Was my father chauvinistic? Sexist? Yes, indeed. But my father was a charmer too. The ladies appeared to like him with his twinkling Irish eyes, his energetic style and his military bearing. He was a disciplinarian with a kindly side and was much liked by his flock when he finally realized his dream and was given a rural parish of his own. He was very much a product of the conflict-riven Ulster of his day, however, and though he left it as a young man in his very early twenties, he remained strongly Protestant to the end. Unfortunately, in spite of his many great gifts, he never really overcame the anti–Roman Catholic animus that was born and bred in his homeland and later nourished by his selective reading both of theology and of church history. It was disappointing to my siblings and me that his splendid pastoral ministry during the final years of his life was at the same time narrowed by his steadfast refusal to participate in any local attempts at ecumenicity that meant, for example, sharing the same platform as the area’s Catholic priest. However, gradually he had to alter his fundamentalist views on Scripture, particularly the Old Testament, as his theological studies quickly opened his eyes to the impossibility of persevering in a literalist understanding of the great stories he loved so much. And he mellowed in other ways as well. However, he was never a man to cherish the middle position on any matter of controversy—or otherwise, for that matter. In my late teens we had many arguments over when and how I was finally to be ordained, some of them very heated.
Sadly, in 1968 my father died suddenly, but peacefully enough, at age sixty-two in my mother’s arms. I still miss him—the haunting sound of the tin flute that was never far from his hands, his incredibly constant optimism and his deep concern for his family’s well-being. He expected a great deal from each of us, perhaps even too much at times. But I thank God always for both of my parents’ courage in breaking with the past to make a life in Canada. My deep, abiding faith in God, however much it has changed and developed down all the decades since, owes everything to them. It is true, as one of John Wesley’s biographers has said, that “mothers are the makers of spirit” in our earliest beginnings. That being said, fathers, for better or worse, have the awesome responsibility of forming some of our earliest inklings about God. As we grow in awareness and self-knowledge, however, shaped by our own individual experiences of the world and of others, both aspects of our lives are inevitably moulded and changed, sometimes quite drastically.
During my high school years, my sister and I attended weekly Youth for Christ rallies at Massey Hall on various Saturday nights. Charles Templeton, full of charisma and eloquence, was at the height of his evangelistic career and, together with his glamorous partner, a Spanish-looking diva with a wonderful voice, regularly held the audience of eager teenagers in the palm of his hand. When, to the haunting but overly repeated strains of “Just as I am, without one plea”—so familiar from Billy Graham’s crusades—the invitation was given to come forward and be saved, there was a kind of hypnotic atmosphere in which the pull to go to the front of the hall was close to irresistible.
As a child and then in my teens I had asked Christ to come into my heart and life on more than one occasion, but Templeton made it nearly impossible for many of us not to go forward again. However, both Elizabeth and I usually managed to resist the emotional appeals while enjoying the company of our peers, the entertainment of the music and the movie-star quality of Templeton’s leadership. Little did I know that I would one day be a contributor (through my knowledge of New Testament Greek) to his best-selling book on the sayings of Jesus or that we would eventually become friends. He often used to call me on Sundays while I was a regular columnist for the Toronto Star to discuss whatever I had written that weekend. We met at his home, on an apartment rooftop overlooking the Don Valley in the heart of Toronto, not many months before he was hospitalized with severe Alzheimer’s disease. He showed me many photographs and newspaper clippings of his days as an evangelist and, for a while, partner of Billy Graham. While Charles had eventually become an agnostic, he remained in my view “a God-haunted man” all his life. In There Is Life after Death, I outline the story his wife Madeleine told me of a vision Charles had just before he died. Nobody who knew Charles Templeton or who had read his final book, Farewell to God, would have anticipated or predicted anything like that.
In retrospect, I see that my childhood, though enviable in so many ways, was a thorough-going indoctrination into the basic tenets of Christian fundamentalism. This cannot be overemphasized. It was an upbringing heavily into guilt and fear. My parents’ religion was intensely judgmental of others in different camps, particularly the majority of “unsaved church members” who were regarded as Christians in name only. Sin was humanity’s greatest problem and we alone had the answers. To be outside our company of “right” believers was to be eternally lost and headed for hell. It was no easy burden for a teenager, destined by his parents for the ministry, to carry. But, to quote the famous inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller, “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
3
FROM HOMER
AND PLATO TO
THEOLOGY
IHAVE TO CONFESS to liking high school very much indeed. Compared with the years spent in elementary school education, it struck me forcibly as an entirely new kind of adventure. A powerful lust for knowledge combined with a fresh sense of freedom made what was dull and tedious to many of my fellow students a pure pleasure to me. A course in music appreciation was a part of my chosen curriculum for the entire five years. This opened up a whole new world of classical music that has been a motherlode of spiritual comfort and renewal in my life ever since.
When the Metropolitan Opera Company came to Toronto’s Massey Hall, our music teacher was asked by a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to look after the sale of programs and librettos for the week. He then asked me and two other students to assist him. This meant we saw many of the best-known operas, including Faust, Carmen, Il Trovatore, La Traviata and The Magic Flute, presented by the leading artists of the mid-1940s. The Met came two or three times to Toronto during that never-to-be-forgotten era. Glenn Gould, who grew up in the Beach district and was a student at Malvern during my final two years there, was persuaded to play for the whole student body at auditorium several times. So we were able to hear and watch him before he became the famous artist we know about today.
In high school, it was learning French and Latin that I enjoyed most. Once again there was the recognition of entering new intellectual realms and into a broader experience of the minds and lives of other peoples and cultures—a deepening of one’s own humanitas. But it was while I was in grade ten that something happened that brought about a truly significant change in my life. We had an English teacher, Ms Enid McGregor, who made studying English grammar, poetry, prose, drama and composition a perfect delight. One day, however, she took one of her frequent side trips (as we called them) and began to show us how many of our most familiar words came from ancient Greek. She began writing lists of them on the blackboard: geo-logy, anthropo-logy, demo-cracy, pneumatic, Christ-ian and so on. I was absolutely fascinated.
It must have been a case of what Carl Jung dubbed a synchronicity (again, a word from two Greek words) or, as they say, “it was meant to be,” because I eagerly drank in all she had to say and felt a genuine hunger for more—much more. At close of the class I stayed behind and asked her if she knew how I might be able to learn classical Greek. I told her of my thoughts about entering the ministry and how it seemed a good way to prepare for one day reading the New Testament in its original written form, that is, Hellenistic Greek, which was a popular form of Greek spread over much of the ancient world by the deliberate policies of Alexander the Great. She positively beamed at me and said that a retired friend of hers, a Miss Myrtle Stevens, had taught Greek at one of the only two high schools in the Toronto region where it was on the curriculum. She said I probably already knew her since she had been a supply teacher during the recent illness of Malvern’s Latin master. I recalled the lady at once. With the lack of sympathy typical of many teenagers, we had called her Little Caesar and had done our best to make life difficult for her. I now blush to think of how cruel a lack of awareness and compassion can be when a crowd or even a mob mentality moves in before you know it. In any case, an introduction