NAVIGATING HEAVEN’S PATHWAYS TO THE TOP
Education and religious beliefs anchored parents’ lives,
Arthur Milnes and his wife, Alison, embarked upon a special project to mark Canada’s sesquicentennial year: A time capsule. But rather than filling it with things from around their home in Kingston, the pair have reached out far and wide to people, places and institutions around the globe with any connection to this country. The responses, from small towns to celebrities, has been overwhelming. This is the latest in a series of columns on his Canada 150 time capsule by Arthur Milnes.
If there was anything that anchored my parents’ lives — particularly my late history-teacher father — it was their belief in education and their respect for religious beliefs and persons of faith.
My father had taught Sunday school in the United Church and both my parents were very involved in our local church, the Church of the Master, on Lawrence Avenue in Scarborough.
My mom, for example, took private pride in her work at the church organizing sponsorships by the congregation of children living in the developing world.
However, at some point, they both suddenly stopped attending. I suspect — but honestly don’t know as I was too young — this might have had something to do with the early splits in the United Church involving gay ministers.
As I look back on it — and imagine being a former teenager and being able, now, at age 51 to say this about your mother and father! — they were both extremely liberal-minded, so I can guess where they would have stood on that issue. But I digress. There were a great many books around my parents’ house, particularly involving the history of Christianity and other religions. Dad, in fact, had a great passion for discussing, with me at least, the Gnostic Gospels. He also loved explaining the theory about “Q” being the basic missing source text for the Gospels.
He did that on my back deck in Kingston with friends of mine shortly before he died.
Once, when I was a teenager and starting to question matters of my own faith, Dad gave me a serious talk. “Heaven,” he told me, “is a mountain and there are many pathways to the top.”
While that is cliché, I didn’t know it at the time. And you know what? As I’ve got older I too have used Dad’s exact phrase when discussing — which I rarely do — my own struggles, which continue, with my own faith and lack thereof.
Education was Dad’s other pillar. He taught history and Latin. After he died, I read some of the Grade 11 essays he kept in his files from Scarborough’s R.H. King Collegiate in the 1950s and 1960s, before I was born.
In one file, I saw that in the early 1960s he had assigned, in one of his Roman history courses, Grade 11 history students in Scarborough 2,000-word essays. In one, and Dad kept the best student essays for the rest of his life, he had 16-year-olds writing 2,000-word papers about Imperial Rome in which they were required to only use original Roman historians from the period as sources. Reading said Roman historians, in English translation, was allowed.
Eleven years after the death of W.H. Milnes his son, me, and his daughter-in-law, Alison, began writing letters for our Confederation 150 time capsule. Naturally, in Dad’s honour, we made a special point of reaching out by snail mail to religious leaders — of any and all stripes — heaven being a mountain, after all, that had, and has, many paths to the top — and education leaders.
I’m pretty sure that Dad would have been as moved as Alison and I were at the first one we received back. From a holy man living in exile in India. His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Others followed.