Obituaries
Bride of Sorrows: Marnie Butler Recalled
Patrick Jamieson, Victoria
Volume 38 Issue 10, 11, & 12 | Posted: December 28, 2023
I’ve borrowed the title of another friend’s book of poems for this reflection on the passing of my dearest friend and spiritual colleague Marnie Butler, who served as editor for twelve years of Island Catholic News between 1993 and 2005. Her contribution to ICN was critical to its survival and thriving in the 35 years now of its existence. More about that a little later, first it is time to note the character of her outstanding sensibility and how it shaped the prophetic direction of ICN in the decades since she stepped down due to ill health.
In its first six years, 1987-93, ICN was a progressive Catholic Diocesan monthly on an autonomous basis stressing ecumenicism, social justice and the Second Vatican Council’s whole program of renewal. Marnie expanded the perspective to include multifaith, sensitivity to gays, racial equality and, of course, feminism. In other words she transformed the basis of the journalism. This was no head trip she imposed but sprang from the inner core of her being and was the result of the upbringing by her adoptive parents, a justice driven Methodist mother and a very intelligent secular Jewish father, Lil and Bill Berger, a school teacher and a barber in Victoria.
From childhood she was sensitive to the plight of Black people in The United States. When she was a young teenager she and her mother went to hear John Lewis speak in Victoria, a close disciple of Dr. Martin Luther King who Marnie always called Dr. King. She couldn’t understand why her close friends were not interested in tagging along.
In terms of her passion for peace and justice and standing up for the underdog, Marnie suffered Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. She took so much suffering into her heart and body, she was a bride of these sorrows.
In the late 1980s, she found a home in Roman Catholicism under the leadership of Bishop Remi De Roo for these passions, who she came to recognize as the friendly little priest at the Cathedral who welcomed her to sit and meditate after stocking up on books at the library across Yates street. Only years later did she recognize him on television as the bishop.
She said she would go into Munro’s Books store, also nearby and the owner and author Alice Munro would send her to the library in a helpful way when she knew the young girl didn’t have the funds for the purchases. Such was Victoria.
Early Years
Marnie’s spiritual nature was revealed in an episode from her fifth year. Born in 1950, during her first five years her constant companion was her maternal grandfather C.C. Perry, a former Indian Agent with the federal Government. Perry quit on principle protesting against the government’s policies. He would read to Marnie in Old English, Chaucer and the like. This relationship, in my view partially accounted for Marnie’s attitude that she had all her major ideas by the time she was five.
When C.C. died, the little tyke was stumped. She kept waiting for him to return, sitting up on the edge of the bed waiting. She said she was rescued from this situation by a lady in blue who came and explained that Grandpa would not be coming back. Grandpa himself might have made a farewell appearance, the way she told it. But I always found it an interesting coincidence that Marnie spent a good part of her adult life sleeping upright in a chair of some sort.
To say that she had a highly developed intuitive sense would be at best an understatement. People could not figure out how she knew things about them. One staff member at ICN found it very spooky. It was one of the aspects that connected Marnie and me.
Like the author Caroline Myss, Marnie was a medical intuitive. Whenever I had a health question that was bothering me, I learned to tell her about it and her first instinct unfailingly helped resolve the issue.
She took a great interest in Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, and this would be a good example of making the symbolic conscious in a constructive way as Jung recommended.
ICN Editor
Marnie was chosen unanimously to be my replacement editor in 1993. This was in spite of the fact that many of the other candidates had a journalism background while Marnie was trained as an arts administrator at Banff Springs. She had done her undergraduate work in English and film editing, but primarily the board of ICN just automatically recognized the paper would be in good hands with her.
And it was. Financially during her era the budget was three times what it is today. Enough to pay her an adequate salary. The board consisted of a stellar group; Tom and Beth Loring, Grant Maxwell, Sister of St. Ann Catherine Moroney, Msgr. Michael O’Connell and my father Jim Jamieson. I was surprised they picked her, I said at the time, which Marnie took as a bit of an insult.
Marnie had what is known as a contrarian nature. She rarely accepted the conventional wisdom on a subject. We had a way of completing each other’s sentences along this sort of tangent. The last thing she said to me in her final hospital stay was, “Pat don’t contradict me”. She was suffering and recognized we didn’t have time for our usual repartee.
Suffering was a major category of experience for Marnie. Physical, spiritual and psychological. Her birth mother came to have her at St. Joseph Hospital in 1950 from a city in the Interior of BC. She was adopted and was an only child in that setting, having to guess about her parentage until her mid 30s. We spent time with her birth mother after that. She always credited her good friend Bill Krampe with doing the hard sledding to discover who her birth parents were.
The way she took to my large family of origin, including becoming a close friend of my mother, suggested she would have been very much at home in the large family she actually came from. Marnie was something of a man’s woman. Most of her closest adult friends were male including the musicians John Fisher and Norm McPherson, and librarian Tom Carson and the poet professor Mike Doyle. She did not have the regular female reservations about how the male mind of the species works.
That and her contrarian aptitude and an ability and need to speak her mind, could be startling. She used to say that we were all cells in the cosmic body of God. Catholicism appealed to Marnie on its cosmic consciousness basis. She needed a religion that had a global and in-depth perspective. Prior to becoming a Catholic, she had attempted to become a Jew but was not aware that it was the custom to test your resolution and was turned away at the first try,
Later in life she was welcomed into the tribe of Israel, a decision which startled many in the Catholic context, including Bishop Remi who paid her a visit to discuss the matter. Toward her final years she drifted back into a practice of Catholicism including attendance at our home liturgies by a group associated with Island Catholic News.
She is buried with my parents and grandparents in the family plot at Hatley Memorial Gardens at Royal Roads in Colwood.
We had a grave-side religious ceremony on October 14, four days after she passed away at Hospice at Richmond Pavilion Jubilee Royal Jubilee Hospital. A celebration of life is scheduled for next spring where her wider selection collection of friends can gather, having adjusted themselves to the fact of her early demise.
Marnie Butler (née Maureen Rae Berger) rest in peace.
Patrick Jamieson, Victoria