Remarkable People I Have Known: The Idealist

The Idealist married Bright-Eyes in 1983.  I first met him in 1978 when we were both involved in the House of Missionary Fanatics.  I moved there out of a desire and need to recreate the miraculous wonder and power of my adolescent involvement with the Jesus People and the Charismatics.  I hoped that by moving in with them and engaging in local Christian missionary work and ministry that my life would somehow get back on track where God really wanted me to be.  I couldn't have been more mistaken.

I had been there almost two months when the Idealist moved in.  He had spent the previous year in Afghanistan ministering to white twenty-something North American and European hippies and other wanderers on the so-called Hippy Trail to Kathmandu.  I found him wise and learned and very inspiring even if at twenty-five he was but three years my senior.  He was an ardent peace and anti-nuclear activist and at his feet I learned.

He was a theology student and moved out of the House of Missionary Fanatics. He said that he wanted to be closer to the university.  He also admitted that he did not like the direction the house was taking, that the narrow minded fundamentalism of the leaders was abhorrent to him.  Unlike me he got out in time.  By the time I was ready to leave it was too late.  They had already found time to designate me a dangerous heretic and I was thrown out on the street late on a Saturday night.  Fortunately my mother took me in. 

The Idealist gave me access through his card to the University library.  I took out a book of essays about the presence of Christ in secular literature.  I began to read, seriously, and discovered that Christ was indeed present in the novels of Margaret Lawrence, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and many others.

He also introduced me to the radical Mennonite House Church where I met the Famous Canadian Artist and others who did much to move my life in a thinking and thoughtful direction.  While we were both with the Missionary Fanatics we talked together and often ministered together in a drop-in centre.

I gradually became aware of how much the Idealist lived inside his head and that he never really appeared to connect with the people to whom we were ministering in a visceral or honest way.  He always behaved like a bit of a Brahman, as though he was not simply unconscious of his bondage to his upper class origins, but how he unconsciously lived out of this sense of natural superiority.  He was not at all arrogant, very kind and very affable.  But somehow untouched and untouchable to the naked writhing humanity of others.

I have not seen him since his wedding day.  I may never see him again.  I cannot say that I ever really missed him.  He never reciprocated the human connection that I have always maintained open to others, that same raw connection that has done much to wound and ruin me and even more to heal and restore me to life, strength and wholeness.