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THE YEAR 1979 marked my fiftieth birthday, and a time when two critical personal matters came to a head and had to be resolved. The first had to do with my role as an ordained priest of the Anglican Church yet deeply involved in what was obviously a very secular profession as a working journalist.

For the first few years after joining the Star I had assisted at several parishes and then took a more or less regular posting as honorary assistant at the historic Little Trinity Church in the heart of downtown. The rector, Rev. Harry Robinson, had invited me to alternate with him in delivering either the morning or the evening Sunday sermon. The church used to be packed for both services as Robinson, a very popular minister, was a leading evangelical preacher. Also a graduate of Wycliffe College, he had preceded me as the Senior Student there in 1955. Readers of my book Water into Wine will know that we didn’t always agree. In truth, my own steadily increasing discomfort on intellectual grounds with evangelical thinking had been quickly making the arrangement less and less satisfactory. By “evangelical,” of course, I’m referring to that theological position which relies almost wholly on sacred scripture for its source of authority (in the Protestant Reformation the rallying cry was sola scriptura—only the Bible) and calls upon the individual to “accept Christ as his or her personal saviour.” I eventually resigned from Little Trinity in 1976. Robinson and I parted on the most cordial of terms, but our paths separated from that point on and once he had left Little Trinity we never really saw one another again.

Meanwhile, I had continued what I had begun when I first went to the Star in 1971, that is, my role as unofficial chaplain to anyone in the media who felt a need for one. Although many reporters are not ardent churchgoers, there were nonetheless babies to be baptized, couples to be married and funerals to be performed. While it made things hectic at times, it was an important ministry and one that I had enjoyed. However, since I no longer had an institutional base and since Anglican canons or rules of discipline require that every functioning priest be officially licensed by the bishop to a specific church, chaplaincy or other post, I began to hear some distant rumblings from diocesan headquarters on Adelaide Street. I soon realized there was a good chance of my being summoned to the bishop’s office, required to sign afresh my oath of obedience to him “in all godly admonitions” and asked to name some parish or post to which I could be assigned in an assistant capacity, however limited. Some called it a matter of discipline; others thought of it as a control mechanism.

By a synchronicity, at the very time I was feeling pressure to conform, an acrimonious controversy erupted at a prominent east end Anglican church. In the larger scale of things, like many church conflicts, it wasn’t about very much—something about parishioners demanding their rector be fired because of his refusal to conduct the baptism of the children of certain “influential” members. A couple of brief stories appeared in Toronto media and as the fracas seemed to be escalating I decided to do a full feature on it. Naturally, I wanted to give Bishop Lewis S. Garnsworthy a full opportunity to air his official take on the matter. So, as I was in the habit of doing, I called his secretary and requested an interview. A short while afterwards Garnsworthy came on the line and exploded in my ear. “Tom,” he thundered, “you’re not helping me on this.” When he calmed down a little, I pointed out that it wasn’t my job to help him if by that he meant my not undertaking a perfectly valid investigation of a series of events of interest not just to Anglicans but to the wider community as well. I reminded him of his words to me at lunch in the Royal York Hotel early in 1971 when I first told him I had decided to become a religion journalist. Garnsworthy had given me his full approval and had said explicitly, “Tom, I want you to be the best reporter you can be.” That reminder cooled his anger somewhat, but there could be no doubt on my part. I went ahead with the story, but the ambiguous nature of my situation had been made very evident. The more I reflected on it, the clearer it all became.

For some time in any case I had felt uncomfortable with the role of “professional holy man.” I seldom if ever wore the Roman collar, the long black cassock or the white linen surplice of an Anglican priest, even when on official duties. Whenever I thought of the latter there rang in my ears the words of a young urchin of the streets who was hanging around the door outside Little Trinity one Sunday morning after the service. Robinson and I in full regalia were standing on the pavement by the door waiting to shake hands with the congregation as they filed out. The little girl with a soiled face tugged at my surplice and blurted out, “Whatcha got that there dress on for, mister?” I wondered what she would have said if she had ever attended a High Mass at the Vatican!

I knew there was a further tightening of the canons governing priestly conduct and teaching in process at Church headquarters on Adelaide Street, and that opposition to this had been turned down at a recent diocesan synod session. But beyond that, I was now deeply aware that I had a real conflict of interest, which I had never been made to feel before—between an oath of obedience to a bishop of one denomination and my desire to bring objective, unhindered coverage of every religion to the Canadian public and the rest of the world. In addition, while I remained totally committed to what I understood and knew about the reality of God, I had serious problems with much of the rest of Anglican orthodoxy.

Reflecting on this, I discussed it with a friend and reached my decision. I decided it was time for me to leave the priesthood chosen for me by my parents long ago. I invited Bishop Garnsworthy to lunch at the Royal York and told him of my intent. He took it all much better than I had thought he would. Perhaps he was secretly rather relieved. He even ordered a second Scotch as he gave his consent and wished me well. We continued on the very best of terms throughout his term as bishop and mine as religion editor for the Toronto Star.

When a notice of my decision to “leave the active use of holy orders,” as it was described in official Church language, appeared in the monthly Anglican publication The Journal, two or three Toronto clergy called to chat about it. (Anglican doctrine, as in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, holds that “once a priest, forever a priest.” The reasoning behind this is that ordination by a bishop in the Apostolic Succession confers upon the recipient an indelible character, character indebilis, which remains. Thus my action was described as giving up the use of holy orders, not the reality itself.) Their major concern was that I would feel a great sense of loss, particularly since I would no longer be officiating at the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. I assured them that I truly felt a new sense of freedom. I told them this was especially important to me because I hoped soon to write a book, together with a regular opinion column in which I would most likely be compelled by new insights and convictions to take positions that would at times conflict directly with official Anglican dogma and practice. As I was convinced that the Eucharist (for Roman Catholics, the Mass) was one of the most poorly worded and misunderstood parts of the ritual or liturgy, I shocked them a little by saying I didn’t think I would miss celebrating it very much at all. The honest truth is, I never have. Over the years that followed, my understanding of “the ministry,” like so many other things, broadened and deepened enormously as I came to see that through my writing and work in mass media it was possible to reach and in effect minister to a far larger parish than would ever have been reachable had I remained in a much more traditional role.

All columnists have critics and enemies. Some of these tried to circulate a rumour that I had been “unfrocked” by Garnsworthy. Nothing could have been more untrue.

Significantly, the one person I hadn’t discussed this whole matter with was my then wife. When I finally told her, she became quite upset. We had sadly by this point reached that stage in the marriage where almost anything of major importance became a battleground.

Nobody was really surprised when the news came from Rome in the late spring of 1979 that Most Reverend G. Emmett Carter, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Toronto, had been named a cardinal by the new Pope. The Star immediately hired a small plane to take a photographer to London, Ontario, the new cardinal’s old stompin’ ground, where it had been learned he would be playing tennis all that day with a staff member of St. Peter’s Seminary. I wrote a story and it appeared with a large photo of His Eminence in full tennis garb in action on the court. I learned later that there had been a last-minute panic at the photo desk when the editor noticed that the fly on Carter’s shorts was definitely not zipped up. Judicious touch-ups were required.

A few days following the announcement of his promotion, the Chancery Office sent out a press release outlining the date in June set for the induction in Rome of several new cardinals into the Church’s highest office next to that of the papacy itself. The release also stated that a commercial jet was being chartered to take the archbishop, some aides, a couple of score of Canadian Catholic dignitaries, plus a full press corps from Toronto to Rome for the ceremony. The managing editor came to my office to give me the word that I would be going and that proper accreditation was being sent by courier that afternoon. Ron Bull, a Star photographer and a friend of long standing with whom I had often worked on previous stories at home and abroad, was to be part of our team as well.

The trip to Rome in June 1979 produced little hard news, but I did get to know Cardinal Carter a lot better, particularly during a lengthy interview on the plane going over. We were just over an hour out from the ETA at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport when the Chancery Office press secretary, Father Brad Massman, came back to where I was sitting and whispered in my ear that the cardinal-elect was inviting me to come forward and join him in the front row. Carter greeted me warmly and said he thought my readers might be interested in an interview on the eve of his being elevated as a prince of the Church. I was, of course, only too happy to seize the opportunity. It was obvious that in Rome, once he was caught up in the preparations and in the event itself, there would be little if any chance for a truly one-on-one conversation.

Before going any further, I should note for anyone not already aware that the College of Cardinals is unique in many ways but most notably in the function it has of electing his successor upon the death of a Pope. The word cardinal itself comes from the Latin word cardo, “a hinge.” The members of the College of Cardinals are the critical hinge upon which the institution itself depends when the crisis of a vacancy in the succession occurs.

When I joined him, Carter was in a very expansive mood and went on at considerable length about his new role and about how he would have much greater influence than ever before on the Canadian scene. He made it clear he now saw himself as about to become one of the prominent movers and shakers of Canadian society. The message was that he was going to be given genuine power and that he fully intended to wield it for the benefit of his Church as well as for the wider common good. I had always liked Carter in the past, even though he often seemed more like a chairman of some large corporation than a leading spiritual figure. But in this interview the impression was of a very large ego about to become much larger, with a dash of potentially manipulative scheming thrown in.

As the outskirts of the city of Rome itself appeared beneath us and word came to prepare for landing, I fired off a quick question about the issue of religion in the schools. Now that Ontario premier Bill Davis had given full financial support to the separate schools in Ontario, did Carter not feel it was only just for the Catholic bishops to go to bat with the Ontario government to seek extension of funding to all religious schools—Jewish, Anglican and the rest? He said he agreed with that position and that he and the bishops would do that sometime in the near future. Of course, that never happened, and when the Progressive Conservative leader of the day, John Tory, made it a central plank of his platform in the Ontario election of 2007, he and his party were soundly defeated at the polls.

I thanked Archbishop Carter warmly and went back to my seat for landing.

The weather was glorious, with Rome at its very best. The pomp and ceremony was colourful and stirring—even moving at times. There is a reason that Italy has produced such great operas and opera stars: Italians have a natural gift for drama and music, and the Vatican, with its history, its setting and its resources, knows how to put on a show. Very few assignments were as wholly enjoyable and as soft to cover as that one turned out to be, and I was glad to have had the privilege. Spiritually speaking, however, I had to wonder seriously what all the pomp and show seen up close had to do with the Gospels or a true religion of the heart.

I heard indirectly in due time that the cardinal was pleased overall with my reporting on his receiving the cardinal’s hat. However, our relationship took a sharp downturn over my critique of John Paul II later in the same year and culminated in a showdown of sorts a few months afterwards. I received a note from press secretary Massman saying the cardinal wanted me to call his office and offer a date on which we could meet for a chat. It sounded a little ominous, but I was naturally keen to keep the door to communication open and so went along with the idea. When the day arrived, I was shown into his large outer office (where he conducted most of his business affairs) and told to wait. Carter soon afterwards opened the door to his inner sanctum, a smaller, more private yet elegant setting reserved for confidential consultations, discussions and decision making. I recall seeing a marble bust of Pope John Paul II on top of the bookcase as I entered. It was inscribed as a gift from Premier Bill Davis.

The cardinal seemed sterner than I remembered ever seeing him before, and he grew sterner still as the encounter went on. He told me he thought I had been slanting my writing against Roman Catholicism in general and the Vatican in particular in recent months. He said this was most noticeable whenever I added a personal column to the religion page but that he felt its presence elsewhere as well. There was more, but that was the gist of the matter.

Apart from the minor tension once with Anglican Archbishop Garnsworthy, I had never been fully leaned on by any religious leader before, but as our session developed it was abundantly clear that he was applying pressure on me to back off. I kept from showing my rising sense of indignation, but I admit it was a struggle. I said it would be helpful if he could be a little more specific and cite columns, news stories or features with my byline where the alleged “slanting” had occurred. He replied that he didn’t want to—or couldn’t—come up with exact examples at that time. I told him he could get a secretary to look them up and send me copies, but he didn’t seem to think much of that idea either. I then took some pains to make certain he understood the difference between an opinion column and stories reporting news.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, he got fairly hot under the collar at about that point and for a moment I thought he was going to end our conversation. In any case I made it plain that I was going to continue writing about all faiths with as much objectivity as possible and that I definitely had no animus against him, his archdiocese, his leader or his Church. (I might have added that I had paid to send two of my daughters to a separate school.) However, at the same time, I told him that Pope John Paul II in my view had been receiving a free ride from the media from the day of his election. I said it was my intention to ensure that the Star reported on all aspects of the papal persona and message regardless of what he or other members of the hierarchy thought or felt. We finally shook hands, but I knew that any friendship that had existed, however fragile, was now a matter of history.

The entire encounter with the cardinal left an unpleasant taste in its wake. It reminded me forcefully of something I was learning as a journalist—that, generally speaking, Church leaders and leaders of other faiths viewed the media with a mixture of guile and ignorance. Basically, they saw the media as there to be manipulated or used for their own ends. They had little knowledge of how the media really worked or of how best to approach them. Certainly their theology had no place for mass media, and it still lacks any depth of understanding, in my view. I remain of the opinion that my own denominational matrix, the Anglican Church in particular, is woefully backward where mass media are concerned. I felt so strongly about this when I finally resigned from my position as religion editor in 1984 that I shortly afterwards accepted a part-time lecturing post at the Toronto School of Theology. The course I taught for three or four years was called the Theology and Praxis of Mass Media.

The summer of 1979 was fairly quiet for a while. I was asked to be a speaker/panel member at the annual think tank at Lake Couchiching called the Geneva Conference. It dealt with the theme of religion and global social justice issues. The only memory remaining of it is that theologian Gregory Baum was also part of the proceedings and that I got into a heated argument at one point with a woman delegate who was upset by a recent column I had written somewhat critical of Ivan Illich. I was in a rather sour mood anyway, because my rocky marriage had grown even more so over the past year.

After Couchiching we went to Manitoulin Island on what was scheduled as a two-week camping trip. In brief, the holiday was an unfortunate domestic disaster. Both of us were in the wrong, as so often happens, but in spite of an attempt at marriage counselling, we realized that we were in an impossible relationship. Fortunately, the children were by then of an age and maturity to handle the breakup in as healthy a manner as possible. At the time, I saw the ending of twenty-three years of marriage as a sad though inescapable failure. In the eyes of my parents and those of the circles they moved in when I was growing up, divorce was looked upon with a kind of holy horror. I felt it could never happen to me. However, in retrospect and in truth, it heralded the beginning of a most creative and fulfilling second half of my life.

Before the end of the camping holiday, I called the Star one day from Little Current, the main town on the island, to check in and was relieved to receive a message from the managing editor about an upcoming assignment. On my return to Toronto, I was to be sent to Ireland and then the United States to cover Pope John Paul II’s second trip abroad. The message said that the plan was to send me over to Northern Ireland a week or so ahead of the Pope’s arrival in Dublin to do a special feature on the effects of the sectarian violence upon the children of Belfast. It was slated for the Star’s prestigious Insight section. I left for Belfast on the evening of September 15.

Belfast was vastly changed from when I had been there as a child of nine and then several times as a student at Oxford. Since at that time my grandparents were still living and nearly all my relatives were there, I was able to receive a greatly reduced fare that the airlines offered for students “going home” for school vacations. I usually visited family briefly in Belfast and then went down as soon as possible to Tullyhogue, the tiny, historic village where my father was born. His brother, my uncle Bob, was my favourite among all the kinfolk. He loved fishing, hunting and other outdoor pursuits as much as I did. We had many wonderful hours fishing for sea trout or salmon up on the moors. It mattered little to either of us whether we were soaked to the skin by the seemingly ever-present rain or not. I vividly recall on one such occasion how we sought temporary shelter in an isolated cottage up on the moor near Loch Fee in a sudden thunderstorm. It was a simple whitewashed stone farmhouse up above the small loch, or lake. The farmer’s wife took instant pity on our bedraggled state and welcomed us in. Soon our coats and other apparel were steaming in front of a glowing peat fire in an open fireplace. The scent of the peat reminded me of the times when I was on the trail through the bush with Rev. Leslie Garrett and our guide, Henry Cutfeet, at Big Trout Lake many years before. Our impromptu hostess soon had two mugs of hot tea and some absolutely delicious buttered scones set before us. It was better than a feast.

In 1979, Belfast had British soldiers in full body armour and carrying assorted weaponry on every downtown street. It was a formidable experience walking past them because they were usually in groups of four, two with their automatic weapons aiming ahead and to the side while two comrades walked backwards behind them guarding against snipers from rooftops or windows. Armoured cars patrolled the major streets and the various districts known for their IRA presence. The Europa Hotel, in the city’s core, had been bombed a number of times. That’s where the Star staffer handling my travel arrangements had decided to put me. “All the journalists stay there,” she said. The place looked badly beaten up and there were various barriers outside to prevent cars with explosives from ramming the entrances. Getting in and out through the security was a regular hassle. But the rest of the city bore the signs of the ongoing unrest and violence on all sides as well. I spent several days visiting schools, talking to parents, educators and doctors, and meeting with representative clergy. The Reverend Ian Paisley refused to talk to me. He was still furious over a column I had done once in which I had said bluntly that Toronto needed a congregation of his Free Presbyterian Church like the proverbial hole in the head. I lost no sleep over his unwillingness to talk.

The city was so bitterly divided that even getting a taxi involved knowing whether you wanted to go to a Roman Catholic area of dominance or a Protestant one. I remember going into what I was told was a storefront where I could order a cab. When you went in, you were immediately faced by a wall that cut the room in half. High up on it was a grille. A voice carried on a PA system said: “Where do you want to go?” There was no sign of anyone anywhere. I gave my destination in a loud reply and was then asked to give the purpose of my trip and the party I would be seeing there. Only when that was cleared out of the way was I told to go outside and wait for my ride.

When I finally left Belfast and headed down to the country for a very brief visit with the Harpurs in Tullyhogue, I felt so thankful that my parents had made the decision long ago to leave all the religious bitterness and fighting behind them and make a new life in Canada.

Fred Ross, a colleague and photographer from the Star, then met me in Dublin, and I was about to have some of my most hectic days as a journalist. The Pope’s schedule called for a week in southern Ireland and then his first visit to the U.S.A. It was a non-stop ride from first to last. It began with a rally one million strong in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. An utterly incredible roar met his opening words. He raised his hand for silence and in the great hush that followed he shouted: “Ireland, semper fidelis!” And the crowd roared its approval once more. His words “Always faithful” have a sad irony about them today. Little did anyone know then the sorry fall from grace that lay ahead for the Irish hierarchy in general and certain of its bishops in particular. Ongoing revelations of abuse of hundreds of children by priests and lay brothers, including a massive cover-up by those in the highest positions of authority, have shocked and shaken the Irish laity to the core. Also a rampant secularism has eroded what was once a monolithic Irish commitment to institutional religion, Protestant and Catholic alike. Faithful Ireland is no more.*

The five or six days the Pope spent in Ireland in 1979 were a mad whirl for him and an even more hectic one for the international press corps trying to keep up. As happened in Mexico and was to be the hallmark of all the many tours of his pontificate, the trip was a non-stop succession of speeches, masses and visits to sacred sites. He had the advantage of a helicopter when needed to avoid the endless traffic jams caused by the vast throngs of people and the extreme narrowness of most of the rural roads off the main motorways. For example, after the youth mass celebrated in the open at Galway Bay, the buses carrying the journalists were stuck in car-choked country lanes for hours afterwards.

I realized more harshly than ever before that, as I had experienced with missionary work up north, a lot of journalism consists of “hurry up, then wait and wait.” But eventually the stories got filed. Then it was time to catch a few hours’ sleep before getting up and tearing off in the papal wake again. When the Irish trip finished, the Star’s photographer and I were chosen in the draw for a seat on the Air Italia 747 that was to carry the Pope across the Atlantic to Boston for the American lap. Overall that was a big disappointment. We had been told he would be coming down from first class to meet with us during the flight. I was certain that, after so many addresses, so much talk in Ireland, he would do what any other world figure would do and at some point hold a press conference. Mid-Atlantic seemed as good a time and place as any. I felt we would have an opportunity at least for a few questions.

It was not to be. When it was announced over the plane’s PA system that he was on his way to our encounter, there was a frantic rush of cameramen and reporters towards the front of the aircraft. There was a lot of shoving and pushing to be in the front ranks. I somehow managed to be struck on the back of the head by the tripod of an over-eager Italian TV correspondent in the process. Suddenly the Pope’s white-robed figure appeared. He took one shocked look at the horde let loose upon him, turned abruptly around and fled the scene.

A few moments later, his voice came over the PA speakers: “This is the Pope speaking. My blessings be upon you and your families. If you have any object with you you’d like to have blessed, now is the time to hold it up. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen.” And that was it. It seemed preposterous to me then and still does today. Here was a genuine chance to engage people committed to carrying his message to the world, to get their feedback, to listen to their concerns, and if necessary to hear their critiques. But, as I knew already and as the world was slowly to learn throughout the whole of his pontificate, this was not a man who was prepared to do any listening even to his own clergy and his most devoted laity. He was highly courageous and single-minded, but at times at fault for his closed ears to everything but what he himself wished to hear, especially the sound of his own voice.

The American tour took in five cities—Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington—plus a visit to rural Iowa. My most vivid memory—apart from the incident of the solitary nun who dared to speak out and question the Pope’s stand of opposition to women priests during his speech to hundreds of women in religious orders at the cathedral in Washington—is of an outdoor mass in the great Mall in that city’s centre. As was his wont, John Paul II had waxed eloquently, at times even stridently, on his already familiar themes of the sins of birth control and abortion and of how priestly celibacy can never be abandoned by the Church. He was of course aware of pressure from the liberal wing of American Catholicism on all these issues.

As he ended the sermon and moved ahead with the Mass, I noticed several young, smartly dressed and sophisticated-looking women in their mid-thirties who had been moved to tears. They joined vigorously in the loud applause when the event was coming to its close. So I took the opportunity to briefly interview several of them as they waited to disperse. All were unanimous in their joy and in their admiration for the man. “What about his message?” I asked. They didn’t hesitate for a minute. One by one they said they really hadn’t paid much attention to it. Asked about the various issues raised, they laughed and said, “We don’t believe any of that at all.” One of them, who happened to be wearing a wedding band, actually opened her purse and showed me her birth control pills. Of course, repeated polls in North America and elsewhere reveal that nowadays the majority of Roman Catholics no longer follow the Vatican’s dictates on birth control or any other of the “hormone issues” either, if they ever did.

There was a certain thrill to some of the events—for example, being part of the papal motorcade with full motorcycle police escort for the press buses, with sirens screaming on every side as we rushed through New York on the way to a youth mass at Madison Square Garden. There they treated JP II as if he were a rock star, and he played the role of global celebrity to the hilt. Again, however, the young people loved the way he looked and sounded, but appeared to be paying little or no attention to what he was actually saying. There was, to my mind, an appearance of connecting but very little substance once the thrill of seeing a major world personality before them had faded away. I found myself wishing it were otherwise.

I returned home exhausted. Thankfully, it would be a couple of months before I set out on an unforgettable trip to India and Nepal, among other things to spend a week with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. She had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

My editors at the Star were immediately supportive when I proposed the concept of “Christmas in Asia” for four consecutive front-page features to run on the days leading up to Christmas 1979. The first and probably most important piece would be about Mother Teresa and her work in Calcutta. But I was also aware of two other people who were less well known but whose calling had taken them to Calcutta on the one hand and to a remote mountain village in Nepal on the other. Because of the unique forms their ministries had taken, I felt they deserved as much attention as the Nobel Prize winner. So photographer Bob Olsen and I were given the assignment. It was the most exciting journey of my career, and it changed my thinking about a lot of things. I had the opportunity to encounter Hinduism and Buddhism actually being lived instead of just hearing about them from lectures and books. Both religions, of course, have a much longer history than Christianity and, contrary to many predictions by missionaries and others, are reawakening and spreading in our time, rather than fading away. I found the things we had in common to be far greater than the differences. In Water into Wine I discuss the many wide-ranging parallels between Vedic or Hindu scriptures and the Christian Gospels.

This was the first visit to Calcutta for both Bob and me, and nothing we had read ahead of time had prepared us for the culture shock of suddenly landing in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. It is also one of the cities where the extremes of wealth and grinding poverty are most evident. Because of the sheer number of motorized vehicles of every size, shape and vintage—few if any of them with proper exhaust systems intact—and since the tens of thousands who have the streets as their only home use dried cow dung for cooking and washing, the air was constantly filled with smoke and fumes. The din was a constant, all-embracing cacophony. But a strange thing happened as you got used to all of that and looked behind and beyond to the people themselves. Calcutta’s streets teem with humanity in all its glories and shames. It’s hard to describe, but you somehow felt your appreciation of the full range of human emotions and inner depths gradually expanding. Even the poverty-stricken beggars had about them a dignity and a sturdy cheerfulness. There was a lot of joy on the faces and in the smiles of children and adults alike. At night, from the window of our hotel, you could see long rows of huddled figures sleeping on the pavement. Each with a shawl or a sack of some kind wrapped about his or her head, they looked like mummies.

Mother Teresa’s amazing efforts to help “the poorest of the poor” by feeding the hungry, caring for the orphans and comforting the dying are so well known they need no cataloguing here. She was very gracious with us. She agreed to be interviewed and photographed and personally escorted us through her orphanage in the heart of the great city. She went with us also to the House of the Dying in the precincts of a temple of the Hindu goddess Kali, and encouraged us there to join in helping to feed some of the dying patients. I was standing there feeling rather at a loss in the face of so many sick and dying people when she suddenly picked up a tin plate with a few chunks of bread on it and said, “Feed that man on the pallet there.” Coming from our germ-conscious culture, I felt at first a reluctance even to touch or come that close to one so dirty and so obviously in pain. But I did what she said and almost instantly knew it was not only right but something that I needed to do for my own sake as well as his. I had a small epiphany and learned through this experience that it was true: the other is oneself. It is in giving that we truly receive and recognize our deep unity with “all sorts and conditions of men,” as the Anglican Book of Common Prayer so aptly says.

In September 2007, Mother Teresa’s little book of personal correspondence, Come Be My Light, was published and shocked the world by revealing that for most of her life, certainly since the early 1950s, she had been weighed down by a terrible sense of depression and of the absence of God. “There is such terrible darkness within me, as if everything was dead,” she wrote in 1953. “It has been like this more or less from the time I started the work.” Then, in 1959, “If there be no God, there can be no soul—if there is no soul, then Jesus—you also are not true.” Like most who try to lead a holy life, at times she found it very hard to pray. Her “darkness” plagued her right up to her death at age eighty-seven in 1997. Upon reading excerpts in Time magazine, I was saddened by her suffering. But I was amazed too at her courage and the grace she showed to us. Many saintly souls down the ages have been troubled by despondency and doubts. Her achievements, in my eyes and in the minds of countless millions, are all the greater in that light. In her presence you felt the power of purpose emanating from such a tiny, elderly woman. She made you feel that all things are indeed possible.

For the second feature I wanted to focus on a Canadian-born, American-based Pentecostal minister, Mark Buntain. Like Mother Teresa, Buntain has since “gone to his reward” as they say in some Christian circles, but what a remarkable story of dedication and of service he had. He had come to my attention sometime previously in a short news story in a Pentecostal magazine headed ST. MARK OF CALCUTTA. I had never heard of him before and I was certain most of our readers hadn’t either. Buntain and his wife had been in Calcutta for over thirty years. The salary was very low; they were rationed to one bucket of water each per day for all their needs; but I have never met a happier couple. Buntain’s record was phenomenal. He had a motor mechanics school for young boys living on the streets. They were given a uniform each morning when they showed up at the school’s entrance and left it behind when they went out to go back to the street each evening. Many had no family. In the school they were taught among other things how to build school buses for his program of schooling and feeding children who lived near the garbage dumps outside the city and scratched out a pittance there. Not only had he established a school for training nurses to meet the needs and hopes of homeless girls, but he had built a modern hospital as well. In fact it was Buntain’s hospital that cared for Mother Teresa on more than one occasion in her later years.

I didn’t share Buntain’s theology any more than I did Mother Teresa’s. But there was everything that truly mattered in common between us. He was so clearly doing the true work not just of a Christian but of any truly spiritual person, whatever their profession of faith. In fact, immersed as I was for the first time in a country where the prevailing, dominant religion was Hinduism, and seeing how in the case of both Mark Buntain and Mother Teresa it was human need that was the determining factor and not denomination or religious faith, it was brought home to me as never before that all our religions are really metaphors for the same Divine Mystery. At their core there is only the one imperative or commandment—to treat one another with true compassion, especially those who need it most. This was the spiritual message that fermented in me from all my various travels as a religion editor.

The same truth shone through when we met the third and final person featured in our Asian odyssey, Dr. Helen Huston, a medical missionary with the United Church of Canada. Here again my interest had been caught by a small news story, this one in the United Church Observer and headlined DOCTOR ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD. That phrase haunted me from the first time I saw it. The article described how Dr. Huston was running a small front-line medical clinic in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Accordingly, when we left Calcutta we took a flight up to Kathmandu. There we hired a car to take us along a very dangerous single-lane road built by the Chinese into the remote interior of the country. It was a long, hair-raising journey of 140 kilometres made more so by our meeting the occasional large truck and having to stop suddenly and back up incredible distances in order to find a spot in which to pull aside and let it pass. There were no guardrails and the gorges on either side were at times totally precipitous. When we reached a tiny village called Dumre we asked the driver to meet us at the same spot in four days’ time. We then arranged for a porter/guide to go with us. He shouldered our packs, including Bob’s heavy camera equipment, and headed towards the snowy peaks in the distance. The name of the remote village that was our destination was Amp Pipal.

In the far distance we could see Annapurna gleaming in the early afternoon sunshine as we made our way across rice paddies, forded cold, snowmelt-filled streams and kept steadily climbing towards our destination. At one point a troop of monkeys scampered ahead of us across the sodden fields. It was very late in the day as we headed into the steep climb up Lig Lig Mountain to the nursing station. The path wound around as it rose until we were deep in the shadow of the mountain itself. It was then that a near disaster struck. I had taken the lead and suddenly, where the solid ground of the path should have been, there was only empty air. Grass growing out of the side of the opening had concealed it in the shadows. All at once I was falling, sliding into what seemed like an abyss. Within seconds, flat on my back and clawing at the steep wall of the gorge, the aluminum frame of my pack caught on a root. I held my breath and gave a yell. Just then I heard Bob Olsen shout and then a thud above me. He too had stepped into the hole in the path and had tumbled. Luckily, his camera strap had looped over a branch above and held him. Suddenly I felt the Sherpa reach down, and with a grip that was utterly surprising in a man so slimly built, he extracted me from my predicament. He did the same with Bob. We were both very shaken by the experience. When we returned to the spot a couple of days later on our descent, we looked over and could see the small huts of a settlement near the valley bottom. It was a dizzying height and it had been a very close call indeed.

The clinic or nursing station was the only such facility within over a hundred kilometres and had in its care a whole series of small villages tucked into folds in the mountains. There were no roads in most of the area, so the “ambulance” was a pole with a hammock slung under it that could be carried on the shoulders of two men. They walked single file along the narrow paths and across the swinging rope bridges over chasms where white water often churned below. When a person was ill, the family accompanied him or her to the hospital and stayed in a rough inn in order to be available to cook and do other necessary chores for the patient. In the short time we were there, Dr. Huston tended to the widest possible range of illnesses, including a man with a very badly infected eye. He had slashed it while working in a patch of sugar cane and, on the advice of some would-be helper, had rubbed rat dung in it as an alleged cure! There were cases of leprosy as well as a host of other ills. You could see from the faces of these finely featured people just how much Helen Huston meant to them and their families. It seemed to me to be the only kind of missionary work that made any sense. These folk had their own millennia-old Hindu faith. I knew from my familiarity with the Vedic scriptures, and especially the Bhagavad-Gita, that when the outer trappings were stripped away, the core doctrine was actually very close to what I believed myself. It looks outwardly like a religion of many gods and goddesses. However, there is only one ultimate source of divinity, or “Godness,” and the various deities are manifestations of that. Each of us is a bearer of the divine light, or Atman, within.

When we finally got back to Kathmandu and caught a flight to Calcutta prior to returning home, the pilot came on the intercom not long after takeoff. He said that Mount Everest’s peak was usually covered in clouds or mist but that at the moment it was perfectly clear there. So he announced he was going to do a favour to everyone aboard and fly as close as safety permitted. It was a truly glorious sight and a fitting close to our adventure on the other side of the globe. We felt a profound sense of gratitude. We had had the rare privilege of meeting with three “saints,” had been preserved from serious harm by a deceptively slight Sherpa, and had seen the highest mountain in the world in all its breathtaking glory. It made what was probably the best Christmas series of any. In the fourth and final article I had the opportunity of summing it all up and of saying how Christmas could no longer be for me the story of the one life of one baby born so long ago. It had become the story of all humanity’s quest for a restored unity and of the need for the birth of compassion in the heart.

* It is relevant to note that on February 10, 2010, Pope Benedict was forced to hold special sessions with the Irish bishops to discuss the huge sex abuse scandal there. At the moment of writing, the Vatican and even the Pope himself are being dogged by emerging stories of cover-up in the highest echelons of the Church.