Dialogue: One lifelong lesson in loving thy neighbour

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Selwyn Dawson, MA, QSO, who died this week, was born in Dunedin in 1918, raised in Gisborne, was a chaplain with J-Force, ordained in the Methodist Church in 1946 and became a big-city minister in Lake Rd, Takapuna, in Durham St in Christchurch, and Pitt St in Auckland.

He was president of the New Zealand Methodist Church in 1972, and president of the National Council of Churches in 1968-69. He was a two-term Auckland City councillor, worked for Amnesty International and, after his retirement in 1981, served part-time at St Marys cooperating parish in Glen Innes.

That was the stuff of his professional career, the milestones that pegged out his life, but it gives only one dimension of a man who, improbably, I came to love.

I first met Selwyn soon after he had retired 18 years ago when he joined a writing class I was conducting. He introduced himself and said he lived over the road from the house we'd just moved into in Orakei.

The chance of my becoming the friend of a retired Methodist minister was very slim. You see, my father was an atheist, mostly because his father had been a bigoted member of the Free Church of Scotland in Dunedin. And I've always been agnostic: if there's a God, good on him; if not, bad luck.

After the course, he went on, of course, to broadcast many Morning Comments on National Radio, and to write several books, hundreds of newspaper columns, and enough letters to editors to fill a mail train.

We talked, as neighbours do, and gradually I came to understand what a remarkable man he was. I have from time to time savaged organised Christianity and after such a column appeared, he phoned me and quite formally said he wanted me to know he was writing a letter to the Herald rebutting my case. I said, "I'd think less of you Selwyn if you didn't." He did, of course, and did it very well.

I was approached to join the Rationalists Society. It was Selwyn - and I never told him this - who made me decide not to. You see, I listened to some of the rationalists and found in them some of the same bigotry, the same certainty of rightness, that my grandfather had; but when I talked with Selwyn on any subject, I discovered this deep well of tolerance.

If you read his book about Jesus, called Meet the Man, you'll understand how foreign to his nature bigotry was.

Without knowing it, I'm sure, he so instinctively embraced the philosophy of Gandhi - hate the wrong but not the wrongdoer - that I told him once he was in danger of giving Christianity a good name.

He smiled but fixed me with a gimlet stare. He made me think about tolerance and I realised it's a much more important quality than so-called cultural sensitivity.

I mean, there are things about some other cultures that I feel are uncongenial - I can't join an appreciation of them, I feel I must argue against them - but I must be tolerant and understanding without necessarily accepting them.

That was Selwyn's attitude towards politics and politicians. His intense and continuing interest wasn't about the art or the science or the shrewdness of it all, but about how political actions affected ordinary people - an unfashionable attitude often considered naïve.

Let me catalogue his physical problems since I've known him: emphysema, a longstanding heart condition, diabetes, surgery for serious cancer, a broken hip and a shattered elbow. And all the time he battled on. When his emphysema was getting worse he walked for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, in rain and shine, with a transistor radio clamped to his ear with one hand as he listened to news and current affairs programmes.

He was engaged with life. I remember once when I visited him in hospital after surgery, he said cheerfully that he'd woken up in the recovery room, seen the nurse, realised where he was and rejoiced that, as he put it, he was alive and still had all his marbles.

After his legs were amputated last week, he was asked what he wanted done with them. He told the doctor he wasn't much fussed, and chuckled to me that perhaps they should be scattered over the Domain: "They've walked over it so often, I think I've got the right."

He made me think of the nature of goodness because he was as good a man as I've known. He was an instinctive liberal tending compassionately to take the side of the disadvantaged and underprivileged but, fundamentally, his goodness was this: he could argue strongly on any matter, disagree with you stoutly while exuding - without unction or being patronising - that he loved you anyway.

He had genuine humility and courage - not the sort of courage that bravado and a bottle of whisky gives, not the sort of flashpoint courage that you need to crank up for an hour or two, but the sort that enables you to endure for years, without whinging, pain, discomfort and the indignity of dependence.

Through him, I understood fully that you don't have to be built like Buck Shelford to be enduringly tough and resilient. He was a tiny man in stature but as big as they come in spirit.

After seeing him last Saturday, I was convinced he was going to recover yet again. I was going to say to him once he was better that for a clergyman he seemed excessively, even improperly, reluctant to leave this world for the next. He'd have enjoyed that.

He's been a constant in my life for a long time. I wouldn't see him for two or three weeks at a time, but it was good to know he was there. He was a kind of decency touchstone in an often nasty world.

So, while it's not news to the many thousands of people who've known him, I'd like everyone else to understand that Auckland and New Zealand this week lost one of that rare breed, a good man.