The Journey of Faith

        In retirement, I am a baker, a bag piper, a trained marine search and rescuer, a farmer and an author.  Along with  my wife, Ellen Vestredal, I am exploring what it means to live on a small island in the Salish sea

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From a young age, I understood that faith came at a cost.  Sitting around the kitchen table with my father, a United Church minister and trained theologian, I was told how he became a conscientious objector during the war because of his belief in pacifism.  Always understated, we’d have to pester him to recount the details of his trial and sentencing─how he was sidelined and marginalized. Dad claimed he got his inspiration from the non-violence of Jesus, and we would then drift off into discussions about the miracles, the sayings and commandments of that carpenter from Nazareth.  I came to recognize names like Barth, McClung, Woodsworth, and Niemöller─all activist thinkers who paid a price for following Jesus. I took this upbringing for granted. Didn’t everyone discuss the quest for the historical Jesus over cornflakes? My dad’s favourite lines came from Albert Schweitzer who wrote:

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 He comes to us as One, unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word, “Follow thou me.” And sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

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My journey through faith has been that constant dialogue with the mystery of Jesus.  In my childhood, it was mediated through my parents, and then by elders, from Zion United Church in Brantford, like Bessy Swinton and Sam Wyatt. As I grew into my adulthood, I encountered Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his book, The Cost of Discipleship, which reminded me again that faith requires a commitment, not just to God, but to transform the world God loves, and to actively resist the evil that would destroy it—not just with our words, but with our deeds.  Consequently, I was arrested for praying against nuclear weapons along with a First Nation’s elder on a street in Ottawa. A few years later, I was incarcerated for trying to serve an arrest warrant on the Ambassador of South Africa for his country’s policy of apartheid.

It has been one of the privileges of my journey to meet and be inspired by so many members of the United Church who are aware that faith is more than words. Our 29th Moderator, W. Clarke MacDonald, was once asked how he could tolerate leading a church that was always in trouble. And he replied that if his church wasn’t in trouble, he’d leave it and go out and find one that was.  God bless that wisdom─a church in trouble!

I have tried to live by that bit of advice throughout my 41 years of ordained ministry, which has been roughly divided between academia and congregational life.  Apart from the time when I was a freelance journalist and commentator with CBC, I have received my pay from a United Church related institution my entire life. What an privilege it has been working as a minister in seven congregations, but also as a principal of St. Stephen’s Theological College. For a time, I was hired to organize housing cooperatives and grassroots communities in a poor Montreal neighbourhood. For five years, I was a professor of practical theology at Queen’s Theological College, where I also taught ethics to engineers. While working in these varied positions, I developed a relationship with Cuba and for the past twenty years have been a regular pastor in local congregations there, a teacher at the Matanzas seminary and a pizza maker for community groups.

It was while in Cuba that I received my true vocation. Taken from a song by Silvio Rodriguez, a Cuban colleague said I was “el reparador de sueños” (“the dream service agent”). She said, “Is your dream broken or malfunctioning? Chris will fix it, making it operational.”  So, whether writing books or marching in the streets, preaching a sermon or preparing an ethics commentary, my gift as a teacher has been to recognize what could be possible, to be able to put wheels under our dreams and be open to show the guiding of where the Spirit takes us and uses us.

What about me personally? I have four children, rich relationships with two daughters- and a son-in-law. While still working, I carve out time for a yearly “grampa camp” for two of my four grandchildren. My wife, Ellen, is the music director of our church, an opera singer and a constant companion.

Divorced twice, I have had my share of bent and broken promises. And like many who go through fragmented relationships, I live with deep regret and doubt. In the current context of the “Me Too” movement, I also recognize how I have enjoyed the blind benefits of male power and am increasingly aware of how far men must travel, waking up to how much we don’t see or pretend not to witness.  

For now, I live by forgiveness. It was while I was a Ph.D. candidate with Douglas Hall that I learned about it first-hand.  At McGill, one’s final test, before writing the thesis, was a major comprehensive examination. It was a pass/fail proposition, and if you failed you were out of the program entirely. No chance of appeal. I had arranged to do my test on my new computer (I had a portable that weighed 21 lbs, which was a marvel in 1984!). The deal was that I would write the exam on the computer and copy my answers onto a disk that the faculty secretary would then print off for Doug. Lasting four hours, I knew I would receive five anonymous theological quotes written by anyone from St. Paul to the present day. The test? I had to identify their source, author, importance and give my opinion. I did it, getting four for sure, while I guessed about the fifth. Complete. Then my self-righteousness took over and I started to get fancy, aligning the margins on both sides of the page. I put proper titles, footnotes and special fonts. Too pleased with myself when I finished the editing, I pressed the button to shut down the computer - only to realize I hadn’t saved anything. Picture me…finger on the power button - everything frozen. In those ancient days, there was no auto-save, no dropdown retrieve or reverse function, and, having pressed the on/off switch, the screen froze. My test was gone, and my Ph.D. was toast.  Unable to reach the phone to ask for help, I sat there for a minute utterly dejected. Then as I pulled my finger away, the screen went blank and my life ended.

Freed from the computer’s power button, I could then reach for the phone. I called Doug and explained what I had done, fully expecting to be ejected from the doctoral program. Doug, bless his heart, said, “Serves you right with your electronic arrogance, but …you can write it over again right now…” I was saved.

And then he added, “But I’ll mark it harder.”

Harder or not, I realized then that I had been forgiven. Forgiveness was not a theoretical idea, it was a concrete benediction...as necessary as breathing and as tangible as the coffee I was then drinking by the gallon to stay awake.

Feeling strangely saved, I then went through the painful process of relinquishing my self-congratulatory assurance - letting go of the past pat answers, all those clever ideas I thought I had, and beginning again. Not easy.

Returning to Schweitzer, if I had to identify the “the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings” through which our church will pass in Jesus’ company in the current age, they will involve the same kind of letting go - not just of buildings and programs, but more importantly of the self-assurance and pride we take in what we have built as a community of faith.

Letting go is never easy. You blame yourself and feel like a failure. It requires a courage “not to be” - not to be the successful social agency of choice, the great cathedral of spiritual enlightenment or the chaplain to empire. 

Our way ahead in the company of Jesus will be one of suffering humiliation with those whom our world considers losers, living with the rejects. We are not preaching to crowds anymore or professing our faith to prime ministers. It’s back to the kitchen table where we feed the hungry, keep a light burning for the lost, serve up forgiveness by the bowlful and work at building justice on the road. 

 We will get in trouble because we won’t accept the culture’s values of size and efficacy/ We’ll suffer because we won’t allow ourselves to surrender to despair, even while we are unable to afford what we used to be. We will grow smaller, lose stature and capacity, and, in this process, we will arrive back twhere we began - a company of forgiving believers. Elaine Pagels, in her book Beyond Belief, reminds us that in the first century, “What marks us in the eyes of our enemies is our practice of lovingkindness: ‘Only look,’ they say, “How they love one another.’”

So it will be with our emerging United Church, and I am honoured to serve in such a church in trouble.