Voices July 21, 2022
From the streets of Vancouver to a papal Mass: an Indigenous journey
By William Burgess
My name is William Burgess, but my real name was Billy Howard Brown. I was born in the northeastern part of British Columbia in the heartland of the Dunneza people. My people are called the Dunneza and Cree people of West Moberly First Nation. My beginnings in this world began when I was taken away and placed in a series of extremely abusive foster homes, followed by adoption into a non-Aboriginal family.
By this time I had already felt that I was alone in this world. I didn’t know how to speak English very well due to severe hearing loss. My adopted parents were members of the Bahai faith and not bad parents, but after I was separated from my brother I felt like I no longer belonged. I was bullied through early life, first by non-Native children, and then in my teens by Native children because I was too white on the inside.
I ran away at the age of 14 and ended up on the streets of Vancouver and into gangs. It was the 1980s during the time when gangs from other parts of the world were starting to conflict. I got involved with drugs and alcohol and became addicted. There was a lot of violence back then, but I do remember the soup kitchens that I had used from time to time and the volunteers from particular churches at that time. I remember thinking, how could God be so mean to allow so many things to happen? He wasn’t my God.
After a couple of years I managed to escape the street life and found my way back to Moberly Lake on my own. There I found my brother.
My brother had so much hurt from the foster homes and parents that he wanted to kill them. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I found my foster parents and went to see them with the intent to hurt them as they did to me.
I remember it was the sunrise that stopped me, as I stared at them sleeping. I forgave them and walked out, never to see them again. I wanted my brother alive, not in jail and thus I never told him. He committed suicide a few days later.
My decision at that point of life was that I would be dead at the same age as he was. My life turned destructive and I left a trail of destruction and attempted to commit suicide twice. The second time I was hanging in the same cabin my brother had been in, using the same bedsheets and the same chair in minus 30-degree weather. I woke up with people yelling and crying. I never attempted after that.
I got married but I didn’t know how to have a family. I worked most of the time to avoid conflict and sent money home, thinking that was enough. I never gave it a chance to work. My children suffered and when I divorced so did the company we built, leaving us in a trail of debt.
I left on a three-month road trip, leaving a $15,000-a-month job as an Aboriginal relations and sales manager, and ended up in Grande Prairie, Alta. Overtired and having just been paid I did what I loved to do: drinking and playing poker for the weekend.
When I couldn’t take that anymore I sat in my truck wondering why and then decided I’d had enough. I got a bus ticket from Grande Prairie to Miami. Eight days later I was in Miami and I asked the cab driver what’s a good airline. He said American Airlines and took me to airport.
I asked the airline agent what the first flight was I could take. She said La Paz, Bolivia. I asked where that was, and she said it’s in the middle of nowhere and they only speak Spanish. I said perfect, and that’s how I got to Bolivia.
God guided me there, I know that. And what an adventure I had, meeting people and groups and finding my soul mate when a friend told me she wanted to introduce me to her best friend. It was a strong spiritual connection.
She was in the Neocatechumenal way in Bolivia and took me to her church. I hated the church from my family’s past experience and I never wanted to talk it out. But because I loved her I went on.
It was all in Spanish but what captured my heart was the music, this amazing singing, guitars, and bongo drumming. I was thinking something as beautiful as this music can’t be so bad.
We moved to Edmonton, and I had work, but the oil crash and some bad decisions on my part ended my work. We went to Vancouver because there was a Neocatechumenal Way community, and we had our son baptized in Blessed Sacrament Church.
We went back to Edmonton when my wife wanted to move there. I had every excuse in the book not to: it was too expensive, etc. But I wanted to support my wife so she would stop bugging me (LOL!), so I called the priest and explained my concerns.
He asked when our lease was up. I said the end of this month. He asked me what the problem was and proceeded to tell me I had to have faith. A week later we packed our things and were going to Vancouver with no home or job.
Now my wife been in the Neocatechumenal Way almost all her life and had completed all the steps. But she went back to the beginning of the steps with me and we were assigned into a community.
At first I was resistant to the Way. I never went to church except maybe once a year, but now it was almost three times a week, preparing for Eucharist, the word, convivences, and scrutinies. It was hard but it changed me. It opened my heart and eventually I became responsible for a Neocatechumenal community.
Going to see the Pope in Alberta isn’t just my wife’s lifelong dream, but it’s something for me to see this historic event – a beginning of a new relationship between the Church and the Native people. The hurt is still there, and the anger and hatred I know. I have family members who don’t understand why I am in the Church.
But I’m very excited to go and see the change in this new relationship. I think the Neocatechumenal Way can be part of that change.
For more information about the Neocatechumenal Way in Vancouver visit blessedsacramentvancouver.com/neocat.