the adaptability of the bird, negotiating its environment. Stars, trees, the sky, the earth, the animals and birds and plants: te ao Māori is above all a personal universe, full of new insights—and as a renaissance scholar, I know that pākehā people also used to believe in a universe where the stars sang, and the trees clapped their hands before God, and the earth rejoiced before its Maker. People of faith still do! We believe in the interconnectedness and personality of all living things. And there is a wonderful opportunity, in learning te reo Māori, to see my own world and my own faith through other people’s eyes and sacred values.

University is about cultivating that humility; to see and to understand the eyes of others. May you find today, and see today, something new.

E te Atua, te whakawhetai, te whakapai, te whakamoemiti, ki
a koe; i aro mai koe ki a mātou e tahuri atu nei.
Meatia kia pūāwai tō aroha inā īnoi mātou ki a koe.
Korōria ki a koe.