The Rev: Part 2

REVEREND RUSSELL HORSBURGH: SAINT OR SINNER?

(Part 2 of 2) by Jim and Lisa Gilbert

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

By 1964, after having been minister at the former Park Street United Church in Chatham for four rather tumultuous years, Reverend Russell Horsburgh had accomplished an amazing number of things.

He had established a program entitled "Youth Anonymous" that was designed to provide guidance for wayward youth, had designed a number of programs for the youth in the community that were designed to get them off the street and onto church property. Basketball games, dances, counseling services and the establishment of an unofficial "drop-in center" at the church occupied much of his time and made him a popular figure with the young. In fact, the famous Canadian actor Cedric Smith was taken under the wing of Horsburgh and given his first form of employment in Chatham thanks to Horsburgh.

The adults within the community benefited from his ecumenical approach to Sunday night lectures (invited rabbis, priests and representatives from other faiths to speak) as well as the bringing in of noted politicians (Lester B. Pearson) and artists (Virgil Fox and Miriam Anderson).

On the surface, one might imagine that the parishioners at Park Street United Church would have been overjoyed and would have been extremely supportive of their innovative, outgoing, charismatic minister and many in the church were very supportive. However, there was a darker side to both "the Rev" as well as to some church members.

Reverend Russell Horsburgh was the first to admit that he was not everyone's "cup of tea". He once described himself as being "impatient, uptight, demanding and having every ugly virtue possible". Others described him as being impulsive, headstrong, unlikable, chauvinistic, demanding, and media loving.

Some members of the church felt that he was "too big for his britches" and that he tended to "run rough shod" over the wishes of the congregation. He was not one to ask for permission or to follow long held protocol. He simply did and then dealt with the consequences. He was thought by some to not be a team player and some simply were jealous of the attention he received and how he was revolutionizing their church by opening it up to people from all classes and racial backgrounds. Some complained that their closely-knit church was becoming a "church of strangers". Clearly, there was a tension bubbling close to the surface that, in retrospect, was obviously destined to explode at some point.

The breaking point came in a cataclysmic, earth shaking moment in 1964 when Reverend Russell Horsburgh was formally charged (based on revelations by a few minors in the church) with "contributing to juvenile delinquency in his church" by knowingly allowing, permitting and possibly encouraging underage teens to engage in sexual activities on church property.

Although in 2008, these charges would seem rather trite and suspicious (considering all the other sexual offences allegedly committed by clergy since that time), the atmosphere that prevailed in 1964 made these charges front-page news across Canada and outraged religious groups, parental organizations and the general public.

The trial became a virtual witch-hunt that resulted in eighty hours of testimony by some pretty confused, frightened and scared teens. If you think sex sells to day, you can imagine what it did in the early 1960s. The fact that the testimony came from unidentified minors and told in rather circumspect ways served to make the accusations even more sinister, mysterious and licentious.

The court proceedings found Reverend Russell Horsburgh guilty of five of the eight counts of contributing to juvenile delinquency and he was sentenced to a year in prison. Although he served only 107 days of his sentence, his real punishment was that he was forced to resign as a minister in the United Church and for a time was relegated to working as a parking lot attendant in Toronto.

In 1967 the Supreme Court of Canada ordered a new trial for Horsburgh and in this trial three of the five original charges were dropped and he was acquitted of the other two. However, it was too little and it came too late for the once so confident minister. By 1967, he was a broken man who only wanted to clear his name.

By 1971 a partial victory came for Reverend Horsburgh when he was fully reinstated as a minister in the United Church. By this time, however, he was in the final stages of bone cancer and when a testimonial dinner was held at the Pyranon Ballroom (site of Rona Cashway Building Centre on Colborne Street to-day) in July of 1971, he was no longer the Horsburgh that once was. At that dinner, tragically, no young people were present and church officials (locally and nationally) were notably absent. The 170 people that were there however tried to make things right and tried to rally their fallen, broken friend and hero but it was to no avail.

Confined to a wheel chair, this man who seemed once, to have been larger than life and unable to be confined by anyone or anything, was a pitiful vision of his former self. Those who attended that dinner in Chatham and remembered him as he was a few short years before must have quietly shed a tear or two or felt intense anger well up within their hearts. However, it was too late for anger and there would be many more tears shed a few months later when Reverend Russell Horsburgh slipped from this life into the next in October of 1971.

He was cremated and buried in a plain tin box under the floor of Zion United Church in Hamilton, Ontario.

Do I feel he was mistreated and maligned? I do. Do I feel he was a tragic figure? I do. In fact, he could be described as a true Shakespearean hero in the fact that a tragic flaw within himself helped to bring about his own downfall. Do I feel that he knew there was some sexual activity going on in the church? Yes, I think he did and he either chose to ignore it or he was so absolutely naive that he did not truly grasp the danger inherent in his quiet acquiescence.

Do I blame the people in Chatham of the time and particularly those church members at Park Street United Church? I have mixed feelings about that. I would venture that some felt that they were doing the correct, moral thing for the time while I also venture that some were attempting to "put Horsburgh in his place" and "teach him a lesson" not realizing how devastating and tragic an end would result. In short, it was a different time and place and who knows how any of us would have reacted facing a similar crisis. After all, by 1964, it must have appeared to many parents that the sex, drugs and rock and roll revolution was swiftly approaching and all of their children were in dire danger.

A play was written about Horsburgh's time in Chatham (as well as two other books, a record album and countless newspaper and magazine articles) by respected Canadian playwright Betty Jane Wylie in 1981. Considering that the former Park Street United Church is now in private hands (the Chute Family), I wonder if it is time to finally stage this play within the church that spawned this huge controversy?

Personally, I think that it would be rather compelling, enticingly appropriate and more than a little spooky!

I am quite sure that it has never been staged anywhere in Chatham-Kent and it might just be a final fitting tribute to a man who has been described as "a bundle of contradictions, caught up in the furies of the sixties". 

Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.

****************************************************

Postscript. Though the Gilberts have a right to their opinion based on what they were able to piece together about Horsburgh, the fact remains that they were not there when it happened.  Public opinion eventually swung back in Horsburgh's favor, but my own view is that it swung too far.

I was ten years old when Horsburgh was removed from Park Street United Church. I remember a belligerent, browbeating figure literally pounding the pulpit as he harangued his astonished congregation about their unforgiveable rigidity and ignorance.

I remember three very drunken teenage boys hanging around outside the church late one evening,  guffawing and slurring, "Hey, where's the Rev?"

I remember my father's best friend saying, "he's a psychopath," though at the time I didn't know what that meant.

I remember my mother, the least-gossipy person I knew, whispering to someone, "You know, they found empty liquor bottles in the church basement. And worse."

I remember a church bulletin that had an entire page bizarrely x-ed out. When my older brother held it up to the light, he saw that it contained a fulminating rant aimed directly at the ignorant fools of Park Street United, ending with a famous quote: “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.”

It was signed:

Martin Luther
Russell Horsburgh

Rev. Russell Horsburgh: what I didn't know

 

The Controversy over Reverend Russell Horsburgh Continues After Almost Half a Century

The following article by Jim and Lisa Gilbert (part one of two) outlines in vivid detail the strange, turbulent, ultimately self-destructive reign of a United Church minister in a sleepy Ontario town. It was the early `60s, and I dutifully went to Sunday School at Park Street United every week, but in between the services there were whisperings that something terrible was happening with the minister. Though I barely understood what was going on, the episode, and my family`s subsequent flight to a rigidly fundamentalist Baptist church, left indelible scars on me. Years later when my church in Coquitlam hired a fraud who had to be dismissed  from the pulpit, anguish bubbled up from those buried memories, made worse by confusing, fragmentary information and the poisonous fear that comes from not knowing. A few years ago I tried to google Horsburgh and came up with exactly nothing, so these two articles from 2008 were a revelation to me. I reproduce them here out of gratitude that someone finally made an attempt to make some sense of "the Horsburgh affair". They filled in many informational gaps, while at the same time leaving out a lot of emotional context that could only be experienced by someone who was there. Though I do not agree with all of their conclusions, I am grateful to Jim and Lisa Gilbert for clearing out some of the cobwebs from a dark, scary, and extremely traumatic episode from my childhood.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I felt that I might bump into him around the very next corner. His larger-than-life presence drifted in and out of my possibly overactive mind. Whispered teenage voices seemed to be almost audible amidst the quiet of the once former church. There were muffled giggles, whimpers, hushed outrage and hearty laughs that seemingly emanated from everywhere and yet nowhere. I wandered around the former Park Street United Church trying to visualize a man I had only seen once or twice and a scandal that I, as well as most of Chatham Kent, had largely forgotten.

There's a strange mixture of the holy and the profane that seems to permeate the many rooms of the slightly forlorn former church today. Although it has been almost fifty years since the silver-tongued voice of Reverend Russell Horsburgh mesmerized, mocked and motivated those seated amidst the deep, dark pews and the sacred, stained glass windows, his presence still lurks like a forlorn and forgotten spirit that longs to speak but cannot or....dares not.

The former church was so quiet that I suppose I could have imagined many things and the mere closing of the eyes conjured up a hundred visions and revisions. Sitting in the former sanctuary of the silent structure in 2008, it is possible to imagine a time, some forty eight years ago (1960), when Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario was described as a "preacher's church" and the most controversial minister ever to step inside its doors was about to make his appearance.

With its population of over a thousand parishioners Park Street was considered to be the second most powerful church in the London Conference and placement there as a minister was considered to be a "plum job" leading to a promising and powerful future.

When Reverend Russell Horsburgh took over the reins of pastor at Park Street in 1960, President John F. Kennedy was still alive, the Beatles were playing for a few pounds in Liverpool and the distant growing din of a new generation willfully embracing sex, drugs and rock and roll had yet to reach the sensitive ears of those church-going, God fearing, conservative residents of Chatham, Ontario.

If there were whispers of change in the air, they were ignored. Those things happened in Detroit or Toronto but not in the safe, innocent and quiet backwaters of Southwestern Ontario. That, however, was to all change the day Reverend Horsburgh stood up in the pulpit and began, in grand oratorical fashion, to outline his vision of the church's future.

"The Rev", as he soon came to be known by the young and those that admired him, looked at things in Chatham's Park Street Church that never were and instead of simply asking "why", he dared to ask "why not?".

Described by those that knew him, or thought that they knew him, as being impetuous, impulsive, caring, rebellious, creative, maddening, charismatic, contradictory and a hundred other things the new minister wasted little time in "opening up" the church. Park Street United Church was, under his guidance, destined to be open seven days a week. He longed to take the church out into the streets and bring those in the streets into his church.

Between 1960 and 1964 he, amid many other things, launched a teen drop-in center, organized youth basketball nights, set up teenage counseling sessions, arranged group therapy sessions, put a pool table in the church hall, and held regular teen dances on Saturday night.

He also, during those first four years, organized a series of Sunday night lectures where he invited, among many others, a rabbi, a Catholic priest, Lester B. Pearson (whose father had been a former minister at Park Street), Virgil Fox ( the famous church organist) and Marian Anderson (the renowned black opera singer) to speak to anyone who chose to attend. The attendance at these presentations was overwhelming. The church, each Sunday night, was "standing room only" as all residents of Chatham and Kent County, no matter what religion they espoused, were invited to have a glimpse at an exciting outside world that had rarely, in the past, come knocking.

Those concerts were followed up by a series of "sex lectures" that ran from October 20th, 1963 to December 8th, 1963 entitled "The Modern Crisis In Sex Morality". While the world mourned and anguished over the assassination of a progressive young leader who seemed immortal, the charismatic "Rev" was intent on bringing the voice of reason and logic to teenagers, as well as troubled adults, who were woefully ignorant. Ignorant about sexual matters as well as about a world that seemed to be moving much too quickly and losing its innocence on many fronts.

The lectures dealt with such innocuous topics, by to-day's standards at any rate, as "going steady", "petting", "lifting sex out of the gutter" and "date bait" but in the 1960s these topics were perceived, by some in the church, as opening the church doors to sex, drugs, rock and roll and, I suppose, Satan himself.

Thoughts turned to whispers, whispers turned to murmurs and murmurs turned to open dissension out in the pews among some of the conservative members of the congregation. They whispered of a minister who listened to no one, who was an ego maniac, who was much too friendly and way too permissive with their children, who allowed too many strangers (some of them black) into their church and was, like the 1960s in general, moving way too fast.

There were others of course in the church (and well beyond the church doors) who considered Reverend Russell Horsburgh to be a saint who embodied the essence of Christianity and who was attempting to save not only the youth of the church but the very church itself.

The scene was set for one of the most controversial events (up to that time) to occur within Canadian church history. It was to occupy the media across Canada and North America. It was to bring the former City of Chatham much unwanted attention, inspire three books, a play, a record album, destroy a man and create a local controversy so powerful and so divisive that I had to think long and hard about bringing it to light once again.

However, after almost half a century and so many other much more horrendous scandals and crimes allegedly committed by the clergy, I felt that it was time to revisit Reverend Russell Horsburgh and attempt to put the incident into a balanced, objective and modern perspective. I wanted to explain both sides of the issue and try to see the good, the bad and the ugly in this really sad story that hints, in many ways, at an almost Shakespearean tragedy.

Next week......I shall try.

---

Jim and Lisa Gilbert are local, national and international award winning educators and historians.

Nice. Nice. Nice.

That's no nut, boy. . . it's Captain Nice!

(To explain the preceding video experience)

For no good reason at all, thinking about the Kid from Deliverance and what he looks like now, which got me thinking about that rockin' Duelling Banjos scene from Deliverance, watched it on YouTube and was impressed by Ronnie Cox on the guitar, wondered what else Ronnie Cox had done, remembered he played George Apple on a show called Apple's Way, then remembered he was also on St. Elsewhere playing Dr. Craig's wife's boy friend, then remembered Dr. Craig (William Daniels) starring in a very very bad, very very lame Batman-ish sendup in 1967 called Captain Nice.

Now you know where I get my ideas.

A horse is a horse is a horse

Last week I had a wonderful riding experience on Vancouver Island at Tiger Lily Farms. I got to ride Bentley, a lovely roan Quarter horse with an amiable personality and a penchant for grabbing leaves that brushed his nose over the trail. Oh how I wish. How I wish I could've taken Bentley out on my own, for a nice meander and perhaps a canter or even a bit of galloping, but this isn't an option for me now. Riding for an hour with a guide cost $40.00, which seemed like a lot until I checked prices around here and found out they're $55.00 per person per hour, minimum booking of four, with a $100.00 deposit.

Did I appreciate having a horse of my own when I was age 10 - 13? Of course not. I am embarrassed to say I eventually lost interest. I was in high school and it wasn't cool to be horsy then. Rocky wasn't a registered anything, certainly not a Quarter horse like Bentley (though I used to say he was "1/4 Quarter horse"). He was a trail horse well-trained to tolerate any kind of rider, even a kid who steered him into some pretty bad situations (like being stuck to the shoulder in a mud-wallow).

I realize in these primitive archival photos that he seems to have too big-of-a-head, which he really didn't. The style of his mane could be described as a Mohawk, more for ease of grooming than anything else (I think his unshaven mane would have been a tangled jungle in which curry-combs would have been lost forever). He was what was called a strawberry roan, a sorrel (redhead) with a lot of creamy white sprinkled through his coat, especially on his face and rump(though it's hard to see it here).

My mother used to say "Rocky has a pink-and-grey face." I remember a kind eye and a rubbery nose perfect for kissing.  He was a "character" who would prance around the pasture trying to evade the bridle (prance? My ass - he was putting it on to annoy me). If we crossed a stream, he would stop and splash vigorously with a foreleg until I steered him the other way.

He once broke out of my back yard and took off like a shot (back yard? Yes, these photos were taken when I had the bright idea of riding him the 2 miles or so from the boarding stable to my house). My Dad said, "I didn't think that horse was so fast." He was a strawberry blur, his hoofs clopping the pavement at a furious rate, and by the time our car caught up with him he was contentedly munching hay in the barn, his coat unusually dark with exertion.

I think horses have taken on an almost mythical significance to me. I was born in the Year of the Horse (not that I believe in such things!) and have come to see the horse as a symbol of absolute freedom. Even the most highly-trained have a streak of wildness in them, much as cats do. The quietest horse can spook (as Rocky did once, seeing a gum wrapper on the trail, causing me to say, "You idiot, you're doing that on purpose").  I have sat on bolting horses, horses who tried to scrape me off under a tree branch, and I stayed on. Not because I'm a good rider - I'm not, particularly - but because I feel like I'm one with them. Or one of them? Almost.

The Help: they just can't help it, can they?

My mother had a black cleaning lady named Eva for years and years. She didn't have much to do with us kids, though we regularly saw her vacuuming our rooms and setting right the chaos of our jumbled games and toys.  My Mum once said if she met Eva on the street and didn't say hello to her first, she'd look away, but if she did say hello, Eva would smile and warmly respond: "Hello, Mrs. Burton." 

I think that was the protocol then: "the help" didn't initiate greetings, in case the white lady would rather the cleaning lady remain anonymous. Or in case she didn't want to be seen talking to a colored person.

Does this sound like the deep South? Guess again. I grew up in Chatham, Ontario, which is near Windsor, which is near Detroit, so we got all the Detroit TV channels and culture. Motown music got to us sooner and affected us more than in most parts of Canada, as did the late-'60s riots that Gordon Lightfoot wrote about in "Black Day in July". 

The Supremes came to Chatham in 1961, but I guess it was too much too soon, because hardly anyone showed up. Marian Anderson came to perform and couldn't stay in the same hotel as her entourage. There were, by Ontario standards, a lot of black kids in my classes, maybe 3 or 4, 5 or 6 even, but we usually didn't hang out with each other or both sides would be offended.

I never learned about the profound historical significance of Chatham/Kent County because it was never taught in school, nor even mentioned once. My mother did talk about it a bit, but I was not sure what she was referring to and I am not even sure how she found out about it. This is a tidbit from Wikipedia:

During the 19th century, the area was part of the Underground Railroad. As a result, Chatham–Kent is now part of the African-Canadian Heritage Tour. Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site is a museum of the Dawn Settlement, established in 1841 by Josiah Henson near Dresden as refuge for the many slaves who escaped to Canada from the United States.^[3] John Brown, the abolitionist, planned his raid on the Harpers Ferry Virginia Arsenal in Chatham and recruited local men to participate in the raid. The small village of North Buxton, part of the African Canadian Heritage Tour, also played an important role in the Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad was a loosely-organized escape route for runaway slaves from the U. S. South looking for sanctuary in Canada, and many of them found it in Chatham. I read these statistics now in shock: holy hell, these are all places I was familiar with from my childhood! There were poor neighborhoods in Chatham and surrounding areas where black folks had their - well, weren't they really happier in their own communities? We tried to convince ourselves of that. But by then, integration was the norm and they had to go to school with us, whether they (or we) wanted to or not.

Churches remained pretty much segregated, mostly (we believed) by choice. Reminds me of the old joke about the black man who goes to a white church and finds the door locked. He pounds on the door and shouts and tries to get in, but he can't. Then God comes along and says to him, "Don't worry, I've been trying to get into that place for years."

If there was any sort of official attitude toward black folks back then, it was "aren't we generous to let them live here": they were treated as glorified squatters, not part of a historical movement every bit as significant as the undergrounds that operated during World War II. Imagine the raw courage it took to escape, to risk life and limb for freedom and sanctuary. Imagine how many were maimed and killed. But what really destroys me is the kind of "welcome" waiting for them in this land of safe haven: every trace of their courageous journey was erased from the record, as if it were just some sort of embarrassment we'd rather forget.

This is complicated stuff, isn't it? I wonder. I'm not finished reading Kathryn Stockett's novel The Help, the book that would have been on Oprah if Oprah were still on. I probably don't need to tell you what it's about: an entire sub-class of black women in the early '60s basically taking on the role of nanny/surrogate mother as well as household help. But the deeper issue is a racial oppression so ingrained it didn't even draw comment, and a seething unrest just below the surface of normalcy.

I grew up on the cusp of that unrest. By the mid-'60s things were starting to bubble and boil and overflow the container. A shy lady named Rosa Parks had gone to jail for refusing to sit at the back of the bus. I heard about Malcolm X and Black Power and the Black Panthers, but I didn't understand much of it. There was a famous baseball pitcher named Ferguson Jenkins who was as well-known for being black as for his sports prowess. And a Chatham boy! Imagine being on the map for such a thing.

My Dad was full of hot air and given to endless, boring rants and monologues about pointless things. I was the last to leave home, so I sat on his right side for years at the dinner table without any kind of support or buffering from my three older siblings, who had made their escape years before. 

He got drunker and drunker over the years, and more maudlin, though of course no one believed me. His attitude towards black people still puzzles me. It was along the lines of "I knew a real nice colored guy once," like saying you knew a nice Nazi or maybe a leper. My parents were generally enlightened enough not to use the "n-word", and in fact I absorbed the message that it was just about the worst word there was, but my Mum still told me, not once but many times, that when she was a girl Brazil nuts were called "nigger toes".

I still don't know if this was meant to be funny, or a sign of how far we had progressed. But it was all part of the confusing and often conflicting stew of attitudes I absorbed as a child.

Just now this comes back to me: a song by Janis Ian, who wrote the provocative At Seventeen ("for those whose names were never called/When choosing sides for basketball", an anthem for the scorned and socially rejected). I remember kids saying to each other, murmuring. "Didja hear that new song?" "Which one?" "You know, the - " "Oh, yeah. Society's Child?" "Yeah." An exchange of knowing looks. The song is full of loaded images:

Now I can understand your tears and your shame.
She called you "boy" instead of your name.
When she wouldn't let you inside.
When she turned and said
"But honey, he's not our kind."

She said I can't see you any more, baby.
Can't see you anymore.

This is "the" forbidden relationship, delicately referred to as "interracial dating", forbidden particularly in quiet conservative non-radical Chatham. The nice boy down the street who just happens to be black, from another world. With the inevitable ending, but more shocking than I remember: 


One of these days I'm gonna stop my listening,
Gonna raise my head up high.
One of these days I'm gonna raise my glistening wings and fly.
But that day will have to wait for awhile.
Baby, I'm only society's child.
When we're older things may change.
But for now this is the way they must remain.

I say I can't see you any more, baby.
Can't see you anymore.
No, I don't wanna see you any more, baby.


"I don't want to see you any more"? That's not the way I remember it. When did it change?

The "rules" are nearly invisible but incredibly persistent, and thorny. Trespassing can happen in an instant. A middle-aged white woman wrote The Help, wrote much of it in dialect that is quite plausible as Southern black American speech, but in doing so she walked a fine line. I read about at least one lawsuit from a black woman who claimed Stockett had stolen her life, skimmed off the juicy parts and incorporated them into her novel without a thought. This sort of thing happens all the the time, because writers are vacuum cleaners (if not vampires) who suck the life and energy out of every situation and spew it back out again as "literature".

Perhaps they can't help it. But how many black people are equipped to write such a novel? Did Stockett decide she had to become a mouthpiece for the still-dispossessed? Maybe their usual champions are too busy. It seems that every African-American celebrity has to stand for a few thousand or million unknowns. There's only one Oprah, after all (though Condaleeza Rice didn't do too badly and blew open every racial stereotype I ever learned as a child). Alice Walker hasn't been around much since Oprah totally snubbed her at the premiere of the Broadway musical version of The Color Purple. Then there's Toni Morrison, an Oprah Book Club staple.  And who's that other one. . .you know, the one Oprah worships. God, I should remember.

Am I trying to say that only black people should write about black people? Obviously, someone had the nerve and the writing chops to step over that barrier. But I do wonder how all this goes down with black readers. Dialect is just a device, isn't it? Mark Twain didn't speak in the y'all-drawl of Huckleberry Finn, though he caught  the rhythms of speech from the deeps of Mississippi with uncanny accuracy.

"We" have a black President now, but unfortunately, not a very popular one. "We" have Jackie Kennedy coming out in her taped memoirs to say she didn't like Martin Luther King, didn't trust him, thought he was a phony even.  What does it mean? Applecarts are being upset, and even the sacred, calcified foundations of white liberalism are beginning to tremble. Now we have this woman, this middle-aged white novelist, uncovering shameful examples of racism, such as rich white women going on a campaign to force people to build a "colored" bathroom for the help, not just to make their houses more marketable but for sanitary reasons.

The book is readable, so far, but a little sudsy, a little slick. Bits of it make me groan for their almost-cutesy-ness. This is the sort of book that sells wildly. Supposedly Stockett was rejected by 60 agents before landing the one that slam-dunked this probably-mega-million-dollar deal. This smells of the kind of legend spun around the unknown writer (as in the probably-apocryphal "Whales, Mr. Melville?"), the writer who seemingly comes out of nowhere. Kind of like Mark Twain, who had been bouncing around for years on the fringes of eccentric anonymity before he broke through with Tom Sawyer.

Well. . .he didn't quite come from nowhere, nor did Stockett. Try Jackson, Mississipi (Oprah country, for sure). Try sixteen years in the publishing business in New York City. That's not "nowhere". It's the farthest thing from a literary backwater you can get. Surely a writer, a smart writer, a smart white writer like Stockett could make best use of those kinds of contacts. The woman has a good ear and a good eye and a good nose for opportunity, and is any of that a bad thing? If she calls attention to the plight of black maids in the South, a plight that still isn't resolved by many people's reckoning, isn't it all good?

And if it isn't, why not?

Bitter fruit: why I left the United Church

Those last two spirituals, stumbled upon while trying to find something else, so pierced the core of me that I wondered if I could write about the central dilemma of my life (at long last!). After many years of intense involvement with the United Church of Canada, and after varying degrees of satisfaction/frustration, I "walked". There were many reasons why I walked, chief among them (I thought) my dire disillusionment with leadership. Yes, I know ministers have a tough row to hoe, but I also think churches have a way of drawing to them ministers who reflect both their strengths and their most dire, unacknowledged weaknesses.

In some cases, they even draw evil. What does this mean, and, more to the point, why doesn't anyone recognize/admit it? What sort of spiritual blinders keep the so-called faithful from seeing even the most glaring kind of light?

From needing the church as a way to belong, contribute, and express my feelings about God and Jesus, I ended up feeling like I was in a box. Not just any box but a shoebox that I was supposed to squash myself into. Suddenly - or maybe it was not-so-suddenly - all I could feel was limitation, lack of oxygen, and bitter alienation. I cannot even tell you how lonely this was. I became deeply disaffected, and there was no one in the church - not one person - I could talk to about it. I knew it would be misinterpreted. Or, worse, perhaps it would be interpreted correctly.

I had something happen to me that I really can't describe, and for some reason - maybe very obvious reasons - I link it to Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. I obsessively watched those stranded souls - marooned in a stinking hell we can't even imagine - as they cried out for help, help, help. I watched old people die and be covered with whatever was available, maybe a plastic tarp. I saw hungry, dehydrated babies, glassy-eyed like in those ads for Save the Children.

The ordeal went on forever. I began to wonder if there could be a benevolence in the universe that "loved" everyone, that "cared". The Christian model of God was supposed to be an omnipotent deity, remember, one that was capable of changing everything. Like the poet in The Hound of Heaven, he swung the earth a trinket at his wrist, and we were expected to dangle from it like insignficant little charms.

So what does worship mean? It seems to me it means a kind of surrender, a submission to what is perceived to be a power greater than ourselves. It's a bowing down, at least of our heads - or a kneeling - or outright prostration. Lowering yourself. Worship doesn't mean love, it's something else, something quite else, and it began to scare me.

(This just popped into my head as a sidebar: a First Nations preacher talking about being forced to adopt the white man's style of worship. "They told us to close our eyes and bow our heads in prayer. And when we opened our eyes, our land was gone.")

Though the church claimed to allow me all kinds of freedom of interpretation, increasingly I found that freedom ebbing away. It was subtle at first, but soon I began to feel we had to shape our lives, not around our own apprehension/comprehension of the deity, but around the church's. I saw this as a very conventional and limited model, no renegade cries of hallelujah, no embarrassing professions of salvation. If you were saved, and United Church people don't talk about being saved very much (or a personal Saviour or even the Devil), then keep quiet about it or you might bother people.  And if you're committed, you have to Serve, which means doing thus and so. You can't just fill a pew. Go and bake something, for heaven's sake, or sit on a committee and pick on fine points until the cows come home, solving nothing.

Though we were expected to keep our faith journey pretty much in a one-block area, I saw no such restrictions on clergy, who sometimes had agendas that were not so hidden.  In the 15 years I attended, we went through some doozies: one minister decided, without permission from the congregation, to allow CBC television cameras into the sanctuary on Sunday morning to further a "cause" that would raise his spiritual profile, improve his media image, and lift up his wife as a heroine and role model for oppressed women everywhere.

It made me sick. But nobody said anything. Not anyone. Stepford Syndrome had already set in, a dry rot worse than I could have imagined.

It was not ever thus: early on in my involvement, I tried to share some things that went to my core, leading worship services, doing Biblical readings and poetry and even dance and drama set to classical music. People were polite, but I see now that it didn't really fly. The starchiness inherent in churches (I mean "liberal" churches) eventually communicated to me a lack of openness to anything new or different. Being a little tired of their perception of me as a creative flake who really couldn't help it (and whom, by the way, they generously tolerated as a kind of social work),  I gave up and stopped doing it.

Recently I went with a friend to visit Christchurch Cathedral in Vancouver, a magnificent edifice in the old style, full of stained glass featuring Biblical figures that could not have been inspired by human beings. I used to come here to pray, hadn't been in it for years, but this time it was a whole 'nother place. It was the smell that hit me: that old-varnish, dusty-hymn-book smell. The echoing emptiness of the place. The huge pipe organ. I felt my throat constricted as by a collar and leash. I could no longer bend my knee and worship: as my friend meditated with her eyes closed, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when I could get the hell out of there.

There were and are many other aspects to my discontent. A few years ago the United Church set up a trendy website called Wondercafe (hey, make sure you don't mention church or God or Christianity or anything spiritual, but set it up as a sort of Sunday Starbuck's). I see this as a fairly desperate attempt to overcome the largely accurate public perception of the church as outmoded and dull. But they went too far, having some sort of squirrel-figure that gave answers to moral questions, and even offering bobblehead Jesus figures for sale. (No, I am not kidding: kind of like that buddy Christ in Dogma).

It sickened me, but everyone else seemed to either ignore it (what did this have to do with them?) or display a mild acceptance, even enthusiasm. I couldn't figure it out. The church was hiding behind something, I didn't know what. But whatever it was trying to do, and I guess it thought it had to do something, it didn't update the essential dustiness and boredom of liberal Christianity.

Same old hymns, for the thousandth time. A seating plan that isn't even made manifest until you try to sit in the "wrong" place. (After I "walked", I made three more attempts to find a church home. Twice, when I went to sit down, an elderly person said, "No, my family sits there." One old lady even put her hands on the pew beside her. Get your ass out of here!) Superficial friendliness exists, all sorts of it. But what lives underneath it, if anything? I remember a few people washing up on shore over the years who were in some sort of personal crisis, but they immediately left when that crisis was resolved.

There was all sorts of other stuff going on in my church (which I came to privately call Dysfunction Junction),  including hiring a minister so corrupt he had to be fired, and unceremoniously running another minister out of town after nine years of service (and surely we could have sat down with her and gone over our grievances? Apparently not. Nobody said anything until it was too late.) Underneath the friendliness and the Sunday starch, I saw cruelty, all the more awful for being subverted, pushed down and denied. If you raise even one objection, unless you have an immediate and total solution, the messenger will be shot. Problem solved.

When I left, no one called me, but perhaps it was just as well. After fifteen years of somehow trying to fit in, I got tired of the lockstep and had to abandon the whole thing. During our big meltdown over leadership, in which the entire congregation was embroiled in a kind of civil war, not one person seemed willing to take responsibility for hiring a minister who turned out to be a complete fiasco. He was a con artist and a manipulator, but why didn't anyone see that? (If they had, would anyone else have listened?)

I think in large part, we saw him as desirable because he was a black South African who constantly referred to his "pals" Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu. At last we had an opportunity to transform our bland pseudoliberalism into something far more exciting. We'd have the most politically correct leader in the whole Lower Mainland! Such power, such cachet, even if only second-hand. This would blow those sad little churches with gay ministers out of the water.  No one was willing to entertain even the possibility that hiring him was a way to increase our prestige in the community, not to mention raise our profile as an "inclusive" congregation who even accepted black folk, so long as they had the right connections.


It all went bad because he wasn't who he said he was. I don't think he was exactly evil, but I often heard that word bandied about. (The Council Chair once fumed, "He's a nasty, evil little man.") Without a doubt he was a shallow con artist with a smooth exterior, and we fell for him hook, line and sinker.  Unfortunately he flipped the race issue  and turned it to his advantage, calling his dismissal an appalling example of racism. The church was left in a tailspin from which it never recovered, in spite of our insistence that we had "healed" and moved on.

But if a church could be so blind as to hire a man like that, how can it make clear-headed judgements about its multitude of unsolved problems, systemic problems that go right back to the founding of the church?



The mess my church created was a big part of my disillusionment, but I was also astonished and shattered to find I no longer believed in God. Not the God of dusty hymn books and pipe organs, anyway. There was no "big guy in the sky" calling the shots. If there is anything, it is an indwelling love, not always within our comprehension, and a dizzyingly complex Creation that quite literally came out of nothing.

So am I Christian or not? Probably not, but the only real Christians I know seldom or never set foot in a church. They live and embody it, and don't even talk about faith or worship because they don't have to. They have the quiet gift of making others around them feel comfortable and OK with who they are. If there's a task needs doing, they show up and do it. They don't say things like "if there's anything I can do, just call me" to a person struggling with devastating bereavement. They call them and say, "How are you?", then listen for the response. No unsolicited advice, no psychobabbling, no social work. And above all: no staying away.

Do we really need Christ any more? I'm not sure, because my personal relationship with Jesus has gradually devolved from a dazzling connection with a personal saviour (eventually fizzling out from the cold water the church threw on it - no embarrassing displays of love, please!) to blankness and complete bewilderment. We turn Jesus this way and that, make him whatever we want or need him to be. Many Biblical scholars are now coming to the conclusion that he didn't exist at all.

I tried the Unitarians for a while. Nice people, mostly elderly, and far more welcoming than United Church folk. But the "sermons" I heard were talks about people's hobbies, photography and music and the like. No mention of God or prayer or anything spiritual at all. I almost felt like I was at a Kiwanis Club meeting, or maybe Toastmaster's. 

The other two United Churches I tried nearly suffocated me with boredom. I kept looking at my watch. I didn't feel comfortable trying to butt into the little conversational knots of two and three in the hall downstairs as people ate fat-and-sugar-laced baked goods washed down with tepid tea.

I guess I don't belong anywhere now (in spite of my constant references to "my" church), which is sad. It hurts me more than I can say. Recently I was shocked but not surprised when two of my dearest friends, a married couple who gave tirelessly to the church for years and years, were asked to leave. So I have given up the frantic (or whatever it was) search for "sanctuary". If church happens again in my life, it will have to come about through a natural turn of events.

So what do I miss most? I guess it would be the singing, and when I hear spirituals like the two I posted, something in me just aches for it. I wonder sometimes if some mysterious force has hit me like a stroke of lightning and smashed my spiritual life all to hell. I can't pray any more, not like I used to, because I just don't see what difference it makes.

If there is an ultimate power, someone who is in charge of everything, how in the world can we convince him to do what we want? (Do this, God. Do that. Why would we pray at all unless we wanted to change things? Can't we trust that God is doing OK on his own?) And if a thousand different people pray for a thousand different (probably conflicting) things, and none of it comes true, do we go on praying, in hopes that we just somehow didn't do it right? If ONE prayer is "answered", say, wiping out the infidels in the Western hemisphere, does that mean that those people are more beloved of God than the rest of us?

While it may be true that disillusionment is just proof that you harboured illusions, spiritual disaffection - if that's what it's called - is particularly devastating because it strikes at the heart of matters of life, death, and ultimate reality. We expect better of our friends when we're down, or lost, or full of tears. We don't need pats on the hand, Bible verses prescribed like medicine, or more pans of brownies. If the so-called people of God can be this shallow, this dogmatic and self-deluded, how indifferent are the people who walk outside the margins? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?