The End Before Each Beginning

Photographic Evidence of "The Lions" in North Vancouver [Photo Credit: Luc Tribolet for Unsplash]

I returned to North Vancouver in search of the homeland I'd left behind, years before. It was raining as the taxi drove me into town from the airport, so I couldn't make out the low mountains of the North Shore, or the higher, majestic "Lions" who stood guard over the city of my childhood. When I asked the driver about them, he informed me, in a thick foreign accent, that there were no Lions. There was Grouse Mountain, Mount Seymour, and Cypress Bowl (which I'd known, growing up, as Hollyburn), but "no Lions." I knew I'd been gone awhile. But how had they made the mountains disappear? And why?!

If Christmas conjures nostalgia for the past, the New Year proclaims hope in the future. We can't have one without the other. There's no embracing the new without first grieving the old, especially if the old feels worthy and the new suspect, by comparison. As much as we may want to rush headlong into the pristine possibilities of a new year, it's important that we know what we're leaving behind. How else to know what to bring forward into the future?

My father has been dead twenty-seven years now. I miss him every day. I often wish I could talk with him and, in truth, sometimes I still do, thinking he would like this book I'm reading or the way a relationship within the family is working out. When this happens, I am aware that, in a way, he's still with me. I know when I am making him proud, and also when I'm disappointing him. Paradoxically, it is by grieving his absence that I feel his presence. Something of my father's essence has survived his death.

This is what I mean, about recognizing our losses. Like the Lions, that had disappeared from view on that pilgrimage home, I realized how much I missed seeing them, how important they were to me, and how mountains, and forests too, for that matter, and burbling brooks, should always be part of my life, going forward. Their value to me has increased as I've distanced myself from them, and they from me.

Heading into this New Year, we are faced with this peculiar tension, between what's been lost and what's being gained. We desperately want to believe, with all the tectonic shifts in our world, from the dismantling of democracy and the redrawing of the geopolitical map to the rage of the disenfranchised and the disillusionment of the young, that a hopeful New World is being born. We want to penetrate the diabolical forces presently at work and recognize the creative possibilities emerging, like a more soulful humanity that is re-attuned to its place within the natural world, or a more spiritual global fellowship imbued with compassion and understanding.

It may or may not be self-evident, that such a world is coming. But only by grieving what we know we're leaving behind--civility in public discourse, stability in the home, love for the planet--can we know what to bring with us. We take our nostalgia for the past seriously, in other words, in order to build our hope for the future.

So it was that, back in the mid-1990s, I flew from Toronto to Vancouver for a job interview. I was needing an escape from the frenetic pace I'd set for myself as a parish priest in the Anglican Church. The job for which I was applying, that of a congregational development officer, would take me out of the daily grind of parish ministry by offering my support to those who were still caught in its grip. It would be a new beginning for me.

But it would also be taking me home to the land of my birth, the Lower Mainland, in British Columbia, which had continued to form my inner landscape, wherever else I'd lived across Canada in the ensuing years. This was as strong a pull as the thought of the new work, that I would be going back, reclaiming my childhood, and reengaging my sense of magical connection with the verdant mountain forests of my youth. And this led to the sad but inevitable conclusion: we can never go back. We can only be grateful for what we had and faithful in carrying it forward, as best we can.

To listen to this story, fully told, click on the Play button in the box below. It leads you to the latest episode of my podcast, The Mystic Cave, featuring a chapter from my collection of personal essays, Pie Face Boy: In Search of Soul, published in 2013. The chapter is titled, "Wondering Where the Lions Are."