Remarkable People I Have Known: The Protestant Monk

That was not my nickname for him, if you must know, but the invention of another Remarkable Person I will soon be profiling.  I think I first really saw him when I was eighteen years old, a teenage hippy-Jesus Freak, hitch-hiking in East Vancouver.  I got a ride in a car crowded with five or six odd sorts of fellows, the Protestant Monk among them.  He was then just over thirty, balding, with wispy reddish hair, wire-rim glasses and the modestly dishevelled look of a beat poet. 

I was twenty-one when our friendship began to gel.  We became friends through the Cursillo-style retreats we participated in.  We would lease a Catholic school for the weekend, live there, serve one another, pray and worship and learn how to share our lives in a climate of pure Christian love.  These  retreats were a very powerful, and for many participants, an epiphany experience.  We became a kind of community and continued meeting together every week for years, singing, praying and bearing one another's burdens.

The Protestant Monk had become kind of a local legend.  He was very devout, and in equal parts gentle, respectful, whimsical and compassionate.  He was slightly introverted, an intellectual devoted to reading, prayer and study, but equally focussed outward and a loyal friend and helper to many.  We spent many hours visiting and talking together and I think he was one of the most powerful human forces in my early twenties for molding and shaping my spirituality.  He had a soft, gentle and rather halting way of talking, as though he was carefully thinking and praying about each and every word before letting it proceed out of his mouth.  He was one of few Christians who didn't appear to find my edginess offensive or frightening.

He went away for eighteen months to join an intentional Christian community in Scotland, believing this to be his life call.  I must have been twenty-eight when he returned, dejected, disillusioned and disheartened.  We had coffee together.  He said that he left the community on not entirely friendly terms.  The director wanted him to stay and serve God through a single and devoted life.  There was a woman, a Baptist minister, here he was sweet on.  He wanted to marry her.  The director of the community tried to forbid it and he left the community and came home feeling broken, shamed and guilty.

I tried to persuade the Protestant Monk that for me there was no issue here.  That to me marriage is every bit as honourable as celibacy and that both ways of living are gifts and callings from God.  Little did I then realize that it wasn't my judgment that he feared and that how critically and gravely he was being hobbled by his own self condemnation.

He distanced himself and I came to believe that somehow I reminded him of a spiritual perfection of which he had fallen short.  He did not need me around to remind him of his failure even if only by my inconvenient presence.

I accepted that I was not going to be part of the new life he wanted to build for himself.  It was saddening because I have never been one to easily leave a friendship.  I don't know why, but I have always been hopelessly and pathetically loyal to my friends.  I still don't know whether to view this as a virtue or a liability.

We briefly encountered each other a few times when we both lived in Richmond within a mile of each other but he always seemed less than enthusiastic about even having a quick coffee with me.  Perhaps as he had also morphed into a respectable bourgeois, the presence of someone like me for him was something of a social liability?  Well, probably.

For a few months in my mid forties I was attending his church.  We had some pleasant conversations but it was clear he was simply acting out his Christian duty of being civil.  Then, one day about five years ago, I saw him on the new Canada Line Skytrain, on his way to his home in Richmond.  We knew each other all right.  We both opted to say nothing.

We will likely never be friends again as our friendship occupied a past that he became eager to leave behind and which I could only move forward to inform the life in Christ that for me is perpetually growing and developing.  Still, I will always honour this Protestant Monk for all that he taught me and I only hope that I have internalized and made real and alive the deep love and faith that he so faithfully role-modeled for me.