Places Where I've Lived: Basement Suite 4

My life was downright monastic.  I got up every morning, crack of dawn and walked two and a half miles to make it to the 7:15 am mass.  Every day except Thursday and Sunday.  Thursday's mass was at 9:30.  That was the church ladies' mass.  The church ladies are a reality in every Anglican parish.  They run the church.  Some of them are downright evil.  You don't want to mess with an evil church lady.  They are truly terrifying.  Evil church ladies were the prototype for the wicked witches in the unedited Grimm's fairy tales.  I was usually working at nine-thirty though on occasion I did attend if only to remind me of why God wouldn't mind if I booked off just one day a week.

At that time, in 1982 I had become totally dependent upon the mass.  I blamed Mother Teresa who then was one of my mentors.  I took my Christian faith very seriously.  I took everything very seriously.  I took especially myself very seriously.  Hey, I was in my twenties! I couldn't deny that something special seemed to occur for me whenever I received the blessed sacrament at the altar.  That for me was receiving Christ.  What I hadn't clued into was that Christ was always waiting for me everywhere, in every person, situation and circumstance for me to receive and welcome.  The eucharist was simply an image of this reality.  At the time it seemed to work and I deeply depended on this limiting blessing in order to function well in my difficult work.  Since I would be spending my work day cleaning homes, bathing people, wiping their asses, putting up with their abuse and watching silently with their loved ones as they slowly died, I became entirely reliant on the sacrament of holy communion in order to cope and do well at my job.

I prayed a lot, walked everywhere and enjoyed the silence interior and exterior.  Even with the unspeakable racket my neighbour upstairs' child made with her running and stomping.  Despite the annoyances we became very good friends and sometimes I babysat but very rarely.  My life only began to change noticeably the year I got fired from my job.  I had savings, then unemployment insurance benefits.  That summer began my ministry in the gay clubs and streets downtown.

Places Where I've Lived: Basement Suite 3

I lived near Commercial before it became known as the Drive.  No matter what you call it, it will always be Commercial.  Which is to say all stores, businesses, restaurants, cafes and services.  I lived there 1980 to 1985, still a few years before it became so painfully and notoriously hip.  Commercial Drive at that time was still solidly working class, strongly left-wing, and the Italian and Portuguese presences were still very visible.  There were not yet any hip cafes except for a generous selection of espresso bars and Italian bakeries and restaurants.  This was pre-Starbucks and pre-coffee snobs.  There were pool halls everywhere, still notorious dens of vice full of tattooed youths before body art became common and rather banal.  There were also, then as now, unique grocery stores and cheap produce markets. 

The Drive was not yet invented.  It was not considered fashionable to live or be seen there, but still rather déclassé.  I would walk along there window shopping and sometimes wandering from cheese and sausage deli, to Italian food store, to Chinese vegetable market, filling my basket with fruits, vegetables, cheese, sausage, tinned mackerel and orzata almond syrup, among other delicacies.  The locals were Italian, Portuguese, Asian, young, tattooed (long before there were hipsters), loud, rude and often poor and sometimes desperate.

I first saw Commercial Drive when I was a kid, perhaps eight years old.  I lived with my family in Richmond and one Saturday my father took me with him in the car to get me out of Mom's hair for a couple of hours.  He had some kind of business to attend to in East Vancouver: I think he needed to buy equipment for his fishing boat.  We drove in from Richmond, then east on Marine Drive to Victoria Drive.  For me, strange, unexplored and unknown territory.  Every house, building and storefront appeared to grab my attention.  Then the street curved and it all looked suddenly strange and different.  I asked my father where we were.  "Commercial Drive", he replied.  I thought, what a strange name for a street.  "Why call it Commercial?"  I asked my father, "You mean TV commercials."  He replied, "No, just Commercial, like business, see all the stores?"  And I saw the stores but mostly the buildings: all old, with strange curves and engravings and enchanting windows that I did not yet know where features of vintage architecture.  It was the colour of the buildings that intrigued me most.  They all seemed to be yellow, golden and orange, though also a bit disheveled, like aging poor women prettifying themselves in cheap makeup and costume jewelry.  A magical radiance seemed to emanate from the buildings and I asked my dad if we could stop, get out of the car and look around.  I already knew that his answer would be no.  We didn't have time.  We never had time.  And the neighbourhood, he said, was shabby, run down and full of Italians.  I didn't know what he was talking about and only left behind this magical radiance regretting and resenting the beauty that one more time my own father would be denying me.

Places Where I've Lived: Basement Suite 2

I had been living in the basement suite for one year when I began to attend Snooty Church, the High Anglican church in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.  I wasn't terribly impressed, or not at first anyway.  The place was huge and beautifully built and designed on the interior though the exterior seemed a combination of a Byzantine temple and a concrete shithouse.  I attended the family mass which seemed forced, stilted and uninspired.  After a few weeks of this I tried the Solemn or High Mass and was quite blown away.

I remember my bus ride to my first family mass. It was early, just past 8:30 am and quite an odd time of day for a Sunday.  I remember a man carrying a stuffed and mounted armadillo on his lap, engaged in a conversation with an old woman seated nearby.  I have since come to appreciate the aptness of the metaphor for my initial impressions of the Anglican Church.

I began to walk to church.  It was a pleasant route, about two and a half miles from my home.  I took side streets, enjoying the peace and quiet away from the noisy traffic as well as the heritage houses and trees and gardens.  The services themselves seemed intriguing.  I learned there was a daily mass, usually celebrated at 7:15 am, and a twice weekly evening mass, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 all celebrated in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the back.  The masses were preceded respectively by the Holy Office services of Matins and evensong.  There was something very medieval Europe about it all and I often felt that I was being transported into quite a different time and place from Canada's poorest postal code in the early 1980's.

My entrance into the Anglican Church was somewhat reluctant but it did correspond well with my new living arrangements.  My basement apartment seemed like a hermit's cave.  I had recently discovered silent prayer and soon a lively synergy evolved between church and home, places to be still and silent before a living and vibrant God.

Places Where I've Lived: Basement Suite 1

I moved into this one bedroom basement apartment in East Vancouver November 1980.  Wow! That seems like a long time ago now.  Thirty-five years!  It was a rough start.  I had a dysfunctional roommate who quickly headed for the street and morphed into a drug-addicted transvestite hooker.  I in the meantime got on with it and did the best I could in my job as a home support worker while doing everything I could to keep my life in order.  I was twenty-four, soon to turn twenty-five.  The wild boy that I'd been had slowed, grown, become heavy, with already thinning hair.  I embraced to my surprise a quiet home life, long walks and intimate dinners with friends.

I was tired.  Work was demanding.  I was cleaning up the most unspeakable messes after incontinent clients, abusive clients, tragically helpless and vulnerable clients.  I was already doing palliative care.  I was attending a different church, Four-Square Pentecostal and enjoyed being part of a new community.

My neighbour upstairs was a single mother in her thirties with a noisy energetic toddler.  It wasn't always quiet in my apartment but generally it was very peaceful.  I collected and dried herbs, principally fennel for its seeds (it grew wild in my neighbourhood), mint, chamomile and rosehips.  I began to make batiks.  The big parks nearby were an added boon: Clark Park across the street with its huge trees, and Trout Lake nearby.  Every morning before breakfast and every evening after dinner I went for a walk involving both parks, walked around the lake and returned home.

I worked, took care of people, prayed, read, rested, listened to classical music, walked, devoted time to my friends.  It was a simple, quiet and very introspective life.  I was determined to squeeze as much from this quiet time as I could, knowing that it wasn't going to last.

Places Where I've lived: Mount Pleasant 15

It was getting involved in that evangelical community church in Kitsilano that began the change.  I left the Mennonite house church because I wasn't feeling spiritually fed there.  Intellectually they were stimulating and very educational but their relationship with God seemed more intellectual than visceral and I began to feel rather hungry and thirsty there.  A friend I had known back in the Jesus People and charismatic days had re-emerged in my life and he invited me to his church.  We also shared a common desire to be part of an informal home prayer group, so with a few others we formed one, alternating between four homes every Friday evening.  There was a lovely intimacy and strong sense of God's presence in these little gatherings and for a while we throve and flourished.

I found myself under and unemployed and was able to put in two shifts a week as a volunteer worker in the Dayspring Christian Bookstore, which was the evangelical community church's major community outreach ministry.  I loved it there and more often entertained all manner of intriguing strangers than sell books.  I also began to feel really involved with my new church.

The bloom really came off the rose when the leaders of the church wanted to absorb our home prayer group.  We mostly resisted it at first, then were fifty-fifty.  We eventually capitulated, which ended the group as we knew it, destroyed its beauty and began the end of my involvement and presence in said church.  The vision we had for this group was of providing a safe and nurturing bridge between churches of all denominations.  We didn't need to be claimed by anyone.  The vision perished and soon it was time to move on.

I was awake all night and spent the time in prayer and received a prophecy, or a written message, and to this day I believe it was from God.  It was a message of rebuke to a church that was divided and rebellious and estranged from the reality of love.  The leaders of the evangelical church rejected it since they expected God to be a kind grandfatherly gentleman who wanted only to spoil us with good things.  Others were very open to it.  I decided to leave this church following just nine months attendance.  I found employment as a home support worker and was suddenly plunged into care-giving, including palliative care.  One day after work I walked a great distance home while seeking God in prayer.  It was at that moment that I was initiated into silent prayer marking a major shift in my life direction.  A month later I moved to a basement apartment, larger, only a little more expensive but also a hugely needed change.  It was a one bedroom, furnished and actually very cozy.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 14

Many things happened in my last year there.  It was, as I mentioned already, a house of all-sorts, to cop a phrase from Emily Carr.  C and I were the sexually dubious ones and others in the house often puzzled over the nature of our relationship, or so in our youthful narcissism, we liked to believe this.  The caretaker of the house was an artist living in the front on the main floor.  I referred to him as "The Woman Who Lives Down Below", a reference to a character in Margaret Atwood's first novel, The Edible Woman, which I read during my time here.  He was rather a strange, antisocial man whom now I suspect likely suffered from Asperger's Syndrome.  We didn't like him.  He was an artist producing rather chaotic looking abstracts.  He sometimes had a young boy, about six years old visiting.  We were not charitable in our suspicions.  He also took up the saxophone and was even worse at music than he was at art.  Every time he would practice the house would empty out as all the tenants would suddenly have friends to see or shopping to do, or suddenly realized it was after all a perfect day for a walk.

In the large suite behind the "Woman Who Lives Down Below" lived a young woman with her musician boyfriend.  He was good and I actually enjoyed hearing him practice his guitar and singing from my room upstairs.  We were sort of friendly and even occasionally visited.  They broke up and her spanking newly minted Eastern European boyfriend moved in.  To my discomfort while trying to get to sleep at night I could hear that either this new one was giving her the orgasms that his predecessor couldn't , either that or she was taking acting lessons.  This was one of the reasons I ended up moving out.  I remember a conversation she and I had one day downstairs near the front door.  Learning that I am a Christian she wanted to know my position on pre-marital sex.  I assured her that regardless of what I believed for me I was not going to believe the same thing for her or for anyone else.  She was of course a liberated woman and lauded the Sexual Revolution as the best thing to happen since sliced bread and the electric toaster.  I gave her my Cheshire Cat smile and said, "That's right, kiddo, once upon a time if you were a good girl you were always expected to say no.  Now, to prove that you are a good girl you are always expected to say yes.  Progress?"  She did not have a ready answer.

Upstairs in the garret lived a hip progressive couple with a cat with an attitude problem.  They were the prototypical politically enlightened, cultured and cool boomer young couple of the late seventies.  They were well-educated, well-informed, nice looking and not all they appeared to be.  One afternoon I heard a loud banging on my ceiling as though they were hurling furniture at each other.  Then I heard someone running down the stairs.  I went down where I saw her sitting on the front steps crying.  I asked her how she was, if I could help.  She replied she was okay.  She had just thrown a rocking chair at her partner who was being an asshole.  I can't recall if she apologized for the disturbance she had made.

Down the hall from me lived the only person who wasn't young, hip and bohemian or at least a fashionable social outsider.  He was a man in his late sixties, recently retired, a former labourer who had been a miner.  He was quiet, polite and very old fashioned.  It was odd but somehow refreshing having him in the house.  There was something about the old, quaint and traditional reality that he carried with him that balanced and grounded us.  Good Friday I had some friends over particularly for prayer and Holy Communion to observe Our Lord's death on the cross.  While we were praying together he knocked on the door, his hand bleeding rather badly.  He had cut himself while making dinner.  I quickly got him some band-aids and saw that he was okay.  My friends and I all agreed that it was like Jesus visiting us in a meaningful way on such a solemn and sacred day.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 13

I can't believe I have written so much already about this house where I spent nearly two years of my early twenties, but this was a watershed time in my life.  I was listening to the Ideas program on CBC and two episodes really grabbed my attention.  One was called "The Terror Of Consumerism", or something like that.  I just did a quick Google search and can't find anything.  This was a series of programs that I listened to on the radio at work in the cashier booth of the Hotel Vancouver parkade.  I already lived modestly which was really for me making necessity into a virtue.  However, the unique and multifaceted exploration about our consumerist culture and society and its impact on our lives and thinking, not to mention the way it paralysed our ability to think, more than assured me that I was living the right way.  It convinced me that poverty, as long as it was not grinding poverty, could be in itself a virtue.  I only needed what I needed: sufficient and good nutritious food, clean running water, a safe and cozy roof over my head, meaningful work, creative activity, a community, freedom and good friends.  It really did not take a lot to secure these things and I was happy to work for a low wage if all of the above could be the result.  This was also during an era when it was much easier to simply work for a living and actually live okay even at minimum wage.  Those days, in Vancouver anyway, are long gone.

This series of broadcasts was followed by another titled "Freebooter Treatises."  This was based on some writings of avant-garde Italian film-maker Petro Paulo Pasolini celebrating the bohemian life.  The theme of travelling and living lightly, of treating life and others as a gift and as a feast resonated powerfully with me, confirming much that I had already learned and experienced in my twenty-three years and inspiring me to remain on this path.

This all triangulated beautifully with my involvement with the Mennonite house church since these were the very values we together sought to incarnate in our daily lives and worship. I also made myself a promise which I think has turned out to be a kind of solemn vow: that as much as lay possible within me that I would resist and block out of my life all the consumerist influences of American pop culture, advertising and entertainment.  This proved not to be particularly difficult.  I didn't own, nor want to own, a TV and I was also a film snob.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 12 (The Four-Gated City 6)

Rita arrived sometime in 1996, the Maynards' granddaughter and Martha's newest charge.  The young woman's inability to fit into the various scenes of fashionable London made her an instant hit.  Paul, the nephew, fell in love with her and tried to alter her image to fit the dictates of fashion.  She resisted, and because Paul was asexual despite being wildly handsome, spurned him since she really wanted to get properly laid.  She eventually conquered Mark his uncle, they became an item and soon she was, at the end of the novel, pregnant by him.

Francis, Mark's son, despite his conventionality and gift for common sense became involved in theatre arts and soon a commune formed around him that also involved some of his cousins and their friends.  They moved out of London to a place in the country.

Martha could feel a new change coming her way, as though her life was once again about to blow itself into a new shape.  She was no longer needed so much and began to consider making preparations to live independently.  She didn't feel jealous of Rita and really did not seem to be one to accommodate jealousy.  She was really more preoccupied with getting the job done while studiously examining and exploring her own inner life.

The novel comes to a conclusion when Mark's now ancient mother, Margaret, throws a huge evening garden party at her new estate by the River Thames, inviting celebrities, authors, royalty, sitting politicians,  and business magnates and prominent figures in the arts.  It is there that Doris Lessing delineates the growing political influence and power, in 1969, of the great corporations and global business empires over national and international affairs.

Following the novel's end we are treated to appendices that leap into an apocolyptic future.  There has been somewhere in England and in other parts of the developed world a series of nuclear accidents or attacks.  Great Britain and much of Europe and North America are evacuated and quarantined.  Mark with help from Martha, Rita and others, has been setting up a network of refugee camps in North Africa, trying to model them after the fabled city of Martha's vision that he also made a novel about.  It has been largely through Martha's and Lynda's psychic experiences and experimentation that they have been warned to prepare for this global catastrophe.  Martha, one of the few survivors, is now very elderly and with a group of other survivors finds refuge in some uninhabited islands in the North Atlantic.  They set up a commune there and manage to eke out a subsistence survival.  Her telepathic gifts are by now highly developed and she finds herself communicating psychically with Francis and others who are living in Africa, Asia or South America.

This is where Doris Lessing delineates the idea that humankind never learns from their mistakes and that the tendency towards war and brutality is sure to be our downfall.  She balances this despair with a modest hope that some of us are evolving into a new kind of human: people with ample mental and psychic and spiritual gifts and generous and loving hearts.  The tragedy is that these same people are already damaged, sidelined and ostracized by society and can best offer up their gifts from broken vessels.

During a particularly severe winter, Martha, now eighty years old, dies and the novel ends with a postscript lament from a very aged Mark Coldridge.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 11 (The Four-Gated City 5)

Lynda is in and out of hospital between bouts of attempted wellness and refusing to take her medication.  She even tries to be a proper wife to her husband, everything short of sharing his bed.  She tries to excel as a hostess to their many dinner and cocktail parties where the most fascinating icons of the new swinging London mingle.  Martha is fascinated by the course of her friend's mental illness and is determined to share in the suffering with her as a way of recovering her own authentic self.  They spend several weeks alone together in the basement apartment, going without proper sleep or nutrition and Martha finds herself entering into Lynda's illness with her.  She begins to have aural hallucinations, especially of the Self-Hater, the dark shadow that inhabits everyone.  Both women lose a great deal of weight.  When they are finished with their ordeal of self-induced psycho-sickness they both feel a sense of enlightenment, of a kind of spiritual purity.  They clean themselves up, get their hair done and all made up and dress in vintage costumes from the Edwardian era and the Roaring Twenties waiting in Mark's study where they study his map of the world and all the pins he has stuck on global and strategic hotspots.  Paul comes in and is so intrigued by his aunties' extreme fashionable glamour that he takes them out for dinner where he can proudly show them off. 

Martha again embarks on a psychic safari, this time alone.  Her "nephew" Paul has become an adept wheeler-dealer at the tender age of twenty-one and has already amassed a fortune flipping houses.  Martha sequesters herself in a room in one of these houses where she fasts, goes without sleep, and without anything to divert or distract her  as she begins to descend again into self-induced madness.  She barely comes out of this one but believes she has discovered valuable truths about the human condition and has finally recoverered some essential truths about herself.
She also believes that she is becoming psychic, a kind of radio transmitter and that Lynda also has this talent.  In fact, that Lynda's deteriorated mental health condition came as a result of her inability to reckon well with her psychic condition.

While Martha is still locked away inside Paul's house she receives notice that an aged couple she had always been at odds with in Rhodesia are in London and they specially want to see her.  She meets with them-they are now in their eighties-in a fashionable restaurant staffed with beautiful gay male waiters and she herself is fashionably thin and fashionably attired in a tight fitting white dress, red broad-rim hat and sunglasses.  The couple hardly recognize her, nor the swinging spectacle their formerly staid London has morphed into.  They pile a mound of banknotes on top of the table, which one of the pretty waiters makes a spectacle of blowing on and dusting off and give her the money for the education of their granddaughter who will soon be arriving in London.

The young woman arrives in a few months and again things begin to change.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 10 (The Four-Gated City 4)

Eventually the bad time, as Doris Lessing called it in her novel, ended and a new liberal wind was already beginning to blow in London and the West in 1956.  With Lynda Martha began to seriously explore alternative consciousness.  They didn't use drugs but they thought that there were some strong connections between so-called mental illness, psychic and clairvoyant experiences, and altered mystical states.  Martha began to buy and read a huge range of books by mystics, psychics and authors of fantasy and science fiction.  Her appetite for knowledge and information was voracious and she trusted in her instincts to guide her on her quest.  She remembered painfully her own ecstatic spiritual experiences when she first arrived in London.  She had almost nothing but the clothes she was wearing and what she could pack in her small suitcase.  She explored, went everywhere, met people, let them adopt her temporarily and love her as kith and kin and then move on to the next page.  She found that by not eating, or eating only very little, sleeping little, she could hone and sharpen her mind into a delicate instrument of reception and communication.  She was endeavouring to recapture that experience of the soft dark receptive awareness that was her unidentifiable self, the very centre of her being.

Now, as a woman approaching middle age and charged with running a household and providing secretarial duties to her off and on lover, she had become thickened, dulled and in a way comatose.  She wanted to wake up again, experience herself and simultaneously the universe.  In the late fifties the antinuclear movement was born in England and began to take off.  The children under her care and their cousins were now adolescents and largely involved in the peace marches.  The house opened up and became a kind of community brain and nerve centre as well as a growing extended family that ran well beyond the ties of blood and common DNA.

Then began the Swinging Sixties of London.  The changes were radical everywhere.  Everyone was suddenly kind, loving and generous.  Drugs, marijuana and LSD in particular were infusing and influencing the popular culture and music and art.  London became a happening, a party, one massive be-in.  It was in this context that Martha embarked on one of her most risky and terrifying experiments.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 9 (The Four-Gated City 3)

When Mark ends his communist phase Martha's mother visits from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).  Their relationship has never been good and for Martha seeing her mother again is nothing short of traumatic.  Martha is currently seeing a psychiatrist as she is interested in knowing whether or not she has a mental illness.  Her mother arrives and finds herself shocked about what her daughter whom she hasn't seen in four years has become.  She is a woman from a previous age and completely disapproves of the loose morals of her daughter and young people in general.  She cannot understand that Martha has become part of an unconventional household.  Everything she has known and valued about the family here is turned on its head.  Mark and his wife Lynda co-exist but not as husband and wife.  Lynda lives in the basement with her friend Dorothy, also mentally ill and their whole circle of friends who are ill, involved in the occult or both.  Martha is the default mother to Mark's son and nephew.  When her mother asked her who was raising the two boys her daughter lamely answered "They are being raised."  The house is full of communists, or ex-communists, like her daughter.  She accidentally walks in on Martha and Mark just after they've made love.  The room is dark and there is a glow of cigarettes, their silhouettes and nothing else.  She has a private meltdown in her room, lying on her bed alternately singing a hymn and grumbling what a whore her daughter is and that she would also have free room and board if she made her living with her legs in the air.

Mrs. Quest, Martha's mother, is a racist white supremist like many of the white old guard in southern Africa.  She has been living with her son and daughter-in-law on a remote farm in Southern Rhodesia.  Her need to control everyone drives them both nuts so they have a small cottage built for her where she has to live attended by a pubescent black African boy.  The boy adopts her as his grandmother, and despite her deeply ingrained prejudice she comes to deeply love him while living in a state of complete denial that their relationship is other than servant and master.

Martha's psychiatrist tells her that she has to tell her mother to leave, since she really wants her to.  She resists, more from fear and lack of spine than guilt.  She brings Mrs. Quest to see him.  She refuses at first, becomes psychosomatically ill and confines herself to her bed.  Martha just manages to coax her to come with her.  The old woman moves slowly and painfully, needs help on the stairs and has to walk hobbling on two canes.  They arrive in the psychiatrist's office and Mrs. Quest proceeds to spend the entire hour vituperating her daughter, telling the good psychiatrist in as many ways as she can what an absolute failure Martha is as a daughter, a woman, and a human being.  She leaves the psychiatrist a picture of robust health, forgets her canes and nearly runs like a schoolgirl on a soccer field to the waiting cab.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 8 (The Four-Gated City 2)

Martha Quest soon becomes part of the Coldridge household.  She is like a substitute mother to Mark Coldridge's son, Francis, and his nephew, Paul.  Paul's father, who is Mark's brother is a prominent scientist who defects to the Soviet Union in 1951 after selling them nuclear secrets that enable them to manufacture nuclear weapons.    His son Paul's mother reacts by gassing herself to death.  All the journalists of Fleet Street besiege the Coldridge household to get the full scoop of this prominent member of the British establishment running off to the communists.  Paul, who is part Jewish from his mother, grows up to be a self-absorbed angry narcissist.  Francis is well-behaved and conventional. The two boys hate each other.

Mark's wife, Linda, moves home from the mental hospital and she and Martha develop a close bond.  She often has relapses and tends to hallucinate and not take care of herself and absolutely refuses to sleep with her husband.  She moves to the suite in the basement where she inadvertently sets up a thriving community of mental health sufferers and psychics.

Meanwhile, in solidarity with his brother who defected to the Soviet Union, Mark Coldridge joins the British communist party and his house becomes a hub of subversive political activity.  Martha, being an ex-communist is no longer trusted and kept at arms length.  Cold War hysteria is high and many lives and reputations are destroyed.  Mark writes a couple of novels.  One, before his communist phase, is about Martha's vision of the fabled city.  As a communist he writes another book, a novel about class struggle which does rather badly and is also badly written.   Eventually his ties with communism dissipate, he falls into a depression as does Martha and they become for the first time lovers.

Martha is concerned that she has lost entirely a dimension of spiritual lucidity that she discovered during her first month "freebooting around in London."  She found that if she ate little, slept little and walked much that her mind would clear and that she would be transported into a transcendent state.  She yearns for this heightened consciousness and throughout the rest of the novel strives through various forms of experimentation to recover it.

Places Where I've Lived: 7 (The Four-Gated City, Part One)

I read a lot of Doris Lessing during this time.  I first came across her writing in an anthology of short stories during my time in college.  Her writing stuck with me and I wanted to read more.  My neighbour upstairs suggested I read her Children of Violence series.  The first four novels of the series were set entirely in southern Africa, following the youth and young adulthood of the protagonist, Martha Quest: her divorce from her first and second husbands, her involvement in the communist party during the Second World War and her increasing preoccupation with discovering her soul, her authentic self.

This all comes together in the fifth and longest volume "The Four-Gated City" set entirely in London from 1949 to 1969 then projecting forward into an imaginary apocalyptic future that sees large swathes of the First World countries rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear holocaust.

The story opens in postwar London in a small café in South London.  Martha Quest has just immigrated to England from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  She feels for the first time in her life absolutely and unconditionally free and hops from cheap inn to bedsit until she lands in an upper middle class home as the secretary of an eccentric writer and caretaker of his dysfunctional family.  She has abandoned communism, feeling sick of the many inconsistencies and hypocrisies and finds herself searching for an ideal and mythical reality that she imagines as a kind of archetypal city.

With her employer and sometimes lover, Mark Coldridge Martha maps out this fictitious city which is an ordered and integrated whole of well planned streets, houses, buildings and gardens.  Everyone has a useful role or function to play in this city which seems to be governed by a kind of spiritual anarchy.  No one knows where the divine power comes from that seems to hold everything in a dynamic order until a foreign army invades and conquers the city.  In the library in the centre of the city a small empty room is discovered to be the source of this energy.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 6 (Till We Have Faces)

CS Lewis' decidedly weird novel, Till We Have Faces, I first read when I was nineteen or twenty.  It quite messed with my head but in some very good ways.  I read it again while living in the house in Mount Pleasant and along with George Macdonald's "Lilith" and "The Four Gated City" by Doris Lessing it became for me a thematic work of fiction.

Till We Have Faces was published in 1956, the year of my birth.  It is subtitled "A Myth Retold" because it is Lewis' spin on the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche.  Look up the myth on Google if you want because I am not going to describe it here, but CS Lewis' take on it.

In an ancient kingdom, likely somewhere in Eastern Europe, north of Greece was the Kingdom of Glome.  The king was like a figure from Shakespeare, perhaps Lawrence Olivier or Richard Burton playing Richard III.  He had three daughters: the oldest, Orual, was very ugly; Redival, the second daughter, was very pretty, and Psyche, the youngest, who was their half-sister was extraordinarily beautiful.  Orual, upon the childbed death of her stepmother, took Psyche under her care, though she was still herself a child.  A tight, almost incestuous bond formed between them.

They were educated by a wise Greek who had been purchased by the king, the girls' father as a slave.  Orual, with an incredible thirst for knowledge and wisdom, became deeply attached to him.  Redival was more interested in attracting boys.  Psyche, as she grew, like her elder half-sister became an eager student of the Fox (the Greek's nickname, though he was really named Lysias.)

Just when Psyche reaches puberty, and has become lovelier than ever, there is a great drought in the land.  The priest claims that the gods are angry because Psyche has been compared to their great goddess Ungit and that now she is jealous and demands payment.  It is decreed that Psyche must be sacrificed to Ungit's son, the God of the Mountain.

Psyche is taken up the mountain where she is tied to a tree.  The God of the Mountain has her rescued and receives her into his palace as his bride.  Meanwhile Orual after some weeks of morning goes up to the mountain to see if she can bury the remains of her sister.  Instead she meets Psyche, alive, well and radiant with joy and good health though she is dressed in rags.  Orual is unable to see the palace or the riches or the beautiful clothes that Psyche is wearing.  She insists that Psyche is deluded, gives her a knife and a lamp and tells her to expose the god and kill him.  The god has appeared to Psyche only in darkness.  She has never seen him and he has sworn her to secrecy about him.  Psyche waits for him that night, lights the lamp when she hears her husband approach.  Suddenly everything is destroyed, a huge storm destroys the palace and Psyche wanders out into the wide world, a weeping exile.

In the meantime Orual begins to go out in public wearing a veil because she is deeply shamed both by her ugliness and by her betrayal of the being she loved more than anything in the world.  Her father dies and she becomes queen, an accomplished stateswoman and warrior both.  No one sees her face and eventually many strange and wondrous myths arise about her face.  It is eventually thought that she must be a woman of great beauty.  She is a wise and able ruler and there are parallels between herself and her father and Queen Elizabeth I and Henry VIII.  She never marries and lives and reigns for many long years always carrying in a secret place of her being the unyielding guilt that she destroyed her half-sister's happiness.

Orual becomes old and soon death approaches.  In a series of dreams and visions she meets with her sister Psyche, who has become a goddess.  She has been writing a long manuscript which she calls her complaint to the gods: that they act in secret, that they are capricious, that it is so hard to discern their true will and desire for humankind.  Finally she writes, how can we expect that the gods will show themselves to us until we ourselves have faces...and then she dies.

Reading this amazing novel over and over again has done much to reinforce to me the importance of yielding up those things that are dearest to us and that by not doing so we end up enslaving ourselves.  It tells me about the importance of trust, of trusting in God regardless of how dark and unknowable appear his will and his counsels.  It tells me that as long as we ourselves remain unknowable to ourselves that we can hardly expect that God should ever reveal himself to us.

Tomorrow I will write about the Four Gated City.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 5 (Lilith)

My literary sense really began to develop while I lived in this house.  I wanted to be a writer and tried to write short stories.  There always seemed to be something wanting in my writing style and I didn't think I would have the stamina to keep writing, keep improving and keep enduring rejections from publishers.  I read voraciously: Victorian classics, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Doris Lessing, George Macdonald, CS Lewis and others.  During this period my three most constant novels emerged: "Lilith", by George Macdonald, CS Lewis' "Till We Have Faces", and Doris Lessing's most monumental and least appreciated novel, "The Four Gated City", the last volume of her "Children Of Violence" series.

For almost thirty years I would find myself reading each of these three novels annually.  They fed me, they nourished me.  I will offer a brief synopsis of Lilith here:

"Lilith" is a fantasy novel authored by George Macdonald.  He wrote and published it at the end of the Nineteenth Century.  It pertains to a wealthy young man, age twenty-one, who has just come into his inheritance: an ancient palatial mansion stocked with an equally ancient library that spans almost every room on the ground floor.  It is a library containing many old and esoteric texts and one day he begins to explore.  He encounters a mysterious old man in a frock coat who suddenly transforms into a raven.  It turns out that he has been the librarian of the house for centuries.  He speaks to the young man in riddles and then inadvertently leads him to the attic where through a specially positioned mirror he passes into another realm or dimension.  The young man, Mr. Vane, follows him and finds himself in a rather desolate countryside .  He finds his way to a small house on a windswept moor where the old librarian/raven lives with his wife.  It turns out that this is also where the dead arrive when they have left their mortal coil and they sleep on beds that occupy a huge chamber, each one sleeping until they are resurrected.  The raven/librarian and his wife are really Adam and Eve and they have long repented of their original sin.  Now they are the custodians of the souls of the dead and they guard and care for them while they sleep. 

Young Mr. Vane refuses to lie down on his appointed bed and accept his death and the healing sleep that will follow.  He rebels and flees from the chamber of the dead and wanders into many bizarre mishaps and adventures: he is nearly destroyed by monsters, finds himself witnessing a battle to the death between skeleton armies, and eventually finds himself taking refuge in the cottage of Mara, the daughter of Adam and Eve.  She goes about veiled and has a white panther as a pet who is charged with rescuing all the babies that are going to be destroyed by Lilith, the evil queen of the realm.  Mr. Vane then finds his way to the forest where the rescued children have lived apparently for centuries or even millennia.  They have remained children throughout.  Lilith is immortal and tries to destroy all the children that are born in her city because of an ancient prophecy that says that her death will come through a child.

Young Mr. Vane is adopted and loved by the little children who also rescue him from their enemies.  The oldest girl, who cares for them and is also the lost daughter of Lilith comes to love him and they work together to conquer Lilith's city Bulika.   He goes to the city and on his way encounters in a cave the comatose body of a woman.  He nurses her to health and life.  It turns out that she is a vampire who has been nourishing herself on his blood while he sleeps.  She wounds him then transforms into a white leopardess that kills children and then runs to the city Bulika.  Young Mr. Vane tracks her there, has an audience with her and inadvertently puts the children in danger.  Later he meets with the children and together they try to invade the evil city to reunite with their mothers who reject and try to kill them.  Lilith kills her daughter whom Mr. Vane carries to the House of the Dead where Adam and Eve receive them all, including Lilith who has been reduced to a near comatose shadow of her former self.

Together they all lie down in their beds where they sleep and eventually they are resurrected into their glorious new life.

This book resonates on so many levels but it has to be one of the most deeply and profoundly spiritual works I have ever read.  I learned much about dealing with death and mortality in the pages of Lilith.  I learned about compassion and intercession.  I learned about the ongoing conflict between good and evil.  I especially learned of the triumphant power of love and goodness, that God created the earth and humanity to be good and beautiful and that life eventually triumphs and swallows up death and that love alone can will always redeem even the most hideous evil.

In my next post I will write about CS Lewis' "Till We Have Faces."

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 4

I left the Green House New Years Eve, having worshiped there exactly one year.  I enjoyed my time there but there were lingering issues of discomfort.  I felt like an outsider, like a chronic outsider, like an outsider who would never hope for a snowball's chance in hell of turning into an insider.  They were nice people, lovely people, but they were insular.  You had to be a Mennonite by birth to be really part of this church. It wasn't a written nor even a spoken rule, but it was tacit and felt.  The leader of the church did not like me at first.  I was not one of them.  As well as being not Mennonite I was clearly too charismatic and evangelical by background, experience and theological orientation to feel really trusted there.  He did get unpleasant for a while and threatened to get nasty.  I threatened back.  We both got over it.

They did not square with my vision of a healthy church.  They were not diverse, they were small, insular and introverted.  They were artists and educated eggheads.  And they were Mennonites.  I was none of the above.  I had, as I have now, a far higher than average IQ, but I had completed only one year of college.  I was, as I am now, artistically gifted, but I had done very little to develop my talent.  I was very intrigued by their version of Christian feminism and I was hugely in agreement with them.  There was a keen emphasis that in Christ there is neither male or female.  It was through my interaction with the Green House that I finally felt confirmed and reassured in being androgynous.  I also wholly endorsed their vision for living simply and without tons of unnecessary material baggage.  There was however one glaring difference on this matter between me and the others.  They had opted of their own choice to live modestly and simply.  For me it was a fact of life due to circumstances beyond my control.  One day I did speak to them at length about this, telling them that they had not the foggiest idea what it is like to be involuntarily poor.   Not that I had aspirations towards wealth.  The beauty of it is they did understand what I was saying and they supported me.  For a while anyway we did become friends if in a slightly distant sense.  I would always be an in-law.

I loved our common meals.  During the summer we would meet at five on Sunday afternoons.  Otherwise it was at ten in the morning.  We would rotate: one would provide soup, another bread, another cheese and another salad.  I loved this form of potluck.  It felt liturgical and sacramental.  During these meals I did feel really at one with these people and to this day I regret having left them so suddenly and so prematurely.  But I was on the verge of turning twenty-four, impulsive and headstrong.  I learned a lot from these people: about classical music, art, politics, about community, about courtesy and etiquette and about persevering love and about social justice. 

I also gravely missed charismatic worship.  I missed the Jesus Freaks.  I missed spontaneous expressions of love and joy.  And I missed the complete, messy and absolute diversity of the incongruous groupings of some of the most beautiful and damaged people I had ever known.  I walked around carrying a huge hole in my heart and nothing could fill it.

I also was by far the youngest member of this Church.  I lacked experience and accomplishment.  I felt hopelessly incomplete. I also knew without knowing that I would be needing much more help and support than this house church nor any church would ever be able to provide.

Still, I loved walking there and back every Sunday from my white and blue tiled housekeeping room.  I came to know in almost intimate detail almost every charming old house, garden, tree and friendly neighbourhood cat as I walked a distance of a mile and a half each way, praying silently or singing audibly in all manner of weather.

I left the Green House and the following Sunday began to visit an evangelical community church on the West Side of town.  It was okay, not exactly Valhalla and I did not even suspect the many future problems I was already sowing for a harvest.  Right or wrong I stepped forward and I would have to somehow make the best of whatever would come.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 3

My employment was a bit inconsistent while I lived in the housekeeping room on West Fifteenth Ave.  I have already mentioned that I spent my first five or six months delivering flyers all over the Lower Mainland.  I did not love this job but it was quick money, and the fresh air and exercise were a bonus.  I met a lot of interesting people, and some for the short term became friends.

There was one fellow about my age: we visited each other and had meals together.  A profoundly sensitive young man who seemed to have no direction in life.  We didn't stay in contact for long.  I didn't realize, though suspected, that he might have a mental illness.  We lost contact with each other and within a few years I began to see him on the street, anonymous, faded, mumbling to himself while concealed behind dark sunglasses.  Only once in more than twenty years did he acknowledge me.

Following a magical High Spring I began to work in an elegant restaurant.  I was a dishwasher and lasted perhaps a few weeks.  Horrible work and the owners were nasty rich people who treated their staff like crap.  One day she, a blond German woman who looked like a Valkyrie having a very bad day, started screaming at me for not washing the windows correctly.  She had a reputation for being frightening.  In front of bemused customers I yelled back at her, something unprintable, threw my apron in her face and stormed out.

Through the Green House, the Mennonite house church where I worshiped, I became connected with a matron in West Vancouver, where twice a week I did the gardening.  I was connected by one of the residents of the Green House, a talented harpist who was in love with me.  The West Van Matron I would charitably describe as a small hippopotamus. she was a poet but I had no idea how she paid the mortgage of her not very cheap bungalow.  It was a nice gig and we seemed to enjoy chatting but I always had towards her a certain instinctive reserve.  When she asked me to take my shirt off while working on a hot summer day, I studiously left it on and continued to do so till she grew weary of my services and laid me off.  I think she was also a bit disenchanted when I called her on her racism, for example when she uttered disparaging remarks about Vietnamese Boat People.  She herself immigrated here from Eastern Europe many years ago and I did press this point home to her.  I did not regret leaving.

I found other work.  I spent the rest of the summer going door to door for subscriptions to the city directory and when that job ran out I applied as a parking lot attendant/cashier.  This job had me working graveyard shifts at the Hotel Vancouver site on weekends.  My life changed during this time.  During my time off I| was often up late at night and taking long walks in Queen Elizabeth Park and other places.  There was a certain contemplative beauty about these long solitary hikes in the small hours of the morning.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 2

It sometimes astounds me the circle of friends I developed while I lived in this strange house.  Casey next door and I quickly renewed our friendship.  She seemed to see me as a support, almost as a caretaker and I did find this a bit odd.  We were very young: I was turning twenty-three and she would soon be twenty-two.  I was her only close male friend and given her intense involvement in her lesbian-feminist collective it was only natural that I should count this an honour.  My being a good and eager cook made it very easy for her to rely on me for meals but I didn't mind: she didn't eat a lot and I enjoyed having company for dinner.  I did find her a bit formidable and scary at times.  She could be very intense and I have to say that she is one of the most disarmingly transparent people I have ever known.  I have known few people so nakedly honest as Casey.

In the meantime the Great Canadian Artist and I were forming an interesting friendship.  She was the same age as my father and lived in as modest but nicely appointed house in Kitsilano with a beautiful garden.  Her house was also her studio and she was turning out some of the most interesting works of art, be they panels of canvas covered with details from her flower garden or giant ceramic cabbages.  We would go out sometimes to a concert or for dessert and coffee.  She was in a way teaching me and helping to form me because she was so wise, experienced, cultured and educated.

One Sunday while waiting to visit her at home at the appointed time I had an hour of free time so I sat at the communal table in the Naam where I met Michael, a locally prominent folk musician.  We strangely hit it off right away and became close friends for years to come.  He also lived just two blocks away from me.  We were a regular feature in each other's lives.  He often took me to his performances and concerts and venues where I met a lot of his friends.  He was also a frequent visitor in my little housekeeping unit.

Jeff and I remained good friends.  He was wise enough to leave Diliram well ahead of me and was not subjected to the wrath of the living Dan Gardener when he returned from Quebec.  He would frequently take time out from his studies for a visit and a chat.  Jeff very much mentored me and thanks to him I was able to develop a good, lasting and viable concept and theology around Christian peace-making and social justice matters.  It turns out that I was not the only one he mentored in this way.  Some thirty years later I met another friend, a teacher in the theological college where he was a student with Jeff, who has since become a very dear friend.  Recently we both learned of our mutual connection to Jeff.

My little housekeeping room, for its limitations became very much a place of hospitality and I enjoyed many dinners, potlucks and coffee and tea visits from these and many more of the diverse and wonderful folk who were so kind to befriend me during this challenging time of transition for me.  I still remember this time and these people with deep and profound fondness.

Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 1

Mount Pleasant is quite a large jurisdiction in Vancouver.  I had the good fortune of finding a place to live in the most beautiful part of this district, in a neighbourhood of small mansions on streets lined with towering trees.  In this tall dark green house of Edwardian vintage I came to rest in a small housekeeping room.  It was simple, basic and beautiful.  It once served as a bedroom for likely a succession of young sons and young daughters of the immediate offspring of the founding bourgeois of Vancouver.  The white walls and the bare wooden floor held the mysterious invisible traces of unknown feet and hands that had been there before me.  A huge bay window of the second floor room dominated the wall and looked out to an enormous spreading tree.  To the left of the window a small alcove had been covered in square blue ceramic tiles surrounding a counter, sink, gas stove and white cupboards.  The fridge was on the other side of the room near the door.  I would again be sharing the bathroom with other tenants but the rent was almost scandalously cheap.

I was recovering from Dilaram.  I was recovering from being on call and on duty twenty-four/seven, and I was especially in need of recovery from trauma.  I had been expelled, dishonorably.  I was thrown out on the street in the middle of the night and all because the leader of this so called Christian community was a nasty little Napoleon who must be obeyed and whose will would not be questioned.  I also suspect that he was a closet case, in love with me, and enraged by my rejection of him.  Not only has hell no fury like a woman scorned.  I was very fortunate that my mother was available and ready to take me in that night.

I stayed with her for six weeks, the longest I had lived with her since I first began to live independently five years ago.  My supervisor at work helped me move and he joked that this would likely not be the last time I would be living with mumsy.  How wrong he was.  It wasn't much of a job.  I was delivering flyers fulltime for minimum wage but it was honest work and it helped get my mind off of my sadness.  I felt like a complete failure leaving Dilaram, and this is a splendid example of the twisted and perverted power of cults.  I felt that I had left of my own volition, that I had disobeyed God and that the only way I could restore my broken relationship with God would be by returning in repentance and putting myself under the authority of Dan Gardener.  I knew this was both irrational and toxic.  I felt unable to appreciate nature or beauty because I no longer was walking with God.  I had to force myself to rebel against this thinking.  I was getting plenty of news about Dilaram on the bush telegraph.  He had turned into a particularly harsh, vicious and nasty dictator and lives were being ruined by him.

I remember my first evening there.  C. had taken the rooms next door and once again we were neighbours.  I had her over for dinner, my first meal there: home-made whole wheat flour chapattis filled with spinach and melted cheese and chai to drink.

I don't think I have ever lived in such a simply or spartanly furnished place.  I had for a bed a foam mattress covered with my single remaining Indian bedspread against the far wall.  Facing the bay window was a large solid desk and a white wooden and black leather old fashioned farm chair.  The desk was a gift from friends.  The chair came from the Famous Canadian Artist.  I kept my dresser in the large closet.  Covering the left and right panes of the bay window were highly coloured old fashioned drapes with designs of palm leaves and flowers.  The walls were adorned with
Chagall's Blue Violinist:  

and Van Gogh's Sunflowers:

The wall above my bed was covered by a square hanging of Fijian tapa bark cloth:
 I was really cool! ;-}

The wooden floor was partially covered by two straw tatami mats.  In a corner I also had a make-shift bookshelf for my literary treasures.

I bought a pentagonal crystal that I hung in the window.  The afternoon sun would shine in through the leaves of the tree and cast rainbows all over my room.

While writing on my typewriter (remember those?) at my desk I would observe the tree outside as the buds became swollen and long catkins began to descend from the twigs.  I didn't know what kind of tree it was.  Small red flowers appeared and then the leaves began to grow and swell and break out of the tender buds.  Small birds would appear on the branches, especially house finches: (see image at bottom)

It eventually became clear that the tree was a black walnut or butternut tree. 

 The nuts were edible, delicious and hard to crack but worth it.  There was Bartlett pear tree in the back yard and in the fall I would harvest the pears and stew and spice them.  There were also delicious plums growing there.

I remember the huge thunder storm during my first spring there and the most powerful thunderclap I had ever heard.  It shook the house and I found myself on my knees in awe and reverence before God.  I knew then that already I was beginning to heal from my trauma.

In early July I lay on my bed napping while listening to classical music on the radio.  The most wonderful fragrance, a heavy, musky but not oppressive and incredibly delightful smell of perfume.  I lay in the most delicious delirious torpor.  The afternoon sun filtered through the summer leaves and cast golden white lozenges and ovals of light on my ceiling, embroidered by little spectrums of colour from the prism in the window.  The music was perhaps Vivaldi or Telemann.  I did not want to move.  But I had to find out the source of this incredibly intense perfume.  I pulled myself up, put on some shoes and went outside, following the fragrance.  I traced it, two blocks away.  The glorious smell was coming from a linden tree in full flower.  I was overcoming trauma:










Here is an image of one of the many house finches I saw perching in the branches of the butternut tree just outside my window:

Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram, 3

Leaving Dilaram was not quite as difficult as I thought.  When Skip and Pam left in disgrace David and Debbie Shute took the reins.  David was the worst kind of homophobic intolerant fundamentalist Christian.  He was rude, disrespectful of others, controlling, bossy and dictatorial.  He was a jerk.  An asshole.  And yes, Dave, I am using your real name.  SO SUE ME!!!!

I basically coped.  I was not able to continue with my college education.  I had run out of money and my father, wanting to save money to build a new house, was not exactly forthcoming and Canada Student Loan did not seem very promising either.  I began looking for work.  The only thing that looked promising was doing yet another turn at the post office for Christmas, my third and last time there.

I lay low.  I read.  I did my shifts on the crisis line (usually the only one willing and available), did my time at the counselling centre in the West End as well as in a similar venue in Gastown.  I behaved myself and kept my mouth shut.  People I thought of as close friends began to move out.  I was feeling alone, unsupported and nervous.

I was reading Canadian literature, notably the novels of Margaret Lawrence.  This was interesting and hugely useful to me.  I really got a sense of what it must have been like for my parents, notably my mother, growing up.  I was also intrigued with how infused her books were with evidences of God's grace and of how no one else in Dilaram save those who had the forethought to leave in good time would understand or appreciate, much less agree with me.

Under Jeff\s positive influence I became increasingly interested in Christian social justice work, peace making and activism.  With his help I was introduced to the Mennonite House Church where I would be worshiping every Sunday for another year, literally from New Year to New Year.  My life was changing and I knew it.  I was seeking employment and a place to live, both fruitless searches.

Dan and Helen returned January 16, 1979.  I was less than enthused to see them and I think they knew this.  Dan became particularly hostile and dictatorial.  I was rudely chastised for not being on hand to help with moving furniture (no one had informed me that I would be needed and I was busy looking for a job).  On the following Saturday a friend of mine invited me to Whistler with him for the day.  I returned in the evening and was immediately called into a meeting.  It turned out that the leadership of Dilaram and discerned together that I was a threat to their community and that I must leave immediately, that very same night, so the contamination I carried with me would be cleaned out.  They quoted me some scriptures out of context and told me that my life would always be fruitless and bleak.  They put a curse on me.  I phoned my mother.  She asked me to come that evening and stay with her for as long as I needed.

I am still carrying scars from the trauma.

Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram 2

I nick-named our community "Delirium House."  Dan met a couple in Oregon whom he invited to live with us.  We were at a Christian music festival, a series of outdoor concerts attended by thousands of middle class white young evangelicals who wanted all the trappings of sex drugs and rock and roll without having to actually sin in order to get them.  In a word I found them all pathetic.  I got hit by heat stroke and was sick for a couple of days when we returned. 

Jeff moved in, whom I have already written about.  He was the Idealist and later married Beryl
 or Bright Eyes.  She would not be appearing on the scene for another couple of years.  Jeff had spent nine months in the original Dilaram community in Kabul, Afghanistan and like me was quite alarmed at the mess Dan and Helen were making of things.  What had begun as a beautiful and gentle vision of a welcoming Christian community that was more interested in caring for people than proselytizing was being degraded into a cruel and judgmental cult by Dan, a rabid fundamentalist with the most hideous Turn or Burn mentality. 

In September Dan and Helen were gone and Skip and Pam moved with us from Oregon with their three kids in tow.  They were lovely people, kind, affectionate and simply fun to hang out with.  They were very good with people who had been traumatized, gentle and nonjudgmental.  The children slept in the basement.  I found myself doing a lot of childcare and actually enjoying it.  Then Dave and Debby moved in from the YWAM (Youth With A Mission) "base" in Hawaii, apparently to correct the "errors" of Skip and Pam.  In one single day they kicked an entire family, Skip, Pam and their three, all younger than eight years, children.  They justified it as doing God's work, that they were corrupting the community, that they were hindering the work of God, or maybe that for reasons undisclosed, Dan Gardener simply did not like them and would brook no challenge to his authority.  So, presuming they were God's instrument doing God's work they threw a vulnerable family with three small children out on the street.

We carried on.  People were already beginning to move out.  They didn't say as much but it was clear they wanted to be out before Dan and Helen returned in January.  I stayed on though I felt a strong need to get out as well.  Still, I was curious.  I wanted to see what would happen next.  One of my major character defects.

In November 1978 I had a dream that still sticks with me now.  I was in some kind of valley surrounded by very poor people wearing rags.  We were all lined up together with our empty bowls to be fed from a trough.  It was a kind of green pea soup, very flavourful and very nutritious.  I held out my bowl to receive my portion.  I knew that this was where I must live and this was where I was going to grow.  Just a few months later I was to learn just how true and meaningful this dream.

Places Where I've Lived: Dilaram 1

Those of you who speak Farsi will wonder why I would live in a place called Dilaram or Peaceful Heart.  It really was a beautiful concept but where I lived in Vancouver a concept conceived and interpreted in a form most ugly.  Moving there was really one of the big mistakes I have made in my life and the damage and trauma that resulted still in some ways cling to me this very day almost forty years later.

I returned to church after a hiatus of almost a year.  I was twenty-two and getting my Christian fellowship fix out of a weekly charismatic prayer and worship meeting in the home of some of my friends.  It was really a lovely community of care, love and friendship that grew out of the Live-In retreats of which I have already written.  I visited the Canadian Bible Society one day in March, 1978, just as I was preparing to move into the elegant house of my most recent post.  A friend who worked there whom I knew from the retreats told me in all earnest sincerity that I really ought to return to church.

He suggested Burnaby Christian Fellowship, a splinter group that formed out of St. Margaret's in the early Seventies, then in the past year attracted a huge following due to the widespread disenchantment with the new pastor's dictatorial and hierarchical style.  While I didn't care much for the long and onerous bus ride into darkest Burnaby I was happy to reunite with a lot of friends with whom I had lost contact.  Something though had changed and I wasn't sure if I liked it now.  They were becoming almost American-style fundamentalist and I really should have run the other way fast. 

It was there that I met the leader of Dilaram, a good looking and charismatic young man just twenty-five years old.  He seemed extraordinarily attracted to me and fairly insisted that I must start visiting his little Christian community.  I began to visit regularly, became acquainted with people there and concluded that they had what I was needing.  I moved there in June.

Our first project was getting a storefront Christian counselling centre ready.  It was on Robson near Denman.  After spending my first day working there till late in the evening I returned to my new home ravenously hungry.  I had missed dinner but one of the women there found me something to eat.  It was then that the wife of the leader confronted me, insisting that I was not allowed to eat since I never called to say I wouldn't be home for dinner (no one had informed me of this rule).  That's right, I was being punished.  Through food deprivation.  Signs of a cult, don't you think, gentle reader?

The house was, I would say, inconveniently located, in a spanking new suburb full of tacky monstrosities in the remotest southeast corner of our fair city.  It was a "modern" brown wooden bungalow from the front but a two storey behemoth from behind.  Everyone had to share a bedroom which I did not much like.  There was an interesting assortment of people, or as interesting as it can get with a group of young white middle class people trying to serve God in community and through mission.  They loved my cooking, like everyone else, and I worked hard under pressure to perform and ingratiate.  This soon burnt me out as I certainly had no sense of being valued for anything outside of my usefulness.

While attending classes in college part time I also was the most constant presence in the storefront counselling centre.  We had taken a course on counselling and I seemed to shine in this area of work and ministry.  I was very reluctant to proselytize and was very welcoming to others which seemed to make me quite popular and sought after.  There were two easy chairs in the front and this made for a cozy ambience and I throve on serving tea and coffee and talking about whatever with whomever came in.  There were challenges, especially with people on drugs or with mental health issues but I was very open and eager to learn.

We also had a crisis line.  The phone was directly across from the bedroom I slept in.  It became known as "Greg's Private Line." (you will remember gentle reader that Greg is the name I was given at birth and kept until I legally changed it to Aaron in 1995).  I was taking calls at all hours, especially suicide calls in the small hours of the morning.  I also became acquainted with a middle aged man living in a mental health boarding home.  He called frequently out of loneliness.  I sometimes visited him in his boarding home, situated in a mansion in Shaughnessy Heights.

So I passed the summer at Dilaram.  It turned out to be a front for the fundamentalist Christian missionary organization "Youth With A Mission", a society that I really wanted no part of.  I grimly accepted that that was where I was going to be for the time being.  In September Dan and Helen Gardener (their real names.  So sue me!) the dictatorial leaders, took off to Quebec for four months for some kind of extended training session.  This was for me and others in Dilaram delightful news and we all breathed until the following January one huge and extended collective sigh of relief.

Places Where I've Lived: Elegant House

I saw the ad on the community bulletin board at Life Stream natural and organic food store on Fourth and Burrard.  This store is long gone and was a hub, mainstay and meeting point for all the local hippies and other progressive folk during the Seventies and Eighties.  The location now is occupied by a furniture store.  I had given notice in February and was eager to get out of the faded pink mansion.  There was something about sharing a kitchen with a succession of strangers that did not sit well with me and if I was going to share facilities it would have to be with people whom I knew, liked and trusted.

The ad was for a Christian shared house on Twentieth and Yukon.  I bit.  It was a beautiful house, Edwardian vintage and full of wooden ceiling beams, wainscoting, stain glass and one of the most elegant dining room fireplaces I had ever seen.  My room was on the second or top floor.  The closet had a window and there was a door opening on to a balcony.  I was only able to claim the room after two weeks spent in a basement bedroom and at times couldn't help feeling whenever I slept down there that I was being held for ransom.

The house was shared by a single father with a noisy five year old son, a rather witty and engaging Englishman in his twenties and a young woman self-employed in the oldest profession.  She was a paid escort, my age, twenty-one and if not especially beautiful was still more voluptuous than a young Mae West.  It was her room that I inherited when she moved out at the end of March.  She was one saucy flirt prancing around wrapped in a clinging small bath towel or asking me to zip up her little black dress as she prepared for one of her dates.  I found her in equal portions ravishing, frightening, intelligent, witty and ridiculous.  I was not sad when she left.

A lovely hippy couple had also just moved in with their three year old daughter.  They had been living on one of the Gulf Islands in a commune and the wife was six months pregnant.  I really enjoyed them and they were lots of fun to hang out with.  They moved out a little too soon and were succeeded by a pleasant young woman living with a mental illness.  She was attractive with short red hair but looked so vulnerable and mistreated that sometimes I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her from the same horrible cruel world from which I was also seeking refuge.  Her boyfriend, another mental health sufferer soon moved in with her.  This man was decidedly surly and unpleasant. We met together, the single father, the Englishman and I to decide on what to do and we were unanimous.  Girlfriend could stay but boyfriend had to go.

No one else would do it so, as has been often the case, I was stuck with having to perform the unpleasant task, or, kind of like how I ended up being the one left stranded and alone scattering my mother's ashes from the stern of a BC Ferry, but here I digress.  I broke him the news, told him he had to go since he was not a tenant in our house nor doing anything to contribute, except perhaps his DNA in various parts of the house but we won't get any grosser than that.  He challenged me to a fight and I just told him to get out now and stop arguing.  He left.  The Englishman afterward, while I was recounting the situation to someone on the phone, was sarcastically flexing his bicep towards me with the cheesiest smirk on his face.

I did not all but a lot of the cooking.  They seemed to like whatever I was able to whip up for them, and really for a twenty-one year old guy I was really a very good and well-organized cook.  While childcare was not my purview, one Saturday I did get the son of the single father out of the house before he drove him nuts.  We went to a park a few blocks away, hung out for a while and then returned home to his much calmer and oh-so-grateful daddy.

I do recall only one evening there when I did feel somewhat creeped out.  I had just arrived home, I think from an evening class at college nearby and a walk in the April dusk.  When I came home the atmosphere seemed decidedly strange.  The hall was dark and there was a lurid glow of candlelight coming from the adjoining living room where the single dad was massaging his topless girlfriend, lying on her back on the floor.  We'll say I hurried very fast and very quietly up those stairs.

The single father and the young Englishman were members of rather a weird quasi-Christian cult, the Holy Order of Mans.  It's on Wikipedia if you want to look it up, gentle reader.  I couldn't quite relate to them, they seemed just too New Agey and pompous for my more conservative Christian leanings. I attended one of their meetings and decided that there would be no need to return.

I fondly remember one Saturday afternoon when I had the house to myself and the young Englishman.  Three of my friends, including C., my lesbian friend who had just moved back to Vancouver, and we had a marvellous game of tag throughout the big lovely Edwardian home: five rangy young adults unable to hold still.

The house did close down rather quickly and suddenly.  Everyone move in different directions.  It was the end of May.  I was the last one to leave.  I brought my foam mattress and bedding down to the dining room where I slept my last night in front of the fireplace.  The next day I sat on the front steps nursing a bottle of Guinness while waiting for my ride and moving truck to transport me and my few earthly possessions to my next dwelling place.

Places Where I've Lived: The Faded Pink House

I moved from my first one bedroom apartment after five and a half months occupancy.  It felt like time to move and I believed then as I do now that God was leading me.  I was also wondering how effectively I would heat it, given there was an oil heater in the living room and nothing else.  I wasn't confident I would be able to get it to work well and even if it worked okay I wasn't sure about an even distribution of heat throughout the apartment.  More than that I felt deeply that it was time to move.  I began pounding the pavement and within a couple of days I walked by the Faded Pink House.

It was kind of a smallish dumbed-down mansion that had clearly seen better days.  There was a house-keeping room for rent sign on the door.  I wrote down the phone number.  A small Asian woman of ambiguous provenance met me at the door with her large Caucasian male partner.  I looked at the room and kitchen and liked them right away.  It was situated on Fourteenth near Oak Street, a "nice" neighbourhood and the rent was affordable.  I would be sharing the bathroom with three other tenants.

I have already recorded in these pages that I had been praying for an opportunity to meet and befriend some lesbian women.  I didn't know why I had this desire but it seemed to be the next direction I would be going in.  I met C, a young woman a year younger than me who moved into one of the rooms across the hall.  We became instant friends.  She was vulnerable, frightened and angry, given that she was raped the first day she moved in.  She was also formidably intelligent and witty.  I found her perhaps a little bit frightening but I felt honoured to have her friendship.  Her lover, a teenage punk girl and I, also connected well and thus began a new friendship.  My fondest memory of her is the evenings we would hang out together in the local greasy spoon diner munching on cheap coffee and cut-rate pie.

During this time I worked in a florist warehouse and I was saving money for college.  At the end of November C moved and returned to Ontario (or maybe Manitoba?).  I inherited her room which had a beautiful working fireplace that I lit almost every cold night.  The young body builder who was a nuisance and subtly hitting on both of us moved out.  He apparently tried to poison C's Schnauzer (whose high-pitched squeaky bark understandably drove him to extremes) and was evicted.  A boy my age, but unused to living alone replaced him.  He was nice, but a slob in our shared kitchen, but we did try to befriend each other and he unsuccessfully tried to teach me chess (a game I still seem to have no real aptitude for, perhaps because in order to play chess well it helps to be naturally competitive and this is something I'm not)

I think he was negotiating depression, and he moved back with his parents in White Rock.  He was succeeded by a tall athletically built inarticulate young working class lout, freshly divorced, though he wasn't older than twenty-four (I suspect that he probably beat his wife) and I simply made every effort not to be in the kitchen when he was.  He moved out shortly after I gave notice and a very ordinary looking pudgy young woman, possibly a lesbian, moved in.  I rather liked her but within two weeks I was already moving into my new home, a room in a shared house, in March 1978, already opening a new era in my life.

Places Where I've Lived: My First One Bedroom Apartment

I moved there in mid-April, 1977, age twenty-one.  The drab grey stucco wall of the building façade was beautified by freshly blooming bluebells.  My mother had obtained a dresser for me.  I succeeded in buying other furniture cheap in various second hand havens.  The building was very old with perhaps eight one bedroom suits.  The hall stank of stale cabbage and other cooking odours.  There was no elevator.  Mom helped me clean the apartment and move in.  We both found the process enjoyable and more than ever she felt like my friend as well as my mom.

The building was managed by two thirty-something sisters and their brother, each living in one of the four units on the second floor.  I occupied the fourth apartment.  They had dogs, two aggressive Belgian Shepherds that would fiercely bark from the open upper windows as I returned home.  One of the sisters had a long haired cat named Tripper who often visited me.

I was so used to living with people that I welcomed three separate strangers to stay with me for the short-term.  This created strain for me and I was glad to get them all out of there.  Ten days into my first month there I finally had the place to myself.  I put up new art posters:

and

I still had one of my exotic Indian bedspreads, all golden-yellow paisley, and it covered a foam mattress that acted as a simple couch.   Two tatami mats covered the bare wooden floor.  It was quiet and I was happy living in a sense of holy solitude.  I had neither TV nor radio and this was in the olden days before the internet.  I read copiously: the works of Dostoevsky,  Virgina Woolf, CS Lewis, George Macdonald and others.  I worked casually in construction in the early summer for only ten days then enjoyed some free weeks, while looking for work and surviving rather well on Unemployment Insurance.  I was always meeting new and fascinating people.  It was just so difficult forming solid reliable friendships.

Every day I went on long walks.  I would sometimes visit friends but usually I was alone, walking along Tenth Avenue from where I lived on Prince Albert Street, one block east of Fraser Street in Vancouver's East End, to Alma Street on the border of West Point Grey then down to Jericho Beach.  I almost always stopped in the same mom and pop shop at Fourth and Alma where I would buy a giant oatmeal cookie.  I always took the bus home.

This contemplative joy of walking, resting, reading, praying and meeting people came to an abrupt end in September when I started a new job in a florist warehouse.  By the end of the month I was moving yet again.

Places Where I've Lived: Strange Little House 2 (Dec. 1976-Apr. 1977)

I already wrote fairly extensively about the four eccentric Christians who lived here all sharing the same bedroom.  I moved in with the Bucolic One for the second time shortly before Christmas.  I knew it would be a bit challenging but I liked these people and they reflected to me the same kind of spontaneous freedom that was precious to me.  The church hated us.  I had been involved in the stifling network of house fellowships and home Bible and prayer groups that made me somehow marginally legitimate to the evolving status quo of St Margaret's Community Church.  They had gone from being a crowded church full of people from all walks of life enjoying the presence of God together to a bunch of middle brow middle class dullards.  They were becoming frighteningly fundamentalist and seemed obsessed with keeping out and throwing out anyone who didn't adhere to the letter.

I had been particularly vexed by an upwardly mobile Newfie, previously known as Hallelujah Dave (his real name.  So sue me!).  He had no respect for boundaries and one morning as I was just waking up at eight marched into my bedroom to shout me out of bed.  He was under the assumption that I would be sleeping till noon (and I really ought to be out pounding the pavement looking for a job), though I was really five minutes from getting up.  I let him have it afterward.  His wife, Sylvia, had gone from being a beautiful self-possessed woman to his fawning slave.  A submissive Christian wife, or a dog used to being beaten and still loving unconditionally her boorish master. They, like everyone else at St. Margaret's, were decidedly anti-feminist, as well as anti-gay, and the took the Bible to the letter, especially some of St. Paul's more questionable teachings.  Women had no rights and they all more or less happily lived as though the Sixties never happened.  I don't know what happened to them since.  Either she had a mental breakdown from being married to the idiot or she woke up one day and divorced his sorry ass.

They lived across the street from us.  One day I knocked on the front door to say hi.  Sylvia eyed me suspiciously, would not let me in and told me we couldn't be friends.  I had not contacted them in the six weeks I had been living across the street (because I anticipated this rejection) and besides, I was living with the presumed enemies of the church.  "Look at their lives", she hissed, and before closing the door in my face she warned me that I would end up falling on my ass (though she used a much politer word)

I really didn't know what she meant by "look at their lives."  Perhaps she was referring to the Bucolic One's casual grooming (though his hygiene was impeccable), or that D., the Bob Dylan wannabe smoked cigarettes (agreed, not a good thing), and drove taxi at night.  Maybe she meant all the various foreign cars in our front yard, including the Bentley, that the Bucolic One fixed for a living.  She might have also taken offense at the stream of visitors we would entertain with the warmest hospitality, mostly Christian souls from a variety of dominations including those dreaded Catholics (the Bucolic One was an ecumenical Catholic).

We had our differences in the Strange Little House and sometimes we were too harsh on one another and at times to laughable extremes (D., the Bob Dylan wannabe tried to scold me for looking sexually attractive.  Like, I mean, HUH!!!?)

We were also involved in weekend Christian retreats, ecumenical, called Live-In, where we prayerfully spent a weekend together, up to forty adults from diverse backgrounds and Christian denominations) would dwell together in an atmosphere soaked in the love and joy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, revelling together in the Holy Spirit's healing, restoring love.

While living in the Strange Little House I left St. Margaret's.  I have never regretted this and I have never gone back.

In April I left the Strange Little House.  I was feeling increasingly shut out from the tight little two person clique that my housemates had turned into.  I was also anxious to live alone, to get on with my life and find out for myself just where God was taking me.

Places Where I've Lived: The Boys' House

This is the worst place I have ever lived.  I was in a house run by the church and filled with four young single homophobic Christian males.  I was the fifth one.  I didn't know this was waiting for me, otherwise I would never have considered living there.  They were fundamentalist fascists, every one of them.  I was the cook and cleaner.

My room was okay for a basement.  They gave me the worst room of the house, not only because it was the only one available at the time but because of their irrational fear and loathing of me.  I got to work at making it beautiful.  There was already a vintage armchair in the corner.  So far, so good.  I put art prints on the fake wood paneled wall:

  They were lovely images that provoked a lot of innocent fantasy.  The nasty jailhouse closet case who lived in the house thought they were both perverted images.  He also yelled at me for wearing a T shirt that came from the days when I worked briefly at an espresso bar on Davie Street.  The place was called Iggy's and it was a red T shirt with the logo tastefully located on the upper left side of the shirt.  He railed that the place was a homosexual hangout (it wasn't, but really why would I care?), and I had no right displaying its sordid logo in a Christian houselhold. What didn't help matters was he was infatuated with me, in complete denial and became all the more hostile, especially given that I didn't reciprocate the affections.

I covered a wall with an Indian bedspread and against another wall assembled a bookcase with boards, bricks and of course books.  I adorned it with ornamental squash and candles.  The overhead lightbulb I covered with a vintage scarf with parrots on it and I covered the window with an Indonesian batik print.  There was no door so I covered the doorway with a vintage curtain covered in deco era palm leaves and flowers.  My bedroom was an aesthetic retreat from a very drab house inhabited by hostile roommates.

I dd the cooking and cleaning.  They did love my cooking.  I had a Joy of Cooking and for the fun of it and to test my creative forces turned out an impressive Duck a l'Orange and other goodies.  I also did a lot of the grocery shopping often crisscrossing the city to get the right cheese at the right price.  They put me under a lot of pressure to get a fulltime job, not because we needed the money (the rent was very cheap) but because this fit their backward and conservative image of manhood.  I had during this stage in my life tremendous difficulty landing decent employment.  Later in life a couple of employment counsellors informed me that I was too intelligent and too original a thinker to be tolerable to a lot of employers and that I should not blame myself for being a victim of publicly sanctioned mediocrity.

The house had a new leader, another closet case, in love with me, and more or less admitting it.  Talk about creepy!  His discomfort with his sexuality and with me made him at times comical, otherwise frightening.  I never knew what he would try to do to me next.  Fortunately he never laid a finger on me.  When I could find only temporary part-time work (for the summer a downtown food truck, for the autumn a bussing position in a steakhouse from where I was fired only for not having "enough zip.") I was told to leave, immediately. 

Fortunately, my mother took me in again.  The day after I was kicked out of the Boys' House I received a phone call from a shoe warehouse in Gastown.  They liked me and wanted to hire me.  I accepted the job.

While I don't hold a grudge against the Boys' House I can't say that I've actually forgiven them nor that I ever intend to.  They are worth neither grudge nor absolution and I have been very happy to move on.  The closet case leader did track me down more than a year later to apologize for the way I was treated.  I sort of accepted and have been very glad to see or hear absolutely nothing of any of those clowns in all the almost forty years that have since passed.

I continued to produce sumptuous meals and kept the house spic-and-span.  Not good enough.  The pastor's wife, an absolutely horrid British woman let herself in one afternoon.  I was tired from job-hunting and housework, and was on the couch for a half hour nap.  She saw me there and reported me to the house leader.  I really got shit for that one.  Then a hundred dollars went missing from the household kitty.  Even though my honesty and integrity were flawless I was still blamed for it and only half-heartedly exonerated.

During that summer the snotty British pastor and his horrid British wife took me shopping for clothes.  They detested my "Bohemian