The Peacock 52

 "So your dad didn't like you snooping around St. James", Carl says.

"He was downright worried.  You see, my dad was an evangelical, and the evangelicals and the high Anglicans have always hated and distrusted each other.  But I wasn't really comfortable with what my dad, or his parish were doing.  I called them Baptists wearing robes.  He was an assistant priest at St. John's Shaughnessy, low-church, evangelical and smack-dab in the middle of one of Vancouver's wealthiest parishes.  In the nineties it became very popular among the evangelical community for the lively preaching and the great music.  They were all pretty fundamentalist, too.  And it just grated on me, that and my father's shallow and smug certainty about biblical correctness.  I was a brighter than average kid and I really wanted to explore my spirituality but in a way that really harnessed the imagination.  A visitor at St. John's, this really eccentric lady who was in a community in Richmond, thought I might be interested in St. James.  She didn't care for the place herself, though her community was connected there, but she thought it might be worth checking out for me.  And she did give me all sorts of caveats.  Oh, by the way, Aaron, our friend here, was part of that community.  He was the de facto leader.  I met him with the lady and two others one evening at St. John's.  

"What did you think of Aaron back then?"

"Oh, I liked him right away.  Great sense of humour, super ironical. But he soon quit visiting, and then the two older ladies stopped going.  So, I visited St. James, and I have to admit that I was immediately swept away into something extraordinary."

"It is an interesting church," Carl says.

"Have you been there?"

"We've visited a couple of times."

"During the coffee hour, just following high mass, my first Sunday, there is Father Griffin taking me aside to thoroughly monopolize my attention.  Before I knew it, I had consented to him taking me out for dinner the following Friday evening, and it was only when I went home to report to my father what had happened.  I told him everything except for one little detail."

"Which was?"

"That I was soon to dine with my father's nemesis..."