Stranger Than Fiction, 5

In March 1985 I began working again in home support in Vancouver's famous Downtown Eastside, aka Canada's poorest postal code.  I have mentioned already that snooty church had its own local social services agency and they became my employer.  I rather enjoyed this seamless garment of working and worshipping in the same place, so to speak.  Often the church was open and it was no difficult thing to step into the chapel in the back for a few moments of silent prayer while between assignments.  My clients all lived in the area, were very poor, often with issues of addiction and mental illness.  I cleaned, took in laundry, assisted with shopping, sometimes did personal care.  The situation was very humble and nondescript.  I throve there, if for only a short while.

In a repertory cinema in my neighbourhood I saw a documentary film about Carl Jung.  This was life changing.  His exploration of human spirituality, the archetypes and the collective unconscious resonated deeply with me and soon I was taking out books of his writings from the library.   I began to pay especially close attention to my dreams, writing them down, and trying to view them through a Jungian lens, which is to say, looking carefully for the presence of archetypes as well as the dynamics of anima and animus, the masculine and feminine forces, not to mention the presence and existence of my personal shadow.

Meanwhile my ministry of presence downtown continued as usual as did my daily attendance at morning mass.  I developed friendships with some particularly interesting, and troubled individuals who came to rely on me for spiritual mentoring and counsel.  These became particularly volatile relationships involving a lot of mutual projection and transference as well as having to constantly negotiate and renegotiate boundaries.  A fate I would wish not even on an enemy.

I was also engaging on lengthy prayer walks, especially in areas that seemed to contain a lot of spiritual darkness.  This was also a kind of spiritual warfare and it became for me a very costly activity.

I came to live in a particularly heightened spiritual awareness.  I was always listening carefully for the slightest whisper of God's guidance and leading and this actually became very advantageous for helping me encounter persons and situations where I could be of help.  So, my work in the downtown eastside, with my ministry downtown, my daily attendance at mass, the long walks, the work I was doing on my novel, the batik work, everything was infused with a strange and dynamic spiritual potency further bolstered and ignited by my readings of Jung.

In the fall I moved downtown to an apartment on Robson Street, where I lived and prayed and received visitors and was used as a platform for intensifying my work downtown.  This move would exact from me a very high price.