Spiritual Autobiography 10

The darkness began when my mother moved to Vancouver Island to live with her new boyfriend, a shallow, violent and drunken lout with a criminal record. I stayed with my father and his girlfriend in their house in Steveston, My father hated me, we had seen each other perhaps five times in the past three years and he asked me to leave just as I was beginning grade twelve. I stayed with my mother and her fat studly Romeo in Duncan where I finished grade twelve and coped. I have written about this elsewhere on these pages so I will just skim over. I tried to stay close to God in this difficult family situation. I faithfully attended a charismatic church in Victoria nearby and maintained close friendships with other Christians I met in school, in Victoria and also my friends in Vancouver. I hiked and wandered alone in the woods a lot. Academically I was doing better. In Cowichan High, I was befriended by two girls and a boy.  One of them, Nancy, had prophetic gifts and just radiated the lord's peace, love and jo.  Albert also became a close friend, and sometimes if my mom's fat studly Romeo was getting drunk and aggressive, his family would shelter me for the night.  On two occasions, barefoot, I had to run to the local cop shop to get them to intervene on the bastard, but mom escaped a month after I did.  Actually she told me that once I graduated I had to leave for my own safety, and that is when I returned to Vancouver where I  stayed a month and a half with some very sad and broken down Christian folk in a derelict house in Strathcona till I found employment in a factory and my own apartment. I was wandering from the faith, though God was still real to me. This was a difficult and dark time for me and I ended up in Toronto for six months where in late 1975, I re-encountered Jesus and attended a charismatic church. I returned to Vancouver on my birthday, February 29, 1976, now twenty years old. I stayed briefly with my father, but he didn't want me, so I spent a month and a half with my mother while getting my life sorted out. I found employment and stayed with a new friend in a tiny house down the street from St. Margaret's, which was undergoing its own change as they became almost like a conservative and very hierarchical cult. My new friends and I were like the rebel holdouts so there was a lot of tension and ill-will on all sides. I went to live in one of the St. Margaret's communal houses, a big mistake, I was treated like crap, did not fit in, and was considered an anomaly. I did not fit their conservative heteronormative, but it was clear that of all of them, I alone had a really close and authentic walk with God, so they were even more hostile towards me and I was kicked out in December, 1976. After a couple of weeks with my mom I moved back in to the tiny house with my rebel friends, who also got me connected with weekend charismatic retreats with a coalition of Catholics and Protestants. These Live-in Retreats, as we called them, were wonderful, and it was an opportunity for people to really serve and take care of and welcome one another in Christ. the officiating priest, Marty Tarbell was an Eastern Catholic priest of the Order of St. Thomas and his order had as special papal dispensation to administer the sacraments to Catholics , and Protestants alike. The sense of God's love and reconciliation was very thick in those retreats and a real sense of community involving some very diverse persons became a reality. St. Margaret's in the meantime, became even more ornery and there was a huge split in the church. I left and my Live-In community became church for me as we met every week in the home of some of the participants. in the meantime, I was again coasting on an experience of perpetual joy, following a very dark period. From my one bedroom apartment in an old Mount Pleasant building, I felt called to move and also felt called to pray that God introduce me to lesbians, because I sensed I was needing to know them better. I became close friends with a young lesbian who lived in the same house as me and I supported her as she was recovering from a rape. I was mentored at the time by writings about Mother Teresa and some of the writings of Jean Vanier, which was helpful for setting the stage for my next phase in life. It was around that time when I became involved at the Dilaram community, already written about on these pages, and I survived what turned into a very oppressive hierarchy of cruel fundamentalists. For a while I did flourish at Dilaram, which was part of the Pentecostal missionary organization, Youth With A Mission. I ran and mostly occlupied a counselling and drop in centre in the West End and took midmigt suicide calls on our crisis line across the hall from my bedroom later I had a dream that i was in some kind of soup kitchen eating a hearty soup among poor and outcast folk, and I knew that God was calling me out of gthere an into somethng new. When they kicked me out on the street, I was broken and traumatized and only recently after forty years of this have I been set free from that particular shadow. I again was next door neighbours with my young lesbian friend, now a radical women's' activist and I attended a radical Mennonite house church where matters of social justice, feminism and gender, way ahead of our time here, and other things were being explored. I also became friends there with a famous Canadian artist who did much to open my mind for me. I lived in a small housekeeping room in an old house. The year after I attended a community church, Dayspring, but was eventually driven out by their extreme homophobia. In the meantime, with two other ex Jesus freaks and refugees from Dilaram, we started an informal weekly prayer group, and flourished, but unfortunately Dayspring swallowed it up, saying we could not have anything indepedent. By this time I was working as a home support worker, caring for the very sick and dying in their homes and in this way Jesus became very real to me. I moved to a basement apartment and there I stayed for the next five years as I entered into a new phase of life, at the tender age of twenty-five. I spent about a year at a Four Square Pentecostal church in East Vancouver, where with another individual, we crafted together a street ministry downtown reaching out to the gay community and survival sex-workers. Then I became an Anglican.