The tables turn for Glen
Mission success story will be giving back this year
Easter is my favourite day of the year. It’s a bout resurrection and salvation. There is no question that is what happened to me.
GLEN BANNISTER
FORMER JOURNEYMAN PAINTER
Even in his darkest hours, Glen Bannister has always enjoyed a good Easter meal at the Union Gospel Mission in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
And he will be back again this year, but there will be a key difference. Having put years of hardscrabble living behind him, Bannister, 55, will be standing on the other side, helping as a volunteer to dish out around 3,000 meals to the hungry coming in for a free hot meal.
The Calgary native has had a lifetime of ups and downs.
When he moved to the Vancouver area at the age of 21, he was making big bucks as a journeyman painter. The money was both a blessing and a curse. It kept him well-housed and welltravelled, but it also helped feed an addiction to alcohol and cocaine going as far back as age 13. His life spiralled out of control five years ago when he was struck by unexplained depression.
“I am a really happy guy by nature,” explained the soft-spoken man with warm eyes and a face framed by a shock of curly grey hair.
Doctors figured his liver and immune system had been compromised by toxic painter syndrome. That left him unemployed, struggling for survival on mean city streets, and living in a fleabag hotel.
“There was blood on the bathroom walls, syringes all over the place, bugs like you wouldn’t believe.”
Three years ago, he had a stroke in his downtrodden lodgings that immobilized the left side of his body. Alarm bells went off. When he emerged from hospital, he went into a year-long Christian-based detox and treatment program in the Chilliwack area to shed his cocaine habit. He had quit drinking in 1995.
But habits, especially ones that have lingered for decades, die hard. He slipped a month and a half later, going back to his old seducer, cocaine. Fortunately, it was a brief fling, lasting just a few hours. Just enough to get him to head back for more treatment.
Throughout, he kept checking in for warm meals at the mission and emotional and spiritual nourishment from “Pastor Matt” (Matthew Hislop).
Bannister’s big turnaround came last July when, with the encouragement of the pastor, he moved into clean, safe housing at the mission.
When you are an addict, you have never completely won. The seducer is always there, an unremitting temptress. She could strike again at any time. But Bannister sees his switch from being on the receiving end to the volunteer end for the Easter dinner as a hopeful sign of recovery. There couldn’t be a more apt time.
“Easter is my favourite day of the year. It’s about resurrection and salvation. There is no question that is what happened to me.”
Holidays like Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas are a bright light on this blighted landscape of soggy cardboard boxes, stranded shopping carts, human strays on the verge of collapse and teeming humanity, both good and bad.
A recluse by nature, he sees his role in this Easter dinner as a way of reaching out to others. That is not easy for him.
He chokes up as he describes his gratitude to the mission. “If it wasn’t for them, I think I would be dead. They clothed me, they fed me, they gave me encouragement.”
Finding God has definitely helped, too. “I don’t walk alone.”