Epiphany Explorations the five-day theological education event held here January 19-23 at First Metropolitan United Church marked a decade of such progressive Christian theological formation organi

Epiphany Explorations the five-day theological education event held here January 19-23 at First Metropolitan United Church marked a decade of such progressive Christian theological formation organized by the congregation for adult education purposes. The event draws from across Canada in its attendance, but particularly from western Canada.

Over six hundred registrants attended talks by headliners Mary Jo Leddy, Marcus Borg and Elizabeth May as well as presentations by Paul Bramadat, Martin Brokenleg and Herbert O’Driscoll, who always closes the event with talks on preaching. As well the conference features a series of other religious educators in such diverse fields as grief counselling, immigrant settlement, First Nations’ issues and youth leadership development.

MARY JO LEDDY

The overall program began on Thursday afternoon and concluded Tuesday at 1 pm. I missed the first session with Rev. Martin Brokenleg who heads the Native Ministries program at the Vancouver School of Theology in Vancouver. The buzz immediately afterwards was very positive.

I bumped into an old friend, Neil MacDonald, who said it had been excellent. Neil was also there for the Mary Jo Leddy keynote talk “The Other face of God: When the Stranger Calls us Home.”

When we first started Island Catholic News twenty-seven years ago, we held a series of meetings to get people involved if they were interested back in the mid-1980s and Neil had attended those early sessions.

Personally, I found the Mary Jo Leddy session riveting and emotionally moving if only due to the parallels with my own family in doing refugee work these last three decades as well. My father was instrumental in founding the Saint Andrew Refugee Association (SARA) in 1979 in response to the Vietnamese Boat people crisis. He kept at the work for thirty years, retiring in 2009 after the passing of his wife and in the light of advancing years.

Each Christmas there always seemed to be what Marnie Butler, another SARA member, termed ‘our Christmas family.’ An unplanned for refugee situation would invariably show up at that time. And it usually figuratively represented what Catholics call ‘The Holy Family’ in transition as depicted in the Infancy narratives of the Gospels.

Mary Jo Leddy’s tale of meeting threatened refugees face to face in a transformative experience this past Christmas was the framework for her talk. These were Roma people from Hungary who had been human rights activists in their native country. With the rise of neo-nazism in Hungary the family of three were forced to flee and were now in turn being threatened with being sent back under the new expedited Canadian immigration policy. The present Immigration Minister had publicly denigrated Hungarian Romas just prior to her encounter.

I found it ironic how this policy is shaped by the right wing Roman Catholic federal immigration minister Jason Kenny,  a Calgary MP. Mary Jo Leddy, a left wing Catholic who founded her own progressive Catholic newspaper in 1975 based in Toronto,  the Catholic New Times, lives at Romero House in Toronto.

Named after Oscar Romero, the assassinated Salvadoran bishop who stood up for the poor, Leddy said she has lived with refugees now for twenty years at Romero House and they were pretty well entirely non-Christians. She confessed that living with non-Christians honed her Christianity.

      A university lecturer and author and commentator, Leddy is very much in demand, so when the urgent situation arrived at her doorstep last Christmas, it was just one more thing she had to do in the face of a very busy schedule. But when she met the people face to face and saw their little girl and heard the depth of their plight, it put everything into  perspective.

She said that meeting the other face of God in this way is an exceptionally grounding experience in the flurry of the busyness of contemporary progressive Christians with all their emerging agenda items. It proved the still point in the storm.

MARCUS BORG

I have known Mary Jo Leddy since those heady days in the early 1970s when Catholic New Times (CNT) was being developed at the grassroots level. Catholic New Times came about in response to the traditionalist Catholic Register of Toronto, which was purporting to be a national Catholic newspaper reflecting the emerging Post Vatican II church.

Her intellectual stature warranted her to serve as the CBC television commentator for the Pope’s tour to Canada in 1984 but this talk was delivered all the more effectively straight from the heart.

Her passion for the lived details of the subject was colored by her erudition but it was the feeling from her words and manner that moved the audience in a great send-off to the Conference. It grounded us in the theological virtue of Hope.

The Friday evening presentation on restructuring our Christian language by biblical scholars Marcus Borg and Richard Rohrbaugh was the first of their five sessions throughout the weekend, sessions which underlined the Scriptural renewal and analytical framework of contemporary progressive Biblical studies.

‘Culture, Text and Context: Speaking Christian, Then and Now’ was the overall title to the series. Borg, a Fellow of The Jesus Seminar, an American, he has served as the national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, while Rohrbaugh of Portland, Oregon pioneered work using anthropological studies of the ancient Mediterranean world to set the New Testament in its original and cultural context.

Their work has tended to liberate the language of the Gospels from the cultural conditioning which may have accrued from later historical periods.

Borg, for example, in one session re-examined the root meanings of the ‘Big Christian Words’ Salvation and Righteousness, stripping away meanings which distorted the original concepts of Liberation and Justice.

In another session, Rohrbaugh did a close examination of the concept and reality of ‘Honour’ in Luke 19:1-10, the calling of Zacchaeus out of the Sycamore tree. This background to the social problem of status in the so-called honour killings of our time threw a useful light on the subject.

It struck me in listening to these scholars how something timely was occurring. Borg physically resembles Sigmund Freud in his later years and the content presentation of using biblical adages in a fresh manner reminded me of the early songs of Bob Dylan and his exclamatory style at times sounded like the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I got up at the question period to tell him these home truths if only to allow more serious questioners a moment to catch their wits.

ELIZABETH MAY

The Sunday evening presentation by the federal leader of the Green Party and most recent political star of the Christian left was scheduled to address ‘Global Expressions of the Green Movement’. Instead Elizabeth May announced that she would speak on the subject that had been shaping itself in her mind during the full year since she had been asked to address Epiphany Explorations.

Religion and Politics, as dangerous as it might seem, was her topic, she jested in typical style. She opened with some startling statistics revealed by author Bill McGibbon, author of The End of Nature, who revealed in a Harper magazine article that in the USA proportionately more citizens identify themselves as ‘Christians’ than citizens of Israel identify themselves as Jewish.

But what sort of Christianity is this? Most mistakenly thought that the Benjamin Franklin cynical citation, “God helps them that help themselves” was actually a biblical quote and that 17 per cent thought that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Elizabeth May was there to espouse a distinctly different prophetic kind of spirituality. It was one I was well acquainted with.

Prior to relocating to Vancouver Island in the mid-1980s, I worked for four years in Cape Breton where a young Elizabeth May was first making waves by taking on the forestry companies for using toxic sprays. Armed with her copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and her own then freshly printed volume Budworm Battles, it was clear that a new star was being born on the social activist scene. She went to law school to become an environmental law specialist.

Even then she knew that the Green Party was the most likely eventual home for her liberal democrat American sensibility. I wrote a poem at the time based on her tales of her close family friend ‘Uncle’ Norman Cousins, the celebrated liberal American author.

One social activist priest I worked with in my job, twenty years her senior said she always came so prepared for her presentations that he felt that he was only winging it half the time in his own efforts to effect social change.

      Her talk Sunday evening reflected the same sort of rigorous erudition yet in a personal testament sort of tone. She did a radical critique of the State Religion of Selfish Individualism, an exact counter to Ayn Rand. She cited Peter Timmerman’s work on the pernicious nature of Econo-theism, or the worship of the Almighty Dollar.

Her cry was for a re-emphasis upon the redeeming concept of the Common Good, or working together before we entirely run out of time. She had special fear of the mentality where the economy is invoked as trumping every other human value. It runs against the grain of our moral fibre, she stated.

HERBERT O’DRISCOLL

The eloquent preacher and former Anglican Dean of Christ Church Cathedral Vancouver has closed the conference in his inimitable style for its entire first ten years. He announced this would be his final year during his talk titled ‘Life is Narrative’.

The former warden of The College of preachers in Washington at the Episcopal National Cathedral with his North Irish manner of speaking in images rather than concepts has a popular following and is author of thirty books.

In 1976 I was attending Christ Church Anglican Cathedral in Vancouver through a friend. It was there I met my wife to be. She was a parishioner and a leader of the adult faith group which was made up of a truly motley assortment of West End habitues. A more colourful cast of characters I never knew so intimately although at the time it just seemed like the usual post-1960s conglomeration.

Our pastor was one of the first women priests in the country and she was an assistant to Dean Herbie, as he was called with affection by our lot. It was a rich experience in itself, but many were drawn by the enlightened attitude of the Dean and by his masterful preaching style, which seemed to mentally recreate situations from the readings. Again, now I realize we took him for granted.

After the Renaissance of the Sixties, creativity like that seemed almost our expected norm. But I can truly say that in my wanderings throughout the world and the Christian world, Herbert O’Driscoll is among the most memorable preachers, homilists and speakers.

      I first noticed him on the FM radio of the day, where twice a day he would have a one minute reflection over the air waves. ‘Poems’ of a sort  in the midst of the commercial and pop cultural flurry which seemed the sole competitors for the public consciousness on commercial radio.

Dean O’Driscoll’s excursions into the metaphysical, the spiritual and the sacred in our midst were not only brilliantly executed but inspirational in its original concept. He endeavoured to capture the sacred imagination, the layer beneath, with the in-depth question just below the surface and correctly assumed to be within the heart of every human being. It was often very moving, always worth hearing. Even today, in his work, Herbert O’Driscoll’s triumph of this nature persists.

2013

Epiphany Explorations is planned more than a year in advance. The complete slate of speakers and resource people was included with the program handouts. The major speakers include ‘historical Jesus scholar’ John Dominic Crossan and Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s 26th Governor General. Others are ‘Preacher’s preacher’ Tom Long of Atlanta, Teilhardian scholar Ilia Delio as well as Victoria Jewish story teller Shoshana Litman, Muslim Sufi Imam Jamal Rahman and Louise Rose of the Victoria Good News Choir among the sixteen slated for Epiphany 2013.