I went down a bit of a rabbit hole last night. I follow the Whistler Museum on Facebook, and they had a post about the Whistler Chapel, a long gone A-frame structure at the base of Creekside, but once ministered by Rev. Tom York of the United Church of Canada, who sounds like a fascinating individual:
In honour of Valentine's Day, we are posting an image of the Whistler Skiers' Chapel - which opened in 1966 - at the base of the Creekside Gondola: the first non-denominational chapel in Canada. It...
www.facebook.com
The bits about Tom are in the comments.
Continuing down the hole, I found that he was also a novelist and learned more about his life on the following page:
TOM YORK, B.C. NOVELIST AND United Church minister, was killed in a traffic mishap in December of 1987. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1940 and raised in Little Rock., Arkansas, Thomas Lee York came to Canada in 1962. He retreated to the New Brunswick woods and immersed himself in the...Read...
abcbookworld.com
Anyone know of this man? He apparently died in a car accident in December of 1987.
Hi, this is Tom York's son. Yes, he was a most interesting man, and he died too young. I made this little Facebook page to honour him.
Facebook I can fill in some biographical details. The first part of this is covered in his book And Sleep in the Woods, now out of print, but you can still get it in some libraries. It's well written and worth reading. In the early 60s, he and my mother were young grad students at Tulane in New Orleans. He was in the NROTC naval officer training program, but didn't like military life and was instead spiritually called to the far North after reading Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces and the Buddhist text The Dhammapada. This was before full-scale U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They were spiritual hippies essentially. He went AWOL by failing to report to the draft board or return to naval training. They crossed into Canada before the actual draft started - so technically he was not a draft dodger; he was AWOL. They were very young (early 20s), very educated, but with little life experience and no money. He had never seen snow before. They lived in the woods in a remote cabin in New Brunsiwch and nearly starved and froze to death there the first winter. They moved to another wilderness cabin near Barrie, Ontario, the following year. They lived on very little from teaching and small jobs. Well, to be honest, my mother worked, and he studied. She was always a hard worker and is still, to this day, in her 80s. There, while meditating and reading the Bible in NT Greek, he had a vision of Jesus and met an angel (which in Greek means 'messenger') who said he should become a Christian pastor. He became a United Church pastor after that, and they served in many remote parishes in B.C. and the Arctic (where my siblings and I were born). In the early 1970s, he decided to return and face trial for going AWOL. He had by that time developed mixed feelings about it and felt it was right to stand trial, though he didn't have to. Vietnam was now happening, so he was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail, but the church paid for a lawyer to appeal it, and he won the appeal and did not go to prison. But for about a decade until he turned himself in, he was on the FBI's wanted list. But his choices were not political. He was not protesting the war. He just wanted to meditate in the woods when he went north -- and my mother followed him. They eloped, which disturbed my maternal grandfather, who was a US Air Force Colonel. My father was not political at all, though he was one of the first pastors to perform a gay marriage in the 1970s. But he didn't want publicity for it or to make a statement. He did it only because he was asked by the couple, and it wasn't legal then. He told them not to tell anyone, but they did, and it became a big issue. He was part of PEN, which is a writer's group for freedom of speech for writers in totalitarian countries, as I recall, but for the most part he was apolitical. However, trouble followed him sometimes. In the 1980s, while at Pemberton/Whister, he was briefly fired by some Pharisee types within the United Church when he didn't defer to them, but the Pemberton congregation rallied behind him and got him reinstated. They didn't really give a reason. He just used the time to finish a novel he was working on then. He was able to rise above the usual frays and issues that suck people into them, I believe, because of his connection to God and the vision years before. He was very grounded and easy-going and charismatic. He liked being a minister and loved people, and he was very popular with most parishioners. He had a great sense of humour and treated everyone with respect. In terms of his faith, he said he was really a nature mystic who joined the church. He also carved out time for his novels and weight-lifting and canoeing and reading and was very disciplined in his schedule. In 1980 he finished his dissertation in English literature and briefly taught university courses, but his real vocation was the ministry and writing. He took being a novelist seriously and was inspired by William Faulkner. All but one of his books was published. He was very well read, reading exactly four hours every evening before bed, usually philosophy and history, in both German and English. He knew several languages. He was a great father to his four children, taking us on long canoe trips every summer and many other events. He never raised his voice or was cross with us. He was very loving. We adored him and were devastated when he suddenly died at a young age unexpectedly. So was my mother, who loved him deeply. It's nice to see someone remembering him after all these years! One last note: it was reported to me by a driver who stopped to help at the car crash where he died that they spoke for half an hour or so, and my father was calm, didn't want drugs for pain, wanted to be conscious, and knew he would die and asked the man to share his love for us. It changed that man's life, he told me. This was very much in character for him. He left a lot of notes that some literary biographer could use, but as of now, he is not well remembered. His novels were quite good and should be digitized and put online. Someting I have been meaning to do for 30 years!
