Spiritual Autobiography 11

St. James was more than I expected, and less than I needed. I began attending on the recommendation of a friend who was in the habit of making presumptuous statements about where God was leading other people and I fell right into it. I don't think it was necessarily a mistake for me to attend St. James Anglican Church, since I really felt entirely out of options for church. This was a High Anglican church, more Catholic than the Catholics, with ritual, incense, bells, candles, plainsong, sung mass, and a magnificent pipe organ and professionally trained choir. It was like worshipping in the nineteenth century. The people were generally very conservative and quite out of touch with the squalor of the Downtown-Eastside setting of their magnificent art deco church building. They did have a social services agency to attend to the needs of the miserably poor and vulnerable in the neighbourhood, but most parishioners came from wealthy and upper-middle class neighbourhoods and for whatever reason they chose to worship in the high church splendour that was St. James, attending to the needs of the poorest of the poor was not one of them. I did crave the sacrament, and sensed, following much of my reading of writings of notable Catholic mystics and saints that there was a certain divine virtue in receiving the Blessed Sacrament on a daily basis, especially given the challenging nature of my work in care-giving. I did love the music, as I had come to listen to nothing but classical music at home on the radio for the past three years. They had daily mass, usually beginning at 6:45 am with matins, followed by the eucharist at 7:15, then a light breakfast with the clergy in their adjoining house. I learned to be friends and to enjoy the friendship of people whom I found to be vastly different from me, but still next to imposible to get to know or close to as I had been used to with friends. There was also a tremendous age difference: most were of my parents' generation or even older and the few younger people I met there seemed not at all interested in offering me the time of day, much less a friendly visit in a coffee shop. They were appallingly dreadful snobs, a lot of them. Under pressure from the quaint and already verging on elderly rector, I agreed to getting confirmed, otherwise he was not going to let me receive the sacrament. So, I went to early morning mass every day, following a two and a half mile walk from my basement apartment in East Van, then following breakfast with everyone, I would go see my first clients of the day. In 1983, I added to my agenda ministry to people in the downtown gay bars and survival sex workers, and was consequently out at night. This was confirmed to me when I had a vision in early August of that year following mass in the blessed Sacrament Chapel in the back of St. James. I could see a newborn infant lying on the ground in its mother's blood, its umbilical cord still attached and I heard God saying (not an audible voice but in my mind (I do not, nor ever have in my life heard voices, but I do believe that God speaks to us if we have a will to listen to him.) that the child was born, premature, a sickly and helpless infant that will need much care, tending and protection, but still he was calling me to be as a sacred presence among my gay brothers and sisters, not to partake in the lifestyle but to be among them as their brother, without judging. This was just after I lost my job of three years as a home support worker, so I went full time into this work of minister, while writing the first draft of a novel and attending services daily at St. James. I managed to get by on employment insurance and when times were really bad, miraculously, donations of money in envelopes would appear in the mail in envelopes with my name written on them, always in different handwriting that I didn't recognize and these were eleventh hour rescues. This happened four times in almost as many months. I did work for another eight months as a telephone market research interviewer, followed by another stint of unemployment. It was a very intense year and a half that took up incredible energy as I was often out till the small hours of the morning in places that Christians were not ordinarily seen in, while attempting to be their in the name of Christ's love for people who had been thoroughly rejected by the church. I also made lot of strong and interesting friends along the way. A couple of friends and I would often go in shifts in a local twenty-four hour café where we would spend hours with local sex workers of all genders, as well as many of the local gay, lesbian and trans people in the Davie Street area. It was, in a word, exhausting.