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. I moved back to Vancouver, on my own around the first of July or so, just after finishing high school, and stayed with friends, got a job and found 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. 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. 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 other things were being explored. 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. 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.