Pat Jamieson, Victoria, B.C.

Four things come to mind when I look back on my friendship with Phil who died May 15 in Nanaimo at age 90.

His search for, and with his dreams; his search for identity; plus his search for a wife and finally his search for a heavenly destiny, blending his traditional Catholicism with what he found along the way.

Shortly after we started the Island Catholic News in the mid-1980s, someone directed Phil to our door. He was running dream analysis workshops and wanted us to help promote the venture.

He had changed life direction in his fifties, after a career as a salesman and had started down a spiritual path after his mid-life shift. He had become a leader in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in Nanaimo but his interest and training on dream analysis was driving him to the outer edges of traditional Catholicism.

We were right down his alley as I was recording my dreams and applying Jungian dream analysis to the process. Over the next decade Phil fine-tuned his efforts with workshops in the areas of the men’s movement ending up with his establishment of The Self-directional Institute and his Self-realization Destiny project.

He published two books on the subject area about the same time I was getting a few out myself so we regularly met to shoot the breeze in coffee shops and bars and to introduce each other to individuals who had similar interests.

Black Bull

During one of the encounters at the Black Bull Lounge at the old Imperial Inn on Douglas (which seemed a thematic title for the venue) the theme was on the struggle to finding the right romantic partner.

I suggested that Victoria had a more favourable proportion of females to males to help him with the quest. He took me up on the brainwave and relocated. What I had not realized was that he was assuming I had made a life-time commitment to helping him find the perfect new partner.

Phil already had seven children by his first marriage which had ended badly and this had driven his mid-life crisis from which all the spiritual searching ensued. He seemed a classic case of mid-life issues, and now wanted a soul mate for the second half of his life. He was very serious while I wasn’t quite as convinced this was my personal responsibility.

It came up with enough regularity though, so that when I went away to Romania in the middle 1990s to get married myself, he was chagrined and abjected to an extreme that even I could not be entirely oblivious to the situation.

I didn’t lose a lot of sleep about it but when I returned to Victoria after a year or so, the news headline in the Phil Winkelmans daily gleaner was that he had met Marie while I was away and every thing was rosy, for a while. He had his life partner to work with him on his destiny project.

Phil was a very interesting guy. We kept in touch regularly from then on. He received the paper and would call me when in town to meet at Ricky’s or some equivalent diner for a chow down and lengthy chin wag. I was moving into more fictional writing as time went along and I could discern in his reactions to my poetry and novels that his Catholicism had about peaked in its liberalism. His personal moral framework reflected increasingly what he had learned at his mother’s knee, and his mother was a permanent moral compass in his life.

Funeral

I attended Phil’s funeral on May 26 in Nanaimo and was struck by the strength of the event. All seven kids were there and their families plus others like myself who had experienced him in what we thought was his post-patriarchal period. But as a feminist poet who attended said, as we departed at the same time, he never really left that behind especially in his relating with his kids.
The boys all seemed to have settled on some sort of objective stance in the ongoing relationship they had with him to the end. The girls were much more emotive in expressing their still extant subjective experience of his spirit in their lives.

The final projects Phil and I shared were with mutual friends who might have needed certain pastoral attention in our ambit and orbit. When a close associate of his relocated to Victoria he asked that I try to find him suitable housing and this particularl individual was very helpful with my father in his latter years.

At the funeral Dr. Stephen Faulkner, spoke openly how Phil had helped him with his own mid-life crisis and this was quite a revelation to me. Dr. Faulkner is a greatly esteemed physician and First Nations Shaman who has been a key and transformative resource person in Men’s Workshops at Bethlehem Retreat Centre during the last few years. Those events were organized by Rev. Dale Perkins who also attended the funeral and is a valued friend I met through Phil.

To me, then, Phil was what I would call a slightly larger than life character who helped many people by coaching and counselling. He had a permanent impact on many and was someone who laughed his way into eternity, enjoying life to the full, even the pain and suffering. Phil Winkelmans. Rest in Peace.