Brood of Vipers: How I Survived The Anglican Church 3

Returning to St. James was not easy.  The clergy knew how I felt and their welcome was muted and qualified.  There were parishioners who wouldn't give us the time of day, especially the clergy's housekeeper, a horrid, sour old woman from Eastern Europe whom for reasons beyond my comprehension was granted the New Westminster Award last year (the local Anglican Order of Canada, or a kind of local Nobel Prize for exemplary Anglicans).  She had spouted at me nothing but hate and venom when she heard me speak to clergy on a first name basis (they had introduced themselves to me on a first name basis and actually expressed preference for the informal form of address).  She also had a notorious hate-on for the local poor and homeless and did everything in her power to prevent then from eating buns and marmalade with us after Sunday mass (she made the marmalade so I imagine this was for her a particularly personal matter.)  Others were quite friendly towards us and were even allies, some even visiting at times our farmhouse in Richmond.

We didn't always make ourselves easy to like.  Two of our members were often embarrassingly outspoken about their disapproval of St. James, High Anglicanism, and Anglicanism itself.  I did everything I could to put out fires and do damage control.  The old guard of St. James seemed unyielding in their hate and unforgiving in their resentment.  I was seen as the leader of the community and therefore all their sins fell upon me especially because on some matters I could not disagree with my comrades in the community.  I think we were especially hated because we exposed some of the hidden corruption in the church, especially some of the sexual promiscuity occurring in high places and some really set themselves against us.

Eventually our community disbanded, in early 1996.  I tried to stick it out at St. James, following a brief hiatus at St. Margaret's Cedar Cottage where the rector quickly turned against me when she learned that I did not share her enthusiasm for gay marriage.  Even though I made it clear that I did not have strong feelings about the issue (on theological grounds alone I said I didn't feel that I could fully endorse it) she quickly demonized me and became part of a kind of conspiracy against me.  I will elucidate further on this in  my next post or so.

Things did go from bad to worse for me at St. James.  One of the clergy, a particularly disagreeable sort who sexually preyed on young men tried to do particular damage to me (I had very foolishly walked into his trap) and the resulting fallout was so traumatizing to me that I nearly committed suicide.  This was the first of my seven nervous breakdowns and the first major trigger that resulted for me in symptoms of complex post traumatic stress disorder.  I hold the Anglican Church of Canada partly responsible for this.