Amish dreams: visions of the disaffected

 

God, I have crazy dreams. . .

 I don’t usually even remember dreams, but once in a while I have a doozie – not really a nightmare (I don’t remember those either), but one that is so bizarre it defies any explanation. It means what it means, I guess. As Bob Dylan put it in Gates of Eden:

"At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means."

But this one - . Anyway, Bill and I were in New York (I think – at least, some teeming urban centre that I wasn’t familiar with, at all. Here we were in Gotham. The Big Apple. This Is The City.) We were standing at a sort of crossroads, a busy corner, although I had no idea where we actually were and even less idea of the names of the streets, what hotel we were staying in, etc. THEN – suddenly – I was sitting in a wagon. It was a wagon FULL of Amish people. Just chock-a-block. Not one of those smart carriages – this was a fairly primitive wagon, kind of like a covered wagon only un-covered. I didn’t quite know how I had gotten there, although I vaguely remembered climbing aboard. No kidnapping or coercion was involved.

But I was sitting next to this woman (she was on my right, maybe 30ish, very Amish in costume and demeanour, the kind of woman who already has a dozen kids) who kept talking and talking. It was Amish talk, but as usual I can’t remember much content. Pro-Amish, of course, though since I was not handcuffed, I didn’t think I was required to join the cult.

BUT. And this was the hard part. Though I had climbed aboard somewhere in the teeming downtown, I had no point of reference. I had no phone. Where was my husband? I wanted out (or “off”), but didn’t see a way. I could have, I guess, said (and I think I tried), “Stop and let me off”, but the Amish woman told me “no, we’re going up to the Lake country”. I envisioned being away to hell and gone in some isolated rural community living completely off the grid. It was a helpless feeling. I was cut off. I was part of this. . . group. Religion? I finally said, “Can you take me back to where I got on and just drop me off?” They looked at me in bafflement.

Like most of my dreams, it didn’t “end” but just sort of petered out. Of course, my mind wants to put puzzle pieces together, so I wondered if this whole thing was an allegory for the church I attended for fifteen years. THAT ended badly too, though I had been disaffected and unhappy for the last three or four. I stayed too long, and began to feel a creeping sense of “we-think” – in other words, if you start thinking OUTSIDE that box, you are no  longer welcome. This coincided with a horrible meltdown in leadership that I won’t even go into. But still I didn’t leave!

Eventually, as I regained my mental health and saw the light, my relationship with the church also petered out and I no longer wanted to attend. I was tired of the whole thing. I now see mainstream church attendance as something out of the last century. Big drafty 100-year-old buildings being used for two hours a week, doctrine and cant that is always vigorously denied, hidden agendas that create constant guilt and a sense of inadequacy, an INSISTENCE that everyone is welcome and people can interpret God any way they want . . . but if you go too far, the minister will summon you to his office for a friendly chat.

The pandemic has virtually wiped out "liberal" church congregations except in a very limited capacity. Some have gone to “hybrid worship”, which sounds to me like something out of Soylent Green or some other cinematic dystopia. I am not sorry, for so-called liberal churches are an anachronism. We didn’t really help anyone. If someone in need came to us, they were given a bus ticket and a token for the food bank, all the way across town. And that’s it. People grumbled about having to pay for those tokens and wondered why people didn’t just get a job.

Oh, but one time we tried. Having dutifully brought our canned food donations to the church, someone made the mistake of getting up at the front and saying, "We also need can openers." To a person, the congregation roared with laughter. Someone needs CAN OPENERS?

The Amish thing, well, I’ve never had too many feelings about the Amish either way, except to say that we often hear about alarming genetic diseases that have not even been heard of before. The Mennonites, Hutterites, Anabaptists and Amish have been profoundly inbred for centuries, but as young people leave in droves to live more normal lives, the gene pool is getting smaller and smaller. Marry your first cousin? Maybe you have no other choice. So you end up with a sort of horrifying Habsburg situation, with children stillborn, hopelessly deformed, or dying of untreatable medical conditions.

The only churches which are flourishing now are Pentecostals, led by evangelicals who prey on the weakest and most needy. Shameless grifters, the sort that preach at us from our TVs, buy private jets with the congregation’s monetary “seeds”, and eventually get into sex scandals. I’m so tired of it all. We have two gigantic churches in our area, very recently built, which I  have heard are full every Sunday. Pentecostals. The United Church is foundering on the verge of collapse, and is even thinking of converting some of those huge drafty buildings into low-income housing (an idea that horrifies almost everyone!).  I don’t care what is happening to my former church now because it outlived its usefulness thirty years ago.

 Now I’m thinking: if that cart was pulled by horses, why didn’t I see them or at least smell them? Was it an oxcart, perhaps? DID I ever get off? The dream tapered off before I could answer any of those questions. But I would not willingly climb aboard any sort of wagon now, Amish wagon, bandwagon, wagon train with no end. Stop the horses – I want to get off.

End times: when clergy turn atheist

New movie about atheist pastors: “Losing Our Religion”

Losing Our Religion is a feature length documentary about preachers who are not believers, and what atheists do when they miss church. Allowed access to the 600 members of The Clergy Project – a safe haven for preachers from all faiths who no longer believe – the documentary follows ex-members and clergy who are still undercover.

They are not just losing their religion, for many they are losing their friends, community and even family. As well as their job.

As events unfold that change lives forever, their stories also connect with secular communities that are growing in surprising places. New groups are experimenting in ways to have church without god, and asking the same question as unbelieving clergy – “what’s next?”





Losing Our Religion is a documentary about community, acceptance, and a view inside the complicated lives of clergy who are stranded in the rising tide of non-believers.

Losing Our Religion is produced by Zoot Pictures Inc. in association with documentary Channel, the financial assistance of the Canadian Film or Video Production Tax Credit, the participation of the Canadian Media Fund, and the participation the Government of Manitoba - Manitoba Film and Video Production Tax Credit and financial investment from the Manitoba Film and Music Feature Film Production Fund.

I recorded this film which aired on the Documentary Channel, left it on my PVR a while, then watched it last night, kind of reluctantly. And it did turn out to be sort of depressing. (These films are always disappointing somehow, so I don’t know why I watch them). This wasn't so much about The Clergy Project as individual pastors who had “lost their faith” (in essence, become atheists) after a long period of spiritual disillusionment.

Through a lot of very talky interviews and not much else, the film traced their need to get out of the church, or even (in the case of one man) to stay put in it and continue to lead, and preach something he absolutely did not believe in. To my shock, Gretta Vosper (the woman who was asked to step down as a United Church minister because she was an atheist) was interviewed, and presented as something of a martyr. Her hurt and sense of rejection by the mean old church was obvious, though I don't see it that way at all. 

If you are clergy in any mainstream Christian denomination, it makes no sense to me to preach Communism or Buddhism or Scientology – there HAS to be a basic belief system based on the Bible and the teachings of Christ. That is what makes the Christian church Christian, but when Vosper spoke, the filmmaker's sense was, “How dare they persecute such a brilliant, sensitive spiritual leader?" This is what comes of telling five or ten per cent of a complex story.

The rest of it was quite sad. One couple, somewhere in the States, just battled and battled and twisted and turned, and it was extremely painful to watch. The wife's bitterness and even bafflement at what was going on was disturbing. The soon-to-be-ex-pastor husband was offered a juicy plum of a job that he knew he could do well and love, but his wife made him turn it down because she would “lose her support system”. Support system? This was completely gone already because everyone in the church had turned against her (she said) and wasn’t even speaking to her. It was strange to see her try to hang on to the shreds of what she only half-heartedly believed in, mainly in a desperate attempt to hang on to her identity and status in her religious community.

From sort of liking her, I came to actively dislike her and the way she had put herself in a box and was angry and self-pitying, often spitting venom at people she once loved (and even, nonsensically, at God, whom she called an asshole). Watching her face contort with anger and internal conflict was unsettling. But why did she think her friends would continue to support her? What did she think they’d say? “Oh, it's OK if you hate God now and call him an asshole! We still respect and accept you as the minister’s wife.” It was completely unrealistic. 

Never once did she seem to think of the fact that THEY might have felt hurt, angry and abandoned by someone who used to support them. The congregation's belief in a personal, all-loving and all-powerful God was being threatened by someone at the very heart of the church. The minister's wife is often the most accessible person in the area of pastoral care. It's possible and even likely that in their minds, SHE dumped THEM instead of the other way around.

In fact, it never seemed to occur to any of the disillusioned clergy in the documentary that they may have hurt and abandoned their flock, as they spoke only of how lonely and hurt and persecuted they felt because no one understood or empathized with their agonizing plight. The filmmakers did nothing to emphasize or even acknowledge this pastoral black hole. Or perhaps it was just edited out because it was too complicated.

Much of the tone of the film was atheistic in an antiseptic way, and one scene showed the crowd in one of these "alternate" groups singing “What a Feeling” from Flashdance (!!), self-consciously jumping up and down and trying to look un-embarrassed. Pep rallies for non-belief. These were utility halls, all-purpose rooms that may have been practical, but I sure didn't see any beauty or grace, or hear music that wasn't lame and devoid of real passion.

Of course there were standup comics for atheism, too, and a sick song at the end about different denominations, concluding that instead of all that, "all I have is a brain”, implying that no one who believes in this stuff does. It was hateful, but they ran it as a whimsical, funny, lighthearted way to end the documentary. Apparently, we were supposed to laugh.

I am something of a refugee from organized religion myself, so I did get a large part of it, or some of it, but I felt the need to write about the part of the film and its approach that turned me off.  I think religious leaders need to handle their loss of faith in God with extreme care, and with great sensitivity toward the people they are walking away from. But according to this film they are mostly concerned with themselves, with whether they'd still have a job and how they would support their families, and how this sudden lack of a loving God in their lives made them feel sad, alone and misunderstood. 

They seemed to be asking their people: why are you so upset with me?, as if unaware they were jerking the rug out from under them. But I kept thinking their people were justified. What would it have said about them if they had been completely indifferent to their minister's loss of faith? Anger and hurt is a more honest response than the phony pseudo-acceptance I constantly saw in the United Church. If anyone was angry about anything, they swallowed it and tried to be okay with everything that was going on, no matter how outrageous. Hypocrisy on toast.

I have a theory as to why this is. I call it the Titanic Theory. The United Church of Canada, like all mainstream Christian denominations, is a sinking ship. It's crucial to put asses in seats so that they can continue to exist (and, most especially, to hold on to those drafty old buildings with their outrageous upkeep), so they now have to be very, very careful what they say.

During my 15 years in the church, I was constantly being squeezed for money. Once a year, someone would come to my house to talk to me about how much I was going to give, laying on a subtle guilt trip if it wasn't enough. The annual meeting was an exercise in misery and depression, even doom, as once again we were told the church was failing financially, and it was basically our fault. One minister even resigned over it, claiming from the pulpit that our church would be thriving if we weren't all so stingy and selfish. Obviously, our priorities were all wrong.

I didn't find out for years and years that practically every United Church in the country had this same problem, and that in fact our givings were higher than the national average. My own offering, which by the way my family could not spare, was well above average, but who knew? No one told me that until much later - in fact, I found out by accident. Secrecy about money is the norm, as is the chronic isolation of individual churches. There was a sense we were better than the others, didn't need them, or at least had to figure out our problems on our own.

My beliefs are very hard to contain within an institution of any kind. My experiences of mysticism were feared and disapproved of, so I learned to keep them to myself. Love Jesus, but for God's sake don't really love him or at least express any of it, except in wheezy old hymns by John Wesley. I was seen as crazy and unstable for weeping in church, while at the same time the lack of expression of emotion on Sunday mornings was criticized.

To stop believing in God, become an atheist, lose faith, or however you want to say it, is not the same - at all - as becoming disillusioned by all the human bullshit that goes on in churches. True, my spirituality no longer fit, and I was tired of using a shoehorn to try to make it fit. But it was the sickness of the institution that made me sick, the sense of constantly bailing out the ship, of everything turning on money, of frantic attempts to modernize and be cool and "inclusive" (my ass!) while our rituals couldn't have been more wheezy and out of date, even irrelevant.

I was done with it, and was only sad about missing all the years when it was still good. It's the same (I hear) when a marriage breaks up. You mourn for and feel nostalgic for the years when it still worked. But having it end doesn't mean that it all meant nothing. 

As for these atheist clergy, the fact is that many people in many different fields become disillusioned with what they do. But what exactly does "disillusioned" mean? It means you had illusions in the first place. Perhaps the whole structure was built on illusion. If so, leaving is a bold step towards reality, wholeness and health. Remember how you preached forgiveness for all those years? Then forgive all those people who depended on you for being hurt, angry and pissed off at you for changing. Atheism is not what you signed on for, it's not what they expected or what they need, and to expect sympathy and understanding from them is  ludicrous. If your head is where I suspect it is, the view must be dark indeed.

Why I stopped going to church

God! I have wanted to write a post about this for a long time, but every time I approached the subject, something stopped me.


Some sort of massive rock of grief.


Some sort of conviction that "someone" from my former church community would see it, become angry, feel sorry for me, try to silence me, or otherwise write me off.


For you see, after fifteen years of involvement that was often draining and frustrating, I had to leave. The immediate cause was leadership and the wrongheaded direction I felt we were travelling in; this had been going on for years and years and could not be pinned on a single individual. But as the Man used to say: if a blind person tries to lead another blind person, they're both going to stumble into a ditch.

Where do I begin? I want to start with the sense of scarcity that has become epidemic among "liberal" (i.e. not fundamentalist) churches in the past couple of decades. These churches, many of them meeting in dowdy old buildings that are outrageously expensive to maintain, are bleeding members at an alarming rate, and not replacing them. The reasons for this are either very complex, or very simple.


For a lot of people,  religion, the churchy kind of religion many of us were brought up in, now seems as dusty and antiquated as wheezy old pipe organs and hard, varnishy pews.  Most churches appear to be more interested in maintaining a pleasant space and keeping their own little private programs going than in even attempting to address the howling need among their fellow suffering humans.


So the trickle of exodus has gradually became a flood. As people peel off, not always consciously but because somehow they just don't get there on Sunday morning any more, the church's debt (which always seems to be overwhelming: isn't there a church anywhere that makes their mortgage payments?) just snowballs because there aren't enough members left to throw enough dollars into the collection plate.

What happens then is a feverish drive to make up the deficit, usually through inward-turning events like garage and bake sales mostly frequented by members. That's what passed for "outreach" in my former church. Most of the emphasis was placed on desperately trying to stay afloat. If you didn't do your part, guilt was laid on with a trowel. A few years back, you'd get a home visit from someone on the finance committee to talk over your contribution: in other words, how much you were giving, and how much you were helping the church via committees and other churchy agencies. If you weren't giving "enough" in the eyes of the church, the pressure was ever so gently applied until one day you discovered you couldn't breathe.


This attitude of scarcity just breeds more scarcity, not to mention a "help, help, we're drowning" mentality that is probably not the best thing for attracting new members. Asking people to get on-board the Titanic isn't very effective. The minute someone new comes in the door, the hands are out, and the lasso is thrown: come, teach Sunday school,  join this or that committee, join the choir! Get involved (but in our way, not yours: fit yourself into a pre-existing slot.)  And whatever you do, for God's sake, don't leave.


I wonder when my feeling of spiritual awe died. It happened gradually, and at first it took the form of feeling extremely alone. I was not able to voice any of my grief to anyone, or I would be ostracized, patronized or pitied, as in, "well, you know, she can't help it, dear." If I felt transported by a service, it was almost by accident, as everyone was scurrying around making the service happen, busy-busy-busy, and even busier afterwards at coffee time when the talk ran along the most trivial lines.

 









I didn't stay fifteen years for nothing, however, and I am sure there was a time when it all meant something to me, but I'll tell you this - I was never able to truly be myself. I had to be a carefully-edited version of myself, and weigh carefully everything I was going to say before I said it. This was so I wouldn't upset the applecart and be ever so slowly, ever so subtly, ever so ruthlessly edged out.


If I got carried away and cried during a service, I couldn't help it because I was evidently "suffering from depression" (poor soul!). The thing to do was remain in the middle of the middle, a kind of blandness marked by hoary old hymns from the 19th century and sermons that were generally very conventional and uninspired.  Don't upset the applecart, remember. Don't lose control.

Several years ago we had a meltdown over leadership, a very bad one (and forgive me if you've read this here before: apparently I still need to write about it),  but NOT ONE PERSON acknowledged at any time that we had created the experience ourselves by choosing that person out of all the other available candidates. He did not fall from the sky, but you would not know it from the victim mentality that prevailed in our church over the next several years, the sense we'd been "wronged" (by, in the words of the Council Chair, "a nasty, evil little man").


If you blow on a church and it falls over, doesn't that mean the structure is just a little rotten? Like is attracted to like, and (as the psychologists say) we tend to recreate the experiences that are most familiar to us. Such as dysfunction, poor communication and the oppression and abuse of the weakest members. But if anyone had suggested that these things were going on BEFORE our meltdown, the congregation would have been aghast.

And, needless to say, the messenger would have been shot.

The problem was "solved" when the nasty, evil little man was ousted by the larger church. Then came the long period of "healing", in which we replayed the awful scenarios over and over and over again, after which we told ourselves it was all over and stuck big glossy smiles on our faces.


For me, it was all gone, just all of it, whatever I had absorbed of the gospel message, of holiness, of compassion at the deepest level. I began to see things I could and would not see before. While a few other churches in our district were making a brave attempt at programs for the homeless (and by the way, they first had to overcome the common perception that no homeless people existed in our community), our church steered needy people to a social agency whose office was so far away you'd have to bus for half an hour to get there, probably to be treated patronizingly. I think we provided them with a bus ticket.


So much for "I was hungry, and you fed me; naked, and you clothed me. . . " But what does church have to do with any of that?

And how's this for muddying the waters? While that "nasty, evil little man" was in charge, he was horrified that we turned away people in need and insisted we keep some non-perishable food in the church to be given to people who were hungry. Everyone thought he was crazy: that's just not the way we do things!

I still long for a sense of community and spiritual belonging, but I see that when I had it, or thought I had it, the personal cost was astronomical. Financially, I gave more than I could really afford (because I couldn't live with the guilt if I didn't), and saw my contribution thrown into a giant abyss where it promptly disappeared, leading to cries for "more, more, more". Every annual meeting was the same. How I hated and dreaded them: it was a dirge of "not enough, not enough," and desperate ploys to make up a hopeless deficit. We seemed to sink a little bit lower every year.


But a hopeless deficit does not fall from the sky either. WE create it out of an entrenched mentality of chronic scarcity. If people stop coming, that situation doesn't land on us from the moon. They stop coming because they're bored, feel that the service is irrelevant, and need the time to catch up on sleep after an exhausting week of working long hours and looking after the kids.

Most conventional churches had their heyday during the Betty Crocker era, when men worked and women stayed home with the children and everyone dressed up in their finest on Sunday morning. It doesn't exactly work that way any more: not if your husband is a violent alcoholic or has just walked out on you, or you've just been laid off from your factory job and have nowhere to turn. It also doesn't work if all you can get is a Sunday morning shift. (I can't count the number of times I picked up subtle disapproval of people who worked on Sundays.) But most churches I know of "don't have the resources" for a service at any other time of the week.

This tells me everything about their priorities, not to mention their inflexibility and (perhaps unconscious) need to keep things the way they are.
For after all, "we've always done it this way" (and we've done just fine, thank you very much).


I sometimes go on church web sites, if they have them, and see a confused mess, with most of the links not even working. One had no email address. One had been "under construction" for three or four years. It was common to see the most recent events listed under 2008 or 2009.


It screams "out of touch". It screams "irrelevant". It screams "we don't know how to change, in fact we don't want to, so let's just hold tight and see if they come back".

There is very little acknowledgement or even awareness of the profound social turmoil that has thrown the care of needy people back on the church's resources. For the most part, government funding is no longer there. But it appals me to see how many churches protest that they have to put themselves first, to keep their little operation going from all those desperately-begged-for donations before they think about those people "out there", those poor souls (whom they'd rather not have in the sanctuary because they're messy and unkempt and drop cigarette butts on the driveway).


There's nothing wrong with being a little old lady. I'm all for it, as that's the direction I am moving in with frightening speed. But increasingly, churches are dominated by very traditional older women from the Betty Crocker era as older men die out and fewer and fewer young people join. A few years ago I went to an ordination ceremony with a couple of dozen candidates, and all of them were women between the ages of 45 and 60.  No men, and no new blood either. Maybe a 60-year-old woman can be a spiritual firebrand, but why not a 25-year-old man? Where are they,  and why are none of them even faintly interested?

But lest I come across as age-ist, let me tell you a story.  One of our most dynamic members, a great-grandmother who gave tirelessly of her time and energy for years, was asked to leave. She and her husband were presented with a report, a long list of grievances neatly typed-up, which listed all their transgressions over the years. They strayed from the Sunday School curriculum, probably making it interesting for the kids for the first time ever. He (a retired minister) preached a sermon that was a little hard to follow, and it upset people. I don't know what else they did except restore the church library from nothing and build professional-level sets for every pageant we ever put on (and this on their own dime, because everyone else screamed that they had no money).

They were coloring outside the lines, obviously, and even though every progressive thinker we ever heard of was begging people to do just that before the church sank, they were asked to leave. The minister apparently didn't want to get his hands dirty with this task (though, to be sure, that report had to be his doing). He had one of his henchmen do it for him. These two were my favorite people in my church. They were told to toe the line or get out, and the choice was clear.


I'm sorry, but I can't be part of this. It's not going anywhere. It's just not. I am tired of being squeezed for money I can't afford to give. I'm tired of editing myself, of biting my tongue. Of being so careful all the time, never saying what I really think. 

I was never much of a joiner anyway, so all those years of participation were kind of surprising. I'm not going to go out and run after another disappointing experience of listening to those howls of scarcity. I wonder if anyone in these increasingly-empty places has ever heard the story about the loaves and fishes. In my former church, people would be running around screaming, "We're running out of loaves, and look at those fishes!  Quick, pass the collection plate again!"


What would Jesus say? I'd say it would make him sick.

(A post-script. Re-reading this, which is never a good idea, I realize it  resembles a post from quite a long time ago called Why I Left the United Church. I hope this piece gets into some other issues, things I may have left out. The fact that I still need to write about it is significant in itself. Roots that deep are not pulled up without pain.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Which is what?

So which is what? Which one of these honkin' old brick buildings is McKeough School, where I attended from 1959 to 1964 (though it seemed like 20 times that long)?

I won't give you any hints, but I'll help you match the photo to the description. One of them is the Kent County Penitentiary. One is the Armoury in Tecumseh Park. One is a Baptist church with the inexplicable title of Duchess of Wellington. One of them is a munitions factory or something, and one is Park Street United, the church where my minister was thrown into jail for sexual improprieties (look it up: his name was Rev. Russell Horsburgh). And one is McKeough School. Oh-oh, that's six!

Since I am sure the suspense is killing you, I'll tell you. The first one is McKeough School, which operated, incredibly, until 2001. I remember looking up the web site in the '90s, and wondering why the whole thing hadn't fallen down. To me, it looks like a set for Jane Eyre or something, where they have to break the ice in the washbasins.

OK, I'll get off this topic now

No, this ain't the Playboy mansion (or a bath house somewhere in deepest Arkansas): it's Ted Haggard and his hapless family having a nice hot soak. Don't know where he got the funds for his own hot tub, given his supposedly impoverished state.

I found this quote on a site about Haggard. I hereby respectfully share it with you, because frankly it made my hair stand on end. This is after his wife spoke passionately to a crowd of still-loyal followers.

"I was actually looking forward to hearing from him too, but he turned out to be a total train wreck. Still very bitter and angry at his old church. Maybe he’s a little justified there, but then he tried to crack a joke. Jets were flying over the arena we were in so he made this brilliant crack: “I hope those aren’t angry Muslims coming to fly those planes into this building.” No exaggeration, that’s a direct quote.
He followed that up with this great pearl of wisdom. When they asked him what advice he’d give a pastor struggling with sin, he said: “I would tell them to find a licensed therapist…..because they are legally bound by law to keep your secrets, that way if you ever run for governor or become famous they can’t use it against you and blackmail you.”

No mention of God or faith or prayer anywhere. But Haggard doesn't know how to spell the word: it always comes out "prey".

But the greatest of these. . .

When 17-year-old Tory Inglis went to New Westminster's first Pride celebration last June, she was pretty excited about it.

It's not easy being a gay teenager. In spite of all the huge strides we've supposedly made in the realm of "tolerance" (and what does it mean when I "tolerate" you? It's a pretty stingy word), prejudice and even outright contempt lurk in hidden and not-so-hidden places. But Tory really wanted to go. An event such as this, vibrant and joyful, would boost the spirits of any young person who sometimes feels marginalized by who she is.

Tori's picture in the Vancouver Province newspaper reveals a shy-looking, serious young woman in dark-framed glasses, a girl who never thought she'd get into such dire trouble just for going to a parade. She hardly looks like a foaming radical, but rather someone who's quietly but fervently seeking authenticity in a world full of posturing.

Yes, Tory went to the Pride parade, and while she was there, someone snapped a picture of her with (the story says) "two gay men". And that would have been that, except for another truth about Tory: she has been a lifelong, active member of First Presbyterian Church, baptised and confirmed.

When the photo came out in the June 12 edition of the Royal City Record, it didn't just cause a stir.

It caused a storm.

There must have been much buzzing about this before Tory was called into the principal's office (so to speak). It was about a month after the photo appeared in the local paper that she was told to meet with the minister "and a female member of the church" (a buffer? The article doesn't say).

The response was predictable. Basically, Tory had her hand slapped. But it was worse than that. She was scolded for being a bad role model, for "promoting a sexual lifestyle".

She knew that, like most denominations, her church was against gay marriage, but she never expected to be told to step down as a junior youth leader. Tory sat and quietly wept during the disciplinary hearing (for that's what it was). Perhaps her tormentors felt this was a good thing, a sign of repentance.

The Province article states, "The minister told her the church would prefer if she withdraw from the group that organized the Pride events. But she refused and withdrew her membership from the church instead."

I have been through something like this in my own church, not over my sexual orientation but for my profound, disturbing doubts about leadership and the agenda we were expected to follow, especially in light of the fact that "our" church (unlike everyone else) claims to be gay-friendly and "even" ordains openly gay ministers, so long as they don't practice it beyond the bonds of monogamy.

Keep it quiet, boys and girls. No Pride parade photos, OK? If a United Church minister appeared on one of those floats, what would happen? Can you guess?

And dare I even mention the possibility that a minister might be furthering his own agenda, his need for public recognition: that he might have "issues" that he can only work out in front of the cameras on national television? Worse than that: why didn't anyone object to having these cameras filming the worship service, and why can't I even talk to anyone about it? And how about this: why is it OK and even "courageous" for him to do this, and not OK for Tory to be photographed at a parade?

"I see a lot of shallowness," a friend of mine said years ago. I have never seen such commitment and passion in a human being, but organized religion slowly and systematically snuffed it out.

Tory has fortunately received supportive calls from other church members, but the elders are adamant that she sinned in some fundamental way. Her mother commented, "I never thought they'd say she's not a good role model, because she is, and we've raised her to be that way. Our belief is that God created us to be who we are, and I've raised her to be true to who she is."

Imagine that. Another sinner! God created lesbians and gays? What sort of heresy is this?

What would Jesus say? Well. . . he didn't say anything at all about homosexuality, in spite of the fact that fundamentalists like to twist the gospel into something resembling a pretzel. As for marriage, he was sort of against it, telling people it might be better if they were celibate, though acknowledging that most people couldn't manage it.

If I may indulge in duelling Bible quotes, here's a pretty good one from 1st Corinthians: "Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion." - J. Christ.

In being true to herself, Tory was forced to step down from a lifelong, cherished commitment. I can say to you now that this is about as painful as losing an arm. When you sever ties like that, you leave a huge chunk of yourself behind.

But if she stayed on, what would be the consequences? Whispered conversations, quickly hushed when she appears? Judgemental glances? Threats to leave if she stays?

One of the organizers of the Royal City Pride Society describes Tory as "intelligent, quiet and shy". Hardly the tattooed, pierced, raging radical we sometimes see on the news. This young woman quietly made a life-changing decision, choosing authenticity over phoniness, reality over posturing.

And she paid the price.

Tory made an incredible statement that made the hair on my arms stand up: "Above all, I want to promote peace and love and acceptance. And in a place that condemns people for loving, I would much rather be in a place that accepts people for who they are."

Heresy! Floats, drag queens, marching bands. People so "out" they're in your face. How dare she, a Christian church-goer, align herself with such destructive nonsense? How can any 17-year-old know she's gay, anyway? Isn't it just a phase, won't she come around if we just put her together with a nice young man in the youth group? Even if she is gay, can't she just get married anyway to avoid embarrassment (or at least keep quiet about it)?

These are the strictures of the past, and they carry forward in a distressing way. Every so often I think about returning to a church I attended for 15 years, but I find I just can't do it. There is an inauthenticity there that clangs like a cymbal, resounds like a hollow gong, and there isn't a single person I can talk to about it without the fear of being judged or even edged out.

"If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing," a great writer once said.

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."

That sounds like a pretty good desription of a courageous young woman named Tory Inglis.

Bad magic

If this photo seems a little misty, a little unreal, well, that's 'coz it is.

It is a chunk of my history, still bleeding and sore.

This is Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario, now taken over by St. Andrews, no doubt for financial reasons.

I attended this church from birth to ten

years.

When I was about six, I remember a neighbor boy saying, "There's a new minister coming. His name is Horse Burg."

He was close. The Rev. Russell Horsburgh was a man for his season, in many ways embodying the growing ferment in modern religion: social issues were bubbling up to the surface, and black people were actually starting to attend (though most of the congregation was appalled).

Most of all, Rev. Horsburgh wanted to create some new programs for the young people, who up to now had sat on their hands and yawned.

Yes. 1960: the verge of an explosion, though no one knew it at the time. We were lucky to have him, apparently, because he represented the "coming thing". He was cutting edge, just what our poky old church needed to jolt it

into life.

At first, everything went well. Hmmm - fairly well. I was six, so I didn't understand a lot of the murmurings that were going on. Some of the congregation disapproved of what Rev. Horsburgh was doing with his youth group. He was actually including kids who were "underprivileged", from "broken homes" (i.e. homes where Mom worked). At one point, to everyone's horror, he gave a series of talks on teen sexuality. No one knew how to stop him.

I only remember a few things, but they really stand out: a friend of my Dad called him a "psychopath" (a word I wasn't familiar with, and only understood in retrospect). My mother once murmured to her friend, "They found empty bottles in the basement, and cigarette butts. . . and worse." Only in retrospect did I realize the reference must have been to condoms.

So the young people were having sex in the basement? Evidently.

I remember also leaving choir practice and heading for my Dad's car. I saw several very inebriated teenage boys lurching around and saying things like, "Hey, where's the booze?" "You're alreadly plastered!" "Hey, Boozy Bozo." "Where's the Rev?" "Let's have one for the Rev."

Another time, on Sunday morning, the Rev suddenly exploded and began to rant about "mechanical men". "We're all mechanical men. Who wants to be a mechanical man?" he repeated, pointing his finger around the sanctuary.

The strangest thing of all was a church bulletin, usually typed out and mimeographed by the church secretary. But this one had a whole page covered with x's, blotted out. My brother Walt, 20 years old and a total cynic, held the page up to the window and began to read what it said: a quote from Martin Luther's infamous

tirade.

"I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. . . I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don't improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine."

Signed: Martin Luther

Russell Horsburgh

Obviously, something bad was going on. Bad bad. Before long, the villagers with the flaming torches closed in. Horsburgh was eventually convicted of encouraging sexual activity among minors, and sentenced to a year in jail. He got out after a few months, and gradually a pro-Horsburgh faction began to grow.

By the time he died in 1971, he had become something of a hero, a misunderstood saint who was only trying to help those poor kids learn about birth control. Or something.

I remember a frightening man who became increasingly hostile and paranoid. Did he do all the things he was accused of? I don't know. I only know I didn't want to go to church any more because he scared the hell out of me.

Seeing this picture of Park Street United (I almost wrote "Untied") woke up feelings from decades back. I googled around for Chatham sites, and even the names of streets made the hair on my arms stand up. I had buried so much.

Rev. Horsburgh became a character in my second novel Mallory, only this time he was purely evil and corrupt. Perhaps something in my soul needed to see him

that way.

A few years ago, the church I was attending was ripped off by a fraud, a minister who had no real credentials and no pastor's heart. He was a travelling salesman who had already ruined other congregations: so why didn't we find out before we hired him?

It hurt me, gored me, because I had already been hurt in this vulnerable place as a young child. I was six. Why was it happening again?

Why are people so stupid about religion?

What sick needs are met, or not met, by this casual manipulation of power? For I have never known a minister who didn't need power.

Why do I still long to find a place, an oasis, a spring in the wilderness that will quench my agonizing thirst?