The Mystic Cave

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Our move to Calgary was accompanied by signs and wonders, as if heaven and earth were being moved to make it so. Doors were being opened for both my new parish and my new diocese. Expectations ran high. Even our family life was finding a new footing. But appearances can be deceiving, and first impressions do not...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Heaven on earth is a nice idea. But we all know it can't last. It was a pity our time on the Coast couldn't have lasted longer. It was so close to my heart's true home. But forces from without and forces from within were nudging us to move on to our final destination--no, not THAT final destination...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). We had intended to move to Calgary. But we overshot it by a thousand kilometres, placing us on the outer edge of Vancouver Island, in Tofino and Ucluelet. It was a wild new place to call home and an exposure tour for all of us. Sandy was employed by the local tribal council. The kids saw nature up close and perso...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Our move to St. Simon's in Oakville changed the names and faces, but not my underlying problems. Once again, I was caught up in all the exciting new possibilities. As once again my family started to take a back seat to my ministry, I could feel that familiar enervation. I was working too much and too hard. B...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). I thought I was moving up in the world. Having made a splash in my first major parish, maybe I could raise my profile even higher by moving to a new diocese. That's what my ego was saying. But just about every other part of me was saying I needed to rest, and to reconnect with my wife and family. Fortunately...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). In my big new parish it was sink or swim, so I swam for my life. But one of the rules of the sea is "women and children first," something I hadn't heard yet. As my work life exploded, my home life all but rolled up into a ball and shrivelled away. I was burning out, with no one to blame but myself....

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Even the church offers a version of life in the fast lane. It's what happens when a fresh young priest is anxious to prove himself and the church is all too happy to put him to work. It was hard work in my burgeoning parish of St. Philip's, Unionville, but rewarding as well, especially as I learned to s...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). I was a new priest. But I wasn't a new man. And no amount of holy posturing could hide that fact. I was still too young a man and too new a priest to realize that it was my humanity that God, and God's people for that matter, actually wanted of me, not my exalted ego. But, not realizing that yet, I stuc...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Finally, I was ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada, both as a deacon and a year later as a priest. But it appears we can never lift ourselves too far out of the muck from which we crawled, eons ago. Odd things happen when we do, some of them laughable, some of them humiliating, to bring us back down to eart...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). I was placed as an interim minister in Dave Ward's old parish of Cookstown. My heart still needed healing. But so did theirs. So we ministered to one another, as “wounded healers.” It was a rich and grounding time, reminding me of my familial roots in North Vancouver. I might have been content to stay there....

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Following my graduation from Trinity, I was set adrift by my archbishop when he learned that my marriage had broken up. I wouldn't be ordained along with my classmates. But he was willing to give me some thing, so he sent me as the chaplain to a church camp. It proved to be just what my wounded soul needed....

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). There's a children's song for a long car ride that begins, "Are we there yet? Not yet!" That might have been my song as I entered my third and final year at Trinity. Both graduation and ordination were being held out to me as real and tantalizing possibilities. My focus had returned. I felt re...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). In every hero's quest, the sirens of waylaid distraction eventually appear, calling out, "No, over here! This way!" It's not to say we shouldn't obey them. Maybe we should go over to where the sirens are beckoning to us. Maybe, even, we need to go there, in order to rediscover where our t...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Trinity College, at the University of Toronto, where I began my divinity training, was a magical place. But as enchanting as it was, and thrilling, not all magic is good magic. I would find that our humanity follows us everywhere we go, even to places of higher, which is not to say heavenly, education. Credits: I...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). My fundamentalist beliefs delivered me into the bonds of marriage. I was certain that's what young Christian couples were supposed to do. But my new liberal beliefs were pulling me in directions I could not have foreseen, where faith meant stepping out in the absence of certainty. Life was, in fact, becoming...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). As Spirit-filled Jesus People, we had the light, but we didn't yet have the depth. For that, we'd need to live in our new faith for a while, testing it against what life itself wanted to teach us. And life wanted to teach me that I wasn't the only one who had God living inside me. Secular professor...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). I trade in my weekend parties for weekend worship, and for a mission to evangelize the world. Heady times, full of drama, as is just about everything in the teen years. The narrow beliefs wouldn't last. But the faith would. And the importance of a "relationship" with the divine. God was becoming mo...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Our family's move from Montreal to Toronto introduced me to a whole new group of friends. It also introduced me to Jesus. Personally. So I was brought to a classic crossroads. What did I really want to do with my weekends? Party, or pray? I was a teenager, but the answer wasn't obvious. Credits: Music C...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). The tensions only increased as I approached my sixteenth birthday. My good and bad angels fought with each other. My brother made home life intolerable. My parents both suffered challenging health issues. I sought solace with my friends. Until we rolled it all up into another move ... and started again. But what...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). Our family's move to Montreal was as eye-opening as it was alarming. We found ourselves in the middle of a religious battle zone, where it mattered which school you attended and which church you belonged to. But I had other things to think about than my religious identity. I was entering my teens and the wor...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). My childhood, looking back, seems idyllic. Stable home, healthy church, friends and family all mixed together in one big happy tribe. But, as happens, the seeds were already being sown for the person I was to become, specifically, for the minister who was even then taking shape. Life lessons were preparing me for...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). I begin my story with my memorable ordination as a deacon. It was a strange experience, being "raised up" to become a lowly servant. Even then, the contradictions abounded. Not like my early experience of church, where it was all about safety and security and, above all, belonging. My childhood in North...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). This is the start of my memoir about life in the church, titled, "Lost Rites: Leaving Church Land." I wrote the memoir to try to understand why, after a lifetime in the church, almost forty of those years as a parish priest, when I left, I was done. The story starts here, with an unsettling epiphany sma...

Click here to send me a text message (include your contact info if you want a reply). In this inaugural episode of the Mystic Cave I greet my new listeners, spiritual seekers who, like me, find themselves on the other side of conventional religion. It may feel like a daunting journey into the unknown. But we're not alone ... and it's such a rich and verdant terrain. This podcast is all a...