Pilgrimage of Life

When I was thirteen my mother had a favourite psychic.  She was in her early twenties, pretty, a bit overweight with helmet style hair-do and a little too much make up.  A very pleasant and kind young woman with dark hair and olive skin.  My mother was fascinated by the occult, was always consulting psychics, tarot card readers and astrologists.  Her favourite psychic one day said some things about me that floored us.  She was in the living room of the split level house in a Richmond subdivision that became the stage setting for my parents' messy divorce--Dad had already been moved out of the house a few months before-- and Mom had asked her to give me a reading.  So, on a summer Saturday afternoon we sat in the living room where she looked at and examined both my palms.  Among other things, all of them alarmingly true, she told us that there was something very major about the direction my life would take that she could not disclose for fear of embarrassing me.  Then she wrote down the titles of two books that I should read, because she felt they would help me in my journey: "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse, and "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran.

     I was hardly an image of enlightenment.  I was a slightly overweight unhappy boy without friends and reeling from the abuse from my parents and older brother and the disintegration of my family.  I had no friends in school where I felt hated and relentlessly excluded and persecuted by all the other kids.  I was in a way a Mama's boy by default.  If I had had friends to do things with I would have gladly been away from her more.  However, my mother, as well as being my mother, was morphing into my best friend and this I found scary.  I was exceedingly bright and till recently had pulled very good grades in school, loved to read and constantly had my nose in the encyclopaedias.  I always went for long solitary walks, focussing on nature and houses and whatever detail in my surroundings seemed even a little bit unusual or overlooked.  Physically I was slow and completely unathletic.   I didn't dislike sports and actually was fond of soccer and tennis.  I just didn't play them well because I moved too slow and for this reason was never picked for teams.  Looking back I realize now that the reason I was slow was that I was always watching and pondering instead of acting and reacting.  I was really a contemplative in training.

     I didn't get around to reading Siddhartha till I was eighteen, and the Prophet perhaps a decade later.  I can understand why she recommended these books to me.  She must have known and read somehow that I was on a spiritual path, and this has been ratified over and over, through my dramatic Christian conversion, and my journey as a Christian throughout my life.  I have never really questioned this call, since it has always seemed so fundamental to my identity, to who and what I am.  I never became a Roman Catholic so of course joining a monastery was never an option.  Even so, as a friend of mine put it some years ago, I'm really too wild for this.  I don't mean wild in an unruly or undisciplined sense, rather more like a wild animal that would lose its beauty and distinctiveness through the domestication of approved by the church activities, and yet I have generally maintained a close if at times very difficult and strained relationship with the Christian churches. 

     Following the wildness of the Jesus People and the resulting fallout, landing in the Anglican Church seemed the best possible way of helping me send down roots and find balance and structure in my spiritual life.  I spent nearly all of twenty years at St. James in Vancouver, a high Anglican church and for years attended daily mass early in the mornings, and yes, this had a wondrous effect in grounding and deepening me spiritually.  My professional and vocational life also corresponded to the spiritual.  From age twenty-four on I spent many years working in home support, caring for seniors, people with disabilities and administering palliative care to the dying.  Meanwhile I was developing a street ministry of presence to social outcasts downtown, spending copious amounts of time with people offering a gentle and non-invasive Christian friendship.  Those years were particularly rewarding, if very intense, troubling and exhausting at times.  This grew into a Christian community of prayer and street ministry that lasted until the mid-nineties.  Following some rather difficult years of coping with burn-out and exhaustion and some rather catastrophic events I eventually came into advocating for the homeless, working for a while in homeless shelters. 

     For the past almost decade I have been working as a mental health peer support worker, an occupation that really does engage and demand the whole person if it is to be done well.  In a Spanish conversation group that I'm a member of, last night, I was describing to some of the other participants in the language of Cervantes of how involving and all-encompassing this work has to be if it is going to be done well, maintaining at the same time with clients clear and firm professional and personal boundaries.  This does not mean that I don't take my work home with me.  Though I don't fret or obsess about my clients off-hours they almost always leave an impression on me and this interaction I use as a tool for my own personal growth and development.

     I am still in process with a deep and living spiritual walk that involves also a vocational and professional life of care-giving and compassion.  Frieda, my mother's psychic was onto something.  And despite the difficulties and intense poverty that I have experienced, I can say I have absolutely no regrets, I have missed nothing, and I am ready to move on in this pilgrimage of life.