FORMER LESBIAN ANGLICAN PRIEST TELLS STORY OF ABUSE AND HEALING
LANGLEY, BC—Tears still come
to the eyes of the Revd. Dawn McDonald as she recounts the story of her
childhood sexual abuse, rape and family abandonment.
She’s 42 now, and while she
still bears the scars of those early years, there is, behind the tears, a
radiance, joy and peace in her eyes. Jesus the Great Physician has touched her
life.
Dawn today is happily married
and the rector of an Anglican congregation of Japanese at Holy Cross in East
Vancouver, BC in the Diocese of New Westminster under the ultra-liberal
leadership of Bishop Michael Ingham who doesn’t share her views on sexuality.
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Dawn was whisked away to Japan at the age
of one with her missionary parents. Her father, an Anglican priest, had
accepted a call to evangelize and educate a post-war generation of Japanese
unaware of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Dawn enrolled in an elementary
kindergarten school where Japanese became her first language.
She stayed in Japan for 18
years. Her father would eventually die there. Dawn was the second eldest of
eight children, six of whom were born in Japan. Two of them were adopted.
“Growing up in Japan I was,
at first, sexually abused by my father’s students. The abuse carried over into
high school and later I was abused sexually by university kids. I carried the
guilt of a sexually abused child around with me for years.”
At 18, Dawn returned to
Canada and went to live with her grandparents on her mother’s side in Nova
Scotia where she attended school. During that time her grandfather and her
uncle raped her.
“I was hurt, bitter and angry
and ran away to California where I lived on the streets trying to establish
myself. But I had no job, had no home and a couple of Christian girls took me
in. I had a gay uncle in California who finally sent me back to Japan. I
returned home but my father didn’t want to see me. I landed in Kobe and I
remember meeting my dad and seeing his angry face. That night I dreamt that my
father was trying to rape me and I lost all trust in men.”
Dawn finished high school in
Japan and returned again to Canada and attended the University of Victoria to
study for medicine. “I was there for a year when my older brother joined me. We
were both going through culture shock and we assumed Canada was our home, but I
soon discovered I didn’t know anything about the land of my birth. I felt like
a foreigner in my own homeland. Furthermore my brother was handicapped. I
learned later he was autistic. It was all too much for me. I was 19 and I left
him with a social worker and returned to Japan.”
On her return she went to a
Pentecostal church as a missionary for a year. “I taught English and did
evangelism working with 2nd and 3rd generation Koreans
among whom there was a high suicide rate.” It was during this period that Dawn
walked away from her faith. “I could not see how God would allow so much
suffering in my life and those around me.”
“I met a woman from Australia
who was a lesbian and she offered me the companionship and affirmation I so
desperately needed. It felt right. We became lovers in Osaka. She brought me
into the gay lifestyle.” Dawn ceased being a missionary, left Japan and
returned to Canada. “I was 20 and moved to Vancouver. I wanted to get lost in
the city. I met another woman and entered into a lesbian relationship with her
that lasted for 13 years. I wasn’t always faithful to her however and had
numerous other sexual relationships.”
Dawn had no faith, no church
and she worked in gift shops, gas stations doing minimal paying jobs while
studying computers. “I supported my siblings several of whom had returned to
Canada. When my parents found out I was a lesbian they told me I was going to
hell. I was devastated, but by now I didn’t care.”
But at the age of 33
something dramatic happened in Dawn’s life. Her sister’s husband died and she
returned once again to Japan to be with her. In Japan she met a Roman Catholic
monk who became very supportive of her. “I wrote to him expecting him to tell
me I was going to hell, but I took the risk, and he was worth seeing even if he
told me that that was the case. But he didn’t. He opened his arms to me and
welcomed me as though I was still the same person. Brother Augustine’s
unconditional love for me just totally blew me away.”
Dawn stayed for a month then
returned to Canada, all the time wondering what this encounter with
unconditional love meant. “It was not really human love, it had no strings
attached, he just loved me for who I was and what I was. I came to interpret it
as divine love but I didn’t know who this God was. It was not the same God my
father had worshipped. I went through a period of deep soul-searching,
constantly asking what that divine being was. I wanted to know, I began to look
into Zen Buddhism.”
Dawn continued to live in a
lesbian relationship but had other partners during that time. “We called it an
open marriage but we had no ceremony. All the time I was crying out inside
saying ‘show me who you are!’”
“Then I got into a serious
car accident. Lying in hospital I knew it was God who could have taken me but
somehow He allowed me to live. Suddenly I knew that God was God.
Still I kept asking who are
you? When I got back home I wasn’t strong enough to look after myself, so my
sister moved in to look after me.” “I was sleeping in a big queen sized bed one
night when suddenly I woke up at 3 am and started singing, ‘Father I adore you,
Jesus I adore you, Spirit I adore you’. My sister rushed in thinking I had
finally gone out of my mind, but I made her sing it with me. My sister was
still an impressionable 23, some ten years younger than me.”
“In that moment I knew that
God was God. I knew that He was Trinity. Somehow my soul always knew it. Now it
was confirmed. A couple of weeks later when I was strong enough to go to
church, a friend invited me to St. John’s Anglican Church in Shaughnessy on
Granville Street where the Rev. Harry Robinson was the rector.”
I knew Robinson by
reputation. Once when I kicked my father out of my house when he was on
sabbatical from Japan, Harry Robinson picked him up.
When I told a doctor’s
receptionist that I was looking for a church, she recommended Robinson’s and so
I thought I should make things right with this man. The first night I walked in
Robinson was not there. The Rev. Stephen James was the preacher. The sermon was
about how the Holy Spirit convicts one of sin. “I saw people starting to cry. I
began to see movie screens of my life. I saw myself in gay bars, with gay
partners, I saw myself hating my father, I saw scenes of grief and how I had
grieved my Lord. There came a moment when, if I saw another scene I would die.
In my distress I cried out to my Lord. In that moment the movies stopped. Then
there was communion. I hesitated but I knew I had been forgiven. I went up to
receive. As I did so a warm feeling went through me from head to toe. I had a
total sense of love and acceptance, an overwhelming sense of the unconditional
love of God.”
“When I returned from
receiving Holy Communion all the scenes of my life seemed strangely connected.
I saw them all and I realized then that for which Christ had died on the cross
and cleansed and forgiven me. I felt a strange peace and calm.”
“I felt washed and clean and,
for the first time a worthwhile person. I walked out of Holy Communion a
changed person. I didn’t know it then but my attraction to women had
disappeared.”
Dawn returned to Japan a
month later. “I never had a sexual relationship with a woman again. However, I
felt the need to go back to Japan and clean up the mess I had left behind. What
God primarily intended was reconciliation with my father.”
It occurred. My father had
Parkinson’s Disease and he was hospitalized. Over time I we were reconciled. We
spent a lot of time together and we both just loved each other. My mother was
still alive and it was joy to be reconciled to her as well. She saw now how
healed I was.” Dawn, now 34, now felt very keenly that she wanted to go back
into the ministry a healed and restored person. While she was in Vancouver she
met the Dean of Emmanuel and St. Chad Anglican College in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan and she was invited to go out there.
She said yes to study, and
for the next three years she worked and obtained her B. Th. degree.
“I felt God was calling me
now to celibacy. I had no more attraction to women. When next I felt an
attraction it was to a man, a fellow seminarian, but the relationship went
nowhere.”
Dawn returned to Vancouver
where she could use her Japanese. “One day I got a phone call to preach at a
Japanese Anglican Church. John Briscoe, a friend and clergyman approached
Bishop Michael Ingham and asked him about my possibly being ordained. The
Japanese church wanted to raise me up as their priest.”
Bishop Ingham accepted Dawn
and she was ordained a priest in 1997. “I made it privately clear to him that I
was an ex-gay and he ordained me in spite of that. In fact, he said: ‘I won’t
hold that against you’.”
When the issue of same-sex
marriages erupted in the diocese and there was going to have to be a gay
commission, Dawn asked to be on it. Ingham agreed to put the voice of ex-gays
in the Commission on the spot. That was in 1999. The diocese entered a two-year
study period on the subject. The bishop told her that she was on the commission
as the voice of the ex-gay. “I give Bishop Michael a lot of credit for doing
this --- he didn’t have to, but he did”, she wrote.
“But the dialogue process was
not geared for the ex-gay voice to be heard. I was invited to a parish and was
told I had only 15 minutes to tell my life story. I would have loved to talk
about my theological understanding of what happened to me, but I was told I was
only allowed to tell my story. My story was always negated by pro-gay stories
like that of a woman who started her story by stating she was never sexually
abused, in an attempt to negate my story. They planned and schemed against me.”
“At the end of the dialogue,
when I began to say what it was like to be openly ex-gay in the Anglican
Church, I was told on many occasions that I was never gay to begin with, or
that I was still gay but ignoring my tendencies. They would state that gay
people could not change their orientation. It was very painful and hurtful.”
I was told by an Archdeacon
that if I should go ahead with the [making of a] Fidelity video called ‘Touched
by the Master’, the ‘Bishop will not look too kindly on this’. “I did not feel
that Bishop Ingham supported me. I was the only ex-gay voice. Peter Turner, the
chairman of ‘Another Chance’ ministry offered to be on the Commission of gays
and lesbians as well as friends of gay and lesbians, as he was a friend of
ex-gays.”
“I got a lot of harassing
phone calls and E-mails and threats from gay rights activists. They were
closely connected to the time I gave parish talks. The harassment stopped as
soon as I stopped making the rounds. I used to get three or four calls a week.
Ex-gays were negated and ridiculed. The driving force was to discredit those
who had left the life style.”
“I want the church to listen
to the voices of ex-gays. I don’t want the church to turn its back on people
who want to leave the lifestyle. It is going on. I don’t want people, who are
struggling to get out of the lifestyle, to be told ‘God made me that way’. They
should have an opportunity to get out.”
“I was once in a pit when I
was gay. When I jumped out of the pit there was the whole world in front of me.
We should not stop supporting people who want to get out of the pit. The gospel
is about transformation of life and we cannot expect God to fit into our
lifestyle, we have to fit our lifestyle into what God demands of us.”
END