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Spirit of the West — Page 4
5. Bruce Sanguin
Minister, Canadian Memorial United Church
An “emerging paradigm” Christian known to
quote Rumi and Leonard Cohen in his sermons, Bruce Sanguin
is not your parents’ United Church minister. “I
take eternal life as a given. Immortality is not a reward
offered for good behaviour, nor is hell punishment for
bad behaviour. The question is not what is going to
happen to us; it’s how are we going to contribute
to the evolution of the universe.” After reading
his book Darwin, Divinity and the Dance of the Cosmos,
which sketches the foundations of an ecological Christianity—not
to be confused with a Christian ecology— one of
his colleagues called Sanguin a born-again pagan.
But Sanguin’s spiritual path didn’t begin
in a hazelwood grove. As he tells it, it began in a
University of Winnipeg locker room. Between games of
volleyball he was suddenly struck by the “question
of the meaning of life,” and it continued to gnaw
at his spiritual fingernails. He experimented with Transcendental
Meditation and other early-’70s offerings, until
“an itinerant evangelist blew through Winnipeg”
and told him that Christ was the way, the truth, and
the life. “I did the traditional inviting Jesus
into my heart, and I experienced an incredible infusion
and outpouring of love.” The downside, he says,
was that the authentic spiritual experience was quickly
overlaid with fundamentalist dogma. “It took me
a couple of years in seminary to sort of deprogram.”
Thirty years later, Sanguin describes his approach as
an open-hearted, open-minded Christian spirituality
that takes the Bible “seriously, but not literally.”
Currently he’s working on a city-wide ecological
initiative called Be the Change, and a new book to be
called The Emerging Congregation.
6. Louise Mangan
Minister, Pacific InterChristian Community
Louise Mangan spoke recently with kids at a local Jewish
high school. “I loved them, they were brilliant.
They asked me, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if
we just did away with religion, and stuck to the mystic
core of things?’ They had me by the coattails
there.” Wrestling with the paradoxes of Christian
religion—the way institutionalized churches can
both enable spiritual awareness and stifle it—has
been a theme for Mangan, and led her to a new faith
community. “We’re post-denominational, you
might say. We’ve stepped out the other side.”
Raised in Vancouver, Mangan served for 15 years as
a United Church of Canada minister. Over the years,
part of her congregation “found itself out of
sync” with other members over welcoming gays,
lesbians, and other minorities into the church. The
difficult process led the group into the spiritual depths.
“When you’re pressed, when you’re
dealing with the struggle to be inclusive—well,
we started to pray, and to meditate.” This in
turn led to the “difficult clarity” that
their spiritual goals, and those of others in the church,
were mutually exclusive. In 2005 the group left the
church, and after much soul-searching Mangan joined
them.
Adapting Quaker styles of collective decision-making,
Pacific InterChristian Community emphasizes interfaith
collaboration, and personal intimacy with the Divine
through meditation, prayer, and Sabbath rest. It is
a “porous and receptive” community, she
says, rather than an institution. “In institutions
the norms and the forms can take priority over what
is loving. We’ve concluded that we have to be
radically inclusive and continuously open to change,
as wisdom teachers like Jesus taught.”
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