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across the turbulent seas to Iona itself. The weather was gloomy and cold and the crossing was very rough indeed. As the locals (the tiny village has about ninety people in and around it, mostly fishermen and shepherds) are fond of saying: “The weather can be pretty bad, but it’s often in places like this that people can come face to face with themselves.”
This was my chance to witness and reflect upon the Celtic Christianity that St. Columba and his monks brought to Iona. It was so different in many ways from that officially being promulgated then by Rome. What’s more, it radiated outwards far and wide and today brings over 200,000 pilgrims annually from around the world into its embrace. Celtic Christianity, instead of stressing human sinfulness and a need for personal salvation, boldly affirms the glory of the natural world, the connectedness of everything and everyone to God, and the centrality of justice and peace in human relations. That’s why, in 1938, a maverick Scottish clergyman, later to become a peer as Lord George MacLeod of Fuinary, came to Iona with a handful of students, some unemployed workers from the Glasgow shipyards and a couple of other ministers and began work on restoring the ancient abbey and rebuilding part of the ruins of the monastery. He went on to found the Iona Community, which today has members scattered across the globe.
MacLeod, who was awarded the Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre for his heroism both at Ypres and at Passchendaele in World War I, had worked in the slums of Glasgow and had served at one point as Moderator of the Church of Scotland. But he had become increasingly disenchanted with formal “Churchianity” and had become a champion of “a connected Christianity”—a Celtic-type spirituality that stressed that work and worship, humans and their environment, matter and spirit must always be understood as deeply interwoven in one fabric of life. MacLeod was also aware that in Columba’s spreading communities long ago women had an equal voice; an abbess could tell a bishop what to do, and priests could marry. I remember avidly reading MacLeod’s books over the years and realize now that I finally was able to express his kind of “incarnational theology” in my own writing, especially The Pagan Christ and Water into Wine. One phrase of his in particular has always stayed with me. He said that Christianity is not so much about “Glory to God in the highest” but about “glory to God in the High St.” There is only the letter e missing, but a world of difference all the same.
We were only on Iona for three days, but I left there with a full heart and a lighter step. I could see why MacLeod had once described it as “a thin place.” By that he meant that the “other side,” the spiritual dimension of life, seems so much closer there. Any mental “tissue of separation” is so thin it virtually disappears. In other words, there is an end to erroneous dualistic thinking and all of life is one again. I needed to be reminded of that. We all do. It is a message of hope.
8
THE FORK
IN THE TRAIL
THE YEAR 1979 marked my fiftieth birthday, and a time when two critical personal matters came to a head and had to be resolved. The first had to do with my role as an ordained priest of the Anglican Church yet deeply involved in what was obviously a very secular profession as a working journalist.
For the first few years after joining the Star I had assisted at several parishes and then took a more or less regular posting as honorary assistant at the historic Little Trinity Church in the heart of downtown. The rector, Rev. Harry Robinson, had invited me to alternate with him in delivering either the morning or the evening Sunday sermon. The church used to be packed for both services as Robinson, a very popular minister, was a leading evangelical preacher. Also a graduate of Wycliffe College, he had preceded me as the Senior Student there in 1955. Readers of my book Water into Wine will know that we didn’t always agree. In truth, my own steadily increasing discomfort on intellectual grounds with evangelical thinking had been quickly making the arrangement less and less satisfactory. By “evangelical,” of course, I’m referring to that theological position which relies almost wholly on sacred scripture for its source of authority (in the Protestant Reformation the rallying cry was sola scriptura—only the Bible) and calls upon the individual to “accept Christ as his or her personal saviour.” I eventually resigned from Little Trinity in 1976. Robinson and I parted on the most cordial of terms, but our paths separated from that point on and once he had left Little Trinity we never really saw one another again.
Meanwhile, I had continued what I had begun when I first went to the Star in 1971, that is, my role as unofficial chaplain to anyone in the media who felt a need for one. Although many reporters are not ardent churchgoers, there were nonetheless babies to be baptized, couples to be married and funerals to be performed. While it made things hectic at times, it was an important ministry and one that I had enjoyed. However, since I no longer had an institutional base and since Anglican canons or rules of discipline require that every functioning priest be officially licensed by the bishop to a specific church, chaplaincy or other post, I began to hear some distant rumblings from diocesan headquarters on Adelaide Street. I soon realized there was a good chance of my being summoned to the bishop’s office, required to sign afresh my oath of obedience to him “in all godly admonitions” and asked to name some parish or post to which I could be assigned in an assistant capacity, however limited. Some called it a matter of discipline; others thought of it as a control mechanism.
By a synchronicity, at the very time I was feeling pressure to conform, an acrimonious controversy erupted at a prominent east end Anglican church. In the larger scale of things, like many church conflicts, it wasn’t about very much—something about parishioners demanding their rector be fired because of his refusal to conduct the baptism of the children of certain “influential” members. A couple of brief stories appeared in Toronto media and as the fracas seemed to be escalating I decided to do a full feature on it. Naturally, I wanted to give Bishop Lewis S. Garnsworthy a full opportunity to air his official take on the matter. So, as I was in the habit of doing, I called his secretary and requested an interview. A short while afterwards Garnsworthy came on the line and exploded in my ear. “Tom,” he thundered, “you’re not helping me on this.” When he calmed down a little, I pointed out that it wasn’t my job to help him if by that he meant my not undertaking a perfectly valid investigation of a series of events of interest not just to Anglicans but to the wider community as well. I reminded him of his words to me at lunch in the Royal York Hotel early in 1971 when I first told him I had decided to become a religion journalist. Garnsworthy had given me his full approval and had said explicitly, “Tom, I want you to be the best reporter you can be.” That reminder cooled his anger somewhat, but there could be no doubt on my part. I went ahead with the story, but the ambiguous nature of my situation had been made very evident. The more I reflected on it, the clearer it all became.
For some time in any case I had felt uncomfortable with the role of “professional holy man.” I seldom if ever wore the Roman collar, the long black cassock or the white linen surplice of an Anglican priest, even when on official duties. Whenever I thought of the latter there rang in my ears the words of a young urchin of the streets who was hanging around the door outside Little Trinity one Sunday morning after the service. Robinson and I in full regalia were standing on the pavement by the door waiting to shake hands with the congregation as they filed out. The little girl with a soiled face tugged at my surplice and blurted out, “Whatcha got that there dress on for, mister?” I wondered what she would have said if she had ever attended a High Mass at the Vatican!
I knew there was a further tightening of the canons governing priestly conduct and teaching in process at Church headquarters on Adelaide Street, and that opposition to this had been turned down at a recent diocesan synod session. But beyond that, I was now deeply aware that I had a real conflict of interest, which I had never been made to feel before—between an oath of obedience to a bishop of one denomination and my desire to bring objective, unhindered coverage of every religion to the Canadian public and the rest of the world. In addition, while I remained totally committed to what I understood and knew about the reality of God, I had serious problems with much of the rest of Anglican orthodoxy.
Reflecting on this, I discussed it with a friend and reached my decision. I decided it was time for me to leave the priesthood chosen for me by my parents long ago. I invited Bishop Garnsworthy to lunch at the Royal