Basic Theology 4

I'm trying to capture some of my earliest first impressions of reading the Bible as a just converted fourteen and fifteen year old. It was really like fresh, clean and very cold spring water to my soul. I was reading things I had heard vaguely about but was now seeing them in print every single morning. It was especially the Gospels that caught my attention. All these details about the life, ministry, work and teaching of Jesus. I marveled at his confrontation with Satan in the wilderness, of how Jesus turned down every temptation towards greatness, power and mad fanaticism, and those things resonated, as did the response of Peter and his fellows when Jesus called them to drop their nets, leave their boats and come follow him to be fishers of men. These words still resonate with me, to this very day. I read and puzzled over the Beatitudes of his Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. And I wondered, how can the poor in spirit be given something so precious, but even then in my young understanding, I knew that to follow Christ was to turn inside out and upside down almost everything that my parents and the world had taught me, because they had not taught me good nor true human values. They despised humility and poverty, and here in the words of my new saviour, lord and friend, Jesus, I was being told that it was okay to be poor, to be humble, to be a small and little person of limited resources because this makes us vulnerable and open to the love, mercy and kindness of God, and thus we become vectors of his grace. All this was already coming real for me as I, and my young friends and companions, would read, study and pray together over those words. I also came to see this in my new friends, the Jesus People. They were people of diverse backgrounds but they all seemed to share in common this beautiful humility, this complete lack of pretense. When you are a young adolescent, you start to really want and crave authenticity, or at least I did, and here it was, looking me so tenderly in the face. My new friends were, largely, hippies or ex-beatniks, artists, musicians and poets, regular working folk who had run aground in life, people from difficult family and social circumstances. Many had been former drug users, addicts and alcoholics. They had also experienced real deliverance and healing by the power of God, and their joy was unfeigned and contagious. I was, through my new friends, given that precious blessing of not only reading about Jesus in the Bible, but seeing those words brought to life in the people around me. The Jesus People were also racially diverse. Many were First Nations and Metis. The lady who was the pastor of the church, Fountain Chapel in Vancouver's Strathcona neighbourhood, where we were worshiping, was black. Her name was Sister Ann Walker, a middle aged woman who clearly had lived through a lot of pain and difficulty, but radiated a sense of peace, joy and love that drew me to her like the proverbial magnet. This was also particularly salutary for me in my early development. My parents were racists and my father eventually, towards the end of his life which was mercifully cut short by Alzheimer's, a white supremacist. Sister Walker was part of Vancouver's black community in Hogan's Alley, that neighbourhood in Strathcona that was wiped out by the construction of the Georgia Viaduct. She was also the first black person I had ever known. All my memories of her are fond, affectionate and respectful, and I think that knowing her as my pastor was hugely effective in forever inoculating me from the hate that my parents were not successful in inculcating in me. These were the primal influences in my lifelong spiritual growth and development, and even now as I am entering the autumn of my life, I want to make again real and beautiful those innocent and lovely beginnings.