Canyon National Park in southwestern Utah. Our hiking path through the valley followed the Virgin River, alongside the canyon heights, which were named by the early Mormon settlers as the Altar of Sacrifice and the Thrones of the Three Patriarchs. As we stood and gazed mutely at the soaring rock walls, I had a deeper, more awesome awareness of the reality and the power of the presence of God than I had ever known before or have experienced since in any cathedral or in the presence of even some of the holiest personalities I have met. Lorne Greene, the famous Canadian TV personality, put it very simply but perhaps best in his recording of the song “Oh, the place where I worship, is the wide open spaces, built by the hand of the Lord.” Many millions today can say amen to that.
6
LIVING MY
FATHER’S DREAM
MOST OF US, particularly when we have had some measure of success in life, are reluctant to reveal or discuss our weaknesses, failures or defeats. Certainly this is so for me. Yet as Jung and others have made clear, facing one’s shadow with all its latent strength as well as its more negative powers is essential to one’s individuation and growth towards greater maturity. As the great “doctor of the soul” points out in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, anything of substance must of necessity have or throw a shadow. Evil walks pari passu with the good.
There were a couple of major events that, if not necessarily failures, at any rate highlighted a need for a radical change of direction in my personal narrative. Some aspects of these are necessarily painful, but the ultimate meaning and outcome were enormously fruitful and liberating. There was no voice from above, no heavenly vision, no sudden inner light, but throughout even the most difficult, yes, even the darkest hours, the realization of a divine Presence close by me and within made it possible to carry on. And I discovered that coming to terms with one’s shadow, including the darkness of disappointment, depression or loneliness, can be the prelude to a release of fresh creativity and of deeper joy.
Each of the events about to be described is connected to the others by a common thread: a hitherto largely unconscious bondage and subservience to the parental matrix, with all its many-sided demands. In particular, in the early 1960s, when I was a married man with children of my own, the rector of a large and thriving parish, and a budding lecturer at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto, I was still thoroughly in thrall to the authority of my father. Just as my parents had chosen a career as a minister for me from the moment of my conception, so too it was they who had first suggested that I apply for the post of rector at my first parish, St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines. As mentioned earlier, they had even picked out the evangelical Anglican church I would attend when I went to Oxford!
It was of course no accident that West Hill, where the church of St. Margaret’s was located, was only about a twenty-minute drive from my parents’ Scarborough home. They began to attend the services, even Bible study groups and other mid-week activities. Sometimes they would show up at the rectory early on Saturday morning and begin tidying up the garage or our other casual belongings in the vicinity in order to preserve the proper dignified image for any chance visitors or passersby. Worse, they interfered frequently with Mary’s routines and disciplines for our two children at that time, arriving without warning just when they were being put to bed or handing out candy even after hearing they were not to have any. As they say in England about such unwanted or misdirected activities, “they meant well.” That’s a warning, not a compliment. The truth is that I was not as outspoken or as direct as I ought to have been in warding off or stopping the interference.
In fact, in retrospect I see that I was not yet prepared to face what my unconscious was screaming in my dreams and in a general sense of inner tension and unease. Things in the parish were going very well, but I always felt under the strain of not doing enough. My father would ask from time to time, “How many conversions have there been?” And there were signs of trouble in the marriage as well. Mary had reasons enough, but my failure fully to understand what lay behind the many outbursts only made them worse. When there were the inevitable arguments and quarrels, I would piously blame myself for lack of grace and so resorted to prayer instead of looking deeper for the root causes.
Against this backdrop, as the struggle to build the congregation continued at the same time as the planning for the erection of a new church building was proceeding apace, my father had begun a fresh campaign to persuade me to return to academic life and obtain a Ph.D., or rather the Oxford D.Phil. I had already spent nine years at university preparing for my ministry, so the thought of at least two, possibly three more years of slogging completely left me cold. I had fear, not of being unable to do it, but of ending up in total poverty. My years of study even on scholarships had not been conducive to a bank balance worthy of the name, and while the Anglican Church may be generous with titles and other honours, it was not at that time very supportive where clergy salaries were concerned.
At the same time, I knew that my father’s vision for his firstborn was that one day I would teach as a professor at the bastion of Anglican evangelicalism in Canada, Wycliffe College. Though by that time I would have shied away from being labelled a fundamentalist, I still saw myself as very much a part of the conservative evangelical point of view, with its emphasis upon Scripture and upon the need for a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. My friends in the clergy of all denominations and my other personal contacts consisted chiefly of those with a similar outlook. Even though I did not share my father’s far-fetched dream that I would one day be the leader of a movement that would transform Canada into a national evangelical base for a worldwide mission, I was enjoying the part-time teaching I was already doing. I loved reading and research, and the prospect of being relieved of some of the more tedious aspects of parish ministry held some appeal. Also, I was concerned about the future of Christianity and convinced that the training of young people for ministry was absolutely critical for any hope of renewal.
So, about a year after fulfilling the eleventh commandment for young clergy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Thou shalt get thy church deeply in debt,” by building the new St. Margaret’s, I applied for acceptance as a doctoral candidate at Oxford. The choice of Oxford over an American or Canadian university seemed wisest because, as a graduate student there, I had already fulfilled the basic residence requirement. By returning to my old college, Oriel, for one year, I could then be approved and come home to write the thesis on my own turf. The bishop, Rt. Rev. George Snell, was not very happy about my decision when I announced it to him in a hastily called appointment in his Adelaide Street office. He grumbled about my leaving the parish so soon after the dedication of a new and costly building. But he was somewhat mollified when I said I would come back for at least a year after Oxford to “round things off” properly.
Unfortunately, the entire Oxford project was not planned or thought out as fully as it ought to have been. Wycliffe was pressuring me to rush ahead because the New Testament professor, Rev. Dr. Ronald Ward, had served notice he would be leaving his post in the spring of 1964. It was already about mid-March 1962. There was no scholarship money available and, since I had decided to take the family, there would be considerable expense involved: the boat passage there and back for two adults and two children, house rental, food and transportation for a year, plus the university fees and other sundry expenses.
In retrospect, one can see only too readily that it was one of those times and places where youthful exuberance combined with failure to consult one’s own inner wisdom rather than that of others. The result was undue haste and poor planning. In any case, I arranged for my father to sell our car, and having contracted for a retired American Episcopal (Anglican) priest to live with his wife in the rectory and administer the parish in our absence, we set sail for England in August 1962.
It proved to be one of the most conflicted years of my life in spite of some moments of great illumination as well. The house we rented on Aston Street, off the Iffley Road in east Oxford, was dark and dingy beyond belief, its walls and furnishings every possible shade of brown. The only heat, until purchase of a coal oil–fuelled
