Three back-dated posts: October 24, 26 and 29, 1994

"...God is already writing on me."

My Gethsemane moment

Mystical awakening

The beginning of critical thinking

Reflections: These three entries record an essential turning point in my life. Again, I remember it but did not realize I had written about it. Reading it this morning I'm going, "Wow!"

The first passage describes a communion service one Sunday morning. These events were informal, my favourite part of church life. Various people might request songs or stand and read passages that had been meaningful to them during the week. That day I fell into what seemed to me a huge chasm of understanding and connection with God. My religious experience turned abruptly toward mysticism. The insights I gained were not entirely new, but came sharply into focus. For those of you reading Pilgrim's Cross, the novel in my fiction journal, this Gethsemane experience was the inspiration behind Trent's dream.

For the first time since my conversion to Christianity in 1983, I began to explore my own identity and question my church's teachings. The title of the book I criticize in the third entry, Experiencing God, seems ridiculous now. It dictated the prevailing evangelical view, which, while purporting to foster a personal relationship with Christ, in fact utterly discounts mystical experience, i.e. a dynamic interaction with the divine personality leading to apprehension of personal truth. A more accurate title for the book would be Obeying the Bible. Ironically, the ex-gay movement offered more acceptance of my spiritual journey.

My misgivings were regarded as a sign of spiritual immaturity and led to alienation from my church friends. In addition, my ideas about relating to Christ through his suffering probably facilitated my fall into debilitating depression, diagnosed in April 1995. On the other hand mystical experiences helped me resist suicide through that horrendous year and the unravelling of my marriage. They even guided my decision to come out, another kind of born again experience, on January 28, 1996.

This explains why my website, Silvan's Glade, designed and written mostly between 1997 and 2000, is largely devoted to mysticism. It's not as easy to explain why I'm an atheist now.

Saving memory

Kye Yeon Son, Vessel for memory, 2004, sterling silver, copper, enamel, gold leaf; from In service, an exhibit of nine Canadian fine metalworkers at Macdonald Stewart Art Centre until February 27

~~~~~~~~~~

I am haunted by that small white spark in the centre of the cluster of brain cells in the memorial film at the art centre. It still reminds me of a firefly or pixie moving comfortably around its living dwelling while the woven walls, not unlike the structure of this silver vessel, gradually unravel. Once the walls have vanished, it escapes across the screen and disappears, reappearing later in retrospective visions about the artist's work.

At the end our brains may slowly unwind. My father's mother, Fern Waffle, suffered a series of minor strokes which confined her to bed requiring constant care during the final year or so of her life. The last time I saw her she mistook me for her husband, Silvanus Waffle, who had died 13 years earlier. Old Van was doing the thing he loved best one day a couple weeks before his 82nd birthday: weeding tomatoes in the garden. The next day he felt sick and stayed in bed, then died in his sleep that night. He probably knew his heart was ready to give out, but if he had said anything to Fern she would have wanted to keep him alive. I'm sure he wanted to go that way, with a pleasant summer day in the garden the last thing he had to look back on.

Pappy carried vivid memories of his early life, too. He would tell long tales about how he moved to Windsor to work in the new Ford plant in the early 1920's so he could earn a high enough wage to win consent from Fern's father for their marriage. He would tell bout the summers in his late teens when he went to work as a harvester in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. He wrote it all down. The family still has his memoirs, which I edited and compiled into a neat volume in November 1995, 11 years after his death.

Reading through the pages of my own journals from that time, I'm struck by the things I remember: the shocks, the life-changing decisions. And the things I don't remember: a walk on a summer evening with my infant daughter. I am grateful for the time I took to write down small sensual incidents I would otherwise forget. The things that add together to make a lifetime worth remembering.

I'm often startled by the different ways people remember things. Habitually I would stumble around the apartment looking for my keys or a book, only finding them by trial and error. But when Danny visits, he will invariably know where that item is, even a thing of insignificance to him. I wonder whether he walks through my rooms and automatically sees them photographically in his recollection. Lately I have started the habit of always keeping my wallet and keys in one place with the Rolaids and Certs and Tic-Tacs. My notebook and fountain pen are there, too. Everything else is finding places since I recently reordered my living world: the baking soda, the three-hole punch that was lost for six months, my art papers, my favourite cock ring.

The problem with needing one's world so orderly is that when something fails to turn up in the correct place, when it can't be seen among so many clear surfaces, it might as well be lost.

The same way, parts of my life are irretrievable. Episodes of depression have that effect. Maybe that's why I write so fanatically, to get it all down so I can remind myself that this single day held something meaningful. That I bent over and put my nose to the heart of a fading yellow rose.




I'm experimenting with an art journal. I filled these pages last night. The design at left was copied from one half of the cover of the ceiling light in my office. It's for the ED weekly challenge to draw a lamp.