Not your conventional clergyman

Shawn Sanford Beck -- born, raised and educated in Yorkton and area -- is now a pastor with the United Church in Saskatoon with a special mission. He was an Anglican priest, a position he left due to some unresolved conflicts with that denomination.

He subscribes to and has written about Christian animism, is a member of the Order or Bards, Ovates and Druids, teaches Green Priestcraft, and considers himself a Christo-pagan. He is an author, as is his wife Janice and one son, and the family lived off the grid north of North Battleford for almost nine years before returning to church duties in Saskatoon.

He is not your conventional clergyman. His intent is not to convert you. But for those interested in looking at Christianity from a different and wider viewpoint, he offers ample food for thought.

Transcript

Dick DeRyk 0:01

Our podcasts cover many genres and styles. Some seek to preserve important history, some are more whimsical, some are just plain fun or interesting, some explore sports, or education, or business. We have not talked about religion; common wisdom says that if you want to lose friends real quickly, start a conversation about politics or religion. So fair warning… this podcast explores religion. Not religion in the conventional sense, but we explore beliefs and ideas that are seldom discussed in churches, or at family gatherings, or in education. I hope, after you listen to this, that we can still be friends. In the past six months I reconnected with Shawn Beck, born in Yorkton and raised in the Willowbrook area, where for a time his father Brian was the principal and his mother Paula the school secretary and librarian. Shawn and my son were friends when they went to school together in Yorkton, and they have kept in touch since, through social media. When I heard what Shawn was doing, I was fascinated because his work seemed to me to consist of several aspects that were totally contrarian to conventional thinking and teaching, and would be seen by many as being two extreme opposites. Let me tell you what Shawn sent me in the first exchange of emails we had where we explored the possibility of doing a podcast: "The short version of my story is that I was ordained as an Anglican priest a bit more than 20 years ago, I'm currently in the process of shifting into ministry in the United Church of Canada, and in between I was in a number of ecclesial conflicts attempting to stretch the Anglican Church to become more inclusive, especially of sexual minorities. I've also written about Christian Animism, am a member of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, teach something called Green Priestcraft, have researched and experienced runes, folk magic and healing traditions, and sometimes refer to myself as a ChristoPagan. This has made my life in the church, here on the prairies of Treaty Six territory ... interesting." No kidding. It certainly whetted my appetite to see how he resolved what to me looked like very apparent conflicts. Shawn attended Willowbrook School, Yorkdale Junior High and the Yorkton Regional High School, then after graduation in 1991 took one year of university classes in Yorkton before attending the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. He and his wife Janice have three children and a grand-child. They now again live in Saskatoon, but spent almost eight years living off the grid north of North Battleford. Very off the grid! Electricity from a couple of solar panels. Cell phone but no landline. Solar provided just enough power to (barely) keep the phones and computer charged, as well as a couple of light bulbs. No running water, no plumbing. Water was hauled from the lake, wood for heating and the woodstove. Most of the food was grown or raised on the homestead, including wheat for flour which was all ground and sifted by hand, and oats for breakfast which were sown, cut, stooked, winnowed, cleaned, and cracked by hand. Janice has published one book of her own, as well as a series she wrote with her dad. Their son Christopher has published academic articles in philosophy journals, as well as editing the book Shawn co-wrote with Darcy Blahut, also from Yorkton originally. Shawn worked in Saskatoon with the Indigenous and LGBTQ communities, but has long also been interested in, and drawn to Celtic culture and mythology. He made what he refers to as a pilgrimage to Iona, a small island off the western coast of Scotland that is recognized as the cradle of Christianity in Scotland. In 563AD St Columba and his followers arrived on Iona’s shores, en route to spreading the gospel to the people of Scotland and Northern England. He immersed himself in the writings of the early Celtic saints from those early centuries. There he discovered what he has come to believe. As he has said, “I’m not making this stuff up out of thin air. There’s definitely roots way back in our past.” We had a long conversation. I found it challenging, both from the point of view of fully understanding it, and relating it to my own values. But I also found it fascinating to discover these new – and some very old concepts. I am not a religious person, having rejected organized religion in my youth because of the rampant hypocrisy that I was confronted with. And because I found it difficult to accept the central tenet of Calvinism -- that everything that happens is pre-destined. It’s something the church tried to rationalize many different ways in catechism classes, none of which made sense to me. I had another issue that did not have a satisfactory answer, as far as I was and still am concerned. It is the idea that everyone who lived before Christianity was founded, everyone who lived and still lives today not having heard the message of the Christian church, or those who are committed to and content with their own non-Christian religions and live by the values that are common to all major religions, are condemned to eternal fire and brimstone. If any of those thoughts have ever crossed your mind, if you’re open to new ideas which at first glance seem totally off the wall, stay with us. We started by looking at his transition from being a priest in the Anglican Church to a new ministry in the United Church.

Dick DeRyk 0:01

What was it about your experience in the Anglican church that brought you to that change?

Shawn Sanford Beck 7:58

First of all, there are lots of good things about my experience in the Anglican church, and I value much of it and and miss a lot of it now that I'm sort of shifting away from it. Really, really love sort of the ritual, the ceremony of Anglicanism, lots of good things, a sort of sense of a deep, long tradition. But actually my switch back into the United Church is actually a return home in some ways. I was part of St. Andrew's United in Yorkton, that's where I was baptized as a teenager and confirmed there, and then got much more ecumenical and married an Anglican and became Anglican. That's part of the shift into the Anglican world. But I think what really triggered the shift for me was a lot of struggles that I was having around the Anglican church's position around sexuality, human sexuality. It's somewhat, I mean, it's changing now, and there have been changes over the past decade, but really some discriminatory practices and beliefs around same-sex couples, around gender expression, around sexual orientation. And so I sort of tried to work within that framework as long as I could to make change. And I'm really glad that there has been some change. But for me and for sort of the level of commitment I have to equality for all people, it just wasn't quite fitting. And so a return to the United Church is where my my path has gone.

Shawn Sanford Beck 9:29

For the past four years, I've been actually working at St. Andrew's College, which is the United Church Seminary in Saskatoon, doing recruitment. So I was the recruitment ambassador for about four years. Right now, I am actually moving into a specialized form of ministry, brand new. It's called Green Spirit Chaplaincy. Probably by the time this podcast is on air, it will have been started. It'll be in the new year 2025. And it is a ministry specifically to people who are practicing or exploring ecological forms of spirituality. And that could be folks who are Christian, that could be folks who are from other religious traditions or no religious traditions, but who just find that their sense of spirituality, meaning, purpose in life is definitely linked with the sense of the earth, the crisis of the earth right now, climate change, ecological strain, and trying to put those things together. So my chaplaincy will be within those communities.

Dick DeRyk 10:34

I asked Shawn to explain Christo Pagan, which, as I mentioned earlier, sounds very contradictory. And for those not familiar with the name Turtle Island, which Sean mentions, it is a traditional name used by a number of Indigenous communities for North America, relating to a creation story where turtles are symbolic of life and earth. You have called yourself a Christo Pagan, which for most people would be too contradictory, concepts or terms or beliefs. How do you get to that point? How do you change from being a fairly conventional Anglican priest to someone who now has an interest in a concern about your ancestors who may not have been Christian?

Shawn Sanford Beck 11:36

Well, I don't know if I was ever a conventional Anglican priest. My Bishops would tell you otherwise. But yeah, I mean, so I think I've always had what I call both the inner Christian and the inner Pagan sort of tousling together in many ways. And I guess in the past decade or so they've really come to a truce. So part of that has been exploring the spirituality of my ancestors, both Anglo-Saxon and Celtic, but also recognizing that many of us have ancestors from various parts of the world who weren't Christian and who came from spiritual traditions that were very vital, very important, very life-giving spiritual traditions. I think particularly of Indigenous folks here on Turtle Island, some of whom are deeply Christian, some of whom are deeply traditional, some of whom blend both of those together in different ways. So concern is one word, deep interest in free or other than Christian spiritual traditions. But I am also a very convicted Christian myself. So when I call myself a Christo Pagan, sometimes that's just to sort of help people ask the next question, like, what the heck does that mean? But essentially it means if I had to parse that a little bit, I would say I am Christian in my theology. So I believe in the Trinity, I believe in the dual nature of Christ, I believe in salvation through the cosmic Christ. Now, I would probably describe those in bigger terms than most of the tradition would, but it is still firmly rooted within Christian tradition.

Shawn Sanford Beck 13:21

However, my cosmology, so not my theology is Christian, my cosmology is pagan. So cosmology is about how the world works. Like what is it about the world that that makes it tick? And so a Pagan cosmology I identify as magical, enchanted, animistic, alive, where you've got a world that is much different than sort of dead matter. You've got a world that is full of spirits, full of personalities, full of forces that we often are not aware of, other than in very subtle ways. And so most pagan or earth-based cosmologies have that sense of enchantment about it. That at times in Christian history, that's been part of Christian cosmology as well. But these days, not so much. That's usually what people would identify as more of a Pagan or earth-based cosmology. So in that sense that I'm Christo theology, Pagan cosmology.

Dick DeRyk 14:32

The word Pagan gets kind of a bad rap.

Shawn Sanford Beck 14:35

I know, it still does, doesn't it?

Dick DeRyk 14:38

The way you describe it, it's earth-based.

Shawn Sanford Beck 14:41

Yeah, yeah.

Dick DeRyk 14:41

The way most people would see it, it's devil-based, right?

Shawn Sanford Beck 14:45

That's yeah, I know. People still tell me that. And I'm like, I guess I've just been in it for so long that it's either a neutral or a positive term for me, just because I've got so many Pagan friends. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think especially in certain circles, Pagan is still a very scary term and can be used in quite a derogatory way. So I think those are pieces of language that have shifted in some circles. And I have friends who remind me that when I use those terms, I need to remember that they are still scary terms for some people.

Dick DeRyk 15:26

You describe yourself now as living a bi-spiritual life. Your spirituality consists of more than for most people, where it is strictly Christianity-based. People who understand this when you talk to them, do you get blank stares?

Shawn Sanford Beck 15:45

It depends who I'm talking to, but actually, more and more people are starting to recognize sort of blended spirituality or what some people call inter or multiple religious belonging. People are starting to recognize this as more and more a part of many people's experience. So Christo Pagan is not the most recognizable of these blends. But anytime you have, for instance, blended families where you've got people of two different religions, and I don't just mean denominations, but full-blown religions. You've got a Buddhist and a Christian, or you've got a Muslim and a Christian, or whatever, those types of spiritualities, especially among the next generation, among the kids, blend in some ways. There's usually some borrowing of both traditions to create something new. And there are just a number of people, whether they're in blended families or not, who were so much exposed to other religions in a way that we weren't maybe several generations ago. But it's very common that your neighbors are Wiccans or they're Buddhists or they're Jews or they're Indigenous traditionalists or whatever. Like people have so much more exposure. So I think when we see religion in many ways as part of culture, and we live in a multicultural society, of course, this blending is going to happen for more and more people. I'm pretty intentional about it myself because I am a cleric. I am in ministry, so I have to be a bit more, I have to think through these things a bit more carefully as a representative of a religious tradition. But even among clergy, I know there are many more who are exploring and integrating different facets of other other religious traditions.

Dick DeRyk 17:44

Exposure to Indigenous culture and beliefs. Has that added to or been instrumental in your adoption of some of this?

Shawn Sanford Beck 17:56

It really has for me. Over the years, well, over the decades now, I've been pretty heavily involved in reconciliation work, especially within the church, dealing with the church's role in residential schools and in colonialization overall. So I've been working hard trying to build relationships of repair and repentance from those situations. And so I'm always encountering Indigenous folks who are both Christian and sometimes clergy within the church, and also those who wouldn't consider themselves part of the church too. And the spirituality, the spiritual path that I've encountered again and again, whether it's Cree or Metis or Oja Cree, different forms of Indigenous spirituality, seem to me to be so deeply rooted in the earth that when Christians don't have that piece of language, when folks can't sort of understand what people are talking about when they talk about the spirits or medicine, and by that I mean spiritual medicine, or the four-legged people or the stone people, the tree people, the winged people. When Christians can't understand that, they miss out on this whole part of the conversation that could be so rich and so helpful in moving reconciliation forward. So a big part of what I do is trying help create a language within Christianity that can be an honorable dialogue partner with Indigenous people.

Dick DeRyk 19:44

You have said that the Christian church needs to do more than strictly just apologize. The church needs to undertake the unprecedented, unheard of, and almost unimaginable step of apologizing to the Gods, the spirits, and the ancestors of the Indigenous people. I would see that as a very difficult thing for the Christian church to accept, because according to them, there is only one God.

Shawn Sanford Beck 20:20

Let me unpack the whole thing a little bit. And I'll start particularly just because it's usually the thing that is red flagged the most is the notion of one God and many Gods. So when I say Gods, spirits, and ancestors, Gods in that sense, it's more like supercharged, like big powers, but still created. So when I'm talking about the Gods of my ancestors, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic ancestors, I don't mean that these beings are in the same ontological category as the creator of the entire universe. Other people might talk about them as angels, or if you were Tolkien, Tolkien used the word that the Ainur or the Valar for describing these types of powers, incredibly powerful beings who guide cultures and guide peoples, and yet they themselves are guided by, as Tolkien says, Iluvatar, the one, the one God or the creator of all things. So just to unpack that just a tiny bit. But I still think even if we neutralize a little bit of the red flags around that, the idea of the Christian church apologizing not just to Indigenous people who have been wounded through the residential schools and other forms of colonialism, but to the spirits of the land that are such a big part of Indigenous spirituality, to the ancestors, those who have gone before from the Indigenous people. And of course, the recent ancestors of the children who never returned from residential schools, the graves that have been found in the past, even in just the past five, six years, apologizing to them and to the spirits that have guided different Indigenous people. These are the spirits who are called into the sweat lodges, who are called into the medicine wheels, who are called into the long houses. These are spirits that Christians have either ignored or demonized for a long time. And the church needs to really take into account the damage done to whole cultures when it's demonized their spirits and their spiritualities.

Dick DeRyk 23:01

And that happens not only with Indigenous people, it happens with Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people in other places who have different beliefs than what Christians would have.

Shawn Sanford Beck 23:14

Yes. It happened in India with Hindu folks. It's happened in South East Asia with Buddhists. Whenever Christianity colonization and militarism join hands, bad things happen, period. And so there's got to be a real repentance and restoration from many, many centuries of that type of nonsense.

Dick DeRyk 23:47

You mentioned Tolkien, his involvement in mythology, together with the fact that he's a very devout Christian. Catholic Christian.

Shawn Sanford Beck 23:55

Catholic, yeah.

Dick DeRyk 23:57

Do people know that? Does Lord of the Rings give it all away?

Shawn Sanford Beck 24:01

Tolkien was very careful that when he wrote Lord of the Rings, he did not want it to be explicitly religious. So there are hints when you know what you're looking for, right? The lembas, the bread of the elves, the way bread, that was a Catholic form of talking about the Eucharist. Look at some of the dates as the fellowship travels through Middle Earth, and you'll see dates that are not just about the journey they're taking. There are dates that are liturgical dates. So December 25th, or there's a date in March that is Lady Day. Like these are liturgical dates. So he sort of disguises it. But when you start to read his letters, he is very open about how the whole, what's called the Tolkien Legendarium, Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, all of the other writings are really his own sort of deep explorations of faith through the medium of fantasy. Now, his course, his good friend C. S. Lewis, I think people recognize Lewis much more as, very much an open Christian. I mean, his stuff was very explicitly Christian. Although I do encounter some people still these days who read his stuff and don't realize that he's exuding Christianity. So between those two, and there are a few others in their circle too, that they're able to reach into theological depths in a way that honors the mythic imagination of humanity, I think, which is really important.

Dick DeRyk 25:40

Has your family been part of your journey from where you started out to where you are now? You said your wife was raised Anglican.

Shawn Sanford Beck 25:49

Yeah. Family's always been supportive, both my my parents and my wife. Janice still remains Anglican. She's at the cathedral in in Saskatoon. We've always been an ecumenical family, so it's always been more about primary faith commitments, and the denominational stuff comes second. She's very much an ecological person herself, big gardener and a weaver, and lots of stuff with herbs and all types of things. Her theology is very similar to mine. She uses somewhat different language around it, but certainly we've shared this spiritual adventure together. Yes. And my kids, they're at different places as one's children often end up, and they're taking their own spiritual adventures. Of the three, one is very involved with church, one considers themselves agnostic, and the other considers themselves Atheist. I just honor that because people have very different spiritual journeys. I call it spiritual, whether they do or not. Journeys of meaning, journeys of purpose. As a universalist, so someone who believes that all shall be saved and all shall be well, I don't get too freaked out by anybody who says, well, I'm gonna be Pagan, or I'm gonna be Atheist, or I'm gonna be a Fundamentalist. Actually, if they say I'm gonna be a Fundamentalist, that's when I get worried.

Dick DeRyk 27:21

New to me is Green Spirit Chaplaincy, established in the United Church and forming the work in which Shawn is now involved.

Shawn Sanford Beck 27:31

I think there is an unfulfilled need. I've been noticing that for years. There are many people within the church that as soon as their faith journey leads them too far in the way of spiritual exploration of other traditions, earthen traditions, and commitment to the earth, they end up feeling like they need to leave the church. Either the church that they're in just can't handle those types of questions and gets all nervous and sort of gives them the boot, or they're not finding what they need within their church tradition. Over the past decade, or even more, since I wrote the book Christian Animism, I immediately started getting phone calls, emails from around the world, really mainly Turtle Island and Europe, but some much further afield of people saying, this is what my heart says. I didn't know there was a word for it. And I don't have any friends here, I don't have any church people here who can help me understand it. So I've been in these conversations for a long time. There are starting to be more groups that are taking seriously the mix of ecology and spirituality. So there's things like the Forest Church movement in the UK and Wild Church in North America. We've now got a Christian animism network that crosses the Atlantic, and we've been meeting together regularly online for a number of years. So there are more and more people, I think, who are interested in this, but who haven't really found a place to have the conversation. I still get emails probably several a month where people say, I just found what you're doing. And that's really what I want to explore. I put up the new Facebook page for Green Spirit Chaplaincy. I put it up within five hours. Literally a hundred people signed up for it online. Now that you know Facebook and social media, that doesn't necessarily mean like you've got a hundred people, you know, showing up for a church service. It's a different type of thing.

Dick DeRyk 29:44

You might have 50 and 50 trolls, right?

Shawn Sanford Beck 29:46

Yeah, exactly. Who knows? But it does say to me that there is a strong interest and there's need out there, there's hunger out there for forms of community that honor people's Christian faith and honor the fact that they're also looking beyond that, too, and that maybe that's actually part of the the work of the spirit in their lives.

Dick DeRyk 30:11

This is centered in Saskatoon at the present time. Are you the only or the first at this point?

Shawn Sanford Beck 30:18

This is the first chaplaincy of its kind within the United Church. Yeah, it's the first sort of formal one. There are there are other ones that are a bit more localized, like I say, the Forest Church movement and Wild Church movement. But in terms of a chaplaincy that is in a place but really extends online far beyond a place, this is the first one of its kind.

Dick DeRyk 30:47

What do you say to people, as I'm sure you will or have heard? This is all kind of new age gobbledygook. This is just jargon. This is in part because people don't understand, or because the words relate to things that they've always been told is is not good.

Shawn Sanford Beck 31:10

Yeah. For folks who care enough to engage me with that contradiction, I just like to get into the conversation. So often it's about exploring what those words mean for people. And so sometimes when we talk and we open it up a little bit further, all of a sudden the people who are folks who are very sort of opposed to this start scratching their heads and go, oh, well, I hadn't really thought of it like that. I'll have to think about that a little bit more. There are always going to be people for whom this is just gobbledygook and it's kooky and it's new age and all of that stuff. My experience, though, is those have not been the people who have reached out to me. The people who reach out to me are the ones who are already intuiting that this is an important path for them.

Shawn Sanford Beck 32:05

I'm a systematics theologian. So when people sort of accuse me of being loosey-goosey in my thinking, I'm like, okay, well, first of all, let's see where your theology is at to see if you can handle this conversation to begin with. And then let's get into it. Because all of it for me is very, as a systematics theologian, all of this is very well thought out. Most people, that's not their concern. They're more interested in the spirituality of it than the theology of it, but I do both.

Dick DeRyk 32:43

I mentioned a common concern of many, Christian and non-Christian alike, about the influence of some branches of Christianity on shaping and reshaping government policy, which is very evident in the United States with a change in leadership there.

Shawn Sanford Beck 33:02

I try not to obsess over what's going on south of the border. It's hard not to, though. And certainly it's not just south of the border. There are things, phenomena in Canada that are going in the same direction. For me, I see this as, you know, I just named that unholy trinity Christianity, colonization, and militarism. This is sort of what I hope is actually the dying, the last harsh gasps of that particular beast over the years. But I think sometimes when a system knows it's coming to the end, that's when it fights the hardest. And I think that's what we're seeing these days.

Dick DeRyk 33:45

The future of the church as an institution. Do you have thoughts on that? Because it seems to me that especially the mainstream, the traditional churches are losing members at an ever increasing rate.

Shawn Sanford Beck 34:03

Do I have thoughts about the church? I have a few thoughts about the church. And I'll only speak for mainline denominations in a North American context, because the context in Asia, in Africa, different parts of the world, very different, right? Like, so I can't speak to those contexts. Those are very, very different historical, political, social situations.

Shawn Sanford Beck 34:26

Here in North America and in Canada, the mainline Protestant denominations are, I mean, they're in the process of shutting one church after another, after another. Do I think that's going to stop? I don't think that's going to stop. Am I worried about that as an institution? Not particularly, because I see this sort of like an alchemical process. In alchemy, your first phase is always dissolution. It's things dissolve. And then there's a phase of like recombination. And then there's a third phase of rebirth. We are well into the dissolution. I have no fear that the Spirit of God is going to be doing something to recombine the elements and there will be some form of resurrection. It's not going to look like what it has for the centuries of Christendom, though. I think it'll look a lot smaller. I think it'll look like a lot less building focused. I think it'll look like people gathering in coffee shops and in groves of the forest where two or three are gathered. And I think it'll be focused on service, on love, on finding meaning together, not on doctrine, not on hierarchy, not on power and control and fear. I think it's gonna look very different.