This is my story

This is my story
By Michael Burslem
Published: October 2008
I am eternally grateful for my solid Christian heritage. I was brought up in the West Indies, the Middle East and England as an Anglo-Catholic, a faith that I absorbed from my parents. It was not until I came to Canada and went up north to the Arctic that I encountered any other tradition than catholic. I lived in Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, for almost three years, and later in Cambridge Bay and Resolute Bay, working with the Meteorological Service of Canada. In retrospect, I was somewhat churchy, zealous for God, but not really knowing Him. I abhorred the excessive drinking that some in isolation got themselves into, and, like the Pharisee, thanked God I was not like other men. In Iqaluit I spent much of my spare time in the building of the church at Apex, the Inuit settlement close by. In Resolute there was an excellent library, and I read Hakluyt's Voyages, stories of Northern discovery, large sections of Grey's Anatomy, a text in physiology and H.P.V. Nunn's New Testament Greek I had taken north with me, and a Greek New Testament. I was very self-satisfied, until I saw the lives of the Inuit, when something unsettled me.
On returning south I offered to serve in the Diocese of the Arctic, and studied at King's College, Halifax, where I had settled. However, the working theology of the day was not that of the Bible, but rather of Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God. The summer of 1963 Bishop Donald Marsh sent me to Coral Harbour on Southampton Island to build a mission house with another student, Nigel Wilford. I well remember my teenage interpreter, as I was asked to do some preaching, bursting into tears as I tried to explain some aspect of this new theology. This left me so confused, that one Sunday when a boat appeared destined for Rankin Inlet, I asked to go with them, and they took me aboard.
That evening we moored on a sandy beech on the south coast of Southampton Island to eat and to wait for the weather forecast at 9:00 PM. This said fair weather for sailing, so we raised anchor and set out across Roes Welcome Sound. Around midnight the wind began to blow from nowhere, totally unexpected, as there were only few clouds. As a weatherman I was baffled. I was asked to take my turn at the wheel and was told to keep the moon over my left shoulder, but it circled around us, not once but many times over. The skipper finally grabbed the wheel and growled, "You idiot, don't you realize that we are in dangerously shallow water?" On examining the chart I could only see that we were wallowing in the Bay of God's Mercy.
That night the clouds became thicker, and the winds stronger. The sun rose only for a few minutes before it disappeared above the clouds, and it again became eerily dark in the spray and thrashing rain. It didn't let up till evening. The food was under the forward hatch. We didn't dare go on deck to fetch it lest we be washed overboard. By the time we arrived in Chesterfield Inlet we were exhausted. We hadn't eaten for 22 hours and were very tired. That night and day were a turning point in my life.
The next day we sailed down the coast from Chesterfield to Rankin Inlet. At Rankin I had to wait till the bishop sent me the fare to return south, which took a week. I flew to Churchill via Baker Lake. On the strip at Baker there was a gathering of about 100 seeing off an elderly kabloona, Canon William James, their pastor for the previous 30 years. On boarding the aircraft he came to sit beside me, and we became acquainted; he the faithful shepherd and I the run away. At Churchill there was a similar gathering, and we immediately went into a hanger where he greeted them in the name of the Lord and celebrated The Lord's Supper. There was nothing churchy about this.
In Churchill there was a letter awaiting me from the bishop. It was the most blistering letter that I had ever received, expressing considerable anger at my leaving Coral Harbour without his permission. On the train from Churchill to The Pas I showed it to Canon James, when we were alone in the Parlor Car, and we prayed together before going to our bunks, and the next day also, I remember, walking along the side of the train at one of its frequent stops. For three days we visited Inuit patients at the TB hospital at The Pas, and then we continued to Winnipeg, where we parted, he to Toronto, and I stayed there a week.
On my return east I stayed in Toronto only long enough to see Bishop Marsh. He explained that he would never ordain me, because, as he put it, I had no gospel to preach. Before leaving him, however, he came to my side of his desk and we knelt down together to pray for one another. That was real Christianity.
Not knowing exactly what to do next I continued my studies at King's, and achieved a Licentiate in Theology, but not with the intent to be ordained. I was much helped at this time by Rodney Stokoe, professor of Pastoralia at King's. Having read some anatomy and physiology in Resolute, I knew that medicine was an option. In one week in June 1964 I made two decisions that forever changed the course of my life; the first to apply to Dalhousie Medical School, and the second to give my life totally to Jesus Christ at a Leighton Ford Crusade that week in Halifax.
It was through the latter that I met Tony Tyndale with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He invited me to a study of Romans 5 which he led every night for the first week after the Crusade. I was also encouraged by Ron Cunningham, also with I.V.. I also found a church, Trinity, where Dennis Andrews faithfully taught the scriptures Sunday morning and evening, week after. It was in this newly found New Testament fellowship that I met my wife, Ellen, who was from Egypt.
Afterwards I discovered that I no longer needed to achieve to be accepted by others, as I had already been accepted by God, warts and all. I had become a nobody, and even though I later graduated in medicine, I preferred the company of nobodies to those, who like me before my finding Christ, thought we were somebodies. I think I had lost my Phariseeism. In God's eyes only I am a somebody. Problems arise, however, between Him and me, and between me and my fellow nobodies, when I see myself in my own eyes as a somebody.
Over the years since I have thought that if the church really be a collection of nobodies we have nothing to boast about to non Christians, for whom Christ also died. We are like the street sweepers in Cairo, cleaning up the mess which the world discards. I feel a special kinship with Muslims. I'm also much influenced by the Anabaptists. Since I share a common humanity with all peoples, war is an anathema. So this is where I now stand; from Catholic, to Evangelical, to Anabaptist, or whatever; but yet still very Anglican, as Anglicanism runs through my veins. I have received the torch from my parents and forebears, and now pass it on; different, perhaps, in its outward form from that which I received it, but still the same Gospel once delivered to the saints.