into the lap of a matronly woman wearing a straw hat. She stared at me as if I had done it on purpose. I apologized and waded into the homily, but found it hard to keep up the enthusiastic momentum my notes called for. As I laboured on, the congregation took on that fixed, glazed look of those whose minds have wandered far away. Then an extraordinary thing happened. A sudden, quirky gust of wind came in the window, lifted the paper with my sermon notes on it and gently wafted it outside, where it tumbled like a falling leaf to the lawn below.
Now the congregation came to life and started to look interested for the first time. I did my best to smile and, putting a look on my face that I hoped would show I was better off without the notes anyway, tried to improvise. It was a losing battle until I suddenly remembered my concluding points. I seized on them like a drowning man and worked and reworked them until I had successfully filled the remaining ten minutes.
Afterwards, several parishioners told me they had enjoyed such an “interesting” sermon, but I knew that “roast parson” would be the main course at Sunday dinner in more than one home that day.
“The cure of souls” is an old-fashioned way of speaking about ministering to people’s spiritual needs. A good deal of time in the parish was spent presiding over the rites of passage of funerals and weddings, and administering the sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion. During the course of my ministry I had, like all clergy, to face human tragedy and sorrow times without number. I found it a tremendous privilege and responsibility to be admitted into the tender arena of grief and attempt to bring comfort, renewed courage and hope. There can be no point at which a minister comes closer to people, who are very often today total strangers to him or her, than when a death occurs.
The one thing I tried to avoid at all costs was the habit of some overzealous clerics of seizing the occasion of a funeral, where one has a captive audience, as an opportunity to preach to the “unsaved.” It still goes on today and has always seemed to me an unfair tactic. Words of comfort—yes, of course, but anything more is not truly compassionate. My very first funeral was that of a three-year-old. She was a little girl, the joy of her parents and grandparents, who lived on a farm together at the edge of town. The only grandchild, she was tragically run over by the grandfather’s tractor one morning as she ran to him unaware that he was going to back out of a nearby shed. Everyone was devastated and my heart was particularly touched to the depths by the plight of the old man. He was utterly inconsolable. I visited him and his wife, as well as the young parents, several times before the funeral—mostly just to be with them, saying very little, except to try to assure them of the presence and love of the Eternal always with and within them and their darling little one. At the service I studiously stayed away from syrupy truisms or the, to my mind, wholly misleading pronouncements often heard at such events as people try to make sense of the incomprehensible, to the effect that “God took her because he needed her in heaven” or “She was too good for this world.” But it was very difficult, even at times exhausting work, if you really loved your people.
So close a walk with death and dying takes its toll on many ministers and priests. If not for the ability to receive the gift of humour, most clergy would find it impossible to continue. You could even, with no disrespect, call it “putting the fun back in funerals.” Often I found that when hearing about amusing things the deceased person said or did, the bereaved may begin to sense that healing is taking place. This was especially true when the deceased was on in years and had lived a full life. In the midst of the saddest funerals, I sometimes found my own spirits start to lift, for example, at the incongruity of the professional grief of the undertaker and his staff in their mourning clothes or the syrupy and sentimental funeral chapel hymns.
Once, I was conducting a funeral in mid-winter. I felt I looked rather resplendent in my new floor-length black funeral cloak, which was designed to ward off the chill that only cemeteries in winter provide. However, as I strode by a group of mourners, a young lad of about eight pointed at me and, tugging at his mother’s arm, said: “Look, Mum, it’s Zorro!” It helped my humility, but it did more—it introduced a note of laughter and saved an otherwise very bleak day. I was reminded of Robert Frost’s poem “Dust of Snow,” about being in the woods on a depressing winter’s day. He wrote that the way a crow in a hemlock tree shook down a dusting of snow on him lifted his mood and “saved some part of a day I had rued.”
Weddings are usually a pleasant part of any minister’s duties. It’s a privilege to be close to a couple at such a key existential moment. The pitfalls are many, however. Often I would find that the reception hall, flowers, rented tuxedos and even the wedding cake had all been booked and partially paid for long before I was asked if the church and I would be free and willing on a particular Saturday in June. Being the busiest month of all for weddings, compromise was often necessary.
The media got involved at the first wedding I performed after receiving my licence as a newly ordained deacon. It was my sister Elizabeth’s wedding, and it was a tasteful ceremony carried out at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Churchill, Ontario, where I was serving a summer charge. I was mortified, however, to pick up a copy of a Toronto daily (the now-defunct Toronto Telegram) the following Monday and read a report under the heading BROTHER MARRIES SISTER.
During my last summer at Big Trout Lake in 1950, on one occasion the groom failed to show up at his wedding. The missionary, Rev. Leslie Garrett, had told me to be sure to come because it was to be a double wedding and there would be a colourful send-off at the end when all the men of the band would line up on either side of the path as the couples left the church and fire their shotguns off into the sky in a grand salute. Frankly, I was a little nervous about this part of the celebrations because, for people who lived most of their lives by hunting, these particular Cree seemed very unlucky in the number of injuries they did both to themselves and to others through accidental discharges of their weapons. But I resolved to go anyway.
Two brides showed up, but only one groom. We waited for at least a half-hour, and in the end I felt so sorry for the woman without a man that I would have liked to volunteer one of the other young men present. At last someone was sent to find out what had happened to the missing man. It turned out he had fallen asleep and forgotten that the event was set for that afternoon. He was too chagrined and ashamed to show his face that day, and his girlfriend was asked to sit down while the other bride was married. Most girls would have been insulted to the point of rejecting such a sleepy suitor entirely, but the pair were married the following Saturday. I’m happy to report that no one was injured when the shotguns finally were fired for them.
The Anglican service of baptism, intended mainly for infants of very tender age—the Book of Common Prayer actually says “as soon as possible after birth”—always has as its Gospel reading the passage where Jesus bids the disciples to “suffer the little children to come unto me.” Although church attendance today has suffered dramatic declines, for very good reasons, many young parents still want the traditional baptism for their babies. The principle seems to be that once the baby has had all its shots against temporal diseases, it should then be inoculated against any possible spiritual harm. Ironically, the process for many years now seems to have served as an immunization against ever catching Christianity. Of course, the other motivation is the family party afterwards, or it may simply be done to please the doting grandparents.
One morning around 1960, as a consequence of the flood of newcomers taking up residence in the West Hill region, the parents of sixteen children came for the sacrament of baptism. Their many relatives and friends added significantly to the already large regular congregation. Several of the more influential parishioners glared at me when I first came in because they had been forced out of their usual pews by the invasion of these strangers. As I strode into the centre aisle to begin the various prayers for the “remission of sin by spiritual regeneration” of the assorted babies and toddlers before me, one three-year-old decided to make a break for it, running down the centre aisle with his father in hot pursuit.
The escapee was returned, but not without howls of outrage. This unfortunately made the rest of
