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By Lloyd Mackey
 | | Wayne Northey |
WHILE serving a stint as scholar-in-residence at
Ottawa’s St. Paul University last year, Wayne Northey completed a
several-year novel-writing project.
Entitled Chrysalis Crucible, it has now been published by Freshwind Press of Abbotsford.
Northey is likely best known as the co-director of
M2/W2, the Fraser Valley agency committed to linking people of faith to
prison inmates, in the interests of biblical restorative justice. He has 33
years of experience in that field.
Wayne and I had a chance to chat when I discovered that
he was at St. Paul’s, just 12 blocks from my office.
I had always known Northey to be a Mennonite, and what
I would congenially describe as an ‘aggressive pacifist.’
His ability to engage in debate with militarists and
various other more stridently fundamentalist Christians has left me, at
times, in awe and reluctant admiration.
Thus it was that I appreciated the fact that he was
enrolled in a conflict studies program at St. Paul. The major requirement
of his scholarly stint was to do a lecture on the subject of restorative
justice.
He delivered that lecture in September to an audience
of just over 100. I understand the text of his lecture will be posted to an
as-yet-unnamed website.
All of which brings us to Northey’s novel, which
is not set among Mennonites – but, rather, among the Christian
(Plymouth) Brethren, his own roots.
That captured yours truly’s interest, because the
CBs are also my roots.
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Northey builds the novel around a CB mission
organization for which his central character is a field worker,
distributing Christian literature in some of Europe’s largest cities
in the 60s and 70s.
His eclectic group of characters are all engaged in a
range of spiritual struggles – which were certainly a part of the CBs
of that era, but pop up in various forms in the many theological and
cultural subsets in today’s Christendom.
The concepts argued out on Crucible’s pages tend to fall into the pacifist and militarist
biblical outlooks, with pietism forming an undercurrent.
 From the perspective of this particular Christian
journalist, the intrigue of the arguments gives way quickly, in most cases,
to the simple conciliatory explanation generally enunciated by the central
character’s girlfriend.
This technique, of course, advances the novel’s
love story. But as a polemic, it suffers by causing the reader to blink
– thus missing explanations which could well have the potential to
resolve the conflict between the would-be peacemakers, the militarists and
the book-peddling evangelists.
And yes, this all has some potential to relate to
conflict resolution in an adversarial political setting.
Particular food for thought emerges with respect to the
various political posturings on Canada’s role in Afghanistan –
especially those parts of the discussion that try to reconcile the three Ds:
the defense, development and diplomatic issues.
Anyone wanting to try to weigh these issues in biblical
terms could do well to work through Crucible’s 732 pages.
Lloyd Mackey was founding editor of BC Christian News,
but has lived for the past several years in Ottawa where, among other
things, he produces the weekly OttawaWatch column featured on
canadianchristianity.com.
January 2008
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