my life was about to change. A door had opened into a huge new arena and an experience about as far removed from my past—the halls of academic, conservative ecclesiasticism—as anyone could ever imagine. There was a surge of fresh energy and excitement within, but also a tinge of anxiety. There was risk involved. Bridges had been burned. The road to priesthood, with ten years spent in my college education and then a very minimum wage for eight years in a parish, had been intellectually rich but financially close to a disaster. With no house (a residence had always been provided and counted in as part of my remuneration or stipend) and very little in the way of savings, and unused to deadlines, I had to follow the course of everybody else at the Star: three months on probation and a very steep learning curve to boot.
Writing articles for a newspaper is definitely not the same thing as composing sermons, lectures or pious talks for the Women’s Auxiliary. Mr. Honderich believed a story should be such as your average cab driver could understand. He had little use for technical or deeply theological terms. He read every line of every issue, and was particularly critical with regard to any “artwork”—photo illustrations—especially on the Saturday religion page. It is said he had a habit of coming into the newsroom and throwing a quarter onto the head in a person’s photograph. If the head wasn’t at least the size of the coin, there was hell to pay for the editor who had approved the photo.
I had never been to a school of journalism. Having been shown around the newsroom on my first day, May 1, 1971, I sat down at the old Underwood typewriter and realized I didn’t even know where to find a pencil sharpener. I knew nothing about how to file stories from overseas—say, from London, Rome or Jerusalem. The first time I went down to the newsroom to ask for a photographer to take a shot for a feature story, the man who turned out to be the one in charge took one look at me as I approached and roared so all could hear, “Just what the hell do you want, Harpur?” I was so shocked that I almost forgot what I had come for. I didn’t know a photo editor from a copy boy.
I would go on to write about ethics, spirituality and religion for the paper over the next thirty-five years.
There was a time in the sixties when, as a professor at a seminary, I had felt a lot of pressure to publish a book—something, anything, that would have my name on it. It was the old “publish or perish” syndrome. I even canvassed a few publishing houses with a couple of what I now realize were pretty vague, pious ideas. Not surprisingly, they turned me down. I didn’t write my first book—though I was part of the three-man advisory team of Biblical experts for Charles Templeton’s book Jesus in 1977—until, in that same year, the popular American publisher of rather conservative Sunday school and related books, Thomas Cook, approached me. They wanted to see if I’d be interested in expanding a series of front-page articles I had written for the Star leading up to Christmas 1976. The series had been called The Road to Bethlehem and was accompanied by some remarkable photos by Star photographer Dick Loek. The original articles came from an idea I had had while walking to work from my home, which at that time was near the Robarts Library on the University of Toronto campus. I proposed to Star managing editor Martin Goodman that I would go to Israel, hire a donkey and walk the 160 kilometres from Nazareth to Bethlehem, staying at border kibbutzim each night. Accompanied by a photographer, I would file stories giving an account of what such an experience was like today as opposed to two thousand years ago. When I laid the proposal before him, Goodman asked one question: “Have you ever been to Israel before?” When I said no, he said: “You’re the religion editor. Isn’t your not having been there a little like the sports editor having to say, ‘I’ve never been to Maple Leaf Gardens’? I think it’s a great idea, and you’ve got to go.” I was to go to Israel several times over the ensuing years—and to Egypt as well.
The series was a huge success for the paper, especially the day they were able to run a headline saying STAR MAN FIRES DONKEY accompanied by a large picture of the stubborn animal being led along the road near Jericho. He (we were told his name was She-mon, or Simon) was supposed to carry our packs, but he was just too slow and so we had to call his owner in Nazareth to come and pick him up on the second day of our trip. With the coloured photos and a coffee table–type format, the book itself looked attractive and sold well. In retrospect, however, I think of it (as indeed I do of Templeton’s book, Jesus: A Bible in Modern English) as a well-meaning mistake.
While one can never forget the intimate sense of that severe yet awe-inspiring landscape brought on by walking all that distance down the Jordan Valley, I realize now that I was really helping to further literalize a story that was never meant to be taken that way in the first place. The account in Luke, the only place in the New Testament where a journey to Bethlehem from a putative hometown of Nazareth is mentioned, is flatly contradicted by Matthew’s Nativity story. According to Matthew, the star that allegedly was followed by the Magi “stopped over the place where the child was” and “on entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother . . .” In other words, in this version, the house of Mary and Joseph was not in Nazareth at all but in Bethlehem. Luke’s story of a birth in a manger resulting from a lack of room in the inn is totally ignored by Matthew. There are other technical details that add to one’s unease over my Road to Bethlehem venture. Suffice it to say that when one is dealing with myth, it is always folly to lapse into the literal and/or historical. I still had far to go and much to learn on my own inner intellectual and spiritual journey.
For some time, as already mentioned, I had been deeply concerned about the failure of religious institutions to communicate their message to ordinary men and women, especially those on the edges and those completely outside. I was almost painfully aware of how much we in the religious establishment relished talking about spiritual matters in a language few others could understand. It seemed time that somebody “religious” made the effort to learn how the media work and how to use contemporary means to spiritual ends. Apart from Malcolm Muggeridge and C.S. Lewis before him, I knew of very few Christians who had made such an attempt.
The past three and a half decades have been a fantastic experience for me. Perhaps in some small ways I have been able to help in pioneering or attempting to set certain standards in the mass communication of religio-spiritual truths. But that’s not the big news for me as I look back. It’s what I learned through the privilege of being a religion journalist at a top paper during one of the most exciting periods of theological and spiritual change in our history. Yes, and how this experience has shaped me as well. It has been a far more thorough and radical course of instruction than all the years at university and theological college ever were. In particular, the twelve years as religion editor were a whirlwind, but they gave me a global experience and held a richness that enlarged my heart and mind beyond measure. All of it formed a new and fertile matrix out of which the many columns and books of my later life as a freelance author and broadcaster were to be born.
I had only to come up with a compelling idea for a story in order to receive permission to go—to Israel, to Japan, to Africa, to Central America, to Scandinavia, to Rome, and to more other places than I have space to list. Star photographers and I travelled deep into the territory east of James Bay with Aboriginal hunters tracking caribou in the depths of winter while we did a story on the James Bay hydro project. We flew into the Sinai Peninsula and slept on the mountain where Moses is traditionally said to have received the Ten Commandments. We travelled to Central America to report on Canadians working with children orphaned by war. We spent time in San Francisco with the world’s first all-gay police squad, and we went fishing for Arctic char out on the ice beyond Baffin Island with an Inuit Anglican priest. We spent time with film director Franco Zeffirelli while he made his epic Jesus of Nazareth in the Moroccan foothills of the Atlas Mountains. Anne Bancroft and the other stars were eager to discuss Jesus with a former teacher of New Testament in the long breaks between scenes. One day, during a shoot in Meknes, a small Biblical-looking town, there was a sudden downpour and I found myself sheltering in a doorway with Bancroft and Zeffirelli. We had a lively discussion. Zeffirelli told of his difficulty in maintaining a sense of majesty or divinity in the Jesus character while at the same time portraying him as human. “He cannot yawn or burp,” he said. Bancroft,
