For I had been stopped in my tracks, arrested by an ancient symbol of sanctuary. There in front of me, on the north outside door of the cathedral, was a large bronze ring with a lion’s head. Utterly captivated, I looked more closely and saw a man’s legs hanging out of the lion’s mouth, with a double-headed snake biting at his feet. In the museum where the original safely resides, I learned that the ring’s design was based on the medieval “Hellmouth” image, which was thought to keep evil at bay. Despite the ghoulish iconography of judgment and hellfire and its intended deterrent purpose – or coexisting with it – was the fact that this ring afforded a way to a safe haven: sanctuary inside the cathedral walls, even for those who had allegedly committed evil.

I was intrigued by this symbol because as the canon pastor of our diocese, my role is to safeguard the sanctuary of our Church. It is my job to protect the Church from behaviours and actions that undermine or threaten the health and safety of our communities and our people, and to facilitate healing when injury has occurred. On a nuts-and-bolts level, I have oversight of the matters that fall under our Sexual Misconduct Policy and the Harassment when a Cleric is Involved Policy, including the investigations of complaints made under those policies. While technical legal documents, these policies are 21^st century vehicles for keeping the Church safe as the place of sanctuary it is called to be. On that day in Durham, my understanding of sanctuary was illumined and augmented.

The Sanctuary Ring

The Sanctuary Ring was placed on the north door of the cathedral shortly after it was completed in 1133. It offered temporary refuge to those seeking asylum in the church, having been accused of a heinous crime such as murder, rape or theft. Calmly, or perhaps highly agitated – or everything in between – the asylum seeker would hang onto the ring, waiting for the monk stationed on watch in a small room above the door to ring the bell. If the bell rang, sanctuary had been granted. Once inside, the person was clothed with a black robe with a yellow St. Cuthbert’s cross stitched onto the left shoulder. Once inside, they enjoyed temporary reprieve for a period of 37 days.

The fugitives were housed in a small room below the southwest tower and given food and drink. Thus contained and protected for 37 days, they reflected. Their weighty task was to decide whether to go back into the world beyond the cathedral’s walls and face trial, or go into exile. If they chose exile, they had to confess their crime and swear to leave the country, never to return. The Royal Coroner, a legal official, would decide the port from which they would leave, and they were given a set amount of time to get there on foot. There they would board a ship, leaving hearth and home, family and friends, and all that they knew. A most bleak pilgrimage!

This medieval concept of sanctuary was in essence a time out, an interval for sober reflection. It was a process of coming to terms with one’s misdeeds and crimes, a time of penitence and remorse. Although there is no record of this, I can imagine that most of the fugitives made a sacramental confession as part of the process. Today, whether in the Church or civil society, we would call this a time of reflection leading, hopefully, to accountability, the making of amends, forgiveness and reconciliation. And perhaps making a new life for oneself, having been reborn in the waters of repentance.

In fact, this medieval concept of sanctuary is simply a particular form of what we Christians have always done Sunday by Sunday throughout the ages. We gather as people who have all fallen short of the glory of God. We come to the altar having been tested and challenged by the Word of God, confessing the wrong we have done, receiving absolution and restoration, and making peace with our neighbours. We do all of this in a safe, consecrated space in which we all belong and are equally beloved in God’s sight, a place that incarnates and proclaims the Reign of Christ. Or is called to – and does not.

A dark, dank room

Tragically, the truth is this: the Church has not always been a sanctuary for God’s people. Instead, at times, it has been a dark, dank room that has harboured evil and allowed it to fester, inflicting great trauma upon many. As I finished my pilgrimage at Durham Cathedral that May day, I was very mindful of the horrific scandal that had rocked the Church of England just six months before, when the Makin Report was released. It revealed a decades-long pattern of abuse inflicted on adolescent boys by John Smyth, a barrister and active lay member of the Church. A recitation of the Church’s sins is depressing and sobering. But it also provides a trumpet blast awakening us to our need to repent, to make amends and commit to doing all we can to live up to our high calling. In the Diocese of Toronto, we have been striving to do this for over three decades. Shortly after the abuses of the Canadian church in our Residential School systems came to light, our diocese struck a task force to draft its first-ever policy on sexual abuse. That policy came into effect in 1992 and has been evolving in its scope and procedures ever since. Then, as the deleterious effects of harassment also became better understood, the diocese added a policy governing harassment in our churches when a clergy person is involved.

As the canon pastor of our diocese, I am the monk stationed at the door available and waiting for the moment when people in distress reach for the sanctuary ring. Unlike medieval times when the person at the door was accused of a crime, the person at the door now is almost always the person claiming to be injured and needing our protection. This first contact begins a process of investigation overseen and directed by me to determine the truth of the allegations of sexual misconduct or harassment. I work with a team of trained investigators known as the Diocesan Response Team, a diverse group of clergy and lay people from across our diocese who have been carefully selected and trained in trauma-informed investigation work. The investigators follow the process set out in the policy that governs, a process that is designed to create a safe, boundaried space of containment and reflection to encourage accountability.

For the Church to be a true haven of sanctuary, everyone must be accountable for their behaviour. This was modelled for us in the Anglican Communion when Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, resigned last November for his and the Church’s failures in dealing with the Smyth allegations. Accountability means that everyone in our churches is held to the same high standards. Everyone includes all our clergy and all our lay people. Everyone includes the bishops and the canon pastor. Our policies provide for a separate, independent process in the event a bishop or the canon pastor is alleged to have committed sexual misconduct or to have harassed someone.

The sanctuary of the Church

The investigatory work of the canon pastor and the Diocesan Response Team culminates in a report that is sent to the diocesan bishop, so that he can decide the consequences, if there are to be any. This depends on many factors, first and foremost of which is whether the allegations were proven to be true. Whatever the consequences or discipline imposed on the person who did the wrong, the goal is not punitive. The goal is to safeguard the sanctuary of the Church. We strive for that by containing and stopping the behaviour, assessing it to determine culpability or innocence, encouraging accountability, and promoting forgiveness and reconciliation. We strive to educate people about their behaviour and to encourage the exercise of empathic understanding regarding its effects on others.

The paradox of the Church as a place of sanctuary is that we include and protect all the children of God, but do not welcome or permit all their behaviours or ways of relating. Within the sacred bounds of sanctuary, we enter into a process of sober reflection and examination (the investigation) not to cast a person out or exile them forever, but to encourage healing and to safeguard that fragile sanctuary which is threatened by wrongdoing. Grace is free. But it is not cheap. Neither is the sanctuary of Christ’s Church.

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Pilgrimage has always been an important part of the religious experience of humans and of the Christian life. However, like other expressions and disciplines of our faith experience, it has its seasons, its ebbs and flows of popularity and practice. Since the 1980s, both the Camino and pilgrimage in general have been experiencing a renaissance – until March 2020! Yet, as our horizons have narrowed, the idea of pilgrimage has taken on new urgency and even broader appeal. Our present context has not only sharpened the desire to make a pilgrimage, it has also paradoxically – and perhaps serendipitously – been an experience of the very vulnerability that is the lot of the pilgrim on the road. As we have had to sit and shelter at home, our walking shoes languishing on the doormat, our spirits have been untethered and thrown into the great and unfamiliar Unknown of a world discombobulated by pandemic. Unintentionally, and perhaps against our wills, we have all become pilgrims these past two years.

Dictionaries define a pilgrim as a person who makes a journey to a holy place for a religious reason. While that’s true, it’s a bit flat and non-descriptive. I like to think of a pilgrim as a person of daring, one who says “yes” to the divine call to leave their workaday life for an extended period of time, to venture forth into the great and wild Unknown towards a holy place; one who does so for some deep spiritual purpose not quite understood, but accepting that it will involve surprise, revelation and transformation. Richard Niebuhr once said that “pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.” And, I believe, one of the things they create or re-create is their very own self, and in so doing also the world in which they live and breathe and have their being.

Each pilgrim walks for a different reason. Each person has a different Camino. For some, a pilgrimage is a process of deep discernment, listening for God’s voice speaking to their questions of who they are, where to go or what to do next. For some, a pilgrimage is a process of healing a wound or a lifetime of wounds, mourning a loss, learning forgiveness, finding or recovering a sense of belonging. For some, it’s a commitment to Creation and to the fight against the planet’s degradation, as each step they take in slow time, each vista they enjoy without the barrier of windows or walls connects them more and more to the Earth and all her creatures. And then for some it’s a long rosary of thanksgiving and gratitude for a life of blessing. Whatever it is, the common element and driving force for every pilgrimage – whether conscious or just dimly known – is a desire to be with God. To live in the words of the Godspell song, seeing God more clearly, loving Her more dearly, following Him more nearly. Because pilgrimage awakens God’s Spirit within us in a way that almost nothing else does.

Pilgrimage may beckon for a long time before the first physical step is taken.  This is so for the Church of the Redeemer community, which has been talking and thinking about walking the Camino for a long time. We are now contemplating the idea of doing just that, but also of exploring the lens of pilgrimage for our life in Christ in all of its fullness and varied expressions. The work is being guided by a small group that has named itself the Becoming Pilgrims Committee. It was struck last year, after Mervyn Chin, a parishioner, asked our incumbent, the Rev. Canon Steven Mackison, if the community could walk the Camino together. Knowing that I am passionate about the subject, Steven then asked me to lead it. I agreed in a heartbeat. I then asked a second parishioner, Henry Krol, to co-lead it with me. He agreed in a heartbeat. Mervyn, Henry and I have all been pilgrims on the Camino and so have experienced something of the holy mystery and transforming power of pilgrimage. Not to mention the joy and fun.

Word of the venture got out and the Becoming Pilgrims Committee was formed. It comprises Henry, Tony Crosbie, Joan Robinson, Lee Shouldice (also a Camino veteran, along with his wife Carol Ritter) and me. And now after some initial planning, a group of 30 or so parishioners are contemplating walking a portion of the Camino Frances for a week and a half in September of this year. Many others are contemplating making pilgrimages more locally in the city and the GTA; and still others are hoping to become pilgrims in other, less concrete ways by exploring and cultivating a pilgrim spirituality in their lives.

There is much to do before September! But we are in this together and are connecting internally with other committees and groups within and beyond our parish family to make it happen. We will piggyback on the work of our Indigenous Solidarity Working Group to walk a pilgrimage on the U of T campus in June. We are working with the Bishop’s Committee on Creation Care to develop a Redeemer pilgrimage within our own parish boundaries and will commence that project by walking a pilgrimage following the watercourse (buried) of Taddle Creek. We will walk and walk and walk throughout the spring and summer to ensure healthy, strong bodies for the road in Spain. We will learn some Spanish, sharing tapas and sipping Albarino. We will read and talk about pilgrimage, learning how to pray with our feet.

Above all, we will learn how to embrace vulnerability and liminality without fear or resistance – to take, as Steven said a few days ago in his Charge to Vestry, “a deeply hopeful journey together.” That is what pilgrimage is all about. That is what our life in Christ as the Church is all about.

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It was my last evening in Santiago, Spain. I was seated at a long table with 20 or so other pilgrims and we were celebrating the completion of our pilgrimages on the Camino de Santiago by breaking bread together. I found myself across the table from a young Canadian woman, Sarah, from Kingston. As the conversation ebbed and flowed, someone made the connection that three of us grouped together were all psychotherapists – at which point another person, Otto, from Winnipeg, piped up and said, “Yeah, and Susan’s also an Anglican priest.”

Words fail to do justice to the look of rapture on Sarah’s face. Too stunned to speak for many seconds, she was aglow with transfiguring amazement and awe. Looking ready to laugh and cry at the same time, she stammered: “I can’t believe this! I walked the entire Camino trying to discern if I should leave my profession of psychotherapy to answer what I believe is God’s call to the Anglican priesthood. I’ve been struggling with wanting to do both, not able to choose between them, not knowing or ever conceiving that both could be possible. And here I am, on the last night, thinking I wasn’t going to get an answer – and here you are, giving me the answer to five weeks of prayer.”

Now, with tears welling up, she continued, “I just can’t believe it! My heart’s going to burst. Because the answer is: ‘Sarah, you can do both.’”

Yes, you can do both. What for Sarah was a startling and awesome epiphany is simply my normal. My ordinary, bi-vocational life combines ministering to others as a part-time mental health professional and as the part-time incumbent of a small parish. Despite being one of the few bi-vocational priests in the Diocese of Toronto, I hadn’t appreciated its singularity and enormous potential. But she sure did. That she could still be a psychotherapist and also say yes to God’s call to ordained ministry was a tremendous gift to her.

As it has been to me. During the last five years, I have alternated every week between days spent in my part-time psychotherapy private practice and days spent as the part-time incumbent of St. Theodore of Canterbury in North York. It is, I suppose, an unusual rhythm: on Mondays and Thursdays I am Susan, the psychotherapist, and on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays I am Mother Susan, the parish priest.

While my professions may seem to outsiders as so similar as to be almost identical, they are not. This configuration requires me to be constantly alert. Not only is it vitally important to remember, as I open my eyes every morning, exactly what day of the week it is, it’s also vitally important to remember with precision the “clothes” I’m wearing at any given time. However, for me, there is both professional and personal fulfillment, as well as a stimulating synergy created by the tensions between the two, which more than compensate for the effort required in staying alert and switching gears.

What exactly does my part-time parish ministry look like? Like that of any incumbent of a small parish, with all the regular liturgical, pastoral, teaching, administrative and diocesan responsibilities of any other church leader. I do it part-time and on a proportionate basis. But not always! The vast majority of my administrative tasks cannot be delegated, and during Advent, Christmas, Lent and Holy Week, I preside at the same number of liturgies and find myself as stretched and busy as my full-time colleagues.

While, like most of my colleagues, I struggle at times with work/life balance and discerning when to forge ahead and when to say no and retreat to the mountain, I perceive that for the bi-vocational person the stakes are even higher. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, once said that the greatest gift a priest can give her people is what she cannot do. How very true! This is not so much a recognition that no ordained person has all the necessary talent, time, and energy to minister to all the needs of a parish and to fulfill God’s mission in that place; rather, it is that the limitations of an ordained leader open space for others to find and serve in their equally important ministries. While Archbishop Williams’ observation has broad relevance, it has a particular urgency for the bi-vocational parish leader and the people she serves.

When I began my ministry at St. Theodore’s, one of the first tasks I set for myself was transforming the understanding of my role and the congregation’s role, to accelerate the process of awakening in us a more baptismally oriented view of leadership and service. The homilist at my celebration of new ministry told the congregation bluntly that “Mother Susan will not be able to do this on her own.” Following her lead, I spent much time in exploring, inviting, and encouraging the gifts of others. Just one example: I saw early on that having a deacon would be a huge asset, and so moved as quickly as possible to discern with the parish and a potential candidate whether we and she were called in this way. By God’s grace, we were.

This opening of space brings lovely surprises to the life of a parish and to the blossoming of lay individuals, who might not otherwise develop or exercise their own ministries. A year ago, we conducted a very successful capital campaign that was conceived and executed by a former churchwarden who wasn’t a natural fundraiser but felt called to undertake a vital project that I could not have led myself. Time and again, I have observed that being a part-time incumbent creates a steady, salutary pressure on others to harken to God’s call to step up to fill the gaps that are so obvious and at times so large.

Finally, my bi-vocational status is a tremendous gift to today’s Church at large. Many churches in our diocese are somewhere towards the end of their life cycle; like St. Theodore’s, they may have years of Godly mission in which to engage still but not the numbers or financial resources to maintain a full-time priest. There is no reason for them to close; neither must they of necessity resort to non-stipendiary ministry, which may not be fulsome enough for the tasks at hand.

It is also a gift to the Church to have ordained servants who are “at the edge of inside.” In an op-ed article in The New York Times, David Brooks described the unique contribution to an organization made by those members who are neither inside and deeply embedded nor outside and throwing “missiles from beyond the walls.” The part-time priest with another active professional vocation is at the edge of inside, with “the loyalty of a faithful insider, but the judgment of the critical outsider.” As a person standing at the doorway, she is not “confused by trivia” nor “locked into the status quo.” Instead, her experience of watching constant comings and goings makes her comfortable with the process of perpetual questioning and transformation, and so able to evaluate and speak with a fresh perspective.

The voice of the bi-vocational priest is a unique voice amongst many other important voices – a voice the Church needs to hear. Hers is a unique vocation with plenteous gifts to offer the Church in our times, as it adapts and re-configures itself in response to new and sometimes challenging opportunities.

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