Eric Lax
I remember seeing a book in 1968 on a newsstand in New York City titled I Didn't Bring Up My Son to Be a Canadian, dealing with the fact that so many university-aged men were coming to Canada as "draft dodgers" in order to escape the war in which the United States had found itself inextricably mired.
Reading Eric Lax's book Faith, Interrupted, I realized that this Vietnam experience was at the core of the experience he recounts as part of his spiritual journey. Many of us in Canada sympathized and followed closely what happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s to members of our generation in the United States; this book brings back with warmth, compassion and riveting detail what those days were like.
But first and foremost, this is a book about what many people don't write about these days: religious faith. Lax's father was an Anglican priest, brought to Canada by the bishop of the Anglican diocese of Qu'Appelle in Saskatchewan, the Rt. Rev. Malcolm Harding. The bishop went regularly to England on hunting trips for his mission work from what had until recently been the Northwest Territories of Canada, and was a fairly new province. He wanted young recruits to attend St. Chad's College in Regina, so that they would have first-hand knowledge of the Prairies. Lax's father was one of the recruits that this fisher of men brought to Canada.
As a result, Eric Lax was born and lived in Saskatchewan until his mother's health required a move to a climate where she would not have hay fever: first Vancouver, then California, where Eric became unquestioningly and happily an altar boy, assisting his father at communion services every Sunday. His father's genuine love of people, humility and self-deprecating humour gave the young child a calm belief that faith meant that we should love one another.
The family's move to the United States coincided with the civil-rights movement in which the Episcopal (Anglican here in Canada) Church played an early and enthusiastic supporting role. Faith is a gift, and Lax accepted that gift with a profound and sensitive intelligence. The love of the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer is beautifully elicited; it is both touching and refreshing to read about the nature of faith in this way. As he describes his spiritual state, we come to understand his decision to register as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War when his time for the draft came up.
His closest friend from college, George (Skip) Packard, decided that even though he was against the war, he would plunge fully into it and went through officer training school, becoming an expert on ambush and patrol. Both of them had come from the same place spiritually: They had a deep, unquestioning religious faith, which was first shaken by the huge tragedy in Aberfan, Wales, in 1966, in which 140 schoolchildren were killed in a landslide. As young men, they questioned whether a righteous God could allow such things to happen.
Although they went their separate ways, they wrote to each other during the years that Skip spent in combat and Eric spent as part of the Peace Corps on a tiny outcropping of the Solomon Islands called Tsis, where he was the only foreigner and where he was delegated to take a census and to teach English. All the while, he prepared his papers to plead his case as a conscientious objector. After his years spent on the island and numerous bureaucratic hurdles, he wrote to his parents:
"The war to end all wars has been fought too many times to make me believe the path of war will ever bring peace. I hope you will continue writing and sending cookies if I go to prison, an unsavoury topic which shall be dealt with at a later date."
Fighting for his conscientious-objector status for four years had kept his faith in the forefront as he moved through his 20s, but as his life and that of his friend Skip diverged (Skip became an Episcopalian priest and then a bishop), more and more the writer feels that in the absence of his father's example and force of personality, his doubts had solidified and he felt his faith slipping away, "retreating to the breath of the night wind/ down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world," as Matthew Arnold wrote in Dover Beach. In a sad, quiet way, Lax came to realize that "the acceptance of a God who is interested in me, and the path to that God through Jesus Christ that was a central tenet of my faith, disappeared."
And yet he keeps thinking of all those who have profoundly plumbed what that reality means. I think that this book shows that he asks himself the ultimate question about the existence of God: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" It is about this something that Eric Lax has devoted this deeply touching and personal meditation.
Adrienne Clarkson is the former governor-general of Canada, and a lifelong Anglican.