John Shields - The Priest Who Left His Religion: In Pursuit of Cosmic Spirituality

The Priest Who Left His Religion

The Priest

Who Left

His Religion

In Pursuit of Cosmic Spirituality

John Shields

Foreword and Afterword by Briony Penn, PH.D.

Introduction by Nikki Iyolo Sanchez

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

Rhinebeck, New York

The Priest Who Left His Religion: In Pursuit of Cosmic Spirituality 2020 by Robin June Hood

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-948626-35-4

eBook ISBN 978-1-948626-36-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shields, John, 1938-2017, author. | Penn, Briony, 1960- writer of

supplementary textual content. | Sanchez, Nikki, 1986- writer of

introduction.

Title: The priest who left his religion : in pursuit of cosmic spirituality

/ John Shields ; foreword and afterword by Briony Penn, Ph.D.

Description: [Second edition]. | Rhinebeck, New York : Monkfish Book

Publishing Company, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020041395 (print) | LCCN 2020041396 (ebook) | ISBN

9781948626354 (paperback) | ISBN 9781948626361 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shields, John, 1938-2017. | Catholic ex-priests--United

States--Biography. | Catholic ex-priests--British Columbia--Biography.

Classification: LCC BX4668.3.S54 A3 2020 (print) | LCC BX4668.3.S54

(ebook) | DDC 282.092 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041395

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041396

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

22 East Market Street, Suite 304

Rhinebeck, NY 12572

(845) 876-4861

monkfishpublishing.com

Contents

by Briony Penn, Ph.D .

by Nikki Iyolo Sanchez

by Briony Penn, Ph.D

Foreword

By Briony Penn, Ph.D., a Canadian geographer, author, artist, and land rights activist who received international attention when she protested logging on Salt Spring Island by riding horseback through downtown Vancouver (un)dressed as Lady Godiva

When I was growing up in Victoria, on the West Coast of Canada, you couldnt help but hear about John Shields. He was frequently in the news then as the head of the biggest union in British Columbia, negotiating equitable salaries for women, advocating nondiscriminatory hiring, or in the midst of some other battle for social justice. He was often on the TV at night, his pulpit voice projecting a blend of toughness and compassion. He never seemed to stumble, lose his temper, or falter in his conviction of what was fair. This was never more evident than when he challenged one of his ownthe union boss of the woodworkers unionafter taking a trip into the decimated ancient forests, where he felt the union had gone too far in its exploitation of the natural world. It was an act of spirit, one that was characteristic of this former priests journey to stand up against dogma and find spirituality in all of the cosmos.

John was universally admired, even by those who didnt stand to gain by his tenaciousness. For a young woman like me, his authority and skills of negotiating for equity in a world of inequity, power, and influence were aspired to but seemed impossibly unattainableas if from another galaxy. Id started on my own little battles to defend small things like wildflowers, oak trees, lizards, and streams, but I had no inkling that our worlds would one day fuse and that there would be a commonality in our beliefs and ideas.

Twenty years later, John met my best friend, Robin June Hood, who became his second wife, and I was welcomed into their orbit. John shared his many stories, the content of which you will read in this booka fusing of personal memoir charting his philosophical evolution from priest to social rights counselor and activist to cosmologist and nurturer of spirit and earth, with parallel public discourse over the last sixty years of developments in the fields of quantum physics, ecology, astronomy, anthropology, and theology.

Many people encouraged John to write this book because he was uniquely positioned to bring the worlds of spirit and science together in an accessible form. He had access to the theological colleges, laboratories, astronomical observatories, union bargaining table, parliaments, long houses, and counseling clinics where these ideas were formed. He synthesized those experiences and theories and brought them to us in a way that we can all relate to both publicly and privatelyin a personal memoir with interpretations and applications formed by a life devoted to service.

Many people ask: How do you marry spirit with science? How do you find spiritual meaning in the secular age or hang onto the wonder of science in the face of many religions increasingly orthodox dogma? And how do you take such ideas and offer them to someone who is dying or has a hungry child or is struggling with grief or difficult issues of governance to help them get through the day?

Cosmology offers an elegant solution to these questions, and this book provides a priests journey to that answer from his first orthodox training in the Catholic church in his native New York City to his awakening with the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, and the radical theologians to his encounters with the First Nations traditional ecological wisdom and coastal British Columbias ancient forest. John demonstrated that we are at a profound point in human history: We have the ability to know more than we have ever known about the minutiae of scientific discovery and at the same time, embrace a spiritual tradition that bridges the ancient with the modern.

Reading this book reminds me of the way it felt to be at the dinner table with John. At Johns table, everyone felt included and present in the grand unfolding of evolution. The twin stories of the cosmos and his life bind us all together with an equalizing force. No matter whom he wrote about, from his compromised steelworker father who found it difficult to express his parental love, to his first wife with her mystical struggles, the eyes of those portrayed catch the same sparkle of light released at the conception of the universe. In Johns universe, everyone, from the trees that offered him solace during his first seminary retreats, to the young woman he came to adopt full heartedly in his second marriage, was made from the same stardust and fueled by the same solar energy. This book is a celebration of the knowledge that all of our emerging consciousnesses came from the same origins and together we are all creating a future.

Many readers will enjoy being in the company of someone who has explored the paradoxes of religion and spirituality. Here is a man who was at birth predicted to be the first North American pope, but then shed all of his early promise and training to question orthodoxy. Like John, I come from a long tradition of theologians and missionaries (one of my ancestors was named Christian Church), so I have some experience in the virtues and disasters of orthodox faiths. My grandfather was an Anglican missionary in India and then returned to England to be a vicar of a country parish. I only knew my grandfather back in England, where he conducted services of great beauty, especially around harvest time when all of the local parishioners would bring their produce to be blessed in the old Norman church. My grandmother, who was my deepest influence, had a grounded simple faith based on kindness to all beingshuman and animal. When I visited, we walked the woodlands and meadows around her small cottage, greeting the bluebells, parishioners, and badgers alike. This shaped my understanding of Christianity, but I couldnt reconcile this institution with the same church that abducted children of First Nations from their homes and placed them in residential schools. I believe many readers will recognize themselves in Johns recounting of the crisis of faith he experienced when the Catholic Church abandoned the principles of equity and speaking truth to power that moment of faltering faith, along with his long, difficult journey to find something to replace it. John put up signposts for replenishing the cup that anyone from a lapsed orthodox faith will appreciate. In my own experience of reading this book, I ended up back where I started as a childwalking like my grandmother in nature.