The recent news that my old Alma Mater, the Vancouver School of Theology, has just been sold off to become a wing of the Economics Faculty at the University of BC strikes me not only as highly appropriate, considering the spirit of the place, but a definite kind of poetic justice. It also prompted me to compose the following fond remembrances of my life as a budding young theologian there, in the late 1980's.
With the usual apologies to Lard Ass and company.
....
“Woe to you, teachers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You cleanse the outside of the vessel, but inside you are full of plunder and every evil thing! - Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23:25
The first day of school was always a real thrill for me, but seminary was different. The wall of strange and judgmental faces that met me in the assembly hall that morning didn't bode well. Nor did the saccharine niceness that dripped from the walls of the Vancouver School of Theology (VST).
“Hi!” exclaimed one of the stern faces that morphed mechanically into an affected niceness in the oddly dissociated manner that I grew used to while in the church world.
“Hi” I replied.
“Welcome!” said the now grinning young man who looked like a college fraternity President.
I nodded and returned his smile, an automatic gesture that everyone else at VST did so compulsively, and that I quickly imitated: so much so that my jaws usually ached by the end of any school day.
“I'm Brian” he exclaimed, extending his hand.
I took it reluctantly and said my name.
“I'm so glad the Lord has brought us together!”
“Uh huh” I replied, wondering if he was hitting on me.
“Oh! And our prayer circle is every night, downstairs in the lounge!”
He's a Pentacostal, I thought.
When I was a kid in Winnipeg, we had a neighbor who was a Pentacostal, and the old lady kept trying to get my family to leave what she not inappropriately called the “spiritual jello” of the United Church of Canada and come over to the real Christians: her group.
We declined, especially my Dad, who did however get a few well placed digs in to her about removing the crap from your own eye first, or something. So the neighbor didn't talk to us after that, which was a shame, considering how cute her only daughter was.
But on that first day at seminary, I was tempted to lambaste my newly acquired evangelical associate in a similar manner. Unfortunately, I labored then under an extreme sort of low spiritual self estimate based not surprisingly on the fact that I actually didn't have any faith. That hobbled my capacity to challenge the Tartuffian idiots around me, meaning that I mostly kept quiet and smiled a lot.
The lunchtime buffet wasn't bad, however, which made up for all the other stuff that day.
After a whack of prayers and a long-winded oratory by the guy who passed for the school Principal - whose homily to we hushed crowd of fifty or so fresh fish reminded me, by its astounding self-congratulation, of the pep talk I had received on my first day at the campus law school - our saintly crowd of novice seminarians retired to the hog fest spread out for us like some latter day Loaves and Fishes, minus Jesus, of course.
That's where I first met Lard Ass.
The guy was a legend at VST, and not just because of his massive girth. Reverend Jim McCullum ran the place like it was his own private cabana, partly because he was drinking buddies with the Principal and had dirt on the guy, whom I'll get to in a minute. But all I knew about Reverend Lard Ass that first day was his prodigious bulk that stood between me and the sagging smorgasbord like a No Go sign.
Everybody called Jim Lard Ass behind his considerable back, his faculty colleagues included. His behavior only served to cement the appellation. For after the obligatory invocation delivered by a proud and loud first year student, Lardo made a direct beeline for the food like it was Christ Incarnate, and shoved his way in front of everybody to be first in line.
I was as shocked as the rest of the crowd, but none of us said anything, and, being Canadians, we all politely stepped back to let the Hulk wade into the feast, which he did with a vengeance. Lardo reminded me of my Uncle Lloyd, who wasn't nearly as fat as Jim McCullum but had the same compulsive need to cram into his maw anything that had once moved: especially at smorgasbords.
Uncle Lloyd had more of an excuse for his piggyness than Lard Ass, of course, being a child of poverty during the Depression and a survivor of a German prisoner of war camp where he was rarely fed. Lloyd had also come also to being shot by an S.S. Company soon after he'd been taken prisoner by them at Normandy in 1944, and so he ate the way other veterans booze. But Lard Ass was just a greedy pig, and not just about food.
The Reverend Hulk actually loaded down two full plates with everything in sight before lumbering to the nearest table with a stupid self-satisfied smirk that reminded me of the kid who rips off a chocolate bar from the local grocery and crams it in his mouth before anyone catches him. Jim McCullum started filling his gorge like a dog in heat.
And that wasn't the worst part. Stuffed to his gills and belching like a longshoreman, McCullum had the gall to stand up later, before any of us had finished our meal, and proceed to lecture us about that day's “lectionary reflection” from Paul's letter to the Romans: concerning, you guessed it, on the need for restraint, moderation, kindliness and consideration towards others in all matters of faith and life.
Uh huh.
Oh well, the incident was in fact a fair and accurate introduction to life at VST and in the church, and also into the battle for my own soul. But I won't get preachy on you. I haven't even had my dinner yet.
I ran into my new holy roller friend, unfortunately, after Lard Ass's homily. The squeaky clean young guy was belching too, but a lot more subtly.
“You have to join us tonight!” he exclaimed, touching my arm in a manner not befitting a purely spiritual encounter.
“Well, my wife and I have something to go to” I lied to him, emphasizing the word “wife”.
“You can bring her!” he shot back. “Please come!”
The whole day was beginning to feel like I was caught in a Monty Python re-run, trapped to cycle through absurdity until the end of time. And the insanity wasn't over.
Shaking off my dogged pursuer somehow, I ended up in the student lounge to pick up our orientation material. Classes were to commence the next day, and I still didn't know my theological ass from a hole in the ground. I couldn't figure out the academic program at all, since it was based on something called Competencies, which were various hoops one had to vault through to achieve the inestimable status of clergy person.
Competency: how fitting a term for what they were trying to make us.
Ironically, I never felt competent as a minister, despite all my preparation: not in the face of the daily unpredictability and chaotic mix of death, grief and banality that falls upon even the least engaged pastor. The ministry has nothing to do with being “competent”, except from the viewpoint of the church number crunchers and those bloodless little twerps who occupy head office and equate true spiritual witness with the balancing of the annual budget.
Anyway, bewildered by the whole registration procedure to say nothing of the whole atmosphere, I sought help at the head office, where I nearly collided with the school Principal, the aforementioned buddy of Lard Ass, who had so wowed us earlier that day with his glowing “My, aren't we God's chosen ones” speech.
His name was Bud Phillips.
If this was a movie, the music would go somber just about now. For Bud was deeply creepy, as witnessed by his decision that same week to arbitrarily sack two of the longest-serving school secretaries to free up the funds needed to renovate his fancy home, next door to the seminary.
The guy, as befits any jerk, was all smiles.
“Settling in?” he inquired, his eyes cold and uncaring.
“Uh, well, yeah, but I need some help ...”
“Lois here can help you” Bud said curtly, on his way out.
Lois didn't help me. Nor did anybody else. It was a strictly learn as you go operation, and I discovered quickly how it all worked: Follow the rules, don't laugh at Lard Ass, and for god's sake, keep smiling!
......................
Woe to you who are rich, for you have your comfort! - Jesus of Nazareth, Luke 6:24
A Conference room at VST, sometime during October, 1989. Kevin Annett is undergoing his final year end Ordination Interview by a panel from the B.C. Conference of the United Church of Canada.
Panel Chair: So can you please clarify what you meant exactly in your statement when you wrote, “God stands with the poor and all victims of the system against that which oppresses them”?
Kevin: Well, just that. That's my reading of the Gospels.
Panel Member 1: (gruffly) So you mean God doesn't stand with the rich?
Kevin: Not according to Jesus.
Panel Member 1: That's your reading of our Lord, is it?
Kevin: I don't see what other conclusion you can come to.
Panel Member 2: So what does that mean for you, in the ministry, Kevin? Are you saying you'll only be able to minister to poor people?
Kevin: I guess so. I wouldn't feel I was being faithful to my own calling, otherwise.
Long pause.
Panel Chair: I'd like to suggest we take a short break.
Kevin Annett was the only member of the 1990 VST graduation class to fail his first round of Conference Ordination interviews. He was then asked by the Conference Panel to re-write his statement concerning his personal calling in United Church ministry.
Three weeks later, Kevin appeared again before the same Interview Panel.
Panel Chair: I assume we've all read Kevin's statement ... are there any questions?
Panel Member 2: Thanks Bob, I have one. Kevin, this is quite a different statement than your first one. I especially noticed that you've moderated your views about your own calling. So I'd like to know how genuine that is.
Kevin: How do you mean?
Panel Chair: Kevin, let's put it this way: now you say that you would in fact be able to minister to rich people.
Kevin: That's right.
Panel Chair: How, exactly?
Kevin: By not being like them. By bringing them the news of the Gospel of the poor one Jesus and asking them to shed their lives of everything that stands between them and him.
Panel Member 1: You mean, like giving away all their money to poor people, right?
Kevin: That's one of the ways, sure.
Panel Member 2: But could you pastor to the rich as human beings, as people with needs of their own, just as important as the poor?
Kevin: (hesitantly) As important? (pause) Well, yes ... I mean, to a point ...
Panel Member 1: To what point? What do you mean?
Long pause
Kevin (subdued and strained): Okay. I meant, yes, I could. I would see them as part of the broader body of Christ and I would approach them as I would the poor.
Pause.
Panel Chair: Okay, I think that answers your questions, eh Marilyn? Thank you Kevin.
After his second Ordination interview, Kevin Annett was approved by the Conference Panel for acceptance into ordained United Church Ministry. He was so inducted on May 6, 1990, at Naramata, B.C., proving once again that it's never about who you are, but what you say.
..................
Perhaps inevitably because of the guy's enormous bulk, I kept running into Lard Ass McCullum, even when I was away from the Vancouver School of Theology.
One of the times our paths crossed was during my year long internship at a United Church in North Bay, Ontario, where I was to learn the skills of my trade, up close: sadly, under the tutelage of a walking filing cabinet named Reverend Jim Sinclair who had aspirations to be elected Moderator of the whole church.
McCullum was good buddies with Sinclair, the Two Jims having known each other in school. And while North Bay Jim wasn't as fat as VST Jim, he was just as much a company man: hence, their mutual concern about me.
I quickly learned all this one afternoon after church when Anne and I were invited to the Sinclairs' place for tea. Anne was enormously pregnant by then with our first daughter Clare, and she mostly sat and chatted with Donna, Jim Sinclair's wife: another big wheel in the national church. But Reverend Jim took me aside and informed me that Lard Ass (not his name for the behemoth) would be “dropping by” to talk over my “progress”.
I tried unsuccessfully to imagine Lardo “dropping by” anywhere, but sure enough, his Lardship appeared soon after, bearing his usual mean and hungry look.
It turns out the whole thing was a set up. After a recent sermon I'd given in Jim's mostly middle class church about the Christian obligation of personal poverty in a world of suffering, some alarm bell must have been rung back in VST or at head office in Toronto: the first of many, apparently, when it came to yours truly. Sinclair had asked McCullum, as a supervisor of interns, to come to North Bay and “provide oversight” of my work, which is United Church Newspeak for holding an inquisition.
And so there sat the three of us in Sinclair's sanctum sanctorum in the basement: me, the blushing young intern, Lard Ass, doing his Jabba the Hut imitation, and Jim Sinclair, acting all wise and beneficent in his soft cop capacity.
Holy banality, Batman! These church types are really stupid, in retrospect. For how could they have not seen back then that I represented a lethal virus in their corporate bloodstream, and needed to be expunged forthwith? But smorgasbords are to clergy and theologians what donut shops are to cops, and all that extra lard clearly impedes the gray matter.
It's not like I didn't give the pharisees ample warning about me, after all, which is why I don't feel much pity nowadays for the entire litigation-besieged pack of fools. For I was perfectly honest with Lard Ass that day in Jim's study, the moment he asked his first leading query about “how I saw” my goal in ministry.
I was still a tad peevish about Fat Boy's grabbing all of the egg rolls at the VST pig out the previous year, so I didn't hold back.
“I feel that Jesus is the role model for all ministers, not just spiritually but in his lifestyle. Like in the Book of Acts. We need to be showing our congregations the way back to a Gospel community where wealth is held in common and there aren't any rich and poor among us.”
McCullum frowned at my words, glanced at Sinclair, and remarked with a slight wheeze,
“Yes. I read that in one of your papers. I see you really do have a messianac complex, Kevin”
As opposed to an obsessive compulsive complex to stuff one's face? I almost replied.
We stared at each other, he plotting, me trying to make sense of his rudeness and stupidity.
Soft Cop took over.
“I wouldn't say that's Kevin's problem” said Sinclair with an avuncular smoothness, as he emphasized “problem”. “He's just a bit lopsided in his emphasis on prophetic versus pastoral ministry”.
I heard that dichotomous expression a lot in the United Church: “prophetic versus pastoral”, as if one can bind a wound with one's eyes shut. The term was just more church Newspeak: a trendy way to say, don't upset the money givers in the pews with a lot of social justice talk.
In short, Big Jim and Little Jim were telling me to shut up and keep my social conscience hermetically sealed and apart from what is quaintly called “normal church life”. That's known as being “pastorally competent” in the church. That bloody “C” word again.
Well, trying to make plutocrats happy is never an easy job, but I knew I had to try if I was ever to graduate and get the golden ring of entry into the ministry. And as I would prove at my final ordination interview, shit, I could lie about myself like the best of them.
So I grit my teeth and assured Fat Boy that I would try to gain a better balance between the two P's, and would work with Jim Sinclair to “become more pastoral with rich people as well as the poor”: a quaint but ridiculous idea, in practice, since their needs and situation differed so profoundly, especially when you tried bringing the two groups together in the same congregation, which nobody ever really attempted for very long. When I tried to do exactly that, later, in Port Alberni; well, you know what happened.
And so everybody seemed happy for the time being, including my wife. And our child Clare Rose was thus born happily ever after on a deeply frigid Sundaymorning to the acclamation and hugs of Jim and Donna and all the other nice church people who would years later deny and denigrate me and even destroy my family when I stopped trying to remain hermetically sealed.
.............
And as a finale: Crazy Walter meets the Fucking Primate
In his more coherent moments, my buddy Crazy Walter from Vancouver's skid row would wander from his voyeuristic pastimes in and around First United church and seek the greener pastures of the University of BC campus, where abounded aplenty thrown away food, comfy couches and young nubile students. He also knew that I attended the seminary there. So much to his delight, and mine, generally, Walt would show up unannounced at VST and seek me out, usually in a loud voice, and hang with me in the student lounge or sit in on various classes where he'd pretend to be a visiting scholar.
His ruse worked more often than not, since your average seminarian or theology professor is about as sharp as an eraser. Walt never got the bum's rush from VST because nobody there quite knew whether or not he was indeed some eccentric savant rather than his actual street guy self. And of course, the long hair and beard definitely gave him an arcane J.C. quality.
But even with all that, staff and students alike gave Wally and his ripe odor a wide berth whenever he ensconced himself in the VST lounge, slurping the free coffee and regaling me and anyone within earshot about his latest ecstatic and usually sexual revelation, proving that rubby or not, he could bullshit as good as the rest of them.
And Walter was thus poised the day the Primate came to visit.
Anglicans are generally weird, and not just because they're Englishmen. Their wannabee papism prompts them to employ not just absurdly pretentious but downright incomprehensible gestures, including the names they adopt for themselves.
Take “Primate”, for instance.
That's what the Alpha Male is called in the Anglican church in Canada: he's the top official, who lies just under the Archbishop of Canterbury. And guess who was coming to dinner at VST that day?
I could tell something was up when the normal Sycophant Index among the school crowd began climbing steadily as lunch time approached. Well dressed big shots and their mink-coated wives started clustering in the VST rotunda, and students began hurrying around, speaking in hushed and excited whispers. Principal Bud even descended from his office for a few moments to flash his perfect smile at everyone and pump the flesh of all those potential donors.
Walter never let anything slip by him, and from his perch next to the coffee machine, he proclaimed in a loud tone, “What the fuck is goin' on?”
One of the few students who associated with me until he was told not to, an American Methodist named Rich Lang, ducked out of the lounge to go and see.
“Probably some cluster fuck” mumbled Walt to me, emptying the last of the coffee from its urn as several students gave him one of those typically Canadian passive aggressive fuck-off-and-die looks.
Just then I noticed out the window that a collosall limousine had pulled up, from which emerged a scowling bearded fellow in a funny hat and huge gold cross who was adorned in a flowing purple and red robe.
Rich popped his head into the lounge and with a provocative grin, he announced, “It's the Anglican Primate”
Exactly as if he'd been struck by a thunderbolt from the Almighty, Walter jumped up and with a wild and aroused look of rapt joy, he bellowed, “The Primate? The FUCKING PRIMATE? He's HERE?!”
Walt hurried to the hallway and stood facing the arriving dignitary, who of course stepped into the rotunda just as Wally did. And with his hips visibly quaking in anticipation, my buddy turned and thrust his considerable ass towards the cleric and his crowd of austere hangers-on while loudly emitting the kind of primal grunts and moans that undoubtedly does it for your average baboon in estrus.
It's all a stage, for sure, and Walt had suddenly seized its front and center. The Primate and his crowd were riveted into a shocked stupefaction as they watched the bearded trickster perform his little mating dance for them. The entire place was instantly silent, save for Walt's groans and the sound of Rich and I screaming our heads off with laughter.
“Oh god, boys, it's those fucking colors he's got on ...” Walt gasped to us as his bum kept rolling ans reaching out to the object of his affection, and we two soon-to-be-disciplined students rolled around on the floor hysterically, trying to breathe.
George Orwell was right, of course, when he observed that the only thing the rich and powerful ever really fear is to be laughed at publicly. And so after its momentary eclipse at the hands of the unwashed, official church decorum quickly recovered; and gathering their briefly-shattered authority, the Primate and his unamused flock turned their collective back on Walter with a decided sneer and hurried off to the reception hall and lots of free food and booze.
That didn't faze Walt one bit, naturally, and he called out to the departing Most Reverend Whoever,
“Oh come on, not again! Just up and leave without even leaving your fucking phone number?!”
Rich and I, somehow, were still breathing by then, although spent and quaking. The other students in the lounge had long since departed, hurrying past our irreverend shrieks with the kind of career conscious disdain I would encounter only too often in the years that were to follow. None of them would even look at Walter, his heretical gyrations not only way beyond the pale but an object of genuine fear for all of them.
Finally, the three of us sat together once more, alone, in the VST lounge. Walt's eyes were aflame and deeply happy, and he let out his high pitched giggle that he always employed during the passing of the collection plate down at First United.
A gruff campus security guy poked his head into the lounge just then, and he mumbled something into his walky talky.
“Well?” said Walter.
.........................
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