There was one benefit to the way it all happened. Many people told me later that they really felt the deep emotion and even trauma the Hiroshima visit had brought to me—they could hear it in my voice. I didn’t want to tell them that perhaps what they were sensing was simply surprise and exhaustion. The truth is that after taking the bullet train to Hiroshima the next day, standing at ground zero, and visiting the hospital that still housed survivors who had been terribly burned in the August 6, 1945, holocaust, I was indeed profoundly moved. I will never forget getting up very early on the day following my arrival there and walking under cherry blossoms in the Peace Park, its skeletal dome the only vestige of buildings that had once stood there but which were all burned up in the Armageddon-like conflagration. There was a kind of simple shrine with an altar on one side of the park, and in the silence I noticed that early morning joggers would stop before it and, hands clasped in front in an attitude of prayer, stand for a period of meditation before continuing their run. Cherry blossoms fell softly in the glory of the morning sunshine and carpeted the ground. For a moment it seemed that the earth itself stood still to remember the awful cataclysm long ago in which the city was all but obliterated and 140,000 people perished. I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum, dedicated to making certain the world can never forget what happened there or the apocalyptic demons then unleashed and henceforth forever threatening to bring a final judgment on our planet and ourselves. I spoke to doctors and to clergy of various faiths.
Since I had already done some interviews with two or three key thinkers, including of course McKillop, in Toronto (at the Star you always had to keep in mind the maxim “What does it mean to Toronto?”), I had all the material I needed for the story as I retraced my steps. During the long hours of flight over the Pacific and then across Canada I wrote and then rewrote the story until it met my hopes and original intentions. When I saw the weekend edition on Easter Day, I was absolutely stunned. The largest headline I had ever seen in a Toronto paper since the famous editions announcing the end of the war with Japan stood out in huge type across the front page. It said CHOOSE LIFE! and had a photo of the Hiroshima dome in the Peace Park taken by the award-winning photographer Boris Spremo. The shot was even more powerful because the only person in it was a little girl in a pretty dress caught running below the ruin. Some editors I know were unhappy with the sheer in-your-face nature of the play given to the story, but it was widely discussed not just in journalism classes at various colleges but in schools, churches and many, many other venues across Metropolitan Toronto and far beyond. Gary Lautens, the former humour columnist who was then managing editor, sent me a special note of congratulation. It was to be my last major trip as a staff writer for the Star.
The issue of the bomb has faded somewhat from public consciousness just now, replaced by looming environmental and economic problems. However, in the light of present geopolitical tensions, I view the risks of either a terrorist act involving the bomb or a nuclear attack by a rogue state as of the most urgent concern. Nuclear disarmament must be at the top of the agenda for all nations.
In the spring of 1982, Richard Teleky, a Canadian novelist who was then the senior editor at Oxford University Press Canada, phoned me at the Star. He introduced himself and said he thought it would be a good idea for us to meet for lunch as soon as possible to discuss the possibility of a book. We met at a bistro in Don Mills and over a glass of Japanese beer he said it seemed obvious to him that I should be writing in a more permanent and extended form than the Star’s religion page and columns permitted. We discussed several possibilities and finally agreed on a book based largely upon my take on where the churches were at that time and the major problems they faced, together with a truly forthright airing of strong, controversial opinions I held on everything from the hormone issues of premarital sex and abortion to situation ethics (the so-called New Morality) in general. He said that since it would be about ultimate concerns, it should be titled Harpur’s Heaven and Hell. As with the radio show, the name only had to be heard once to stick permanently in the public mind, he assured me.
To the surprise both of Oxford University Press and of other Canadian publishing houses, the book—issued simultaneously in hardcover and paperback—took off immediately and was very soon a Canadian bestseller. I did what every successful author was expected to do at that time: I went on a gruelling cross-country tour, the first of well over a dozen I was to undertake down the years. The reception from radio hosts and interviewers as well as from those on television and in churches from coast to coast was little short of amazing. CBC’s Peter Gzowski did five sessions with me on Morningside dealing with a different topic each day. In the following week we did another show on responses he had received in the mail. I particularly remember speaking during the tour to a packed Christ Church Cathedral (Anglican) in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The crowd was mainly composed of young people, several of whom came up and hugged me afterwards. I also remember a slightly over-refreshed woman in the front row who approached to say she was my cousin from Ireland. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but I later discovered she really was a relative on my father’s side. She had married a prospector who spent all his time in northern B.C. Unfortunately, he never found the fortune he had in mind.
At about this time, I was invited to attend a showing of Ingmar Bergman’s haunting classic film The Seventh Seal at University College, my old alma mater at the University of Toronto. The event was being sponsored by the Varsity Student Christian Movement (SCM). A lecturer from the philosophy department who was an agnostic had been asked to join me in leading a discussion when the screening was over. A good crowd turned out and things went well for a time. But somehow, in the midst of the toing and froing between the agnostic, the students and myself, I began listening to myself as I had never done before.
It was a chilling experience. It wasn’t that I wasn’t holding my own, but quite suddenly some of my words and arguments began coming back to me with a strangely hollow sound and feel. It happened while I was setting forth my reasons for being a Christian, and particularly when it came to defending the claim that Jesus was the unique Son of God. What I was proclaiming was what I had thought I thought for many years—ever since childhood, in fact. It was what I had signed on to at my ordination. It had been at the heart of many of my sermons as a parish priest. Even when looked at from a much more historical-critical point of view, as a professor of New Testament, it was what I had taught during my years of lecturing at the Toronto School of Theology. Ever since my Oxford days and membership in the Socratic Club chaired by C.S. Lewis, I had accepted his oft-repeated dictum that Jesus Christ was “either mad, bad, or God.” But after the SCM meeting dispersed and the hall emptied, I left the building feeling quite disturbed, with a hundred questions whirling in my head. I walked for a couple of hours around the soccer fields between University College and Convocation Hall, struggling to clarify what was troubling me and what I truly believed. My belief and trust in God were rock-solid. I saw agnosticism as a form of “polite atheism.” My real difficulty focused upon Jesus.
The total inadequacy of Lewis’s glib formulation suddenly