Editorials
The Cosmic Priest Who Couldn’t Quit
Volume 29 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 14, 2015
I’ve heard John Shields speak any number of times on his spirituality, but this time was different. I find him quite paradoxical.
Every occasion including this one on Sunday afternoon November 8, was staged at the provincial government employees union building on Douglas Street in Victoria. John has special privileges there as he was the head of that union for a couple of decades. It was under his leadership that the building was constructed and subsequently when he retired fifteen years ago the building was named after him.
Such is the esteem he is held in those circles and beyond. His latest headline grabbing work was with the local land conservancy council where he is said to have gotten it back on a more solvent basis.
I’ve heard John Shields speak any number of times on his spirituality, but this time was different. I find him quite paradoxical.
Every occasion including this one on Sunday afternoon November 8, was staged at the provincial government employees union building on Douglas Street in Victoria. John has special privileges there as he was the head of that union for a couple of decades. It was under his leadership that the building was constructed and subsequently when he retired fifteen years ago the building was named after him.
Such is the esteem he is held in those circles and beyond. His latest headline grabbing work was with the local land conservancy council where he is said to have gotten it back on a more solvent basis.
Since retirement he has been focusing on the articulation of his personal spirituality. This included a book and leadership within progressive spirituality groups. Victoria has a plethora of such bodies, people grouped together in an individual and collective search for more meaningful expression of a relevant spirituality.
His talk on November 8 was in this context but the attendance was about double the usual crowd for these monthly meetings. John and his wife Robin June Hood had been badly hurt in a freak car accident earlier in the year and on this occasion John wanted to speak about that event and its ramifications in terms of his spiritual development. What he had to say was very interesting but it also needs to be put in a certain context.
BACKGROUND
The thematic title of John’s spiritual memoir is ‘the priest who gave up religion in search of a cosmic spirituality.’ John had been a Paulist priest teaching in Catholic seminaries in the United States. This was at the time of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s when expectation for reform of the Roman Catholic Church were a mile high and young Father John Shields was no exception. As a progressive thinking Catholic priest he became entirely disillusioned with the church’s halting progress and he left to marry and become a union organizer and a very effective one with the BCGEU.
While it could be argued that he had simply adapted a prophetic spirituality with such social justice work, John chose to more radically analyze his step away from Mother Church. He left the faith of his family. He completely turned his back on conventional Catholic practice.
John Shields was educated by Jesuits but ordained and served for eight years as a Paulist priest teaching in Catholic seminaries in the United States. When he left to marry Madelaine, he was situated in Texas with his Order, a long way from his New England roots.
After Vatican II, expectations of radical reform within the Catholic Church were dashed at the time of the birth control ruling in 1968. Many voted with their feet, convinced the church hierarchy was playing the usual games. Young Father Shields was no exception, expecting the Catholic Church to be true to what he had found to be true in its newly discovered world view. He was sorely disappointed and left to try other sets of wings including the Canadian labour movement where truly he made his mark.
Another individual might have continued to work within the broadened gates of the church as a university professor, or a hospital administrator but John was seeking higher ground in his theological perspective and he eventually made his way to a cosmic spirituality as discovered through the lens of the Hubble Telescope.
His whole world view and spiritual perspective shifted, radically broadening to attempt to encompass a sense of cosmogenesis, as typified by Tielhard de Chardin. (see "Feature" story)
John and Madelaine were caught up in the fury that overtook many in the 1960s, she as a counsellor and art therapist and he as a social justice advocate who found his niche in the Canadian labour movement. After Madelaine died of cancer and he had retired, John took a leadership role in his efforts to work on the more contemplative aspect of his new post-Christian perspective.
He set up groups to discuss with himself and other similar integral spirituality seekers what was continually being revealed in his inner journey in the way of new meaning. After his near fatal accident for both he and Robin, he almost rushed to bring this experience to the discussion table. His presentation was based on what he had just experienced in the light of his new cosmology.
John Shield’s speaking style is extremely concrete and sequential in his narrative. Things have to make sense on this plane for John to be entirely satisfied in his sensibility. After Madelaine’s death he even devised a mechanical means of confirming with her spirit what he was about. It seems an apt example of his concrete sequential sensibility.
No great flights of intuitive fancy ever sneak into his story line. He is much more of a scientist that way than a poet. I first met John in the 1970s through a close friend. Madelaine was also a close friend and associate of Louis Stoeckle, the legendary former Director at Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario. Madonna House is a community of mystics. Such places have a reputation for taking the long view on the church’s foibles which John had found unbearable.
Louis and his wife Suzanne had their first child, Claire, just at the same time my wife and I had our first in Vancouver. John and Madelaine were Claire’s godparents and we met at the baptism in 1977.
Louis was as long in contemplative hearts as John was in social justice spades, so I found it interesting personally when John turned in his wisdom years toward an ‘active’ spirituality.
No real contentment with the idea of ‘Mystery’, John’s journey seems full of interesting ironies and paradoxes. At his talk he said that the condition which had caused him to black out resulting in the car accident was diagnosed as having no recommended treatment. At the same time the doctors told him that those with the version with no possible treatment often live longer than the ones that they can treat. There is a message in that I thought, but was sure to ask a few more from the audience if they had heard the same thing I did. It seemed so contradictory.
The paradox of medicine seemed to epitomize the contradictions which John’s spirituality attempts to encompass.
THE COSMIC PRIEST
Even in his later stages, perhaps even more so, John Shields seems not to have shed his priestly cloak. Even the title of his disclaimer book identifies himself as one. I have known a great number of laicized Catholic priests in my work and many have moved much further from the psychological spot than John Shields seems to have done.
The Jesuit ones often seemed to have best integrated their new calling with something of the original mystique which drew them to the priesthood symbolism. There is the famous adage for Jesuits – ‘Give us the boy for the first five years of his formation, and we have him for life.’
John Shields – Symbolic Priest Figure, Pronounced Apostate, Cosmic Searcher.