Biographical Sketch
You do not know me. Who speaks this? I do - but it could be someone else. We are hidden from each other as God is invisible.
I have seen 60 summers, 52 of them after my first exposure to the inside of Anglicanism. In my first 8 years, the Anglicans were those who worshipped on the other side of the street - Main street, Granby Quebec. Our 'church' was at the corner of Dufferin and Main. I lived not far down the street - three blocks, past the park, corner of Lorne Avenue and Dufferin - 145 Dufferin to be exact. It was a house owned by my uncle. Uncle Charlie lived across the road and his wife (aunt Ivy) had a fruitful garden, lots of roses, carrots, and bees, especially in the corner latticed bower. Bees collected there. I have a vivid memory of large orange carrots shedding dark earthen clods under the pressure of water from the hose held by a large man in gum boots. His wife tended the roses. They had a noisy chiwawa. All that detail is somewhat irrelevant, but it reveals that my father did not own his own house though he was the president of the family maple business. The minister of the United church was a reverend Cyril W. Foggo (I kid you not).
At the end of our service, I used to watch the Anglicans conversing and dispersing on the other side of Main street. They were, like us, suited and jacketed, tied and flannelled, the ladies with hats - especially at Easter. At first mother was with us, but soon, she was too busy on Sunday mornings and stayed home to cook the Sunday dinner. We had dinners mid days when I was young. Why don't you still 'go' to church, I asked. Perhaps we were the last generation to take Christianity in our culture for granted. Already, I heard from my brother that people went to church for business and social reasons, not for faith. So even then, I knew that some paid little attention to the inertia of the weekly liturgy - whether United church or Anglican.
We were a minority also - English in a French culture, Protestant among a Catholic people. Even to a child, United - a good word - seemed nominal. Obviously we were not united with Anglicans or RC - what then was that word worth? Christian was not an adjective you could legitimate for a country. It was as misleading as the pink empire on the non-Mercator maps. Even a child could see an inadequacy of language, a hoped for power that was not real.
My non-Anglican history ended at age 8 when I was sent to an Anglican boys residential school. The first time my parents left me there, I recall the unexpected sensation of abandonment. I pressed myself against the door frame, my eyes raised to the ceiling, my chin against the portal, my innocent body hugging the door as if it might be alive, my eyes unaccountably filled and overflowing, melting me into a pool of salt.
"You're homesick already, kid?"
So that's what it was.
"Get over it - you don't want to be thought a cry-baby at your age, do you?"
What did it matter - I would be what I would be - and it certainly was not a jock.
I won't go into detail about the school. It could not be described as a "good" school but it had a proud history. I spent 9 years there - from age 8 to 16, 1953 to 1962. I was among the last to be confirmed at St Mark's chapel - the University chapel - Bishop Brown of Quebec, I think. When the new gym was built, the old gym was converted into St Martin's chapel and we no longer had to cross the bridge to the University for Mattins. The stained glass window had two left feet.
Securing healthy growth in youngsters is an ongoing challenge. How do you know what characteristics you want to develop in the world? Conquerors for a new empire? Pride in the past so that future businessmen will continue its glory? What could be taught of love to those whose affections had been scarred by severance from their homes?
We learned the Scriptures. Every day we heard them at morning and evening prayers. But what context could we give them? I expect today we could raise a consciousness that became aware of the history of the first century CE rather than an ignorant and uncritical momentum based on the divine right of kings and the glories of empire over heathen lands.
No blacks or Indians were at our school. One or two Jews, excused from prayers, and one or two Catholics - always the best at Latin - who went to mass in the village, were the token minorities. We were unaware that we were the minority in a French land. The school did represent some old Anglo-Saxon money and power. All this was prior to the quiet revolution. Today, sectarian schools teach some aspects of Christendom. But as it was in my youth, Christian is not an adjective that describes such teaching. If we are to teach Christ and the working of the Spirit to children in any age, we will have to explore the critical depths (whether of the first or the 20th century). Those depths for us in the 50s were:
Ignoring or teaching a party line won't cut it in any generation. Children won't ask or raise these questions - until later. Then they throw out the pabulum they were fed by those who did not even know there was food of substance on the table.
Still here I was on graduation, a tenor of sorts, 9 years of choral training. baptized and confirmed, not sure why religion was useful, trained but naive in leadership, attracted to boys, utterly ignorant of girls. This is a situation worth running from - but first with a string of gold stars from an undemanding curriculum, I had to learn failure.
I was accepted into 2nd year at McGill so I went to Montreal and lived with my brother. I argued with him over religion. For a while I imitated his atheism. He it was who first taught me home economics - how to buy, how to budget, how to cook for 1 or 2, when to take a cab instead of dealing with a dry-cleaning bill. The first year out of school is a big stretch. I found the Anglican Church at St Matthias where there was a substantial music program. We sang three services every Sunday and I read a lot of repertoire. It was a traditional prayer book service of course in those days - as it had been at my school. I couldn't help absorbing something whatever I said I believed, but I was never told, or never heard the message of the cross of Christ and how through our baptism as death we were to become a new creation.
The third year out, aged 19, our little sister died of juvenile diabetes. Friends I still have today had introduced me to Tolkein. I read this to Janet at the hospital. After her death, with so much time spent in the hospital, I threw my 3rd year at McGill and went to work for two years at RCA Victor - 'below the tracks' in Ville St Henri.
I had no lovers among my peers. Four years at that age is a large gap. One boy in the choir befriended me. His parents took us to Rhode Island for holidays - we loved briefly, then he went to my old school for two years. He died in California in a sky diving accident. Accident? I don't know. Did my marriage upset him? I don't know. Certainly I loved him and he loved me. I don't have his old letters or mine. They would have made an interesting study. He signed his "yours ever, David." And so I remember him.
To be gay in those days had been (if it wasn't still in 1964-5) against the law. It was not my mental desire anyway - but such physical desires are more powerful than one knows. Why didn't, couldn't the school teach about sex? Were the teachers aware or not? I certainly would not have wanted to learn from some of them. Maybe it is impossible. Anyway, in the absence of knowledge, instruction, and experience, we learned from each other, exposing the prejudice of the ages as in earlier generations. You have no need that any man should teach you. The anointing will teach you all things. But no one told us even this much - true though it is.
Here is the crux. The teachers didn't know, and you don't teach what you don't know except by accident. And some of the teachers were souls tortured by their own desires, those covered desires finding their seared but guilty release in corporal punishment. So the control of others substitutes for love and affection. And control over others suppresses the needs of the adults in their devotion to duty and process. They hide themselves from their own ignorance. This is how process and policy can fail. [Note 2006.12.26 The school is now under suit for sexual and physical abuse. Certainly it occurred. I knew it first hand.]
In the sciences, we build with success on the shoulders of others. Emotionally and religiously, we invent ignorance on ignorance. Why did Paul or pseudopigraphic Paul tell Timothy to flee youthful lusts? Why is fornication (fornix, fornices, Latin, Arch, where one could purchase a harlot) a sin against one's own body? All of us had heard these words but we had nowhere to put them. What sort of context can we build from these questions? Do we begin with Leviticus? in Hebrew? with its double ring structure and balanced concentric poetry?
Today the school is co-ed. But I doubt they explore Leviticus and ask the tough cultural questions on mixed garments and companion planting. The High Priest's garment is mixed of the very mixture of materials that is prohibited. Is this mixture admissible in the new creation? Were boys and girls separated to prevent premature sexual play? What if the body, male and female, were taught as temple of the Spirit (as Bishop Stephen Neill suggested when asked about sex)? What if Talmud, Targum, and Text were explored in the poetry of Genesis? What if the bind of the laws of stoning were considered in the story of the adulterous woman? (Surely we need these lessons taught correctly so that the world can escape its barbarity.) Why such desire? Where was the man? Who were the witnesses? What the outcome? Not answers - but questions raised.
What if the Song were read? I caution you that you not arouse my love until it please!
Students might be mystified, but teachers would grow and protection might be a byproduct. Most adults in Judaism and Christianity do not have the grounding in their own texts to consider these questions or refine them. They are of the essence of faith. The garment of righteousness is woven over time by faith - not credulity, not doctrine, not proposition, not enforcement of policy, but life.
I married in 1968. My marriage has seen 39 summers. More if you count my children's summers - 213 altogether 39x2 + 37 + 36 + 32 + 28. And none of these children went to a residential school for even 1 day. My wife and I met in the Christ Church Cathedral choir. I had moved there about 1966 in my fourth year at McGill after the choirmaster changed at St Matthias. We moved almost immediately to Ottawa to the parish of St Matthew's where I sang for 6 years.
Still Anglican, when I had three children, I converted from atheism to faith. I needed the death of Jesus to live. And in that death I found unexpected life. There is nothing magically automated about life. It is work also. The health of the children requires it. Could I have learned this as a child? I think so - not by rote but by learning to hear - a line here, a line there, word by word. It should have been possible from the faith of others - I do not know why it does not seem to work. I could not have learned from my parents. They did not know. Nor from my teachers - especially the official teachers of religion. They did not know. Out of this chaos, in spite of it, I learned. Is this an excuse for a kind of laissez faire in teaching? God forbid. I think the willingness to give up power is critical, but it cannot be ignorance and abdication both.
Somehow, the word was among us but we did not know it. Perhaps there is no "better" here but there is love and respect for the truth as it must find and express itself through our bodies. It is not a matter of progress but of listening. In the Bible, we have set before us light and darkness, life and death, truth and deception. A child should learn to choose the right as Isaiah says. We don't need to accept the ancients' apparent anthropology to learn from it. We should not learn the ancient stories as if faith consisted in believing them. No, it is in the dialogue with the anointing Spirit - the same Spirit that broods over our chaos today as yesterday, that informs our spirit and joys our life. That joy includes our sex - of whatever orientation. And that Spirit moves over our waters, walking with us over the marble seas to the throne of mercy and the glory of covenant.
What future in this? The present in the Presence of love. Some years after my marriage (c 1973) I turned to Christ with a vengeance. It was not an easy ride for my wife. I doubt I have ever been easy to live with.
I sought and accepted the gift of tongues, met many other charismatics, studied with an ignorant zeal, dreamed. It was the years of the charismatic movement. I remember the place of the first vision, tongues and interpretation and I have written of it after much study. It happened at a small prayer meeting in a small downtown parish of Ottawa when I was in the process of the move to Toronto - so autumn of 1974. There was input from other nameless denominations. I was seen as fundamentalist but there was more to come than the ignorance of the beginning. We worshipped in various places in Toronto - Little Trinity, St Paul's Bloor street, St Thomas's. Then we moved to Calgary where I sang at the Church of the Redeemer. My wife is a better singer, but many of these choirs were all male in the tradition I grew up with. Many were very good and many friends remain from those experiences.
In 1980, we left IBM and moved to a job in Victoria with the BC Government. Now with four children, St Barnabas church was our first congregation. In the early 80s we moved to St John the Divine where we have been more or less since then. In that same period I became an itinerant teacher of systems - analysis, design, and programming of computer systems. In 1984, I moved to my present position as part owner of a local software development company where I have the responsibility for teaching many people how to build multi-tier systems in the new software world.
Since January 1994, I have pursued theological studies with more careful thought. The first few years of my conversion I spent reading and fighting the "obvious" meanings of the canonical text. In the last 8 years I have had the opportunity to listen in on the dialogues of many scholars over the internet. Some know what they debate about. I tend to side with what is known as a liberal position, but many of my thoughts find the conservatives defensible, but not by the defense some of them seem to choose - e.g. absolutism, inerrancy, central authority, etc. None of these is needed. Better we should refine our questions and leave the sphere of fear.
The careful discipline of scholarship is a great help to clarity, especially historical philology, the contextual usage of words in the period of the text in question. It is not a matter of 'the original text' but of meaning. There is no autograph. Many of the 'originals' were oral performances. Scholarship by itself is not sufficient. The impact of the Spirit is not subject to scientific analysis alone. One could take any discipline - phycology, music, dance, theology. None of them submits to science alone. All can find completion only with that extra indefinable aspect that expresses itself in a commitment. One walks with the teacher by faith, whether the teacher is the minute DNA structure of selected algae (phycology), or the tempered back of the fiddle responding to resin, or the solo or pas-de-deux that trusts a partner, or the concentric poetry of the ancient writers and performers. Discipline without faith is non-responsive. Faith without discipline is an ignorant enthusiasm. Even a wooden structure exhibits some faith. None of us in the long run is without it. Schools require discipline - but note that they degenerate into violence if they are without the faith that enables teaching.
In the 90s I spent some time in parish council. This is not my calling, but I learned some things from the synodical process. During this time, I watched a congregation break away from Anglicanism and priests change their allegiance. And I observed the results in others of the same kind of abuse that I had seen at my school. Many of the arguments and schisms today are over the questions of sexual behaviour. People look for explanation and diagnosis. Perhaps some healing can result from such things. The potential for making a person whole again through the death of Christ is not seen easily by any who wish to control through explanation. Love is not in the use of power. Even respectable religion may only be a machine for creating outcasts. How do we know whether what we have is nothing but the lie of a conforming respectability rather than a new creation?
I wrote; I fell in love; I sinned; I forgave and was forgiven. I have things that could be said or written that might be useful to another. Because I am not in the space the church might have for lay preaching, I have learned to tell story to try to illustrate faith. The first sin against us all is our own ignorance. Let us learn our history that we may indeed learn to choose the right. God will take care of the enemies ranged against us.
The same boy who observed the carrots, ran from bees, shied from the barking dog, went to school, sang, and raised 4 children lives in these fleshly portals by faith and for the sake of love.
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A number of random questions