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IHAVE TO CONFESS to liking high school very much indeed. Compared with the years spent in elementary school education, it struck me forcibly as an entirely new kind of adventure. A powerful lust for knowledge combined with a fresh sense of freedom made what was dull and tedious to many of my fellow students a pure pleasure to me. A course in music appreciation was a part of my chosen curriculum for the entire five years. This opened up a whole new world of classical music that has been a motherlode of spiritual comfort and renewal in my life ever since.

When the Metropolitan Opera Company came to Toronto’s Massey Hall, our music teacher was asked by a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to look after the sale of programs and librettos for the week. He then asked me and two other students to assist him. This meant we saw many of the best-known operas, including Faust, Carmen, Il Trovatore, La Traviata and The Magic Flute, presented by the leading artists of the mid-1940s. The Met came two or three times to Toronto during that never-to-be-forgotten era. Glenn Gould, who grew up in the Beach district and was a student at Malvern during my final two years there, was persuaded to play for the whole student body at auditorium several times. So we were able to hear and watch him before he became the famous artist we know about today.

In high school, it was learning French and Latin that I enjoyed most. Once again there was the recognition of entering new intellectual realms and into a broader experience of the minds and lives of other peoples and cultures—a deepening of one’s own humanitas. But it was while I was in grade ten that something happened that brought about a truly significant change in my life. We had an English teacher, Ms Enid McGregor, who made studying English grammar, poetry, prose, drama and composition a perfect delight. One day, however, she took one of her frequent side trips (as we called them) and began to show us how many of our most familiar words came from ancient Greek. She began writing lists of them on the blackboard: geo-logy, anthropo-logy, demo-cracy, pneumatic, Christ-ian and so on. I was absolutely fascinated.

It must have been a case of what Carl Jung dubbed a synchronicity (again, a word from two Greek words) or, as they say, “it was meant to be,” because I eagerly drank in all she had to say and felt a genuine hunger for more—much more. At close of the class I stayed behind and asked her if she knew how I might be able to learn classical Greek. I told her of my thoughts about entering the ministry and how it seemed a good way to prepare for one day reading the New Testament in its original written form, that is, Hellenistic Greek, which was a popular form of Greek spread over much of the ancient world by the deliberate policies of Alexander the Great. She positively beamed at me and said that a retired friend of hers, a Miss Myrtle Stevens, had taught Greek at one of the only two high schools in the Toronto region where it was on the curriculum. She said I probably already knew her since she had been a supply teacher during the recent illness of Malvern’s Latin master. I recalled the lady at once. With the lack of sympathy typical of many teenagers, we had called her Little Caesar and had done our best to make life difficult for her. I now blush to think of how cruel a lack of awareness and compassion can be when a crowd or even a mob mentality moves in before you know it. In any case, an introduction was arranged and I began taking elementary Greek with Ms Stevens as my tutor twice a week after school. In a one-on-one situation with a student keen to learn and eager to work, she was a marvellous inspiration.

Myrtle Stevens lived in an apartment in the Beach directly facing Lake Ontario. I had a rather nondescript but hugely loyal dog at the time, named Pat. He would accompany me down the winding ravine that led almost directly from our home down to Queen Street East and the water. Pat chased squirrels as I intoned Greek declensions and conjugated Greek verbs to myself while hiking through the woods. On the other afternoons I had a part-time job as a delivery boy for Betty’s Fish and Chip Shop on Kingston Road. In the winter I was told to keep the newspaper-wrapped food orders inside my parka to prevent them being a cold, congealed mess on arrival. The system worked, but it meant that one’s hair, clothes and everything else reeked of deep-fried grease. The good thing about it was that as I pedalled the bicycle through sun, sleet and snow, I repeated the Greek vocabulary and grammar to myself until I had them down thoroughly. This meant I had little or no remaining Greek homework to do at night.

The following year, Ms Stevens introduced me to Homer’s Odyssey. I had always loved adventure stories, especially those involving travel, the kind of tale told so well by my favourite childhood author, Richard Haliburton. His mysterious and never-solved disappearance in the Sea of China on board a junk in 1939 had captured my boyhood imagination in a major way. Accordingly, to stumble, however slowly—looking up nearly every word at first in a lexicon—in the wake of Odysseus and his companions was a dream come true. The two of us, an elderly spinster and a teenager, sat together over the ancient text and shared a rare sense of harmonious delight. I counted myself fortunate indeed in such a mentor. And Pat was always there afterwards, waiting patiently for me outside. We trudged home happily in the gathering winter darkness up to Kingston Road and home. I little thought then that I would one day be the minister of a growing church situated right on Kingston Road, about ten miles farther east along that same highway.

By grade thirteen, the final year at Malvern, Ms Stevens had me convinced that I had a reasonable shot at winning a scholarship to university if I worked really hard. She said the good news was that the number of students in the whole of Ontario taking their finals in Greek was small—so, more opportunity to win. The bad news, of course, was that these students were amongst the top scholars in their respective schools. The competition would be keen and close.

The results back then were published in the Toronto daily papers. It was early July 1947, and I was up on the roof of a cottage on Lake Simcoe helping my summer boss shingle a roof when a young lad I knew from a nearby farm came up the lane on his bicycle. He had a newspaper in his hand. He blurted out: “You got nine firsts and a second. And you got a scholarship too!” I nearly fell down the ladder in my rush to take a look. There it was in black and white: the James Harris Scholarship in Latin and Greek. I let out a whoop of joy because this meant my complete tuition would be paid for all four years of Classics at the University of Toronto, with a little money for books besides. It wasn’t the leading prize; that was won by a student from Riverdale. But for me it was an answered prayer.

There was one piece of wisdom Ms Stevens gave me in addition to tutoring me in Greek. Right at the start she said that if I was serious about my studies, I should find something practical to do as a hobby. Working with your hands, she said, complements working with your brain. “You can do woodworking, manual labour or whatever, but you’ll find it keeps you balanced and fit.” I took her advice and spent an hour or so after school most days at Malvern in the shop making lamps, birdhouses, bowls (on a lathe) and other household items. In the summers before I started going north as a teacher I did a variety of jobs, from selling fresh fish off a horse-drawn wagon to cottagers at Lake Simcoe to haying, hoeing and cleaning stables on a farm near our cottage. Playing sports of various kinds was another great release from purely intellectual pursuits. I even continued to play rugger while in my first parish as a minister, from 1956 to 1958 at the University of Toronto. By that point I had already played as a forward on the Varsity first-string squad during my two years studying theology at Wycliffe, from 1954 to 1956.

The four years I spent studying Classics at University College in the University of Toronto were a mind-expanding, privileged experience that laid the foundation for everything that followed. The course involved reading in the original Latin and Greek most of the great authors of antiquity, from Cicero, Pliny and Virgil, Horace and Catullus, to Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Herodotus and Plato, to name only a very few. I could scarcely believe my good fortune, or “blessings” as my mother would have said. There were archaeological studies of art and architecture from the classical and Hellenistic eras in special lecture rooms at the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition there was an English course each year and also one in Oriental or Near Eastern Studies to put our core interests in their wider context in the ancient world.

The terms of my scholarship required that my marks be a “first” each successive year, and I was able through hard work (and prayer!) to maintain that and win additional, smaller awards as well. But the really important thing is that a whole new universe of ideas and of insights into the humanitas of our species was gradually opening up for me. It was an incredible inner voyage of discovery.

Two of the encounters that were to be powerful influences on my later thinking about religion in general and my own faith in particular were with Platonism and Stoicism. Plato, to use a colloquialism, blew me away. The myth of the cave, for example, has stayed with me all down the years. There has never been a better depiction of the way we humans often persist in ignorance or half-truths and then resist in anger when someone—a guru, a teacher or even a saviour figure—comes and seeks to lead us to the light of a greater reality.

The soaring heights of Plato’s spirituality, especially with regard to the Form of the Good, or God, took me completely by surprise. Here was a writer almost five centuries before the Christian era whose thoughts and even at times his express words echoed in the writings of Saint Paul and in the Gospels. It’s not that Paul or the Gospel authors quote the great philosopher, but his ideas and occasionally his actual illustrations foreshadow and influence the New Testament and indeed all subsequent literature in the Mediterranean world and far beyond. All the top theologians of the Church’s most formative period were inspired by Plato and by Neoplatonism, most notably of course Saint Augustine. Socrates, Plato’s hero and the key voice for all his major works, was widely recognized by these same Christian thinkers as in every way a Christian before Christianity. Meeting him in the pages of Plato in the original Greek text is something one can never forget. What I didn’t know then but was to learn later in my research for The Pagan Christ was that Plato himself had spent considerable time in Egypt, where he was instructed by the priests in the spiritual lore of that ancient treasure house of wisdom. In the writings of the classical authors, Egypt is described as “the temple of the world.”

Meeting Zeno and the Stoics was another life-changing moment of illumination for someone who had been raised in the east end of Toronto by Irish immigrants. Zeno of Citium (335–263 BCE), the founder of Stoicism—the name comes from the stoa or porch where he walked as he taught in Athens—set out a philosophy that directly embraced the world or, better still, the entire cosmos. He instructed his followers to think of themselves as citizens of the whole cosmos. He was thus the first truly cosmopolitan man.

It was profoundly liberating to read how he taught that the divine Logos, the rational principle according to which the cosmos was brought into being—and also of course the same term used in the opening of John’s Gospel and translated as “the Word”—was actually inherent in the mind and heart of every human being. Zeno called this divine spark of rationality the logos spermatikos, the “seed” word sown in everyone. Immediately you are led to think of the passage from John just cited: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . That was the true light which lighteth every human being coming into the world.” Based upon that kind of foundation, the Pagan, Zeno, taught a universal brotherhood of man and a total commitment to fulfilling one’s duty and destiny. Reading the works of later thinkers and writers such as Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, you quickly realize that they too were “Christians,” without the cross.

By this time I was reading some of the New Testament itself in the original Greek, and in doing so I one day came across the famous passage in the Acts of the Apostles describing Paul’s visit to Athens and his encounter with the Pagan worshippers on the hill of the Areopagus, overlooking the city. It was thrilling to hear again his purported sermon wherein he takes as his text an inscription he has just noticed on one of the altars there. It said: “To an unknown God.” The altar was just a case of the Athenians covering all their bases by ensuring that no deity would be left unappeased. But Paul is shown as turning it effectively to his own ends. He says, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” He then goes on to add that the God who

made the world and everything in it . . . does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are [God’s] offspring.”

I wish to emphasize what the Pagan poets being referred to here (Cleanthes and Aratus) actually said because it struck me so forcibly at the time that this is precisely the core message of Christianity also! Every living human—being regardless of creed, colour, sexual orientation or status in society—is a child of God and lives, moves and has his or her being in God, the Ground and Source of all Being. I lay some stress upon this growing awareness of the universality of the Christian message because it played an important part as gradually, through the years of intellectual preparation for the studies and the ministry that lay ahead, I began to challenge little by little the narrower viewpoint of my early years. The discerning reader will already have noticed aspects of my thinking destined later to be fully defined in The Pagan Christ and in Water into Wine in particular.

The question of whether or not students in training for the ministry at Wycliffe College (where I was in residence while attending University College) would take a summer charge each year even while they were still in their general arts course was never seriously discussed. In 1948, at the end of my first year in Classics, the principal, Dr. Ramsay Armitage, one of the finest human beings I have ever known, simply called me into his office and told me of the assignment he wanted like me to undertake that summer. He told me to go upstairs to my room and “pray about it” and then come down to his office the next day to pick up the train tickets. He told me, “They’re expecting you next week.” Apparently no need to ask for divine guidance after all!

When I was still a choirboy, all decked out in an angelic white surplice and high starched collar, I used to sit in church during the sermon and fantasize about being a missionary in the High Arctic. The traditional cleric in his dark suit and Roman collar had minimal appeal for me. But I could see myself with the frost ringing my parka hood of wolverine fur, driving my tireless huskies across the vast expanses of snow in search of hapless Natives to whom I could do immeasurable “good” in some very vague, idealistic manner. Later I eagerly devoured books on the North, especially the one about the bishop who ate his boots—Bishop Stringer. In my reveries I elevated myself to the rank of northern prelate, complete with gaiters, flying my own plane into remote Eskimo communities where I would be met with applause and undying loyalty.

When I did finally arrive in the North as a student teacher that first summer, the reality was of course somewhat different from the dream. I was to be a schoolteacher to about seventy Cree children. Big Trout Lake reserve (or Kitchi Numaboos Seepik, as the Cree call it) was a huge expanse of primeval bush, rivers and lakes about 1,600 kilometres northwest of Toronto. It was very close to what today is known as the “Ring of Fire,” where vast mineral deposits are currently being prospected by a host of claimants. Chromium, a vital but rare element for the making of steel, is apparently hidden there in very large quantities. Diamonds of a quality equal to those of South Africa have also now been discovered not many miles from the reserve. At that time the Hudson Bay store held a monopoly on all sales there, and the Anglican Church had a monopoly on religion. The only non-Natives on the reserve at that time were the Anglican missionary, the Hudson Bay manager and his clerk, two weather station staff and myself. The Cree children lived with their trapper parents on their remote traplines for most of the year and came in just for the summers. Then they would fish, socialize and go to church almost every day. These children were not a part of the controversial residential school system and got their only formal education during the summer months.

With growing excitement I boarded the train at Union Station in downtown Toronto at midnight, settling into a lower berth and then watching through the window as the farmlands of southern Ontario gradually gave way to the rocks, lakes and pines of the Canadian Shield. I was just nineteen and off on the first real adventure of my life. I arrived in Sioux Lookout at eleven-thirty the following night to find the town in a fever over the recent discovery of gold close to the edge of the tiny community. Even the lawns on the main street had been staked out by prospectors, and, to my dismay, the only bed in town was a cot in the middle of an already full room in a very cheap hotel. I tried my best to sleep, but the snoring of one fellow in the corner and the fact that another’s boots kept up an irregular thumping on my head as their owner twisted and turned made it very difficult.

I had to spend nearly a week in Sioux Lookout because bad weather made it impossible for the Norseman float plane I was taking for the final 500-kilometre leg of the journey to attempt to fly. I spent most of my time reading or watching a couple of Chinese men catch pickerel in Pelican Rapids, just west of the town. It turned out they ran the best restaurant in town (there were only two), and I used to order the daily special at both lunch and supper. It was, of course, fresh pickerel, better than filet mignon any day by my reckoning.

With all that time on my hands, however, I was feeling pretty lonely and a little homesick. As in the army or on a film set, a lot of one’s time as a missionary is spent waiting. So it was with great relief that I finally received the message to get ready for departure in a couple of hours. Turning up at the dock with my duffle bag, I found the plane loaded with supplies of all kinds, including a couple of drums of gasoline, two or three outboard motors, several cases of liquor “for the boys at Round Lake” and three Indian children who had been waiting for over ten days to get a ride back to their parents’ after a fall and winter spent at the Sioux Lookout residential school.

The pilot, a former fighter pilot with the RCAF who reportedly had a problem with drink and eventually, having crashed his plane once too often, ended up driving a taxi in a small northern town, saw at once that we would never get off the water with such a load. So he ordered the three Cree children to get off and wait for some other flight. (Nobody knew when that might be.) He then rearranged some of the cases, sat me on a motor next to a reeking gas drum and gunned his engine. As we sped across the bay and the trees of the opposite shore rushed towards us, anyone could tell that we weren’t going to make it. At the last possible moment the pilot cut the power, cursed loudly and taxied back to his base. Here, at the small dock, he unloaded one or two bulky parcels (but not the booze) and asked me to lean over the cockpit for takeoff so as to get more weight forward. When we headed out again, my heart was in my mouth. As before, there was the furious roar as we picked up speed and shot out across the water. The pilot kept rocking the plane to help free it from the suction on the floats, and at the last second, when it seemed a crash was certain, he yanked the thing up and over the menacing border of pines. “We made it,” he said with a big grin. I was too weak even to agree.

It was a very bumpy flight, and as the air grew warmer and the fumes of the gasoline I was sitting beside became stronger, I began to feel very ill indeed. To make matters worse, my ears were blocked with the change in pressure. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it any longer, a small cluster of cabins and teepees appeared on the edge of a lake ahead, and in a few moments we had touched down at Cat Lake to discharge half of our cargo. The entire dock was crowded with Cree who had come to shake hands with anyone on board. My leg was seized in a viselike grip by a big husky dog putting the bite on me, and there were howls of laughter at my predicament. One man eventually released me, saying, “He’s just trying your leg out for size—he does that to every newcomer.”

After what seemed like an eternity, we took off again, and the pilot thrust a large, wrinkled map onto my knees, pointed to a spot between Cat Lake and Hudson Bay and said, “Start looking out for a big lake on the horizon.” I looked at the map then out the window. The whole face of the earth seemed to have turned to water since there were hundreds of lakes, muskeg ponds and rivers, all gleaming in the westering sun.

We eventually spotted what he said was Big Trout Lake on the horizon, thanks more to good luck than to my ability as navigator. The pilot chuckled as he prepared to give the Hudson’s Bay post manager a good scare. I could just make out the settlement on the end of an island in the most northerly quarter of the 75-kilometre-wide expanse of the lake when suddenly he put the plane into a steep dive. Skimming along barely thirty metres above the water, we did a wide circle out over the muskeg and then roared over the tiny community from behind. We just missed the wires of the Department of Transport (or DOT, as it was called) weather station and the flag of the Hudson’s Bay Company store as we buzzed the place for several runs. The Cree streamed out of their teepees and log shacks, waved frantically and ran for the main dock. I was later to learn that everyone who could move always met the plane, even though there was seldom anything on it for any of them. After I had been there a few weeks and grown hungry for mail, I generally led the pack myself, trying not to trample anyone in the rush.

By the time we had taxied over and tied up, the dock was crammed with the welcoming party, and many others sat on the bank. It looked like the audience for an outdoor concert. Babies wailed in their tikinagans (a board with a pouch on it into which the baby is laced and then carried on the mother’s back; it is packed with dried moss, which is changed as often as necessary). Several huskies fought each other while I again shook hands with everyone in sight. “Watchy,” they all said. So I repeated it. The word, which is spelled differently all over the North, can mean either hello or goodbye, so it’s very useful. Apparently it was derived from the earliest days when the fur traders would greet one another with the words “What cheer?” Another sign of the impact of earlier times was the somewhat unusual uniformity of dress. All the men and boys wore old country–style tweed peaked caps, and all the women and girls, even the smallest toddlers, wore brightly coloured kerchiefs or scarves tied tightly under their chins.

Suddenly I was hailed by a very English-sounding male voice. A wiry-looking man in his mid-fifties, wearing a battered old fedora and a collarless shirt bulging out from under a pair of wide suspenders, was paddling his canoe towards the sandy shore beside the dock. It was Rev. Leslie Garrett, the Anglican missionary with whom I was to stay for the next three months. Garrett’s weather-beaten face, enormous eyebrows from under which sparkled a pair of the bluest eyes I have ever seen, and baggy, black pants gave him an aura of eccentricity. Some in Sioux Lookout had warned me he was “bushed”—the term used for those who become a little strange from too much solitude—but I was to find him much saner than his critics. He was one of the strongest men I have ever met. He pulled the large freighter canoe onshore with ease, plucked my duffle bag from me and tossed it in, and then nearly crushed my hand in his grip. His enthusiastic smile rearranged the weathered creases in his countenance in a most attractive way as he said: “I’m Garrett— welcome to Big Trout.”

He handed me a paddle and pointed to the bow position while he climbed in at the stern. I hadn’t been in a canoe often, and I felt every Cree eye on the island watching me as we headed off to the mission dock a short way along the shore. (The next day, just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I capsized off the end of the Hudson Bay dock and sent several men nearby into paroxysms of laughter.) As we passed by part of the village, it surprised me to discover that while the majority were living in simple one-room log cabins, there were a dozen or more families still living in teepees for their summer home. It gave me a thrill to see the smoke curling up from the hole at the top where the spruce poles intertwined. The silhouette of the teepees against the sky made me feel as if I were living in a movie about the Old West.

The problem with teepees, I was to discover, was that they were never intended for people well over six feet tall. If I stood up in one, my head was up where the racks of fish were curing in the ascending smoke. In a seated position, sometimes on a wooden box but more usually on the floor of spruce branches, one had to lean forward like a yogi to allow for the slanting canvas walls. Since it is impossible to sweep the floor in such accommodation, the family would simply move to another site, spread fresh branches and voilà!—the housecleaning was done. It was fascinating to observe that while there was nothing that we would call furniture as such, there was generally a guitar around and one or two radios. The beds were robes of rabbit skins laid on the floor, and the babies rocked gently in little hammocks suspended from the saplings forming the frame of the cone-like dwelling.

The simple log cabins of the rest of the community sometimes had slightly more elaborate fittings, but not always. They were invariably surrounded closely by a solid fence of peeled and sharply pointed poles to keep out wandering huskies and to serve as a drying rack both for any washing and for clumps of moss destined to serve as baby napkins and in general as “the Kleenex of the North.” It’s worth noting that this sphagnum peat moss—which lies in a deep carpet all through the boreal forests of the Canadian North— was put forward by a Manitoba company as a potential ally in the frantic attempts to clean up the disastrous oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 2010. Acknowledged as the worst oil spill in American history, the well churned out thousands of barrels of oil daily for months. The peat moss, according to its promoters, can float on the ocean’s surface, suck up oil and then, when saturated, be easily removed for burning or burying in a landfill. It’s cheap, exists in almost limitless abundance, and quickly and safely degrades into the environment.

Garrett’s mission house was a simple building set beside the white frame church where lengthy services were held on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as twice on Sunday, all summer long. Since at that time the residents spent the long months of winter out on their remote traplines and only came together in the spring to sell their furs, renew their trapping equipment and spend the summer fishing and socializing, they felt they had a lot of churchgoing to make up for, and make it up they did.

The mission house itself was much like a plain farmhouse. The largest room was the kitchen, with its polished linoleum floor, huge wood stove for both warmth and cooking, and generous table where, apart from porridge in the morning, I ate what seemed to me better than gourmet meals (fresh-caught lake trout, pickerel and whitefish). Christine Garrett was a rotund, happy Ojibwa woman whom Garrett had married some years after his first wife died of typhoid fever. She baked wheaten bread about three times a week and the aroma, mingled with that of the birch logs burning in the stove, was sheer heaven. My “room” was a section of the upper storey of the house separated from the Garretts’ sleeping quarters by a four-foot partition surmounted by a curtain. Through the low window at night I had a splendid view of the wilderness, the boreal forest stretching away forever. On those long, long summer nights the sun seemed barely to set at all. The hermit thrushes sang me to sleep.

The Garretts’ three children, Bessie, ten, Herbie, eight, and Esther, five, shared a room on the ground floor. They were very early risers and I was wakened each morning by the strained chords of the only two records they seemed to own and which they played on their hand-wound Victrola as a daily ritual. The songs were “There’s a bluebird on my windowsill, there’s a rainbow in the sky” and “Come to the church in the wildwood, oh come to the church in the dale . . .” They knew hardly a word of English and so most of the conversation at mealtimes was in Cree, of which I at first understood virtually nothing. They were usually very well-behaved children, except for those occasions when somebody would bring us a large lake trout in exchange for a couple of loaves of home-baked bread. Mrs. Garrett always baked or boiled the head of these monsters (thirty to forty pounds) and always there would be a squabble over who got the cheek pieces and the eyes. I knew we were dealing with delicacies, but I always had to avert my own eyes when the fish’s orbs were about to be forked and eaten! There is nothing like a boiled fish-eye rolling on a plate to make one queasy.

The fact that the missionary’s own children seemed to know only Cree made me apprehensive about what I would find when for the first time I faced a roomful of my charges for the summer. They say 90 percent of the things you worry about don’t come true. Unfortunately, this experience belonged with the 10 percent that do. The morning after my arrival, I rang the church bell, signalling nine o’clock. It wasn’t really necessary since the entire class had arrived at least an hour early in their eagerness to see the new teacher. Garrett introduced me to the children, who were between six and sixteen years of age, told them all to behave themselves (all of this in Cree) and then, with a smile, handed me some chalk and left me to my own devices. Now, the Department of Indian Affairs, which had appointed me on the Anglican Church’s recommendation, had only sent the briefest outline, which said that my job was to teach school at a fairly elementary level: reading and writing (in English), simple arithmetic, singing, arts and crafts, and sports. But now I realized that no one in the class would understand a word I said. I nearly panicked as I looked in despair at those forty pairs of dark brown, curious, hopeful, trusting eyes. Various maps, some religious art and the large piece of oilskin that was to serve as a blackboard all hung at the front of the church, but I could see no tangible help there. Suddenly I remembered the large boxes of textbooks kindly sent by the government and neatly stacked in the supply cupboard. I hurriedly tore open several cases. To my alarm, they all contained readers in the Dick and Jane series, complete with illustrations and content that was about as relevant to the lives of these children as lessons on how to walk in space!

The Cree of Big Trout were tolerant enough of my bumbling attempts to improve their lot, but the isolation, the mosquitoes and blackflies, and the arduous labour of professional do-goodism on a small stipend quickly dissipated a lot of the romance for me. Frankly, it was a difficult summer as far as teaching was concerned. I did everything but stand on my head to leap the language barrier and teach the children something. I must have looked berserk at times. For example, I would write a simple word such as jump or run on the makeshift blackboard, get them to print the word in their copybooks and then, seizing one of the smaller boys, would lift him up and down like a rag doll or run with him across the room to act out the word. I taught the alphabet phonetically and made up songs for this and a host of other basics of learning. I brought various objects into the class—cups, knives and forks, a grub box, paddles, traps, items of clothing—and got them to give me the Cree word for each and then had them copy out the English. At other times I used pictures cut from old copies of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Beaver magazine or old newspapers.

Singing proved the best route to learning of all. They could learn words and concepts in an hour through songs that would have taken much longer otherwise. Besides, the government handbook said singing was good for their lungs, an aid in helping prevent tuberculosis. Several students had one or more relatives in the sanatorium at Fort William (now Thunder Bay) and I soon learned that it was generally accepted at Big Trout Lake that those sent out there very seldom came back.

TB, a legacy of the European conquerors, was endemic, a fact of life. Once a year the Indian agent came to pay out the treaty money— about five dollars a head for having signed over thousands of square miles of their territory to the Crown in the mid-nineteenth century. As well as a Mountie escort, a doctor and a couple of minor civil servants, the agent’s party brought along a portable X-ray machine, which was used to check on all the band members. It was at best a very hit-or-miss affair. One time it was scandalous. When the treaty party came that summer, there was the usual annual X-ray marathon. You could hear the little one-stroke motor that powered the generator for the machine running far into the night for four days. About two weeks afterwards, a radio message came to the DOT crew at the weather station asking the schoolteacher (me) to inform a list of eight or nine Cree that they had TB and instruct them to get ready for a plane ride (on a Catalina flying boat) that would transport them out to Fort William. I accepted the unhappy task, and on the appointed day they took teary farewells of their loved ones on the company dock and departed.

A week later, while I was in the midst of teaching, I heard the familiar whisper going around the room: “Pimosayawin.” Plane! Since it was impossible to keep them settled while a plane was arriving, not to mention my own curiosity, I dismissed the class and we joined the usual stampede. When the aircraft finally tied up, to my astonishment all of the people I had previously sent out disembarked. There had been a mix-up in the X-ray plates, it seemed, and those with the dreaded disease were still on the island. I was told there was nothing to be done but wait until the next checkup— a full year away. It is a fact that some members of that particular treaty party were drinking almost continuously during the Big Trout Lake X-ray examinations, so the mix-up was not the result of ordinary human error. I was only twenty at the time and politically very naïve. I now realize I should have gone to the media immediately upon returning to Sioux Lookout that fall. I did make a written protest to the Department of Indian Affairs, but nothing ever came of it as far as I know.

After school hours I tried my best to work with the boys in particular, doing what used to be called manual training, and teaching sports. I have to confess that the results were very meagre in both cases. Our first crafts project was a howling failure. I had noticed that there seemed to be a streak of cruelty shown towards animals and birds among my male students. (This has to be seen against a setting where their whole lives depended upon hunting and fishing.) For example, they used to catch field mice, put them in the lake while still alive, and then try to pick them off with catapults while the mice frantically swam for shore.

As a counterweight to this kind of behaviour, I decided we should make some birdhouses. There was considerable enthusiasm for the idea once I had made one to demonstrate. The boys slaved away for hours each afternoon and evening, sawing, hammering and nailing with great gusto. When they were done, I got a primitive ladder and showed them how to erect the birdhouses on slim, tall poles, or in the eaves of their cabin homes.

A couple of evenings later, when I was walking through the centre of the settlement, I encountered a commotion. Several swallows were flying in tight circles around the new birdhouses and making plaintive cries. Something seemed to be agitating them, preventing their entry. When I got closer I found several of my boys hiding behind the wooden fences around their homes and trying to shoot the swallows with their catapults every time they landed on a perch. Of course, I made them stop, but they seemed astounded. Even their elders looked on curiously at my interference. Puzzled, I summoned Mr. Garrett to see if he could find out what was going on. After he had talked with the boys for a while, he grinned broadly and said: “They don’t understand why you’re stopping them from shooting the birds. They say they thought that was the whole idea, a new kind of trap!” He went on to say that the parents had shared this view and thought the new schooniowgamow (school boss) was really clever for conjuring up such a sneaky device. I realized it was a lost cause, and taught the boys to make stools and grub boxes instead. But they never showed the kind of zeal for these that they had for the birdhouses.

The boys, and indeed all of the able-bodied men of the village, loved playing soccer, using tin cans, a bundle of rags, anything that could be kicked, when there was no ball available. They had no concept whatsoever of boundaries, however. Often two players would disappear into the bushes still kicking and in pursuit of the ball. They would kick it down along the shore, through swampy places full of marsh grass, and finally back out to where the other players were sitting awaiting their return. Some white lime and a marking device were flown in and we set out to make a proper soccer pitch. This activity was watched with enormous interest, and even the men listened politely as I tried to explain with gestures and the aid of one or two older lads who knew some English. When play resumed, however, the game did not change one iota. They completely ignored the outsider’s strange views and kicked the ball all over the cleared portion of the island. In fact, they wore out the soccer balls at such an alarming rate that someone in the agent’s office at Sioux Lookout sent a wire in via the DOT asking with sarcasm whether we were roasting the soccer balls and eating them for Sunday dinner.

In the summer of 1949, I went north again in early June to teach school a second time. Things went well for the first week, although I was a little troubled one day when I noticed a dead husky floating in the lake just off the small dock where we were in the habit of drawing our drinking water. The missionary and his family had a wooden yoke that went over the shoulders and there were hooks on each side for a pail. The water was carried up to the house and transferred into a large drum. A drinking ladle hung on the wall nearby. Since the dock was on a small bay quite a way from the main dock and other cabins or teepees, and the lake was considered by all to be pristine, nobody thought it necessary to boil the water before drinking it. I was in the midst of teaching the children a simple song one day when I began having the worst stomach cramps I had ever experienced. They continued to grow more severe, and before long I had to let the children out for an early recess while I went to rest at the rectory. I began to feel feverish and then the full impact hit me. I became very ill indeed, racked by a burning fever and serious abdominal distress. I took to my bed at once and, apart from dealing with the seemingly never-ending diarrhea (there was, of course, no indoor plumbing, only a slop pail and the outhouse near the black spruce of the bush), I didn’t leave the room until I was carried down the crooked stairs by two of the strongest men in the village one week later. They used a blanket in lieu of a stretcher.

At times I was completely out of it because of the raging fever, and my stomach ached constantly with severe cramping. Mrs. Garrett was next thing to a saint in her unflagging patience in emptying the pail, her attempts to get me to take some soup and her general aura of compassionate care. The missionary himself, who knew some basic first aid but also recognized a serious illness, had sent a message courtesy of the Department of Transport to the small outpost hospital in Sioux Lookout describing my condition. The word came back that a plane would be coming in as soon as some murky weather cleared. It was several days before the decision was made to come in, and it was raining lightly when I was carried down to the company dock and put on board the single-engine Norseman float plane. The cargo area had been emptied to make way for a stretcher. So they bundled me aboard, gave me some morphine tablets and we taxied off across the rough waves.

It was a bumpy ride, and it got worse after takeoff as the plane bucked high winds and I heard the pilot tell his co-pilot that he’d seen lightning up ahead. We flew through a thunderstorm—the roughest ride I’d ever known in the North or anywhere else. I lost track after a while, but I know we put down on a series of lakes all that long afternoon, each time waiting for rain and clouds to pass sufficiently to make possible another “leapfrog” ahead. It was getting dark when I heard one of the two men up front mention “Pickle Crow,” and I suddenly felt the loss of altitude. We were about to land at the gold-mining town about a hundred kilometres north of our goal of Sioux Lookout. There, an ambulance was waiting and took me to the fairly primitive runway where a Cessna was ready to go. When we eventually landed safely at Sioux Lookout, another ambulance was waiting. I remember being placed beneath the wing of the plane, out of the drizzle, before being hoisted into the back of the vehicle.

In those few moments a familiar face appeared above me and as if from a great distance I heard a kindly voice asking how I was. It turned out to belong to Rev. Tom Griggs, the rector of the little Anglican church in Sioux Lookout. I had preached for him on the Sunday I had spent waiting for a plane a couple of weeks before. We accidentally met once again in the former Anglican Book Room on Jarvis Street in Toronto some twenty years or more afterwards, and he told me that when he had seen me that evening in Sioux Lookout he had felt greatly alarmed. “I thought you looked in very bad shape indeed,” he said. He remembered telling his wife he had doubts whether I’d pull through.

There is now a modern hospital in Sioux Lookout, but in the summer of 1949 it was a small two-storey building with tarpaper brick siding down by the railroad tracks. The town was a major train junction for the CNR, so the noise of steam engines was constant. Natives and whites were kept in separate wards. Nobody on the staff spoke Cree or any other Indian dialect. There were two doctors and a handful of nurses for the entire town as well as the hospital. I was there for five and a half weeks, lost twenty-five pounds, and in the end was a much wiser and, yes, a more compassionate person for the experience. They told me afterwards that for the first two weeks I simply lay there, and I recall feeling so ill that I didn’t much care whether I got better or not.

In any case, the dysentery continued and at the same time my abdomen became as hard as a rock—so much so that the senior of the two physicians told the other in my hearing that he thought it would be necessary to perform surgery because of suspected major abscesses. In the end, thankfully, the more junior man, who had been with Allied troops in Italy during the war and had considerable experience with diseases attacking the gut, argued against the knife, opting instead for a new drug he had seen used in Italy near the end of the war, streptomycin.

The drug worked and, though I remained shaky for some weeks, I gradually made a full recovery. The official diagnosis was confirmed as amoebic dysentery. My hair, much of which had fallen out because of the fever, grew back in and had waves it didn’t have before.

One night, after I’d been there over three weeks and was beginning slowly to regain interest in getting back to health, they brought in a young miner who had been trapped for several hours by a cave-in at Pickle Crow. He’d been pinned by a large rock that crushed his leg. By the time he was rescued, the injury and resulting complications had necessitated an amputation just above the knee. He was put in the bed next to mine following his surgery and for several days after he had recovered consciousness he was in near-constant pain even though still heavily sedated. At night he would toss and turn and moan that his “foot” was hurting terribly. When he finally felt well enough for us to talk, I learned about what it was like to have a “phantom limb.” He described the sense of his foot still being there and of it being trapped beneath part of the tunnel roof. He was not that much older than me and so we formed a bond in the fellowship wrought by suffering.

As mentioned previously, small as it was, the hospital kept whites and Aboriginals segregated. Most Cree patients were on the second floor, but there was a special room for children on the first, where I was. Since there was no staff person fluent in Cree or any other Native language, and since I had learned a number of key phrases and in particular how to read and pronounce the syllabics (invented by Anglican missionaries in the 1800s), once I was able to get around I was called upon at times to act as a rough interpreter.

In one instance a Cree hunter named Big Beaver, from Bearskin Lake, had been stalking some ducks from his canoe when he grabbed his loaded shotgun by the muzzle and accidentally blew his thumb off. When surgery was required to fix the wound, a nurse came down and asked me to assist them. I went upstairs and found the doctor trying to judge whether or not his patient had had enough anaesthetic injected to leave his hand sufficiently numb for repair. The doctor seemed anxious not to overdo the medication. I could see that whenever he asked Big Beaver (Gitchee Amik) if it hurt or not when he pinched his arm, the man just grinned a stoical smile and said nothing. So the doctor pricked him with a needle and said: “Does that hurt?” He didn’t reply, and the doctor made a second attempt. I asked in Cree if it hurt. His eyes widened and he said, “Yes, it does, and it really hurt the last time too!” He was then given a much larger dose of the painkiller and eventually everything was sewn up and his arm was put in a sling.

A couple of days later, a girl of about eight or nine from Fort Albany was flown down to Sioux Lookout suffering from extensive burns to her chest, arms and legs. She had suddenly walked in front of the opening to her family’s teepee just as her mother threw a pot of near-boiling water out after some cooking. The girl was suffering from shock and was in extreme pain even after many days of treatment. Since she was in the small private room on our floor, we could hear her screams and almost continuous crying. Finally I was able to make out some words that she kept repeating as she gradually became more articulate. She was saying simply, “I want to go home, I want to go home.” I told the nurses and they said perhaps it would comfort her if I could say even a few words she might recognize. I was happy to do so, and read her a hymn in Cree as well.

One would think that after having been so ill I wouldn’t return to Big Trout. But I was back again the next summer. The year was 1950. Soon after my arrival I learned that the nurse who had been put in charge of the new, fully equipped nursing station had quit suddenly. The Indian agent’s office sent word that they would like me to live in the station and to administer first aid, dispense such simple basics as Aspirin, cough syrup, ointment for scabies and so on, and keep an eye on things until her replacement could be found. I did so, and found myself holding regular dispensary hours three nights a week following dinner. No nurse appeared all summer.

The first night when I looked out there was a lineup of about twenty-five adults and children at the door, and I could see others heading my way. The thought of the gap between their expectations and my woeful ignorance was terrifying. However, with the help of a youth of about seventeen who had been out at the residential school for several years and could interpret a little, I did the best I could. The greatest demand seemed to be for “head medicine,” but I soon had to ration the Aspirin when I discovered their approach: if one would help, they believed many would help more. The children came mainly for bottles of cough syrup. It took a few weeks before I realized that they kept coming back to every “clinic,” rasping out their request, coughing and clearing their throats, because they loved the sweet taste of Pine Cough Syrup. Watching out the window, I would see them drink the whole bottle at one go. Once a different, evil-tasting remedy was substituted, the ailments suddenly cleared up.

Looking back at those days now, I find it difficult to believe that I, a layman with no medical background other than a few courses in first aid, was in charge of a medical facility, however simple, some five hundred kilometres from the nearest doctor or hospital. Of course, when there was a very serious illness, I could always try to send a radio message out and have a plane come in. But this involved some lapse of time. If there was very bad weather—and sometimes there were periods of two or even three weeks when no float plane could get anywhere near us—we simply had to do our best.

I always found it moving to see the incredible ability of these people to bear pain and suffering with stoical courage and calm. Garrett, the missionary, was often away on canoe trips visiting his far-flung flock, but when he was home he would pull teeth in his living room for those whose toothache had become unbearable. There was no anaesthetic, and yet the “patient” would not utter a sound during the extraction. They even continued to smile in spite of the blood and pain. Once, a Cree hunter came to the dispensary with one barb of a huge triple-pronged fish hook deeply embedded in the palm of his hand. He had been trolling for lake trout far from the post when the accident occurred. Since he was alone and had to paddle back, the hook had worked its way in to the point where it curved around a tendon. There was no recourse but to cut off the other two prongs with wire cutters and then, without any kind of painkiller, work the hook completely through and out at another place. All through this, the man never so much as flinched or changed his overall expression of dignified endurance.

I observed this characteristic repeatedly, but one case stands out above the rest. A man had sliced his knee open with a razor-sharp axe while making the keel for a canoe. When I was called to his cabin, he was lying on some dried moss that was quickly becoming soaked with blood as it spurted up out of the gaping wound. I had to apply a tourniquet to get the bleeding stopped, and then dress and bind the knee as best I could. He too never winced or moaned and, weak though he was, thanked me with a smile as I turned to leave. The good news is that he made a full recovery, though he walked with a slight limp.

The church services at Big Trout Lake held a special interest for me as a future clergyman. The church, which seated about 150, was crammed to capacity at every service. The men and boys sat on one side, the women and girls on the other. The aisles were filled and the children sat on the floor. Often a mother would be nursing one child while its toddler brother or sister would be tethered to the nearest pew by a short “rope” made from rags to prevent straying. The noise level inside the frame building once everyone had assembled was deafening, but inevitably matters got worse once the service began. Any huskies not securely tied up at home would follow their families up the hill to the church. They would then inspect each other, find out how much they disliked one another, and launch into a furious fight. As the din mounted, one of the older parishioners would invariably get up, take a stick and wade into the melee, striking at any animal within reach. The pack would then take off in all directions with blood-curdling howls loud enough to wake the dead.

The services themselves lasted anywhere from two to three hours. The extreme length was partly due to the extraordinarily protracted sermons, whether preached by Garrett or one of the many lay catechists, and partly to the fact that hymns were sung at such a slow pace that they would last for about fifteen minutes each. The Cree loved singing, and since times were quiet and they had nowhere else to go, they got full value at the Trout Lake Mission. Because I had attended church every Sunday throughout the winter in Toronto, I felt no strong obligation to be at every service myself. Instead, while out on the lake fishing, I would hear the resonant Cree voices joined in “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” come drifting over the waters while in the distance loons made the islands echo with their haunting cries.

Looking back, I know I learned a lot from the Natives of Big Trout Lake, much more than I was ever able to teach their young. The following are a couple of my lasting impressions from that time.

The three-summer experience showed me in the most eloquent fashion how non-Natives have, since the first contact, treated the First Nations peoples as little children and not as mature persons, with all that would have entailed. The Church did not consult with them, for example, about who should teach their children in the summer sessions, nor was there any discussion with elders or parents about what subjects were to be taught. At Big Trout every white person was known as the “boss” or owgamow of whatever aspect of the community’s life he or she was in charge of. So Rev. Leslie Garrett was the church owgamow, I was the school owgamow, and the Hudson’s Bay Company post manager was the boss of all bosses, the owgamow over all. His clerk was the owgamow’s little boss, or owgamasis. Garrett was kind to his flock but clearly defined as their superior in every way. He wasn’t called Father as in the Catholic missions, but he played that role to the hilt in most details of the people’s lives apart from their dealings with the HBC owg-amow and their livelihood as trappers. Garrett held the “keys” to their souls, training those chosen to be lay readers and catechists, administering the sacraments, explaining the faith, baptizing the babies, marrying couples and burying the dead. There would be a line of adult men at the rectory door each evening waiting to seek his advice or guidance.

But it wasn’t just the Anglican Church that treated the band members as juveniles. The federal government, through its various officials (and in particular the Indian agent, who was ultimately responsible for the welfare of all the bands in the northwest of Ontario and who lived a good three hours by bush plane to the south), treated them in exactly the same manner. There was an abundance of poverty. Most of the residents slept on the ground or floor, had no plumbing or electricity, and thought that the annual five dollars paid to them by the Indian agent was government largesse.

All major decisions were taken off the reserve and directives simply “came down as though from on high,” whether it was a matter of whose children should be sent out to the residential school at Pelican Narrows, Sioux Lookout, or how many beaver pelts a specific hunter and his family would be allowed to sell at the post in any given year. In later years, as the plight of both the Indians and the Inuit came much more to the fore of public concerns in the country, Canadians came to see the tragic results of all the many years of such paternalism.

The other issue that shouted aloud to me then was the perverse way in which Aboriginal spirituality was ignored or despised. This problem still resonates with me today whenever I read yet more shocking news stories about the high rate of suicide among young people on the reserves in the Big Trout region and in the various Native communities all around the shores of James Bay and Hudson Bay. Overall, Native spirituality from the earliest days of first contact was deliberately looked down upon, and wherever it dared any open expression it was instantly and crudely stifled. We now know the havoc wrought by the residential schools as tools of this campaign.

Instead of trying to discover and understand the spiritual traditions and rituals of the conquered first inhabitants of Canada, the government, the missionaries and non-Natives in general immediately assumed they were the vestiges of a savage past that needed to be eradicated as swiftly and as thoroughly as possible. One of the most shocking, even appalling, aspects of this situation is the fact that for over a hundred years it was Canada’s official policy to “take the Indian out of the Indian.” That is an exact quote from Sir Duncan Campbell Scott, head of the Indian Affairs department, as he defined his mandate early in the last century. The results have been a national scandal for years. It does not require a team of experts or a Royal Commission to discover that if you destroy the spiritual beliefs and practices of a people and discourage the use of their languages, you cut off the very wellspring of their being. You rob them of the source of that strength and meaning which made it possible for them to live full, happy and productive lives in one of the harshest environments on the face of the earth. We taught them to earn their living by trapping and then, when fashions or sensibilities “outside” suddenly changed, they were deprived of any viable means of earning a living. Faced with unemployment at a rate that would cause riots and chaos in the rest of the country, the great majority are today left relying wholly on welfare. The young people have nothing to do and nowhere to go. The suicide rate among males from fourteen to thirty is a literal horror story. The same is true for the Inuit as well.

There have been and continue to be attempts to revive Aboriginal religious traditions, but the grim truth is that an awful lot of this past has been forgotten and any meaningful recovery is going to take a huge amount of time and dedication on the part of those sincerely desirous of seeing a renaissance in our day. This is an area where the churches could help, if they could set aside for a while their arrogant assumption that the white man’s God and the white man’s Saviour is the only way of salvation for the world. My experiences at Big Trout had begun to teach me a lesson that I would take a long time to learn.*

In May 1998, I returned to Big Trout with my wife Susan for a week to mark the fiftieth anniversary of my first visit there. Much had changed. The Hudson’s Bay store is gone. In its place is a large Native-run supermarket complex, which includes a clothing store, hardware store, deep-fried-chicken outlet and gasoline pump. The old clapboard church that also served as my school is gone as well. Today’s school, with about 270 pupils from grades one through eleven, is much like schools everywhere, down to obscenities scribbled on the exterior. There’s a huge gymnasium and a computer room. Modern bungalows stand where teepees once were the norm. Some are in top condition—others are eyesores. But most at least have oil heating, a refrigerator and a TV set.

But there were less positive aspects as well. There is a growing crisis of diabetes, tuberculosis and other diseases. The detritus of consumer technology—machines, twisted snowmobiles, rusting vehicles, a million plastic containers—smother parts of the town in ugliness. Their annual cleanup was scheduled for the month following my visit, but like the rest of us, Big Trout residents have bought into the disposable society. And behind the growth and signs of prosperity is another dark shadow. As some angry teenagers told us, “There’s nothing to do here.” Hundreds of similar Native communities across Canada still lack safe drinking water. The infant mortality rate continues to be a national scandal. The plight of our Aboriginal peoples remains a disgrace.

When I first came to Big Trout Lake in 1948, these were an economically independent people to a large degree, living off the land. Today, much of the settlement is on welfare.

Susan and I loved the people. I was deeply moved to meet so many of my old students and to make new friends. But I came away feeling very sad. These people, as one former chief said, “need a deep healing of the spirit” in order to find a different future. The current Truth and Reconciliation hearings will hopefully be a small step in that direction.

* In June 2010, hearings began in a Truth and Reconciliation Event, a five-year project aimed at healing wounds in the Aboriginal communities of Canada caused by the residential schools. It has a budget of $60 million and is a product of the largest class action in Canadian history, brought by former students of the schools against the federal government and four churches who were involved. The church-run, government-funded residential schools began in the 1870s and the last one only closed in 1996. Children were taken, often forcibly, from their parents and traditional way of life. They were forbidden to speak their Native tongues or practise their culture. They were forced to become Christians, and many were physically or sexually abused. See editorials in the Toronto Star, July 24 and 25, 2010.