Class of 1979

Reg Good

Perhaps first to be admitted in the telling of one’s own tale is that of the unreliable narrator. In defence of my claims is a collection of journal books kept since 1983, a requirement then for two experiential counselling courses taken at UVic. The journals were to record observations, feelings and insights in the moment. What tale I write has been tested laboriously in the writing over years, seemingly the same old story year after year, with occasional flashes of insight, at times even a shifting of perspective, with luck, a change of behaviour. However, any movement is only visible across decades, buried within single-spaced records of my observations and feelings and thoughts, scrawled in thin books, at times writ large, the pen cutting through the paper. If the following description of a life strikes you as delusion, rationalization, pompification, know it is endlessly rehearsed and so must be true! I never stopped keeping a journal, it so became me. 

Writing is how I think, how I make sense of things. Often writing has saved me, was a way to stand up for myself when I couldn’t otherwise. Writing has healed me, delighted me, never felt to be a waste of time. It doesn’t matter whether I have little of substance to say. I can be entertained writing a grocery list.

I mention this because it presents a dilemma for us with me writing up a bio of the last 45 years. You can only imagine. My first attempt was 22 pages and I hadn’t even started on the first ‘what happened’ following graduation. I seem entangled with the why, along with the what. 

Somehow you all did a wonderful job summarizing what you have done for the past 45 years. You didn’t need the ‘whys’ which we all harbour within, the ‘whys’ that took us forward, the ones that stopped us in our tracks. I haven’t been able to do that, 16 drafts later, so I’m off with a different approach. Below is my version of the story with all its qualifications and worries. I had a great time writing it. And it’s always been the ‘whys’ that intrigue me, observing from the sidelines, not being much of a joiner, not a lot of rah-rah; instead I found myself curious about the human condition, how it is that we are who we are. The best I managed with my ‘whats’ was to make a list of ‘whats’ in point form after the short-form prose. You can jump down to that list in a following section. Should anything on the list intrigue you, you can read after that an extended account of highlights of my 45 years in a longer form. Good luck and some Excedrin is what I might advise!

The 45 years in Prose

My worry behind all the explanations is that my life choices will come across as a critique, a judgement. I didn’t stay in parish work. I tried. I spent ten years trying. Psychologically it was incredibly hard to make the break, me still believing I could fit in when the game was up long before. My bishop, with whom I worked out the study leave, never wrote back when I filed periodical progress reports; over my time it was five bishops and not a word.

I would like to think it’s just that I didn’t share the bishop’s perspective, nothing more sinister than that -be wary here of the unreliable narrator, for I don’t know, or I don’t want to see, any other explanation. The necessary responsibility of a bishop is for sustaining the institution as a benefit for the members. For the culture of the church, preservation has been the driving force. When we started out in our careers, there was resistance and reluctance to open up priest’s orders to women. Liturgically the absorbing concern was to recover first century worship and instil it in our own. I happened to be of a different mind about church, the church going forward. I felt the core value wasn’t preservation but redemption. For example, how do we do marriage prep and the ritual of the wedding in a way, a moving way, that can help couples build and strengthen their commitment to each other. What might baptism look like reimagined? By nature, I’m traditional. I defer to tradition but not if it doesn’t make sense for the moment. Forms of worship have been changed over the decades but they weren’t reimagined, just reworded. A sociologist helped me to understand what was going on for the church and for me-I believe it was Richard K. Fenn. He described how the observing of authority and the pursuit of relevance were competing and cancelling pursuits. Communities are not the same nor have the same needs. If parishes are allowed to explore how they might be relevant, then different parishes are going to come up with different means and different priorities, different forms of worship and organization, and maybe some of them would be quite radical. If that is widespread, then authority loses control. Members are no longer observing the dictates of the hierarchy. If the value of the institution is to authority, then it has to be one book, one faith, one hope for all, which become fixed over time, can never be relevant in the moment.

I think that’s what happened to me. I was trying to figure out what would awaken that person in the pew, speak to them, open them up to spirit. Anything to prevent that I could let go. I didn’t and couldn’t read all the words in the baptismal service or funeral service I was suppose to. They didn’t seem to make sense. The subtext to my study leave was that surveys report 70% of people believe in God, and they also report most of those believers don’t attend worship. I thought that was a concern for me as priest; I needed to understand why they didn’t attend worship and it wasn’t enough that society had become too affluent. When I went back to the bishops after ten years having asked people outside church what happened to their relationship with church, along with my official study leave exploration of what redemption might look like in pastoring preaching and worship, well, the bishops had other issues on their minds.

I fear, and the reason I go on with qualifications at length, is that my accounting will seem like an indictment of your work in church. What I came to was just me, how I am, how I see the world. I wrote endlessly in my drafts for this bio how I value deeply the pastoring of church. Taking care of people in a community of faith, people who have found comfort and inspiration in Anglican worship and community, many of them for the whole of their lives, how caring for them is a blessed work. AS traditional as one wants that church and faith to be. Church is a way the congregants found to be good people in the world and live well by the world, and I feel, their devotion needs to be honoured, their experience of faith sustained. To do that for them is good work. Good care and pastoring. In my case, I wasn’t suited to the institution or the institution to me. My story is just about who I am and how I am – not a criticism of church, any view of it. Church is church; not what I had thought it should be. I want to be sure you know that, for both those of us who continued in our calling as parish priests and those of us who pivoted.

I know there has been a lot of angst over declining numbers and all the grey hair; a lot of pressure to find some formula to bring droves of people back to worship. I’ve read the books describing the growing and dynamic churches of today. It’s not happening. The growth comes from partnership with community groups. The community groups are the driving force. What I came to appreciate is that those in church like church the way it is. To me, that’s good enough. I just didn’t have it in me, the skills or patience with the institution, to be a pastor for them. Blessed are you who do.

I didn’t rise to any place of achievement, gain status, build anything of value, as many of you, doing very well in the world, with generations of family to your name, advancement in a career, earning responsible positions, advancing Christian faith, running successful enterprises. I found myself in the hinterland, a few of us standing about, observing, watching, no one bothering much. What I didn’t and don’t have is charisma. A friend and I both had community radio shows. He would have 30 people in his apartment all of them excited to be working on the show. I would spend 30 hours a week secluded in a studio, maybe a few colleagues with me as we mixed a show. I’m no good at getting people to do things or feel excited about some enterprise. I know what it takes to be a good priest. I didn’t have it. I could preach sermons, hold people’s rapt attention, meet with them in their homes, make them laugh at a social, but that wasn’t enough. And what I realized, much later on, is I don’t have to be like my friend, be that charismatic person. My learning was that we can only be ourselves: how we are in the world, be that as best we can. Do what we can do. Nothing else. Find our place. Mine wasn’t in the parish,though to accept it took a decade.

Church is a bit more complicated for me because I didn’t join the church or leave it. As some others of you, I was born into the rectory- third generation in my case; it’s a different relationship with church when all the men at the Sunday family dinner table wear collars; when the only families we socialize with are other clergy families, our holidays spent with 35 other clergy families at a charitable camp exclusively for Anglican clergy. I offer that it’s a different relationship to church when the man exhorting eternal truths high up in the pulpit is your father or maternal grandfather; when every Sunday morning you stand beside your father at the kitchen counter cutting Wonderbread into little cubes and stand right next to him at the church door following 4 services on Sunday, shaking hands with 600 worshippers; when just the two of you are alone in the vestry, door closed, and he takes off his robes, his sweaty clerical shirt exposed that mom will be washing, and he chats away about who said what and when and how it irked him- it’s a different relationship to church: church and family get all mixed up in the young brain forming its identity. Can’t tell one from the other. What is church? What is family? All the students in the school knew my father was the minister; he came in once a week to give a religion talk to the upper school. In the Rectory of the 1950s, family and church were the same thing. The vestry, chancel, sacristy, choir loft are as familiar to me as any room in the house, were places where I played, went at will, no one to question my right to be in any room of the church. I went everywhere with my father, sat in the hospital lobby as he visited the sick. I was his sole confidante, trained from a young age to be responsible, keep a secret. He told me everything: about the rich parishioner who thought he was dying and confessed to bribing border guards for his business; told me about the woman he drove home from a church meeting who put her hand on his leg. Church was personal, the family essence I breathed in, not a career; not an opportunity. Rectory life defined me; the inside of church life is what I’m made of. Won’t leave me. All I know, really. I have no idea what it is to be a layperson.

It’s complicated. I don’t know. Does this help you for the telling of my tale? You see, it might not be about church at all, but about family. I can’t tell.

As having a journal for one’s life-long confidante might suggest, my journey was directed within, experienced in the hinterland of my interior self, a coterie of us, friends met along the way, of like-mind, like experience, kin, scattered about, little interest by anyone for what we did, views alternative to mainstream, seeing things differently; little external acknowledgement for us; little resource either financial or family; not drawn to securing status necessary to navigate and succeed, in a system. We had a common nature, preferred talk about the poetic imagination rather than gain position in society, to get ahead. Maybe it’s the old expression, if you cant do, teach. If you can’t make the grade in the external world, turn inward, look to spirit when competing doesn’t work. I always trying to be aware of the unreliable narrator. Our brains have odd ways of keeping us sane. Nothing might be as I think it is.

I had to ask of myself why I was alone in my thinking about church, companionable thinking far and wide, that I found over the years. I had to ask why my life came to me so precariously, always behind, never enough resources for what I dreamed. It became the fabric of my journal which I had to fashion, to make sense of. I wouldn’t trade any of it. It opened me up to nothing like the world I was born to. Assumptions fell away, expectations were discarded. I turned within, to know myself, account for things in another realm, the world of soul. Here is Jame Hillman, Thomas Moore, Eleanor Dixon, Peter Brook, James Roose-Evans, Annie Dillard, W. B Yeats, Samual Beckett…that bunch and a bunch more. Kin spirits who articulated what I experienced. I felt them to be a world I felt belonging to, unlike the world I had. Opening up.

It was all quite magical. I can’t begin to account for the serendipity; can only believe that I was brought along, something other than my good management, to see what I did in my 45 years. Here is but one example. I had read James Roose-Evans book on experimental theatre. One day I happened to go into Wycliffe library, and out front was a table of remainder books for the taking. My eye caught one, the author, James Roose-Evans. It was his personal story. Not only was he a noted theatre director and playwright, but he had sought orders and was a non-stipendiary Anglican priest. His story helped me to understand the interior, the perception of the world I was being exposed to, helped me to make sense of where I was. We corresponded, he very instructive, affirming, modelled how to live in the world of my precarity given me by the indifference of my church’s leaders, my still feeling a commitment to a calling to priesthood.

Another day, I found myself standing on the street outside Book City. I had just bought a book for $30. I didn’t have that money to spend. I was hard pressed to get my rent money for the rooming house. I didn’t know the author. I hadn’t heard of the title. Somehow, walking in to Book City, seeing the book piled on a table, I felt compelled to buy it. Standing outside the store, paper bag in hand, I didn’t even remember buying it. Only the receipt confirmed it. The book was Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul. It became a seminal book in my journey. Magic. Thomas Moore was a close collaborator with James Hillman. My friend had given me rough cut tape of a presentation by psychologist James Hillman when I left for Europe. I had no idea who he was. His talk was profound, expansive. When by pure chance I found myself with a theatre group in the south of France and then by chance happened into the work of one of its members, it turned out that the work of Pantheatre was taking Hillman’s thought and making theatre of it, with the cooperation or Hillman. What! I couldn’t have planned all this, made all these connections, the result of these connections that became my focus, my way forward, the open door. I didn’t have any one showing me the way; my particular journey, a solitary journey, fellows met along the way. Some kind of Celtic guardian angel walking step by step with me, some muse to show me the way…I can’t account for it. I am just so grateful, feel joy, for what has been given to see, that is, when it comes down to it, to have found my own self in the world. As the mystics claim and came to me, the deeper one goes to find oneself, the more one finds a connection and belonging with others.

I managed fine along the way, enjoyed it all, something to do with my buoyant resiliency, my critical mind, my strong physique. I rarely had a down time. If I did, after a night’s sleep I’d have it sorted out, bouncing out of bed. On my way. If the night turned dark…. I recall one night, sitting on the edge of my pull-out couch, no heat except I would leave the oven door open, in my thirties, with all the promise of my life yet here I am, no forward track, no institution helping me along, left by the church to be on my own, living in a rooming house, sharing a bathroom, the fellow in the next room soon to be sent to Penetanguishene, institution for the criminally insane, and nothing I do matters to anyone, certainly not the church from whom I am away on a study leave, all this effort trying to augment my value as priest, bishop never responding to my progress reports, me wondering what fool I was, what was wrong with me, alone, no one caring for what I thought or was doing, how stupid was I. Sitting there, staring at the floor, old, broken up linoleum, impossible to clean, I looked up; the moonlight was coming through the window- I wrote a poem sitting there, in the middle of the night, and fell in love with the poem, and all was right by the world.

I think the rapidly expanding research in understanding how the brain functions and what it does is our new Galileo. Primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolski, brilliant academic at Stanford, writes books for all of us to know what he and others are finding out. The latest book is titled Determined, which would suggest where he is going with this. He shows how decisions we think we have made are actually at the end of a neural process, not the beginning. Our decisions are made after incredible calculations are done unconsciously, well before we have any thought of our choice. Experiments show that decisions are acutally unconsciously committed to, determined, by what happened the second before our decision was made, the minute before, five minutes before, a month before, a year, years, even 200 years before the apparent decision of the moment all determining the decision. He says that the way we are in the world is a product of the particular brain we have -our brains are not all alike- and the circumstances we find ourselves in. And the two are indivisible, one and the same. Genes, they are saying now, are not blueprints for life but rather funnels for what sensations we process. It’s unconscious processing which only at the end of the neural pathways calculating it all, is brought into consciousness.

I arrived at good place in my soul, what I report my life after 45 years amounted to, the whole of the journey feeling like a good place that was widening and deepening with insights along the way, progressing, even today, still new layers removed, new joy exposed. With each journal entry I now make, I can only end with the words ‘I am blessed.’ I am filled with so much gratitude and happiness. So why me? Why this? I don’t know. I have no idea why this for me. So many I know are troubled, feel at a loss, miserable even in their last days. I can’t account for any of this.

I can only say, poring over the journals -imaginatively, for I can’t actually read my handwriting- that I was guided along my way. No way could I have come up with the serendipity that came to me, the casual comment, or book, or overheard conversation, the juxtaposition of events, that opened a door into a new discovery, something I couldn’t have imagined on my own. Happened too often. Can’t be just random luck. Seems purposeful. And only now, when looking back, do I see all the disparate twists and turns, long days in menial work, the disappointments and denials, how it all connects, how every jigsaw piece brought me directly and marvellously to the place I inhabit now, a feeling of gratitude. How is that? Why me? Why this? I have no idea. Because nothing of it has anything to do with me, my work and competence. Nothing I earned or deserved. It was pure and simple grace. But why not for others, more deserving, who are battling some inner voices or some compulsion or fear that wears them down. It’s not anything to do with good and bad. Not as I see it.

Two guiding lights carried me along. They appealed to my nature, informed me how to regard the world out there. One is Carl Rogers ‘Unconditional Positive Regard’ and the other is the specifc stories of Jesus wandering through the Galilee.

On my sojourn to Israel to begin my study leave, I arrived for school in September but because of the invasion into Lebanon, the students, all experienced in military training, a civilian army, were called up, and so school was delayed. I took a bus to Nazareth and walked the streets. Before even going into the Basilica of the Annunciation, built over the birthplace of Mary it is held, I turned left and walked up a narrow street passing by residences. Not far up the hill from the radiant majesty of the Basilica, I came upon an open door with a view deep into the room inside. I stood there, even took a photo, saw a carpenter working away at a table a the back, and a young boy with him. That for me told the story of Jesus, more than the grand and glorious Basilica.

Jesus. Carl Rogers. They showed me a way to be in the world, a way that seemed natural to me, familiar to me, my brain. Told me a way to regard and be with others. It felt right to me. Was something I worked on and am working on – failing, striving, even now. We are all of us just making our way, they say, the same I feel from my own experience of life, making my way; how they spoke of it, Jesus and Rogers, was how I wanted to be regarded and in turn regard others. And how do we best make our way?

What I describe below as the events of my life for the past 45 years are an exploration of an objective that came to me, slowly revealed itself to me -my work for my ten-year expanded study leave formed into a quest- how I might practice liturgy in a way that was redemptive. As I wrote above, I was brought to the shape of that work, came to see the form and way to the work, through a small experimental theatre in the south of France. A small group of us from across Europe assembled together in Malerarugues for a few weeks workshop with Enrique Pardo, he of Pantheatre. Together, hand in hand, over the days, working hard together, using movement and voice, stillness and silence, our work forming and unforming, as we worked together on the floor of the Orangerie, an empty space for us to explore and create, a work that had to do with the space between us, as all theatre is -making a theatre together from out of the air – carefully as we might, along with Enrique, peering into the deep recesses of the human imagination, lifting the veil of appearance, holding the universe out on the tip of a finger nail, as best we could at least. And Peter, an astute and sensitive one, a horticulturist from Paris, said quietly to me after a long session working together on our own – I heard his breath of his soul speak- a word he came to, emerging from the exploration of our work, for him to say to me one word, the word for what he found lay beneath the shadows of our human frames; he said, one thing alone for our need, he felt, discovered in our collaborative exploration, to have found our own Selves in that, to know from that work our humanity, one word, that came to him, he said as coming on his breath, the word he said found under the layers and layers pulled back, a felt thought he softly whispered in my ear… generosity I heard him say.

Karen Armstrong, writer on comparative religion, says one virtue is at the core of all religions: compassion. Unconditional Positive Regard says Carl Rogers. It’s an odd thing the mystics describe, that when we turn in and find our deepest self, we find each other. Why me? Why this? I don’t know. It was a gift that allowed me to produce, as best I could, sacred space where I was.

I realized even when I didn’t know it, I had one interest. It had to do with being with people, how to be with people, what my way was in this world, the grace that came to me. It explains a lot of what I did, tried to do, wanted to do.

I had in me in me this thing to make space sacred, allow for a space, enable a space, where others could find themselves, as I too was also looking for myself. The sacredness of the space allows for one to find redemption, find their humanity, find grace, that place they feel most human, redemption for the other, and for me, sharing that sacred space.

Being born into the rectory and knowing nothing else, sacred space looked like a church. I made sermons, read liturgies, led devotionals. It wasn’t enough to do well in church. I pursued counselling, worked on skills to allow for the sacredness of the counselling chamber, for sacredness to be present between the other and I, as much for me, as for the other. I fell in love with making radio, alternative radio, where I could explore how sound and the relationships between sound could create sacredness in listening, be a way for others to find themselves, their humanity. I came to theatre, what had always been there in me, worked on seeing how theatre could inform liturgy, discovered a theatre that pursued the numinous of the imagination in movement and voice. No career came of it. In the end when I needed to settle down, I came to teaching. Now the classroom became my sanctuary. I had the privilege of spending 45-60 hours a semester with each of my classes, in a closed room together. How to make that space sacred inspired me. Holistic Learning, a secular, wholistic approach to education, body mind and soul, and its proponents, guided me along the way.

The stories of Jesus, the unconditional positive regard taught by Carl Rogers, opened the sacredness of space to me. Counselling skills and a capacity for knowing theatre equipped me for the work. Over the 45 years, these allowed for the space of a church, a stage, a restaurant, a studio, a classroom, to be sacred. As best as could be managed. As best as I could manage it; enough to keep me going, give meaning to my life. In the end I can only say of this adventure that I was blessed by the muse. Nothing to do with me. No way it could have been me. Why me? Why this?

In the telling of my tale for the time since graduation, I have to defer to the poet, how / the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know it for the first time /. To this I will attest, even recorded over the years in my journal. Everything I came to understand by my 70s, after a lifetime of learning, I had known in my childhood. Funny how we have to leave home to know more about it. My exploring was to wander through a wasteland; at age 12 I knew something was wrong, something missing. At 14, my parents said they wouldn’t pay for me anymore. I loved my parents. They were very good people. I had to find a way to buy my toothpaste and clothes, give my parents room and board, even though with our move to Toronto, my father was making more income than he had ever. You’re on your own, they said. That precarity and anxiety never left me. I projected it onto my world. When you knew me at Wycliffe, I was in a safe place, a retreat from not knowing how to be in the world, to a place I knew well, could manage. I would let myself preach because it wasn’t me but God working in me. As a child, I was a responsible and serious young boy; I attended worship 4 times a Sunday. I took to heart the words said solemnly: ‘we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under the table.’ And then, even following the redeeming receiving of the elements, elements of new life, were the words gravely intoned ‘and although we are unworthy, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences.’ I didn’t even have to look the words up in order to write them here. That was my start. My parents never told me it was any different to that. I believed this was being a good Christian. A wasteland where I didn’t exist. The way home began at my ordination to the priesthood. What followed, I have to say, had nothing to do with me, my strategic organization, my devising, my good management, but was a learning: the muse caring for me, showing the way home. What appeared to me as random, accidental, unrelated at the time, I now understand when looking back, to be purposeful and directed. It’s how some describe the order of the universe: chaos theory, which looking back, is pattern theory. I did arrive home by the end, short time ago, knew it always and for the first time. For me it was rehearsal hall 3, symposium discussion, Shaw Festival.

The muse is playful. The Mahabharata, an epic Sanskrit poem compiled over 700 years beginning in the 3^rd century BCE, and to this day an inspiration for Hindu culture, is a poem about a war. Two sets of cousins are contending for the kingship. Finally – anticipated for 200,000 verses – there is a great battle. Both sides seem to have some legitimate claim to kingship, but one side seems the foil for the other, to show how the preferred side overcame herculean odds and won the day. The one side, the one expected to win, does win; the other side is vanquished, annihilated, in a cosmic, cataclysmic battle. How wise is this poem? How like Jesus view, and Carl Rogers’. At the end of the lives of the victors, growing into old age on earth, those victors – who had won the diamond encrusted thrones, the palaces of endless opulent rooms, the vast reaches of land and wealth- these victors process to their final, glorious reward, we might call heaven, and arriving there, to their great shock, find the vanquished, their enemies, already in paradise, enjoying immortality.

We live in a hall of mirrors say the post-modernists, and maybe so say the ancients. It’s not what we think, this life. As the Mahabharata victors discovered about the endgame: it’s not about being victors and taking all the spoils, not that which defines humanity. Kind of like Jesus. Power and glory is but a dream reflected in a mirror. To the Bard, “We are such stuff/ as dreams are made on, and our little life/ is rounded with a sleep.” But if we take Jesus and Rogers to the full extent of their virtue, like the lesson of the Mahabharata, even the virtue of generosity and compassion is a delusion, even that of the virtue of the last being first and the first, last. All are one. Spiritual practice is no higher a virtue than any other, not better, just one human way as much as is fecundity and its desires, as equally noble a human way. Says the Bard, ‘all the world’s a stage….’ Whether we wear a tank top or a shawl, are exotic or erotic minded, it doesn’t matter but that we are human, connected in matter, high-minded or low, makes no difference. Maybe it’s just what it is, in our heads, the world looking in. As Paul Tillich said in a sermon, wrote in a book, even if all this is to nothing, that is something. There for me is faith. The unknown silence. The wisdom of truth.

What I can say in my learning, what that young boy needed to learn, given me through the gift of others, wonderful souls in my life of all I met, especially learned from my thousands of students, that our categories are misrepresented. I have to say that the quality of a character, generosity and compassion, has nothing to do with the categories we subscribe to. Quality of the person has nothing to do with their particular religion, gender, age, demographic, sexual orientation, ethnicity, intelligence, political stance. People of deep human quality cross all lines we draw, has nothing to do in my experience with the categories we proscribe to people.

That is what Jesus and Carl Rogers have passed on to me. What the journey through the wasteland showed me. My 45 years or more. More than what I did – more what it did to me. I got to see things, details below, Peter whispering in my ear, Ton, the dutch performance artist, leaving out the window, his voice echoing, respectez-moi, intoned, fading in the distance, the cosmic salesman. A vendre.

My story may be a lot simpler than my writing of many paragraphs and pages. Writing objectifies the inner thoughts. Puts them in front of one, separates one from the thoughts, all the better to see. It’s all kind of simple in the end, this tale of mine, of 45 years. A young sensitive boy was lost to himself, a self he knew as a child; conspiring events, that seem in the end purposeful, a muse or maybe some unconscious tapping into a quantum field, brought this now old man to have found himself. All along the way, a bit of fun for a young lad of buoyant resiliency. My aspiration, persistent in me, was to make something, make a space for others to find themselves, see themselves in the light of the numinous, be in touch with their soulfulness, to be taken to their soulful place. It’s a kind of work, defined in the words of neuroscientist Anil Seth, that is more about breath than thought. 

I have to laugh. I spent ten years of my life, heart and soul, time committed to a ‘study leave’ to find a way to see and make liturgy an experience of redemption, came to ask how theatre might inform the practice of liturgy, and long years later, long nights, found it – well was led to it – in the work of Pantheatre. I came to the work of liturgy as redemption through the language which informed the Avant-garde theatre of late 19th to mid 20th centuries, came to it in the company of James Roose-Evans and Peter Brook and so many other writers about theatre, came to it face to face on the Orangerie floor in Malerargues with Enrique and a few others. There it was. Finally had my work. How theatre informs liturgy. All those years. Living on an edge. Not able to think of making a home, having children. Nothing heroic. Just the life that came to me. And then tallying it all up in the end, what does it come to. And the muse, my guide leading me along, in the end, teaches me a last lesson, plays the trickster, once again: it’s not what it seems, she says. It’s never what it seems. And she has a great old laugh.

I’m walking the streets of Dublin, a Sunday morning near noon. A door to a Roman Catholic church is open, the church full, mass just about over. I step inside, gaze over the congregation, listen to the priest, and in a moment of clarity, laughter echoing from the ether, I see that, oh!, wow!, the work of liturgy has really nothing to do with theatre. Liturgy is something else. Oh my. Oh my. It’s only ever been theatre all along. And I join the exiting parishioners in an Irish tradition and go into the pub around the corner, order a ham sandwich, the children there running about, and I have a good laugh, a good long laugh. And I say, of course. And I say, thank you.

The 45 Years in Point Form

Parish Work: Diocese of B.C.

• farm for the summer
• ordination to the priesthood, Christ Church Cathedral
• curate at St. Andrew’s Sidney and Holy Trinity, North Saanich, Diocese of British Columbia
• Professional development: training, advanced training and online (25 months) with the Victoria Crisis Line
• Professional development: training as co-therapist for group with with DARS (Drug & Alcohol Rehabilitation Service)
• rector appointed to St. Mary’s Oak Bay; stayed in Sidney until new rector appointed (3 months)
• curate at St. Mary the Virgin, Oak Bay, Victoria
• rector taking anxiety leave after I arrived (not because of me!); took over pastoral duties for 18 months
• left for a study leave

Study Leave

• 2 summer experiential courses in Helping Relationships and Group Processes, U Vic
• Overseas semester program, University of Haifa, Israel (1 semester)
• volunteer, Kibbutz Sha’ar Hagolan, Israel
• a month in Jerusalem
• Orthodox Easter, course, St George’s College, Jerusalem
• Masters in Pastoral Counselling, St. Paul’s University, University of Ottawa (withdrew after completing 1 semester)
• courses in child development, psychological statistics and theatre (continuing), University of Ottawa
• teacher and farm hand, Hamilton Equestrian Centre (maternity replacement)
• teacher, equestrian, Mohawk College
• host, server, bartender Mr. Grumpp’s Restaurant and Nightclub
• server, bartender Spinnakers Restaurant
• news reader, (volunteer) CIUT, closed-circuit radio, Uof T
• host and producer (volunteer), WorldSpirit, CIUT FM, CKWR FM
• religion panel member, MorningSide with Peter Gzowski, CBC
• writer-producer (freelance) short docs, CBC
• workshop in voice, Roy Hart Centre, Malerargues, France
• interim clergy, Diocese of Meath & Kildare, Ireland
• workshop participant, Pantheatre, Malerargues, France
• actor (unpaid) various plays, contemporary, UpStart Crow Theatre
• actor (unpaid) various plays, medieval and renaissance, Poculi Luidique Societas, U of T
• actor (unpaid) various plays, medieval, Medieval Studies Department, U of T
• experimental liturgy, various
• English studies, U of T
• study, Humber College, TESL qualification (teaching English as a second language), Academic English

Settling Down

• replacement teacher, Humber College, LINC new immigrant program
• teacher, English Language Institute, Seneca College
• Honourary Assistant, St. Bride’s, Clarkson, Diocese of Toronto
• photographer, (paid) SNAP newspapers
• photographer, (paid) various clients, special event and portrait
• teacher (part-time), Persuasive Communication, Sheridan College
• teacher, English for Academic Purposes, Humber College
• teacher, communication & critical thinking courses, Department of English, Humber College
• teacher, (8 weeks) Hamlet of Arviat, Nunavut

Retirement

• photography clients
• photography personal projects
• woodworking
• reading and writing
• Irish dancing

The 45 Years in Longer Form (but not the longest!)

Diocese of British Columbia

I delayed joining the Diocese of B.C. until September after graduation so I might work on a horse farm I went to when I could. I always had loved horses and in my 20s had a chance to learn to ride with a German Master, becoming a friend to the family, though I had to muck out a lot of stalls for the privilege of riding. In the summer of 79 I helped with the haying and chose not to wear any gloves so that my hands were calloused. I was inspired by the notion that I wanted the parishioners I was shaking hands with at the church door to realize I knew what it was to work hard.

I was priested when I arrived in the diocese because the bishop needed me to take communion services on my own. My priesting was the moment I can say my journey began. It was the first step out of the wasteland the twelve-year-old questioned. I was curate at two churches that were each full-time which did split when the rector left 9 months after I arrived. He was appointed to the wealthiest church in the diocese vacated by the newly elected bishop, recommended by the bishop, which complicated things later. The retiring bishop was going to send me up-island. However I was working on my counselling skills with training and advanced training with the Victoria Crisis Line. The four hours a week online was invaluable experience. In fact, it was transforming for me. That and another opportunity to join in group therapy work at a drug and alcohol treatment centre convinced me to stay with the rector joining him three months later at St. Mary’s when a rector was found for the original parish.

Three months after I arrived at St. Mary’s, the rector went on anxiety leave. He’d suffered anxiety at the other parish, but it only lasted for a couple of weeks at Christmas and Easter, manifesting in back pain. He didn’t want to go to St. Mary’s. He liked to be the one Anglican minister in the town; he was never comfortable with wealthy people. We had many long talks about this, but the pressure was too much for him: one can’t turn down a plum appointment. In only a few months, he couldn’t get out of his office chair to go home for lunch. I was now responsible for the pastoral life of the church. It was great for me as I could now preach every Sunday, lead the liturgy, deliver the Lenten devotions and carry out pastoral duties for weddings, funerals, and baptisms. I didn’t have to concern myself with the administration of the building and such. Ideal for me. It was thought I’d be doing that for a few weeks, but a year and a half later I was still on my own. I would have stayed until the rector came back or decided he couldn’t, but I felt cheapened in the experience. Despite the extra work and responsibility, at two consecutive AGMs the warden leaned over to me and said, ‘Reg, we don’t have anything for you this year, but we will next.’ In January my apartment rent had increased. When I informed the warden, he said I’d have to take it out of my stipend. I knew I had canon law on my side! This treatment wasn’t a surprise for me, for I had heard these stories from clergy all my life. Poor Rev. Downer was a short man; the warden put his monthly stipend cheque on top of the vestments cabinet so that Mr. Downer had to get chair to stand on in order to reach his cheque. One of the reasons diocesan offices started issuing payroll.

Study Leave: Israel and Counselling Study

I no longer felt obligated to help St. Mary’s to wait until the rector returned. I decided to take a study leave to enhance my skills as priest before settling in to a parish. I had in my mind an old saying that a month in the holy land was equal to a year at seminary, so I imagined how a year in the holy land would benefit my preaching and biblical study. I signed up for a course in Eastern Orthodoxy during Orthodox Easter at St. George’s College, in the close of the cathedral in Jerusalem. Rick was later to be director there. I then found an Overseas program at the University of Haifa. Courses were scheduled in 4 days leaving 3 days for trips run by the program. We spent many hours walking the Negev and Judean Wilderness. We travelled from the north Galilee to the south, one weekend was spent at a military base in Samaria. Haifa U. was a life-changing experience. Remarkable courses. ONe was a media course with the head of the Peace Institute in the university. The course listened to and compared same day news casts from israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, including the Jordan English language broadcast. One course I took in Tenach opened me up to literary criticism. At TST we had studied form and source criticisms, for example, but I don’t recall ever hearing of literary criticism. It’s a bit what Northrop Frye was writing about in The Great Code, but more technical and textual. It inspierd my biblical reading. I find more instruction for my reading of scripture by taking a literary and archaeological reading rather than a theological one. Not so great for parish work when it comes down to it.

Between Haifa and St. George’s, I volunteered on a kibbutz right at the fence post where Syria, Lebanon and Israel meet. I read James Michener’s The Source in the kibbutz library looking out at the fence post. On my days off, I’d take a kibbutz bike and cyle around the Lake of Galilee to the Hill of Beatitudes and sit there in the grassy fields, quiet but for the birds, and look out over the Kinneret at fishers in small boats hoisting in their nets.

I spent a month before St. George’s living in and wandering the streets of Old Jerusalem. Surprisingly, every day was full. Not a moment went wanting.

St. George’s was a return to my own culture and religion. I purposely wanted to be outside my religious culture religion for a while, to measure faith.  St. George’s was back to a Christian world.. It was a remarkable time meeting with Orthodox priests, attending worship, studying about orthodoxy as well as travelling the country.

The second part of the study leave was more counselling work. Another little checkbox that didn’t work for my return to parish work. I was of the mind, even at Wycliffe, that any kind of extended counsellingin the parish by the parish priest beyond basic listening and referral skills was too high a risk for a parish priest, counter-transference being the big one. I also was in a different camp to CPE. As you’ll likely know when CPE was made official for the church there were two competing models, Princeton’s Seward Hiltner’s group which was in line with the Rogerian model and a New York group which was Freudian. Dr. Flint came from this latter group. New York won out. Eventually that group moved to Boston U. and in our day with Jordan, Jernigan and Strunck had become Jungian focussed. I considered going there, and they were very welcoming when I visited, but like all the other theological schools had no clinical requirement, which surprised me. I might have gone back to UVic, but I did want theological reflection. I began my study leave with two summer courses in counselling at UVic. In fact the department had designed and were overseeing the crisis line program I found so excellent. However, I did find one school, a catholic university in the University of Ottawa, that followed the secular model I was training in, offered theological reflection and had a clinic on site in which I would be working. I was walking on air heading to the school on the first day of classes. I had done so much to arrive at this point. By October I was going in at nights reviewing counselling tapes. The clinic taped all interviews, even had one way glass in all the interview rooms. The more I saw of the tapes, the angrier I grew with what they were doing I had my previous work to compare. They were the least expensive counselling centre in Ottawa and still couldn’t get enough clients for the school needs let alone their own counsellors. I left at the end of the semester, wanting to prove I could get the grades.

Liturgy as Redemptive

The course of theological reflection though was very good. Along with the disappointment with the quality of the education, I started questioning for myself how counselling wasn’t specific to me being a priest. I realized my work in counselling was more to help me out of the wasteland than it was work I wanted to do for a lifetime. And not work for a parish priest I believed. The work exclusive to a priest was the eucharist. I saw now that my work was to find how I could do liturgy in a healing way. How could I make the experience of liturgy, my skill in conducting liturgy, how could I make it redemptive. It’s the kind of space that I wanted to make of liturgy. What would it take to do that?

I had a new question. I wasn’t ready to step into parish work. I also had no resources remaining. I went to the horse farm; the hired riding teacher was going on maternity leave. I would have the chance to intensely work on my own riding with my teacher while teaching classes and caring for the horses.

By the time I finished on the farm, I did get to the point in riding I had worked hard for, being at one with the horse, fully on the bit; not many can achieve this. The horse and I were so close in our movement, so at one with each other, that the horses legs were my legs. 

Paying the Bills

I was back in reality. Nothing had changed. I had no plan for how I was going to explore my question, and I needed money to survive.  I wasn’t good at talking my way into good jobs. I had always done low-level jobs, since 14, to survive. There was a cattle-call employment for a new restaurant club. Like many people I thought since I’d eaten in a restaurant, I could work in one. The interview table I was sent to in the large room of many tables, processing many hundreds of applicants, happened to be with the General Manager. Very quickly he said I didn’t qualify to be a server. Lack of experience for one. I don’t normally speak up for myself in an interview but I was desperate and asked if there was anything I could do. My resume was perplexing for him, all the education and experience. What’s your goal, he asked. I want to write, I said. Suddenly his face cleared. Oh, he said, starving artist. Starving artists and students make up the front of house staff in restaurants: musicians, actors, writers, all very familiar to general managers…He thought about it and offered me a hosting job; his generosity of spirit to help me I will remember. The job hosting requires one to take people to their seats, leave the menu for them, smile nicely, and return to seat the next guest. The host does have to distribute the customers evenly to the different server sections so no one server gets swamped. One of the demanding challenges of the job is that everyone wants to sit in the good seats in the front. If that wasn’t enough, the host has to answer the phone and direct calls. My hosting colleagues were young teenage women with coiffured hair, designed by a shopping mall stylist. The restaurant was delayed opening, so they gave us training in the morning to keep us around. Our hosting group had a room in the employment office where we practiced, over and over, role-playing with each other for taking customers to a table, sitting them down, smiling and stepping away. Some of us needed the practice. We also practiced our phone communication skills. Hello. This is Mr. Grummp’s. How might I help you. Lots of practice, in fact. Oddly I wasn’t bothered with this, that is, bothered by where I had ended up, practising greetings on a phone for a restaurant when I had spent hundreds of hours skillfully helping desperate people on the crisis line. I was happy, and eager in my new job. For the first time I felt I was doing something for myself, making my new way from scratch.

Thanks to the insistence of the servers with the manager, and some productive late nights working with the manager to maximize seating, I was soon given a server position. My first shift was a Friday night, just a couple of tables beside the kitchen door, and I walked home at 3AM with $72 in my pocket. Looking up. The hustle and bustle and hard work of serving in a volume restaurant night club suited me. And I made more money than I would at any other job.

Making Radio

I still had no plan for exploring my question, getting on with life. Another server involved with CIUT, the close-circuit radio station at the U of T, invited me to volunteer. He and 9 others had secured the last FM licence from the government regulator and in six months CIUT would be broadcasting FM, the signal reaching from Barrie to Buffalo. I started with writing and reading the news once a week with Jack Thompson. It was our privilege some months later to be the first voices heard on the new FM station.

That was one happenstance, but the remarkable one that changed my life was when one of the organizers asked if I’d like to produce a show he designed. He didn’t have time to do the work. He had a name, WorldSpirit, theme music from Arvo Part, and a set of lectures given by Hans Kung who had been visiting professor at the Uof T the previous semester. Ron showed me the equipment in the studio and then said he’d mix the first show for me. I wrote an opening script: had a colleague read recent news stories of religious conflict as if reading the news, found sounds of conflict, took excerpts from the lecture and wrote my introduction for the first lecture which was titled ‘Is there One True Religion?’ Ron mixed it together. When I heard the mix, something I’d made, something of my own creation, I was hooked. I wanted to make radio. I had the studio to myself as it turned out, spent 30 or so hours a week there. The other CIUT shows were live talk shows or music shows. No one else was mixing a show. One colleague used tape, but he cut it at home. Unbelievably I had the studio to myself most every day. What chance was all that? I figured out recording, cutting tape, writing script, mixing the final show – worked on it for 4 years. I could cleanly cut an ‘ess’ off a word. The restaurant supported me. I lived in a rooming house without heat. After the Kung lectures, I got my own material. I involved other groups and individuals to produce, got colleagues to be voice-overs, gleaned material from where I could, dealt with controversies and conflicts with some material. I made the show about the variety of religious expression. I was happy. I was making something. Actually, I saw it as creating a space, theatre of the mind as it’s called, a space for people to find themselves, see into themselves. The content was also teaching me, helping me with my own theological and psychological exploration.

Being at CIUT opened me up, was my great teacher expanding my world. CIUT was alternative media, not commercially driven. A lot of remarkable people were there making radio that was cutting edge. Monica Penner was doing CanLit before there was any enthusiasm for CanLit. The drive-home show was produced by women, hosted by women and focused on women issues. All kinds of marginal groups and alternative music had a voice. Questions were asked, information given wider public exposure, that challenged convention and entrenched power. Noam Chomsky was given more than media clips, given time for long extended argument. Jack Leighton, the new councillor with new ideas, was a regular on the morning show. Even the food talked about in the halls and showing up at parties was alternative, ethnic and organic food before there was popular acceptance of it.

Because it was an alternative mandated station, I got to do as I wished within broadcasting regulations. I started experimenting with the bridge music and how I edited the text. I played with how to use the music to expand the text, create a space in and around the words, trying out different volumes and lengths. Much of the content of the show was inward directed, so I experimented with how to make a space for that, for seeing in.

One letter from a listener rewarded me with her experience; it was what I was aiming for. She said on Sunday nights she closes the curtains, turns out the lights, and lies on her couch to listen to the show. She let the sounds of the show alone fill her space, let it seep into her.

Finding a Way into Imagining the Practice of Liturgy as Redemption

For breaks, I’d cross the street and browse the periodical room at Robarts. I happened upon a journal, The Drama Review, from NYU, which followed world theatre. I was fascinated with what I read, read all the journals. It took me to the Avant-garde theatre, 1890s-1960s. I started exploring the writing of Peter Brook and Grotowski. I came across a book by James Roose-Evans that pushed me on. This experimental theatre was reimagining theatre, the actor-audience relationship, the play of imagination, the healing of souls, the will to speak out for new possibilities, make a better world. Here, I felt, in this theatre experiment, was a language through which I could explore my question for how the practice of liturgy could be redemptive.

What followed is a magical time reading what I could in Robarts library, making my own work for the radio, eventually doing short docs for the CBC. CBC was getting out of documentaries and moving to live host interviews. A cost-saving measure. I was looking elsewhere anyway and took a leap of faith, put my things in storage and went to Europe on a one-way ticket with one address in my pocket, Peter Brook’s theatre centre in Paris. I might have guessed I’d be yelled at in that Parisian way about how could I ever assume to just walk in and meet with Peter Brook.  His personal assistant, his sister-in-law in fact, took me into her office. He wasn’t around anyway, she said. I happened to remember another theatre group that came to France, only a paragraph written about them in James Roose-Evans book Experimental Theatre. But the name came to my mind and she found them in the south of France. That afternoon I took a high-speed train to Anduze. I walked into the mountains to their centre. It was so silent. I could hear the cows chewing their cuds three hundred yards away.

I had worn myself out, sleeping 4 hours a night, working the restaurant to early morning hours and getting up at 8 to go to the studio. My voice was giving me problems. I felt I was animated enough when recording but would listen to the tape and hear myself so flat. I’d record again, resorted to pricking myself with pins. Taking care of my voice, training it, using it well, was important to me. When at Wycliffe, I had arranged with Canon Dan at St. Paul’s to go over once a week before the organist arrived at 8AM to practice in the church. I’d do my vocal exercises from the pulpit speaking into that cavernous nave, trying to find the back walls with my voice. When in the parishes in Victoria, I’d be in the church Sunday at 7 AM doing vocal warm-ups, to be ready to take the 8 o’clock service. Now that voice was gone. This theatre group, that I magically came to, specialized in extended voice work. They helped me restore my voice.

I was back and forth between France and Ireland. Magically, -it was all magic- I had an interim position in the Church of Ireland. At Easter I headed back to France. One of the members of the Roy Hart Group along with his partner had an experimental theatre group called Pantheatre. More magic. When I had left for Europe my friend gave me a rough cut tape of psychologist James Hillman, former research director at the C.G. Jung Institute. Hillman was speaking about the family. What I heard was stunning. As it turned out, Enrique Pardo’s Pantheatre was taking Hillman’s work and putting it into imaginative theatre. Hillman was working with Enrique. I had found this group by accident and been given Hillman’s tape -led here; given what I needed to take me on my way home. How did that happen? Why me?

In the spring for a few weeks, a small group of us were working with Enrique on how to give life to an object, something actors would work on. On stage one might hold a prop, or approach aq set piece or a prop, or a door, might leave some behind, or even that one might ignore an object on stage. A poor way of relating tot he object leaves the object dead, uninteresting to the audience. A good actor can give a life to an object, the audience see that life. It exists in the space between actor and object, in the relationship between actor and object. In this way the object comes alive for the audience, is seen to have a life, the mean something, not a prop but something bearing a truth, imaginatively. An object that is alive can move the audience, reach inside, well, not the object but how it possesses the imagination of the audience. That is what the audience sees. In the same way well acted theatre is about the space between the actors, the work of acting to fill that space between each other, with value, with magic, that captures the imagination of the audience. Our work for a few weeks with Enrique was to find an imaginative life for the object, not just a functional one in telling a dramatic story. Hillman, a pagan, a lifetime spent in the Greek and Roman myths, writes a lot about soul, the imagination being the seat of soul. Something like that. Over and over in our time on the Orangerie floor, we’d use movement and voice, stillness and silence, working together to create moments that embodied a visible beauty, came on the breath, the ah-hah moment, each of us learning when to contribute to the scene directly, when to fall away, how it all played together, our sensing and feeling the ah-hah moment, the working together, to make the moment come alive, with imagination and mythology, energy and spark. Good theatre. Each of us would feel the other working, feel for the object whatever object was: a chair, a ladder, a bit of cloth. The work was to animate the object, give it a life and presence that could be seen, move with it or toward it or away from it or around it. We would fail often. Animated life would appear and then we’d do something and all would fall flat. We kept working, learning how to work with each other, learning how to work with the object. I thought of the chalice as I was doing this work. How can lifting the chalice give it a life, be a presence for a congregation? The relation of priest with chalice, how can that be redemptive? What might the liturgist do to fill the chalice with imagination, seen and felt?

On our last day, we came together for a final performance, just ourselves. We had honed our skills. Enrique began to play a few notes on the piano, the air started to tingle, we moved about, found a story emerging from the floor, from the objects in our studio space. The beauty grew, expanded into the space, was full of light. Nothing we did took away from the presence of the numinous. Enrique would give prompts, ‘to cross the floor will take you a million years,’ he’d say. Or something else. As the story developed, the space got cold, the angels and jesters and pillars of truth began to fade, collapse, scattered about the floor, lifeless. And in that lifelessness, the space was full of life. Only one of us remained, not collapsed, still standing, Ton, a Dutch performance artist and remarkable artist of found objects. ‘You have to go out the window,’ says Enrique for Ton to hear. Ton, not missing a beat, holding keeping our collaboration that afternoon alive, full of hope and grace, in his character, he who had become the Cosmic Salesman, now alone in the universe, he making his way heavily, footfall and footfall, reluctantly, across the floor of the Orangerie that had in our work become the expanse of the universe, about him a wasteland of fallen angels, collapsed pillars of truth, fairies and spirits. ‘Respectez-moi’ he intoned to the empty cosmos. ‘A vendre.’ With ponderous steps, head swaying from side to side, back and forth, back and forth, he went into the far corner of the room, climbed the step ladder as if weighted by the universe itself, rung by rung, calling out to no one who could hear, in a void, passing out the window and away, from the distance, his voice, fading, ‘respectez-moi; a vendre.’

I was lying on the Orangerie floor looking up through the skylight as the crows were rooking and the sun disappearing from sight. All was silence but for our breathing, as we lay there. For some time we lay there until we felt like moving once again. After all these years, nothing for me to have anticipated, I now saw the work to do. That quest, the remnant of the collpase of the counselling education, a way for liturgy to be healing, no had a shape. What is the work of liturgy, liturgy not as preservation but as redemption? I saw a way through for me. Given me to see.

I have left out a lot of the writing of the magic and serendipity that brought me to that place. It continues to inform me and motivate me to this day.

Bringing My Work Back to Church

I could have stayed in Europe with my Irish citizenship, but thought to come back. Through some contacts I did do some work in liturgy, one with a children’s Easter service put on by children, where we began in the playground apparatus across the street from the church before moving into the church. Teh reality is I I never had any support or encouragement from my own bishops, five of them by this time. I went to see a number of bishops in southern Ontario. 

While I took my study leave to advance my pastoral skills, I also was also seeking in the world outside the church what they would want from worship. Surveys reported that most people believe in God, and report that most people do not attend regular worship. I thought it important for me as priest to understand why that was the case, if only anecdotally.

This was my approach with the bishops -how to appeal to people no longer coming to church. I knew the aging membership and declining numbers of worshippers was a concern for bishops. I raised some points in my interviews, nothing too challenging, nothing like the work with Enrique, just basic things. Oh well, no, they didn’t get it. Fine by me. Family. Take it for what it is. I didn’t have it in me to manufacture support, take a long view, get myself into a position where my work could flourish. I would need charisma for that., Change comes only with a community of people, not a single person. But I don’t have that charisma, the drive to rally to my cause. My friend at CIUT, both our shows on CIUT and CKWR, would have 30 people in his apartment all of them excited to be working on the show. I’d be 30 hours in the studio, with a few people I wanted for voices. I used to think I needed to be like Hans, bring people along, rally them to the cause. He’s so good at it. Likely, so are you. Many classmates are superb at building consensus, getting things done, even big things such as building a church or a business. I came to see I’m not Hans and I don’t have to be. I can only be my own person. If someone doesn’t get my work, I don’t press it. My work has always been on at the periphery, appealing only to a few. I can only be the person I am, focused on the work, not rallying others, bishops and congregants, to the work. If they see it, they see it and we have a conversation. If they don’t, they don’t. I don’t press them, try to sell them on an idea. You are who you are. What a relief. That was my journey, to find my own self.

English Studies

I was near the end of the ten years I’d given for something to come of my study leave. When the game seemed up I turned to toward something in my heart I’d resisted; goes back to family and school. I registered for an English course. Sitting there the first day, waiting for the professor, it came to me, wow, this is a job. I had substituted for a friend who had to have surgery taking her high school theatre classes. The idea of teaching was sparked. At the second class, the professor dismissed an idea I had offered. This took me back to high school. Seemed to happen a lot in high school. I remember in grade eleven being so frustrated with a teacher dismissing my comment, I slammed my back into my seat as hard as I could. No one noticed. Here it was again, just when I’d got the courage to return. No, it was the muse working. The next week, the professor said to the class first thing, ‘I’ve been thinking about what Reg said, and he’s right.’ Redemption of spirit. I spent every office hour with the professor, he the associate Dean of English at the U of T. Rarely did anyone else come to his office hours. We’d walk back across Queen’s Park, he heading to his Dean’s office. I have no idea what we talked about. English. But how did I have that much to say?  I received the highest mark he’d ever given out in thirty years. That’s because I was writing about theatre. Don’t know much else, but I have a feeling for theatre, knew that as a child.

The Dean had a plan for me, but I had spent ten years scrounging, living in unpleasant circumstances, wearing myself out. I couldn’t start over. Didn’t have the resources. Wouldn’t have the energy needed to manage paying the bills and study. I felt I had to settle down. I let go of the idea of church, probably a decision made at the AGM at St. Mary’s, but not admitted to. English is out, but I found something close. Humber College had a year course offered as an intensive for 4 months that would qualify me to teach ESL. It seemed my best option. The pay scale for a teacher was $30 an hour. Wow. I didn’t realize that was payment for class time, not work time. In any case 25 of us out of 250 applicants were accepted. I did well. And graduated. The practicum teacher I had worked with became ill. I was given her class for a while because I knew the students and they knew me. When she returned, another teacher had an emergency. I was on hand; got the class for the rest of the semester. And I never stopped working for 24 years, every semester, summers as well, even though it was contracts. I taught what’s called academic English to international students. It’s language training to prepare them for success in taking college courses. It includes study in essay writing, lecture note taking, etc. I then moved into the English department at Humber. Essentially, it was teaching communication, academic writing, business writing, persuasive communication and critical thinking skills.

Settling Down

The classroom became my sanctuary. Counselling and theatre were a great benefit. The content for Arts & Science departments in Polytech schools isn’t that sophisticated, but how one teaches the subject, how one might get the students to care for the material, is a challenging and fascinating. The field of Holistic Learning,(secular) has a strong base at OISE, and the biannual conferences were a great support and encouragement for my work. Holistic learning understands the classroom to be sacred space, fit well with my idea to make it a sanctuary.

Retirement

In retirement, for the first time, I live without precarity of income. It’s nice to have a pension appear each month in the bank account, and for that month, do just what I want to do. One reason I wasn’t suited to the parish is that I live in two worlds only, one on each side of normal getting along in life. I like to be at a table reading and writing, my little dormer table on the third floor a cherished place, and to be on a platform. At a family camp for traditional music this summer, for talent night on Friday I read a piece from my time in the arctic, a serious piece about polar bears and being in the embrace of their spirit! Saturday I was the Flea in a mummers play with the children, a flea proposing to the princess, being rejected, and happily marrying a horse. I don’t have to do anything else in my retirement. I have my dormer table, some woodworking tools in the basement, intimate conversations with like-minded friends, and a platform which now is more the floor in front of a cashier, for example, where I hope a bit of fun, a joke, might lift the cashier’s spirits.

Current Work

More Breath than Thought

I do feel all of our varied stories are a collective wisdom, we like tributaries going out into Churchland some 45 years ago, our particular life experiences, put together, being a fascinating exploration of faith and belonging… more breath than thought. 

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Contact Info

• Spouse: Anne Armstrong
• Home: 15 Garden Ave. Toronto, ON M6R 1H5
• Email: reggood@mac.com
• Phone: 416 533 3384
• Website: reggood.com