If you want to know more about the remarkable Christian who wrote what critics have called “some of the most humane, sweet and profound poetry of our time,” read David A. Kent’s Optic Heart: A Biography of Margaret Avison.

Margaret Avison twice won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry: for Winter Sun, her first book of poetry published in 1960, and again for No Time in 1989. In 2003, her collection Concrete and Wild Carrot won the esteemed Griffin Poetry Prize. The Griffin judges praised her sublimity and humility.

This is not Mr. Kent’s first study of a distinguished Christian poet. He edited The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, the English Victorian poet. He is also the editor of the anthology Christian Poetry in Canada.

Ms. Avison is an often difficult and enigmatic poet who at age 45 experienced a religious conversion that afterwards informed all her life and poetry. As an English teacher and editor, and as a committed Christian himself, Mr. Kent is an ideal biographer of this strange and complex poet.

Margaret Avison (1918-2007) had a long life, and in Volume 1 Mr. Kent spends almost 400 pages (not including footnotes) documenting her first six decades. He draws extensively on Ms. Avison’s autobiography, I am Here and Not Not-There, which was published in 2007, two years after her death. But any autobiography is, by definition, highly subjective and can leave huge gaps.

Besides digging in numerous archives, and initially spending considerable time with Ms. Avison, Mr. Kent interviewed no less than 65 writers, Christian leaders, family members and friends who knew her well, including such literary luminaries as Northrop Frye, Morley Callghan, John Robert Colombo, Denise Levertov and James Reaney. He also interviewed Margaret Clarkson, Grace Irwin, David Jeffrey and Wilber Sutherland, among others, for insights into her spiritual journey.

Ms. Avison was a very private person, so in deference to her discomfort with biographical work, Mr. Kent agreed to publish his book after her death. “Had I known about Avison’s profound aversion to biography, her ‘wish to remain anonymous,’ I might never have begun this critical biography,” he writes.

Born in 1918 in Galt, Ont., Ms. Avison had a happy childhood with loving parents. Her sister Mary remembers four-year-old Margaret’s first rhyme: “Little birdie up in the birch / Sing to the people going to church.”

Her father was a prominent Presbyterian minister, first in Ontario, then in Regina and Calgary. Margaret always had fond memories of her early years in western Canada. But the family’s move back east to Toronto was not a happy time for 11-year-old Margaret. By age 15 she was hospitalized for three months with anorexia nervosa. This occurred after the sudden death of her favourite English teacher at Humberside Collegiate.

Gladys Story had given Ms. Avison what became a critical piece of advice: “For the next 10 years do not use the first person in any poem you write.” The advice stayed with her, and in later life she was generally impatient with “confessional poems, since they were often marked with ‘synthetic self-pity’ and ‘unearned anxiety.’”

One day, a youth pastor asked the “preacher’s kid,” who was now a teen, to stop teaching Sunday school because her teaching was upsetting someone. “For the rest of her life, her concern with safeguarding personal privacy was grounded in the public scrutiny she experienced in childhood and adolescence,” writes Mr. Kent.

At University of Toronto’s Victoria College, Ms. Avison became close friends with another shy but brilliant intellectual, Northrup Frye, who would go on to influence her creative life.

After graduation she led the life of a Bohemian artist, living in a rented room, eating sparingly and doing freelance editing or clerical work so she could devote her time to reading and writing poetry.

Ms. Avison was a self-effacing, modest woman who deplored pretention and celebrity culture. “Her sympathies instinctively reached out to the disposed and the marginalized,” Mr. Kent tells us. She may briefly have considered social work but “chose poetry as her life work.”

Mr. Kent chose the title of his biography Optic Heart from the opening lines of her poem “Snow,” which was published in 1960:

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes.
The optic heart must venture: a jail-break,
And re-creation.

Although she had grown up in Methodist and United Church manses, as an adult Ms. Avison did not darken the door of a church for 25 years. But in 1960 “a singular experience” changed her life. While editing some manuscripts in Victoria College, she became aware of a woman standing silently across from her desk. When she looked up the woman said simply, “Do you know the joy of knowing the Lord Jesus?” Ms. Avison was exasperated and replied, “I know the theory, and as you can see, I am busy.”

Instead of being downcast, the stranger’s face “just shone” and she gave the poet the address of Knox Presbyterian Church on Spadina Avenue, saying, “Come and see if you like it,” then left.

After several months, Ms. Avison did attend Knox and found the people different from the exclusively academic group she had been working with for years. She met with the senior minister, Dr. William Fitch, and asked him, “I keep hearing about faith in there. You people have it. I don’t. What am I supposed to do?” When Dr. Fitch learned of her background, he encouraged her to “read and reread the Gospel of John – daily.”

At first Ms. Avison resisted the pull back to Christian commitment, but on the morning of Jan. 4, 1963, before setting off for work, she read, “You believe in God, believe also in Me.” (John 14:1) And while she did not have a vision, she sensed a Person present. She said, “I’ll believe, but oh, don’t take the poetry. It’s all I’ve got left.” Finally, she hurled her bible across the room and said, “Okay, take the poetry too!” Then she set off for work.

Mr. Kent relates how she soon noticed how “quickened” her senses were and how “creative ideas abounded.” She did not have to sacrifice her poetry as she had feared. A year later, she composed this stanza in “Prayer–(Answered with renewed prayer)”:

What only Christ makes real
Rests in astonishment
In one Uncommonweal:
(Love is heart-rent.)

She wrote in an essay in HIS Magazine in 1968 that the impulse to write and the impulse to “serve God” do not need to be in conflict. At the same time, Christian writers should avoid the temptation to “play it safe” and choose subjects within the “clearly defined” bounds of doctrine. Mr. Kent notes that “while Avison was a committed Christian, she distrusted didacticism.”

For short stretches she worked as a librarian and then a university lecturer but left both, sensing that such full-time work was interfering with her writing. She never married, but she was not without close friends and did receive some romantic proposals.

In mid-life she nurtured younger writers and argued that Canada Council Grants should go to them, not to established writers like herself. She was also a “scholar who worked among the outcasts.” After her conversion, she spent long hours first as a volunteer, then later on staff at Evangel Hall, a street mission outreach of Knox Church.

One supervisor observed: “Margaret loved and understood the characters at the mission. She identified with their poverty, mental illness and aloneness. For one of the mission’s windows Margaret wanted to write, ‘You don’t have to go it alone.’” She once said, “There are only two kinds of people after all. Jesus. And all the rest of us.”

In another essay, she wrote about what she wished she had known earlier about the Christian way of life, “that nobody is remote from God;” “that music, libraries, and winter mornings burning with cold beauty are the gifts God lavishes.”

Here are the oping stanzas of her 1966 poem “Dumbfounding”:

When you walked here,
took skin, muscle, hair,
eyes, larynx, we
withheld all honor: “His house is clay,
how can he tell us of his far country ?”

Your not familiar pace
in flesh, across the waves,
woke only our distrust.
Twice-torn we cried “A ghost”
and only on our planks counted you fast.

Dust wet with your spittle
cleared mortal trouble.
We called you a blasphemer,
a devil-tamer.

The evening you spoke of going away
we could not stay.
All legions massed. You had to wash, and rise,
alone, and face
out of the light, for us.

Mr. Kent is excellent at grasping Ms. Avison’s poetry and contextualizing her life. Every Canadian university English department would do well to purchase a copy of Optic Heart. So would poets and those who enjoy poetry, especially the works of John Donne and George Herbert. Mr. Kent hopes to publish Volume II in 2028.

Mr. Kent, together with his wife, Margo Swiss, began The St. Thomas Poetry Series at St. Thomas, Huron Street in 1988. It was launched with his anthology Christian Poetry in Canada. In 1996, the reading series included the publication of books by Christian poets. Optic Heart will be the 37^th book in the series. It is a non-profit venture, and all proceeds from the sales of one book are used to publish the next. There will be a book launch for Optic Heart on April 25 at 2:30 p.m. at St. Thomas, 383 Huron St., Toronto.

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But just as the brilliant stage performances of Shakespeare can seem inaccessible to the average person, so too can the tremendous choral performances of Bach seem out of reach to many people.

One choral group in Toronto has made it its aim to remove those barriers and, at the same time, share Bach’s faith-infused choral legacy with a harried world. The Trinity Bach Project is a baroque vocal and instrumental ensemble dedicated to offering “ordinary audiences the extraordinary musical and spiritual riches of Bach’s choral repertoire.” It describes its vision to “remove barriers of exclusivity around classical choral music and open the doors of sacred places – both historic architecture and human hearts – with Bach’s abiding light.”

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a devout Christian who composed more than 200 sacred cantatas for the Lutheran church in Germany, often at the rate of one a week. These are considered among the treasures of the Western music tradition, yet they are rarely heard. The cost of presenting these profound sacred works, which require period instruments and highly trained vocalists and musicians, limits their availability to contemporary audiences.

While a handful of Bach’s longer works, such as the St. Matthew Passion, the St. John Passion and the Mass in B Minor, are performed live fairly regularly, “the rest of his choral wealth lies dormant, not doing the spiritual work it was intended to do.”

The Trinity Bach Project (TBP) intends to change that. This is how its members are bringing down the barriers of expense, obscurity and elitism:

• The concerts are free. The performers are members of Toronto’s professional music scene and all are paid, but through donations and patron support, not ticket sales.
• The concerts are short, an hour in length without an intermission. Some are held during the lunch hour or mid-afternoon.
• A line-by-line English translation of the German or Latin text is projected as surtitles during performance.
• The venues are historic churches, not huge concert halls or auditoriums, making for a more intimate experience. Last year a simple sandwich board outside St. Matthew, First Avenue advertising the free concert was enough to entice one couple who had lived in the neighbourhood for 30 years but had never stepped inside the church.
• The concerts end with the audience joining the professional ensemble in singing a familiar hymn in English. Louise Zacharias Friesen, one of the visionaries behind TBP, says, “We want to invite the audience into the experience. Some have said to us, ‘I haven’t sung in years,’ but they were glad they did.”

Under the umbrella organization Imago Arts, Trinity Bach Project is a joint venture of Louise Zacharias Friesen (artistic director), Nicholas Nicolaidis (music director), Chris Friesen (executive director) and Michelle Odorico (orchestral director). This team is bound together by their Christian faith – they all attend Anglican churches – and by a shared passion for the music of Bach.

Ms. Zacharias Friesen says she wants to invite people to “taste and see that high calibre classical music can communicate to anybody.”

For Mr. Friesen, listening to Bach is like “drinking a cup of spiritual coffee. And you’re longing for your audience to have the same experience.” He finds that music can be a “supra-rational expression of faith,” that it can express more than reason alone.

The project is in its second season, and Mr. Friesen, who is currently pursuing graduate studies at Wycliffe College, handles all the administration involved. “The other important way TBP connects to our faith is in terms of the tremendous adventure of trust it has been to move forward with the project without knowing how we would pay for it,” he says.

Ms. Odorico, who leads the instrumental ensemble, says she’s thrilled to be sharing Bach’s music with audiences “in the spiritual intention with which it was written.” A baroque violinist who has played with Tafelmusik and many other ensembles, she had no trouble finding qualified musicians for this project.

The orchestra, which varies in size from five to 15 members depending on the work being performed, plays on period instruments including organ, violoncello, oboe, viola, traverso flute, trumpet and bassoon.

TBP’s home base is Trinity College Chapel at the University of Toronto. Thomas Bell, director of music and organist at Trinity College, says it has been an absolute delight to host the ensemble. “Their music-making is of the highest quality, a gift to the faculty, staff, students and many visitors to the college. But it is what lies behind their performances that sets the TBP apart as they seek to uncover the faith and spiritual life of J.S. Bach,” he says. “The texts of Bach’s cantatas come alive in their singing – and as a bonus, are projected onto the wall of the chapel – to create a musical experience full of depth and loveliness. As Bach would have said, Soli Deo Gloria!”

TBP’s 2023-24 season will present six different programs in 10 different venues. It has established relationships with several Anglican churches in Toronto (St. Augustine of Canterbury, Grace Church on-the-Hill, St. Matthew, First Avenue and Little Trinity) and one in Hamilton (St. John the Evangelist). It will also perform at Metropolitan United, Timothy Eaton Memorial, Trinity-St Paul, and Holy Family Parish, all in Toronto.

Still under development is a school series to introduce children and youth to the power of Baroque music, a New Sacred Music concert featuring the work of young and local composers who create music in the spirit of Bach, and the concept of a summer Bach festival in Gananoque, midway between Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Syracuse, NY.

“I think Bach wrote this for us,” said one audience member last season. Said another, “I found hope here.” And the ensemble has been told, “You are changing the musical landscape in Toronto.”

Mr. Friesen says the Trinity Bach Project is “on a mission to help re-teach the world – or at least the GTA – Bach’s musical and spiritual language.”

Sue Careless is a senior editor at the Anglican Planet. This article first appeared in the Anglican Planet.

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In 2022, more than 80 children in Minden shopped at the two-day sale held Dec. 2-3 at St. Paul’s, and about another 30 children did so at St. James, Kinmount.

At St. Paul’s, families are welcomed at the church hall and parents can sit comfortably by the fireplace while their offspring shop. The donated items are new or gently used and cost only $1. Volunteers not only help the children find the right gifts for their family members and friends, but also help the young folk wrap and tag their presents.

The Rev. Canon Joan Cavanaugh-Clark greets each child lined up at the door and chats a little about Jesus and Christmas. “Some families are surprised that church is not all gloom and doom,” she says. Some parents tell her that they will drop in on Sunday. “Of course, not many do, but it is an outreach into the community, and two new young families have joined recently.” Other shoppers belong to other churches.

The three-point parish of Minden, Kinmount and Maple Lake is located in the northeastern corner of the diocese, about two-and-a-half hours north of Toronto. Situated in the scenic Haliburton Highlands, the parish serves both summer cottagers and year-round residents.

The sales are advertised not only in church bulletins and on the parish website and Facebook but also in local stores and community newspapers. The event has proven popular with both the churched and unchurched. The sales have been held annually for about seven years; however, the pandemic’s lockdowns forced them to close for the past three.

In December, St. Paul’s sale alone brought in about $500. All the money raised goes back into the parish’s children’s programs to help pay for special trips, as well as the occasional pizza. The parish runs a Messy Church on weekday evenings once a month.

Canon Cavanaugh-Clark, who is well known for her boundless energy and enthusiasm for the gospel, has been serving the three-point parish for 11 years. She has taken courses in innovative missional outreach programs and with the Rev. Martha Waind, her deacon, has begun several outreach ministries besides the Children’s Christmas Gift Sale.

The parish runs a thrift shop called Bountiful Blessings located besides St. Paul’s, which is staffed by volunteers. “The parish does not give away money; we share from the abundance God provides. Other than operation costs, and Bishop McCallister School, all monies are shared to provide for needs in the local community,” says Canon Cavanaugh-Clark.

A few years ago, the profits were used to support Syrian refugees, and more recently school children at the Bishop McAllister School in Kyogyera, Uganda. Last year the thrift shop assisted in making a new girls’ residence at the school secure. (A few days before, the school had been attacked by robbers and three staff members murdered.) This year the thrift shop contributed to the school’s new library building.

This past fall, the parish opened a drop-in centre called The Gathering Place on the main street of Minden for anyone who’d like a coffee or hot chocolate and a quiet place to hang out. Students can use donated computers to help them with their homework. On the afternoon of Dec. 11, a gospel sing-song and worship service was held there.

On Dec. 18 and again on Christmas Eve, some of the children who came to the gift sale attended or performed in the Christmas pageant held annually at St. Paul’s – another popular event in the small but vibrant rural parish.

In 2016, St. Paul’s celebrated 150 years of continuous ministry in Minden. With its sister congregations, the three-point parish has celebrated more than 400 years combined of proclamation of the gospel in Minden and the surrounding area.

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