A Rogue Priest Without An Altar

 I've been wanting to write this for the last nine years but I've been too afraid to. I still am. However, it seems like it is time because for some reason, I have been plagued this week with thoughts of the past. When I write "thoughts of the past" I  actually mean visual flashbacks of events, places, people. Most often my thinking begins in pictures and then these pictures are translated into words. It's one of my secret (no longer!) superpowers. This week, I've seen the chapel at Trinity College, Toronto, just after communion, when it is empty and quiet and the cloud of incense still floats high in the air and the students can be heard in the cavernous Strachan Hall, collecting their next meal in between classes, with cutlery clinking and loud laughter and jokes. I've seen St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, with its tall, triple spires that frame the landscape along Queensferry Road, a place that is always cold and always dark, with wet, dripping stone walls, where the hum of traffic around Haymarket Station can be heard through the silence of quiet prayer. I've seen my mentor and systematic theology professor, Dr. Stephen Reynolds, the most introverted, intelligent person I've ever known, sitting at his big oak desk in his tiny, claustrophobic office overlooking Harbord Street in Toronto, asking me to speak about the theologian Karl Rahner during one of his infamous "relaxed chats". I've seen York Minister, England, on a sunny day in May, 1982, long before there was an admission charge, as I sit as a teenager and hold quiet thoughts of peace and the never-ending hope that the arms race will end before the USSR ends it all. These particular images do not come often because I have trained my brain to ignore them, to dismiss them, to replace them as soon as they appear. But not this week. It has been impossible.

This week I think of all of these things and more. I think of 16 year old me; a girl with immense ideals, a head full of questions as to what the suffering of the world was all about, why good things happen to bad people, and whether the beauty of the sunrise over Rice Lake was just a beautiful experience or whether there was something more, something numinous behind it all. I think of my years working for the Ministry of the Attorney General, sitting through one criminal trial after another, the knot in my stomach twisting tightly, my breath becoming shallower and shallower, as I listen to children speak the most unspeakable horrors of what fathers and strangers and teachers and uncles can do; of hearing the piercing depth of grief of an immigrant mother as she sees, for the first time, the crime scene photos of where her young son was murdered, shot in the head, in a place where he should have been safe. I think of how I tried in vain to find something good in the colossal human suffering I saw day in and day out and how it drove me to the very edge of insanity. And I think of the moment when I really had no choice but to say 'yes' to the nagging discontent, to the overwhelming desire to really live out what I believed to be true; that the most vulnerable, the most oppressed, the most forgotten and despised are worthy and deserving of dignity, kindness, goodness, and respect.; that they are worthy of a place in this world. As my son said to me, it was the moment that my entire life came together and made sense.

And so I did it. I bit the bullet, as they say. I returned to university to study theology full-time for three years while, at the same time, working full-time at one of the hardest jobs I've ever had. In the moment, it felt like an insane task of non-stop reading, writing, studying, working, attending trials, raising children, tending home, and tending a husband. But now, as I write this 20 years later, I realise it was nothing less than a Herculean task of immense magnitude, something that I could never, ever repeat. 

And for almost 10 years after I was ordained as a priest, I worked in an institution that could not sustain nor recognize what I believed to be true about the divine presence of love in the world (that which some people call 'god'). I worked in an institution where the bishops built themselves houses worth half a million dollars; an institution where beautiful, kind elderly people were expected to raise money to keep their churches open and heated, when all they wanted was the comfort of the weekly Sunday liturgy in the final years of their lives, a Sunday ritual they had known for well over half a century. I worked in an institution that did not protect their children from their clergy even though they said they did; an institution that, while corrupt and rife in politics and polemics, paradoxically marked the important life passages of birth, marriage and death with the most profoundly beautiful liturgies, music and rituals. I worked for an institution that almost ate me alive until the day I realized I could no longer fulfill one of the vows I had taken. I could no longer obey my bishop. I could no longer obey a bullying, cowardly man dressed in finery and jewels while the ancient church I worked for was teetering on the edge of disintegration. And so on the Sunday after Easter in 2017, at the end of the liturgy, I removed my clerical garb - my chasuble, my alb, my cassock, my stole, my clerical collar - and laid them on the altar as my final offering.

I had made a mistake. I had made a mistake in believing that the teachings of this historical person called Jesus could be translated onto the streets to the very people who needed love the most ,while working for a machine whose prime reason for existence was its very own existence. I had made the age-old , incredibly arrogant mistake of believing that I could either change the institution or I could rise above the institution. In truth, I should never have worked for the Church. I should have been part of the Catholic Worker Movement, even though I am not catholic, or I should have worked for L'Arche in one of their many wonderful houses. But my own ego got in the way. As a woman, I wanted to make a mark on a patriarchal institution. But I was wrong because I couldn't without losing my soul. And so I left, carrying an incredible amount of pain, regret, anger, hurt, and confusion, and landed, somehow, with two suitcases, three boxes, and two dogs, in a little green house in a little hamlet in Nova Scotia, alongside a river. 

And so here I am today, on Easter Sunday, 2026, in my little green house alongside a river. It's been 9 years since I set foot inside a church. I am a rogue priest without an altar. A mother, a grandmother, a gardener, a sometimes writer, walking my anam cara, Frank, to his death, while coming to terms with the last third of my own life. I still believe in the divine presence of love in the world but it is not to be found in the cathedral or the liturgy or in the preaching of sermons. For now it is found in the dark nights, where the sky is shot through with diamonds, where the spring peepers make themselves known at the far end of the forest, where I hear the river from my bed in the early dawn light. It is found in the daily tasks of making porridge, administering medication, walking the dogs, paying the bills, speaking to the palliative care doctor, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and remembering to keep the truck filled with gas. There are still many things I miss about that time. I no longer know how to pray. I no longer sing. I no longer think of this man called Jesus even though I live out his ideals in my daily life. I miss my books. I miss the smell of frankincense and the smell of a cold, musty church in the early morning. I miss the people so very much and it moves me to tears when I allow myself to think of them. I miss the sacredness and mystery of liturgy. But I remind myself every day that this mystery and sacredness is found in the ordinary things of life: the raising of children and grandchildren, the living and the dying of those whom I love, the quietness of routines, of a warm and peace-filled home where my small works must somehow do something in the bigger scheme of things.