Faith in the family

Note: Written in 1996, about events which took place years before that, the theological and doctrinal views I expressed here – subtly or otherwise – bear only partial resemblance to the faith I try to live out, formally and informally, today. Such is my journey.

(from The United Church Observer, May, 1996)

Adversity has challenged the Chaplin family time and again. But their spiritual and family bonds get stronger.

by Kenn Chaplin and Donna Sinclair

When Madeline Chaplin was in hospital a few years ago she was pretty sure she was going to die. The doctors informed Arnold, her husband, that she had a 10-percent chance of surviving the same flesh-eating diseased later notorious for its attack on Lucien Bouchard.

Life had already thrown a fair amount at this couple. Their sons Craig and Kenn, two of their four children, were both HIV-positive; and she and Arnold had survived heart attacks.

But Madeline Chaplin is a person of faith. “Thy will be done,” she said to herself. At the same time, though, she decided to give her best shot. “I thought I’m going to try awfully hard, I’m going to give this a real good go.”

Their daughter Lynn had dropped everything at the first hint of trouble and flown from Fredericton to the Ottawa hospital where her mother was fighting for her life. “I was hoping I was going to be here to help the boys,” Madeline said to her.

“Maybe you will,” replied her daughter, offering no false cheer; just the honesty that’s sometimes possible when people are very close.

Madeline Chaplin is still here, healthy now. She’s retired with Arnold, after years in Valleyfield, Que., to the comfortable old high-ceilinged house in Perth, Ont., where she was raised, welcoming home any and sometimes all of their four children, cooking up a storm, and active (like her McGinnis forbears) in St. Paul’s United Church.

But that hospital exchange with Lynn speaks volumes about a family that is knit together by love and perseverance. It’s something many might long for in a time when individualism is more fashionable than family. We hope that our children will stay close in their grown-up years; that they’ll be able to get home for important birthdays and maybe, sometimes, Christmas.

That they’ll trust us with their pain.

How does a strong family like this happen? Kenn Chaplin, the youngest son, describes part of it – early years filled with parental affection and good humor:

In the challenge of raising children, I know of no two people who have better exemplified Jesus’ love than my parents, Madeline and Arnold Chaplin. One early childhood legend involves my pulling a stack of Mom’s best china off the kitchen counter; the crash which followed broke only one plate, no doubt making easier the forgiveness that Mom extended me.

Later, when I ignored the morning bell in fourth grade to demonstrate a monkey-bar trick to the assembled masses, and smashed my teeth on the cement below, Mom and Dad expressed nothing but distress and a promise to help. We did, however, grow weary of the 10 years of orthodontal rehabilitation which ensued.

Later still, during the 197o October Crisis, when heavily armed soldiers lined the bridges to and from our community of Valleyfield, Mom and Dad decided the customary trick-or-treating could be dangerous. So we invited our friends to a Hallowe’en party. If Mom and Dad were fearful, they protected their family from it. Any disappointment in not going door-to-door was more than offset by bobbing for apples in galvanized tubs in the basement.

Most parents go through broken arms on the ski hill, a tough year at school – the small crises of childhood – and survive. The real miracle is when the children grow up and stay emotionally close.

That’s the context in which Craig, the oldest, announced that he was gay. He sent a letter first. “He wanted us to have time to talk to each other,” says Madeline. Then he phoned. He had already told close friends, arranging for them to be there to support his parents. And then he came home.

“He had set up three people for us to talk to,” says Madeline softly. “One was our minister at the time; he knew we were going to be told. They were all good friends.”

Still, they “sort of went into a spin,” she says. “And then suddenly it dawned on us. He’s the same guy he was. Nothing has changed.” And so “there was never a question, why did they do this to us?” Not even when Kenn brought them the same news a few years later, unaware that he was the second brother to do so:

In 1981, I “came out” too. My parents filled me in about my brother, not that any of this seemed like much of a relief. Lynn and Janice embraced both of us with unconditional acceptance.

As it became clear that their second son wouldn’t be “carrying on the family name” – not that this was ever to be a sole indicator of our happiness or success – Mom and Dad again sought the wise counsel of confidants in the church. But, unquestionably, their greatest support came from each other.

I had given them my news in a letter. The morning after they had received my epistle, in which I proclaimed my confidence that it was not inconsistent to be both gay and Christian, Mom telephoned to let me know that “nothing had changed.” I would always be loved. I can’t describe the relief I felt.

There was, of course, no thought of rejection. Not in this family. “There was always nothing but unconditional love for their kids, no matter what,” says Janice. From her vantage point as the youngest, she saw that “played out from day one with the other three.”

“Unconditional love is what we have to offer,” says Arnold, looking surprised there could be any alternative.

And Kenn’s coming-out increased their conviction that sexual orientation “is genetic, or at least something that could never be changed,” says Madeline. “It wasn’t something we had done; we never really did think that, anyway.”

This woman who has always felt most at home in a church study group or book club had, typically, been reading everything about sexual orientation she could get her hands on. She knew precisely the dangers that faced their children. “We weren’t living in a dream world,” she says. “We felt it would be a miracle if they both missed AIDS. The age they were, and in the early ‘80s – would we be so lucky as to miss this?”

They didn’t miss it. Another letter from Craig a few years later let them know he was HIV-positive. Later still, Kenn brought the same news.

“We were devastated,” says Madeline.

“I keep telling Madeline she is strong,” says Arnold, looking at her, “even though she objects to being called strong. She seems to be able to handle situations very well. I draw on her for support.”

“I think,” says Madeline in response, “I take offence at ‘being strong’ because it makes it sound as though it is easier for some than for others. I don’t think it’s easier for anyone. The main thing is we were together. I can’t imagine being in a family where the husband and wife weren’t feeling the same way.”

They could all have fallen apart, she says. “But what would that have done for the boys? It would just have added to everyone’s problems.”

So they didn’t fall apart. Craig, a United Church minister, was lovingly supported by his congregation, whose members wrote sheaves of immeasurably helpful letters to his parents as well. Eventually though, as his diagnosis progressed to full-blown AIDS, he succumbed to the fatigue associated with the illness and resigned. Kenn, meantime, had been active in a more fundamentalist denomination; its distrust of homosexuality had badly muddled his own self-understanding.

For more than a year, I slipped into some of the most self-hateful times of my life. My days off found me in Toronto or Buffalo, N.Y., where I would seek community in bars and bath-houses. I’d make sure, however, that my work shifts on Sundays were during the evening so that I could continue going to church.

Then, in February, 1981, Toronto police raided several bath-houses, arresting and harassing hundreds of men. I was at home at the time, but I knew I could easily have been one of them. I was outraged. For the next couple of weeks I went to Toronto whenever I received word of another demonstration against police and government.

A leaflet distributed at the rallies advertised a “Gay Awareness Day” at the University of Toronto. There I learned about Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), with its special outreach to the gay and lesbian community.

He moved to Toronto, drifting in and out of MCC and a United Church for a while, struggling with his understanding of God; until his own HIV-positive diagnosis “brought me to my spiritual knees” in 1990.

After several close friends died, leaving me heart-broken and isolated, this prodigal child of God returned to MCC Toronto. I joined the choir. I joined a care group. I’ve never felt more comfortable in my own skin.

He’s not the only one at ease with himself. The Chaplin family is as strong – stronger – than ever. Family photos crowd tables. Albums are full of photos of birthday parties and anniversaries, smiling faces, everybody there. They’ve driven or flown or taken the train long distances to make it. As Craig wrote in one of his letters home, they “never, never, take anybody or anything for granted.”

Craig had initially hesitated about telling them about his illness, but, Madeline explains proudly, “he has never been able to live a lie.” Still, that was the toughest time of all. She admits she almost “had him buried” for a while. That’s normal, she says. You just “go through the whole process, and then you can go back and start living. Then you can go on with life. You face the worst thing that can happen, and then get on with using every minute.”

There is joy in that sense of the blessedness of time. Have other parents, they wonder, sat down and “talked with their kids the way we have?” Maybe when there is no illness, no threat of death, you don’t do it. “But you can always do it,” she says. “You don’t have to have a reason.”

They talk with others, too, if they ask. They’re surprised, though, even a little hurt at the inability of many to mention their sons’ illness. They feel both Craig and Kenn, by being open, “have educated people, and I think in our own small way we are educating the odd person, one or two at a time.”

And they’ve allowed crises, in whatever form, to take nothing away from them, not their hope, not their delight in each other. Their faith is transparent; you can see their souls through it. Madeline speaks out of her own battle: “I was sure I was going to die. Once you face death like that, you’re not afraid of it anymore.”

She stops for a moment, then goes on. “I think the boys have come to that, too.”

It’s an old-fashioned faith, accepted simply, as it was for generations before. When Kenn questioned his father about prayer, when Madeline was so ill, Arnold was “somewhat exasperated” at the notion that particular source of strength would ever be forgotten. “Of course I’ve been praying for Mom,” he said.

And always, wrapped up somehow with that faith, there is the profound affection of the children for their parents:

I cannot imagine what it must be like to anticipate the loss of two sons. My heart aches for my parents at the thought. The stigma and silence that so often accompany AIDS only exacerbates what, for anyone, would seem to be unbearable.

I love them. All four of us do. Madeline and Arnold Chaplin are my nominees for unsung saints. I don’t know of a time that they have not been active in the United Church. Mom was the organist and choir director at Valleyfield United for the first 25 years of my life. So of course we faithfully – if not always willingly – attended Sunday in and Sunday out. She was also involved with the UCW, Montreal Presbytery and Montreal and Ottawa Conference. Dad has been an elder, on Session, a Christmas tree salesperson, even an Atlantic fisherman in a church variety show.

If anything has carried the Chaplin and McGinnis families over the years, it’s been the New Testament truism that we are never given more than we are spiritually equipped to handle. We roll our eyes, stiffen up our shoulders, take a deep breath, mutter “What next?” and duck. God’s support of our family has manifested itself in a variety of ways; and it increases when we talk to members of the extended family and each other and longtime friends.

Recently there was a birthday party in my honor. Mom, Dad and Janice experienced the wonderful fellowship of my MCC church friends and others. The next morning, for the third or fourth time in a few years, they accompanied me to the altar for Communion, wrapping their arms around me as we prayed.

(First published in the print edition of The United Church Observer in May, 1996, Donna Sinclair wrote most of the article, editing in my comments by using italics.)

 

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