Bald eagles are diving lazily into the Pacific, outside this cottage on a northern Gulf island, three ferry rides away from Vancouver. In a few hours the ocean will pull back a hundred or more metres, exposing star fish, oysters, clams, crabs and a myriad other life forms. There are snow-capped mountains in the distance; the whole scene is stunningly beautiful, and awe-inspiring and apparently sole proof of some (G)od's existence — or so this island's residents keep telling me. (By the time you read this, I'll also have been to the Atlantic Provinces; if I manage to make it to the North this calendar year, I can finally be a Canadian.)
This island, like so much of what is sniggeringly called The Left Coast, is a place where people have chosen to live after willingly rejecting society's grid. Business people, lawyers and other rat-racers, who once had success in their chosen fields, have forsaken those false gods to come here and pursue a more spiritual life. Others have run from societal constraints on their sexuality or their political sensibility. They have rejected Mammon in favour of Nature. They are on a spiritual quest.
Spiritual quest — a hint of Buddhism and Hinduism, something borrowed from various books of death (Tibetan, Incan), bits of world music, gardening, walking, marijuana (it's a common crop here) and of course, Nature. There is a whiff of the monk in them — they have tuned in, dropped out and turned on. The current community on this particular island did begin with communes, but those days are gone. There is no more nude gardening; there are families here now, a public school, markets. It is increasingly bourgeois, and like in many other spiritual environments people talk a lot about money. That may be the only thing they have in common with the religious world.
The one place they do not turn for their spiritual growth is the mainline church — it is seen to be too aligned with society, perhaps even its primal source. When I mention my day job I am treated to one of two responses: silence or indignation. I find it cute, but at the same time I understand their caution.
They are running away from the social conditioning they associate with religion: pretense of happiness, hypocrisy of perfection, smugness of moral superiority. Their anger against the Christian church is palpable. And, I, for one, don't blame them. My God — the monotheistic, Middle Eastern God — has been ill-treated by His own followers, who have dedicated their vulgar behaviour in His name. The church — occasionally even ours, down to its congregational level — has a long history of replacing grace and love with a punitive God, who is mean-spirited and over-sensitive. If that were my experience of God, I too would grab the first ferry out of town, randomly collect deep thoughts and worship Nature.
But I'm either lucky or naïve and continue with the church, despite its pretense, hypocrisy and smugness. And so I was deeply amused as I hung out on this island for half a week to discover that these religion escapees had their own form of smugness. It took me a while to recognize it but I sorta kinda got it after the sixth or seventh person told me they too were uptight city slickers like me once but thanks to the natural beauty and bounty of the island they had found spiritual peace.
I'm not about to move, though. It's easy to find spirituality when sucking on doobies as the sun sets over the Pacific. It's a whole other matter finding the same peace and love and grace at the corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto, or for a greater challenge yet, over coffee hour after worship.
