I have spent time in various churches since moving to Candela Place. I was attending First Baptist downtown when I moved here. I lasted all of nine months feeling alienated by the virulent hatred of gay people that I encountered there. Nothing was directed at me but it was hearing the hateful prayers of a woman in the church that convinced me to leave. I spent several months attending nowhere then I was invited by the manager of Candela Place to participate in an art show in his church. I thought I would try attending Grace Vancouver for a while, an American Presbyterian and to my discomfort fundamentalist church. The pastor was obsessed with being right (in every sense of the word) and eventually sitting through his sermons came to feel rather like being punched repeatedly in the face while tied to a chair. He was a nice man otherwise and I was sometimes a guest in his house. His wife and their young adult children also liked me. As did others in the church. But they were right wing fundamentalists and there really wasn't a lot in common there.
I relocated to their Eastside church which I had somehow helped to "plant." The pastor there preached a sermon against same sex marriage (it was Oct. 2005) and I left that church forever.
I moved on to a gay church. It was a small fellowship in the West End made up of a few lonely and rather miserable middle aged and aging men. They all seemed obsessed with finding their prince and the pastor and I did not get along. He told me I was aggressive and angry, this on our first coffee visit. It got worse from there. In the late spring I left the gay church and found myself back at....
St. James, the Snooty Church! It seemed open and friendlier and I decided to give it a try. The old guard was dying off and there were people who seemed interested in my friendship. However the shadow of the grief and trauma I accrued there in earlier years refused to lift and eventually my relations there were poisoned. I did help out with a language exchange group for Latin Americans at St. James and made a couple of new friends there. One of them, a man from Mexico, and I are still friends eight years later.
I returned to the gay church. I left three months later. I was having dinner in a Thai restaurant with the pastor. His cell phone kept ringing. Finally, after a prolonged conversation with a caller during our dinner I mentioned that I didn't like this. He picked up his plate of food, had the server put it in a takeout box and left the restaurant and ended our friendship.
I was churchless again till September 2007. On the advice of a friend I knew from the gay church I started attending St. Paul's Anglican in the West End. Despite the priest befriending me I found it very hard to fit in and people in key positions seemed to particularly dislike me, especially some of the many gay parishioners. I think word got out that I am anti free sex and pro monogamous marriages and that this I view as the desired way of life for all Christians who wish to exploit their sexuality, straight and gay. My approval of same sex marriage is and always has been and always will be so defined. I lasted till May 2014 when I left the church in tears.
I have managed to retain the friendship of two very fine parishioners of St. Paul's. I will not mention their names but their friendship is for me a healing balm.
I went on to St. Anselm's, the Anglican parish church set in the University Endowment Lands or Pacific Spirit Park. This time I thought it would work. I was warmly received and welcomed and became friends with the priest and a couple of parishioners. I joined the choir and it was downhill from there. The choir director was a control freak and this drained completely from me all possible enjoyment I might have taken in participating in this sacred ministry. One of the choir members is also a particularly powerful member of the church and was in the habit of delivering sniping insulting remarks at me. Then she almost physically attacked me when I asked her if she could please keep a bit quiet during the service since she was chattering away in front of me with another church lady about her worry that there wasn't milk for the coffee after the service. One day I decided I had enough, left the choir and proceeded to avoid her. Then I demanded from her an apology, She became rude, hostile and combative and of course refused.
No one in the parish would support me. Both the church wardens have refused to see me. They are all, it seems, afraid of this awful woman. The priest took her side against me, and suggested I should leave the parish. So, I have left St. Anselm's and I have renounced my confirmation to the Anglican Church. I am exhausted from the lack of integrity, chronic dishonesty and puerile cowardice that I have encountered again and again and again. I no longer attend church anywhere.
As I continue to live here in Candela Place I am aware that my life itself is church and ministry. I will likely stay away from church for a while, perhaps for three years to give myself time to heal. after that, who knows. I might visit a few places in the meantime but given the built-in hypocrisy with the rite of passing the peace in the Anglican church I am not going to be shaking hands with any strangers. Speaking of the rite of the peace this is something that the Anglican church completely abuses and gets wrong. Strangers or people who don't ordinarily give you the time of day will warmly shake your hand and even give you a hug only to regard you afterward as dirt under their shoes. Needless to say, Gentle Reader, I am weary and wounded from these multiple mind fucks.
In the meantime I have many blessings to remember and count. For every false friend who has betrayed and abandoned me I have gained many more real friends and it is with such as these that I make church as we spend Sundays together in the coffee shop, going for walks, or having coffee and a bite to eat together here in my small Candela Place apartment.
Candela, by the way, is Spanish for a little light flickering in the darkness. Story of my life.
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