in 1967, and I spent the summer driving with my family to the Yukon Territory. The Bishop of the Yukon, Henry Marsh, had invited me to take over two churches for a couple of months and to hold some seminars for the handful of clergy in his vast diocese. That was a camping trip to remember, especially travelling up the as-yet-unpaved Alaska Highway. The rough terrain tore the little tires on the tent trailer to ribbons every few hundred kilometres. Taking one of these tires to a garage—they were very few and far between—I realized it looked as though a grizzly bear had slashed it. I asked the lone mechanic-cum-gas attendant, “Do you sell many of these?” and he replied, “We sell them like doughnuts.” But memorable as the Yukon was, the truly important step for me in 1967 was making my first foray into a world that was to change my life and my approach to spirituality forever.
Much as I enjoyed teaching at the college, the questions and friendship of students and staff, I was becoming more and more dissatisfied. The theological college atmosphere, far from being a fellowship of eager, kindred minds engaged in the quest for truth and a better understanding of how to engage and change for the better the world outside our doors, was in reality stifling and incredibly inward-looking. New thinking of any kind was discouraged. The daily morning and evening services in chapel struck me as increasingly boring, cold, and out of touch with the aspirations and needs of ordinary people. I have elsewhere described seminary life as “the Church busy talking to itself.” In all too many well-known schools of theology today, the same description still applies. Outside in the larger world at the time, major events were shaking the very foundations of our society. Inside, it was the old refrain: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Amen.”
In theology, the “God is dead” ferment of the early 1960s had been followed by the Anglican Bishop of Woolich’s 1963 paperback shocker Honest to God. Everywhere in the Church and beyond, it was causing a furor. The bishop, John Robinson, whom I was later to come to know well, spending time with him not only in my home near the University of Toronto but also in Canterbury, where he was born and raised, focused on serious issues revolving around the New Morality and the need to change the traditional thinking about God. In Canada not long afterwards, broadcaster-author Pierre Berton wrote his soon-to-be-famous indictment of a sleeping Anglicanism, The Comfortable Pew. Readers’ opinion pages in traditional Church publications frothed with outrage for months. Internationally, the United States, torn by years of the civil rights uproar, the Kennedy assassinations and a host of other problems, was slowly but inevitably being drawn into the war in Vietnam.
In 1966 the college sent me to some scholarly meetings in New York, held at the stunningly opulent Riverside Church. Sitting for hours listening to deeply learned lectures on Biblical themes and then travelling back to my hotel on the graffiti-covered subway trains late each afternoon, the question I had been asking myself in Toronto grew to a roar in my ears: “What on earth has any of this to do with any of that [the secular world beyond]?” I realized that for me it was time for a truly seismic shift. The longing filled me to find a way or means to move beyond the world of purely academic pursuits to communicate spiritual truths in terms any modern layperson could readily understand. I felt drawn to mass media. The problem was where or how to begin.
One day after my return from New York, between classes, I was in my study praying about this dilemma (this was before my thinking about prayer had been transformed) when there came a knock at the door. It was an Armenian friend, a keen but unconventional, evangelical layman who fashioned fine jewellery for a living. He said that God seemed to be telling him to come and talk to me about a need for me to be somehow involved in media. He cited a series of brief meditations I had done at one time on CBC Radio. It was a nod by the corporation to the churches called Plain Talk and was something I had enjoyed.
I could scarcely believe his words because of their apparent synchronicity. I told him of my deep sense of being “called” to find a voice in the public forum and shared my growing bafflement over how to break in. He bluntly asked: “What are you doing about it?” I told him of my prayers and was priggishly surprised when he retorted: “Well, it’s time to stop praying right now. How many radio or television station managers or newspaper editors have you talked to or taken to lunch? You teach New Testament. You know how the story of the raising of Lazarus begins with a command to move the stone. That’s what you need to do. Move the stone, i.e., do for yourself what you’re busy pestering God to do!” It was clear that he had a valid point.
I knew of only one person who might be a possible contact, an Anglican layman and lawyer named John Graham whom I had once met when he was a delegate to synod meetings at the Adelaide Street head office. He was, I had been told, co-owner of a small radio station called CFGM in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. I called him that afternoon and asked if I could see him about doing some sort of program on his station. To my complete surprise he said at once, “Let’s meet in your study tomorrow.” So we did. On arrival, he came right to the point: “Would you be interested in doing an open-line show one night a week, and if so, when would you like to begin?” I replied that I’d be keen to do so and that since it was then around the end of April, the fall sounded good to me. He said: “I was thinking about next week. How about next Thursday?” That was shock enough, but he followed up that with his idea for a title for the hour: “How about Harpur’s Heaven and Hell?” A vision of the bishop, Right Reverend Frederick Wilkinson, flashed through my mind as I blurted out: “The Bishop will be mortified. We can’t go with that.” But Graham was not a man to be easily put off once he knew what he wanted. And a prophecy he made at that moment eventually came true. He told me: “Some people, especially your colleagues and other prissy Anglicans, may not like the name, but I guarantee you that once heard, it will never be forgotten.” I little expected then that my first book in 1984 would go on to be a bestseller under that name, and that an hour-long interview series I hosted and that ran nationally for three years on VisionTV would bear the same title.
Daily radio had never really been on my radar screen—apart from CBC News occasionally and the programs featuring classical music. Life had simply been too full. But I immediately began tuning in CFGM to discover what it was like. To my initial dismay, I found it was a country and western music station with such theologically insightful songs as “Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goalposts of Life” and “When It’s Round-up Time in Heaven.” A genuine feeling of alarm befell me when I heard the first promo for my maiden show. The promo itself was fine, but the disc jockey followed it immediately by announcing the next record: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ with You Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).”
The principal of my college and I had not been on the very best of terms before this, but there was a further coolness suddenly emerging that was to mark our relationship from then until I left my post to become the religion editor of the Toronto Star in 1971. The news that I would be hosting a radio show was definitely not appreciated.
The program itself had a slow beginning. A country and western audience didn’t have a lot of use for professors of Greek and New Testament, especially one who knew next to nothing about them, their interests or their heroes, musical or otherwise. For some weeks I had to get family members and friends—even the Old Testament professor, my esteemed colleague, the late Reverend Dr. R.K. Harrison, a close friend who sounded a little like my mother on the phone—to call in and voice opinions or simply argue with me. Afraid to face an entire hour void of commercials on my own, I routinely had a guest to talk to when there was nothing but terrifyingly empty air.
Graham kept encouraging me to “lose the guests” and launch out unaccompanied into the deep. Gradually, I began to do this and surprisingly it worked—much better than I had hoped. I still had guests from time to time, including John Diefenbaker, our former prime minister, a stripper who had “found God,” and eventually the famous Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, by a direct line (for an hour) into their room in the Montreal hotel where they were holding their 1968 Bed-In for Peace. John spoke eloquently about his front-page comments on how the Beatles were “better known and communicated with modern young people better than Jesus Christ.” Unfortunately, though the station supplied me
