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.
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