A Column Published every Monday by Kevin D. Annett
January 11, 2016
Into the Cauldron: Learning all about God, the Street and Lard Ass
One Goldfish to another: Of course there’s a God! Who do you think changes the water?
“Woe to you, teachers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You cleanse the outside of the vessel, but inside you are full of plunder and every evil thing! – Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23:25
The recent news that my old Alma Mater, the Vancouver School of Theology, has just been sold off to become a wing of the Economics Faculty at the University of British Columbia strikes me not only as highly appropriate, considering the spirit of the place, but a definite kind of poetic justice. It also prompted me to compose the following fond remembrances of my life as a budding young theologian there, in the late 1980′s.
The first day of school was always a thrill for me, but seminary was different. The wall of smiling blank faces that met me in the assembly hall that morning didn’t bode well. Nor did the saccharine niceness that dripped from the walls of the Vancouver School of Theology (VST).
“Hi!” exclaimed one of the clean faced denizens with an affected pleasantry.
“Hi” I replied.
“Welcome!” he continued, resembling a college fraternity President circa 1958.
I nodded and returned his smile, an automatic gesture that everyone at VST did compulsively. Unconsciously I started imitating the expression so much that my jaws actually ached by the end of every school day.
“I’m Brian” he exclaimed, extending his hand.
I took it reluctantly and said my name.
“I’m so glad the Lord has brought us together!”
“Uh huh” I replied, wondering if he was hitting on me.
“Our prayer circle is every night, downstairs in the lounge!”
He’s a Pentecostal, I thought.
When I was a kid in Winnipeg, our neighbor was a Pentecostal who kept trying desperately to get my family to leave what she not inaccurately called the “spiritual jello” of the United Church of Canada and come over to the Real Christians: her group.
We declined, especially my Dad, who did however get a few well placed digs in to her about removing the crap from your own eye first, or something like that. So the neighbor, whom Dad appropriately nicknamed “Tartuffe”, didn’t talk to us after that, which was a shame, considering how cute her only daughter was.
But on that first day at VST, I was tempted to lambaste my newly acquired evangelical associate in a similar manner. Unfortunately, besides lacking my Dad’s barbed capacity to insult, I labored back then under a low spiritual self-estimate based not surprisingly on the fact that I didn’t actually have much Christian faith. That deficit hobbled my capacity to challenge the pomposity around me, which meant that I mostly kept quiet and smiled a lot to keep the VST mob at bay.
The lunchtime buffet was quite delectable, however, which partly made up for all the crap that day.
After a whack of prayers and a long-winded oratory by a suit named Bud Phillips who passed for the school Principal – whose homily to we hushed crowd of fifty fresh fish reminded me, by its astounding self-congratulation, of the pep talk I had received on my first day at the campus law school – our saintly crowd of novice seminarians retired to the hog fest spread out for us like some latter day Loaves and Fishes, minus Jesus, of course.
And that’s where I first encountered Lard Ass.
The guy was a legend at VST, and not just because of his massive girth. Reverend Jim McCullum ran the place like it was his own private cabana, partly because he was drinking buddies with the aforementioned Principal Phillips and had dirt on the guy, consisting of certain missing school funds used to refurbish El Presidente’s private residence. But in that first encounter, all I knew about Reverend Lardo was that his prodigious bulk stood between me and the mountainous smorgasbord like a No Go sign in Belfast.
Everybody called Jim “Lard Ass” behind his considerable back, his faculty colleagues included. Jim’s behavior only served to cement the appellation. For after the obligatory invocation delivered by a proud and loud first year student, Lardo clearly forgot the proverb about the first becoming last, and made a direct beeline for the food like it was Christ Incarnate, shoving his way in front of everybody else to be at the head of the chow line.
I was as shocked as the rest of the crowd, but none of us said anything, being Canadians; and so we all politely stepped back to let the Hulk wade into the feast, which he did like his life depended on it.
Lardo sort of reminded me of my Uncle Lloyd, who wasn’t nearly as fat as Jim but had the same compulsive need to gulp down anything that had once moved; especially at smorgasbords.
Uncle Lloyd had more of an excuse for his piggishness than Lard Ass, of course, being a child of poverty during the Depression and a survivor of a German prisoner of war camp where he was rarely fed. Lloyd had also come close to being shot by a Hitler Youth company soon after he’d been taken prisoner by them at Juno Beach in June of 1944, and so he ate the way other veterans booze. But Lard Ass was merely a greedy pig, and not just about food.
On that memorable first day, Reverend Hulk actually loaded down two full plates with everything in sight before lumbering off to the nearest table. Even worse, the slob wore a stupid self-satisfied smirk that reminded me of the kid who rips off a chocolate bar from the local grocery and crams it in his mouth before anyone can catch him. Jim McCullum then started filling his maw like a dog in heat.
And that wasn’t the worst part. Stuffed to his gills and belching like a longshoreman, McCullum had the gall to stand up later, before any of us had finished our meal, and proceed to lecture us about that day’s reflection from some Pauline epistle concerning, you guessed it, on the need for restraint, moderation and kindliness towards fellow believers.
Uh huh. Pass the pastries.
In truth, the incident was a remarkably fair and accurate introduction to life at VST and in Church World. Amidst all the ponderous prayers and pretensions of doing “the work of God” you could hear lots of belching going on, including a constant stream of talk of “competency in the ministry”. After all. we were being trained as professional maintenance men in the Temple, and woe betide the clergy person who didn’t competently keep their own piece of the cash cow operating smoothly.
The funny thing was that I never felt very competent as a parish minister, despite all of my grinding preparation for the post: not in the face of the daily unpredictability and chaotic mix of grief, death and banality that falls upon even the least engaged pastor. The ministry has nothing to do with being “competent”, except from the viewpoint of the church number-crunchers and bloodless little twerps who occupy head office and equate true spiritual witness with the balancing of the annual church budget.
But all in all, VST and the church in general were a strictly learn as you go operation, and I discovered quickly what it all boiled down to: Follow the rules, don’t laugh at Lard Ass, and for God’s sake, keep smiling!
I never did get the routine, remaining thankfully incompetent and generally unsmiling.
……………..
Jesus wept. – John 11:35
During those years, I hung out on Vancouver’s skid row quite a bit, no doubt to wash off the VST crap by adorning myself with the halo of a “liberation theology Christian”. I fancied myself a “priest on the side of the poor”, not tarnished by the corporate greed and hypocrisy (to say nothing of the genocidal crimes) of the institutionalized church. That way, just like any spin-doctoring Pontiff, I could have my pension and sainthood, too. But I also got a thrill hanging out with all the young hookers in the downtown east side neighborhood, if the truth be known.
I was kidding myself, but at the time it seemed virtuous. Serving both God and Mammon is a subtle maneuver, after all, but a necessary prerequisite for any successful cleric.
Despite that, I learned a lot about the real score from East Hastings street; and the more I did, the greater became the turmoil building in me about what the hell I was even doing in the church.
My best teachers were all the anonymous souls who came and went on those lean streets. One of them was Carol, an aging prostitute who kept up her looks behind a mask of make-up and seasoned appeal. The woman was a grandmother three times over with a crazy sense of humor, and she took to me right away when I started showing up on Friday nights with coffee, free condoms and “bad trick sheets” describing particularly violent johns to watch out for.
Carol called her work “keeping an open heart on the stroll”, which she always did. Her poetry, which she eventually showed me, cut through crap as easily as it did through me.
I was with her one night when I ran into Doug Graves, one of my VST professors: a senior United Church clergyman who was a big shot in the local religious establishment, and known for his elegant sermons.
“That’s him” remarked Carol as Doug drove by in his Volvo. “A regular little circle jerk”.
“Who, Doug?” I asked, incredulous.
“You know him?”
“Yeah, he’s supervising my internship” I said.
Carol laughed uproariously.
“He’s down here a lot. Never stops. Just drives around all night, whacking himself off. You can always tell by the way the car moves”
I never thought any less of Doug Graves after that. What pissed me off was that professional Christians like Doug would never let their own halos slip, even after getting off with strangers.
When a whole institution lies to itself like that, watch out.
But meanwhile, back on the street, I became known.
Oppenheimer Park is a two block-wide patch of grass and cement where free speech and union protests were routinely smashed up by cops back in the Thirties, and where today the dealing goes on non-stop, rain or shine. It soon became my new workplace, and it still draws me, three decades later, not just by its memories but from the tug of old friends who breathed their last and continue to die off there.
Carol herself disappeared forever one night, not too long after our comical encounter with the Reverend Graves. She never returned to the neighborhood that was her only home, and nowadays it’s assumed she was just another statistic at the hands of whoever likes to kill Vancouver prostitutes, or gets paid to kill them. But many others like Carol came forward to show me the ropes.
They all thought I was working some angle, naturally, since all of them were. And of course I was, although I didn’t see it that way back then. I didn’t have a name for what I was doing because I didn’t know what that really was, which simply made me stupid. But the folks of that neighborhood saw through me and my own mental fog.
“I had you down for another candy pusher” a young male hooker told me once, referring to the Union Gospel street missionaries who routinely shelled out sweets and soda pop and other healthy things to all the street walkers.
“But you ain’t that” the guy continued. “You like, shit man, you searchin’, ain’t you?”
Searching, yes, I suppose; although what I went through often felt like the two guys I spied one night trying to work their way into a Sally Ann clothing drop-off box on Cordova street.
It was unusually cold for Vancouver that evening, and snow even covered the ground. The shelters were as crammed as Jim McCullum’s gut, and the two ragged fellows by the clothing box were clearly seeking a home for the night. The only problem was, there didn’t seem to be a way in.
They were persistent, however, which happens when you’re about to freeze to death. One of them worked at the lock on the back entrance to the box for some time, but it wouldn’t yield. So then they started bashing the thing with their boots and screaming at it like it was some personal enemy. But after awhile they seemed to lose hope, swore a little bit more, and slumped to the ground.
I was about to go over to them with what remained of the coffee I bore when the taller of the men stood up and motioned to his companion. And then with a push he began hoisting the other guy slowly through the front slot of the donation box.
Things were proceeding okay with the operation until a snag occurred, and the inserted fellow got stuck on something. For a few moments he hung suspended with his top half inside the box, his legs dangling and kicking as his muffled voice bellowed something no doubt unrepeatable from inside the container.
Unfazed, the big guy outside responded to his buddy’s shouts by actually shoving him even harder, but that only made the trapped one scream all the louder. And then the pusher seemed to give up, and he stepped back to consider his handiwork.
A cop car turned the corner just then, slowing like some circling crocodile, and the man on the outside of the box must have panicked at the sight of the vehicle: for suddenly he slammed himself into his companion’s legs, and the snagged guy went toppling no doubt thankfully into the space that would be his sanctuary for the night, even though he had no apparent way out of the box.
Thinking that two was a crowd, perhaps, the man on the outside actually patted the container and said something inaudible to it and his ensconced buddy, who didn’t seem to reply. And then the pusher stumbled away into the night.
I always envied the guy who made it inside.