Spiritual Autobiography 5

It might be helpful to offer a bit of a historical overview to that tumultuous era in my life. We were just in 1971. The elder Trudeau, a notorious playboy, was prime minister, recently married to a girl nearly thirty years his junior and whom the next Christmas Day would be giving birth to their first child, our current sitting prime minister, or Junior, as I still like to call him. At least they didn't name him Jesus. The previous October, 1970, was when the same daddy Trudeau invoked the War measures Act in order to combat homegrown terrorism, thanks to the violent episodes of kidnapping and murder thanks to the radical Quebec separatist movement headed by the FLQ, or Front Liberation de Quebec, or Quebec Liberation Front. I was sympathetic to the cause but already I was a nascent pacifist and found myself wanting to draw the line at murder and violence. Still, like many Canadians, I saw as heavy-handed and an unnecessary assault on our democracy this invocation of the War Measures Act and the suspension of rights and freedoms that we all do, or at least should, enjoy under the law in this country. Did I already mention that was still only fourteen at the time? With my conversion I would soon be meeting a lot of people from Quebec and was fascinated by the diverse opinions and positions that many of them held, though, as newly-minted Christians, they were also opposed to the violence. The Cold War was on though somewhat softened by Détente, and inroads were being made to befriend Chairman Mao of the People's Republic of China, a horrifically oppressive and murderous regime controlling what could be called the world's largest prison camp. Nixon was occupying the White House and still two years from being impeached. His name was already a byword. The war in Vietnam was in full swing and I was meeting a lot of draft resisters who had fled to my country for refuge, now encountering Jesus. They were very good and able educators to me. We were fresh out of the Summer of Love, that had gone rancid and stale, and many of the Jesus Freaks were leftover hippies seeking some real meaning in life. They were also some of my best teachers. In the meantime I struggled and did poorly in school, while taking time to hangout with the Jesus People on weekends, whether in the Shepherd's Call coffee house or on the streets telling people about he love of Jesus. I had turned into an incorrigible, and very surprising for a fifteen year old abuse survivor from the suburbs, very eloquent and effective evangelist. I often got around hitch-hiking and got into some very interesting conversations with very interesting strangers. I was also learning even more from them than they were from me as I was coming to discover and appreciate that there were many ways of living and living effectively and that God has room in his universe-sized heart for all of us. Surrounded by born-again socially conservative Christians who were also very fundamentalist in their approach to the Christian faith, I was already becoming a little bit problematic, as |I sought to keep an open mind and a listening ear to the very people we sought to convert, often wondering if we would be better serving some of them by letting them work out their own path in life. That said, I was already gaining a reputation for being particularly receptive and respectful in my approach. Not bad for a fifteen year old kid, eh?