Losing the farmhouse of course presaged the eventual demise of our little community. We really should have known. This simply could not have lasted. We were too idealistic and our dream was simply too beautiful for the likes of us. We were ourselves very limited. I had undiagnosed PTSD and was considered too radical fringe in order to merit any support at all from the Anglican Church. The fellow who left had his own challenges: drug addiction, mental health issues, and a very controlling and domineering personality. The older of the two women was already feeling and showing her deteriorating health and the younger was just such an absolute twit that the very thought of her still boggles the imagination.
We, on the other hand, were also saints. Our notion of Christian discipleship was so profound and all-encompassing that really we all should have belonged to some kind of co-ed monastery or convent, if only we weren't so far too wild for such structured and traditional expressions of Christian community. Despite, and maybe because of, our frailties and our many weaknesses, we were prime candidates for Christ, who has long revelled in making perfect his strength through human weakness. And being saints, we were all, of course, virtually impossible to live with.
We had a beautiful vision for making the love of Christ manifest in our lives and for the people around us. We longed to become a place for people to feel safe, where they could grow, heal and find meaning and purpose in their lives. We wanted to be and provide to others the very sanctuary that we ourselves longed for but could never really attain. We sought to share and to be completely generous and welcoming to all whom we met, the deserving and undeserving for so we ourselves had come to experience the love of Christ.
We presumed to be too much to too many, when we ourselves were wanting, wounded and so incapacitated ourselves. No one would step forward to help, mentor or support us, but we on the other hand would readily scorn and ignore what little support and friendship was to us already available. We also became smug and spiritually proud and arrogant, presuming in our way that we were God's gift to the poor, the marginalized and also to the church which we were zealous to help reform. I quickly came to see where this was all going, that we were rapidly turning into a cult and then I sounded the warning to the others in the community. They turned a deaf ear, so I turned against them and warned the churches to whom we were connected about what was happening. I was viewed as a traitor. I didn't care. I was not going to see the beautiful work that I had been instrumental in starting mutate into something so gross and ugly as some of the cults that had traumatized me. I was not averse to murdering my child since I could now see that I had spawned a monster.
I became uncooperative with the two women. I refused to indulge their fantasies of grandeur and began to question and challenge everything. I was also in mourning for my mother, dead for less than a year. I became close to some of the street and underground folk we were presuming to minister to and sensed I had a thing or two that I needed to learn from some of them and this distanced me all the more from the two women in my community. There was something of a raw unfettered and unpretentious honesty my friends of the street still had that I was rapidly losing to the two women and I was desperate to get it all back. We became separate entities, more or less, the two women and I. They kept doing their thing, and I did mine.
We moved to another house, in East Van. The younger woman moved out. She joined a fundamentalist church and morphed into an intolerant ninny. To us it was good riddance. The old woman became controlling and demanding now that her maidservant was gone (the younger woman used to cater to her in a way that was almost shameful). We had new roommates. The first didn't work out but the second was a bit of a godsend, a very sane young man. It wasn't going to last. Within a year the old woman found affordable seniors' housing and the other fellow and I went our separate ways. By this time I legally changed my name and so Aaron Benjamin Zacharias was born. And now I was going to be living alone in a small apartment in East Van for the first time in seven years, under a new name and a new identity.
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