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Spitting in God's eye >> Robin Edgar says he's had a cosmic revelation, but his church doesn't want anything to do with it by JACQUIE CHARLTON
Six days later he had what he calls a profound spiritual experience. As he woke up, he was flooded with revelations about himself and knew with a sudden certainty that God existed and possessed this information too. The two signs only fully made sense the following April, when Edgar was thumbing through a National Geographic and came across an article on solar eclipses. That the moon is exactly the same size as the sun when an eclipse is viewed from the Earth, the article said, was a coincidence unmatched in the solar system. There was something more that Edgar saw. In his eyes, the total eclipse of the sun resembled the pupil of an eye. This, he concluded, was nothing less than Ecclesiastes' fabled eye of God. It turns out he should have kept the revelation to himself. What followed was temporary loss of livelihood (Edgar sold some of his camera equipment in his initial zeal to spread his message), followed by poverty and heaps of scorn from administrators of the Unitarian Church, the organization Edgar sought as a launching pad to propagate his revelation. According to Edgar, church minister Rev. Ray Drennan, has refused to investigate his revelation, called him psychotic and dismissed his beliefs as those of a "cult." "There's only a certain number of people who take me even semi-seriously," Edgar admits. "Right off, from the very beginning of my experience, I remember saying to God, 'God, people are going to think I'm insane.'" But Edgar's dismissive treatment at the hands of a church that prides itself on its open-mindedness has angered him. "This, I hope, is as close as this religious group will ever get to a witchhunt. You want to discredit someone, you call them insane. They did it to Joan of Arc. What's the difference between saying you're psychotic, and 200 or 300 years ago, saying you were possessed?" >>> A visit to the Unitarian Church in Westmount reveals a faith seemingly bending over backwards to be nice. Its weekly sermon flyer provides a brief description of the church's goals: to affirm and promote "the inherent worth and dignity of every person," "justice, equity and compassion in human relations," "acceptance of one another," and "a free and responsible search for truth and meaning." The congregation sings along to Gordon Lightfoot songs during the service and volunteers sell Bridgehead coffee and Amnesty International CD-Roms afterwards. A member of the congregation speaks respectfully to this reporter of Edgar's views, but says he wonders, "why he doesn't just give up." He nods sadly out the window at Edgar, who is at this moment picketing the church's entrance in the pouring rain with two signs reading, "A church where your beliefs are ridiculed" and "A church that flagrantly violates its covenants." It's the first of what Edgar says will become a weekly picket campaign. He's already well into an angry, many-pages-long, several-years-old letter-writing campaign, which includes exhaustive accounts of perceived wrongs inflicted on him by Drennan and the Unitarian Church, letters of complaint to Canadian and American Unitarian headquarters, and photocopied attestations from various psychiatrists stating that Edgar is not insane. Though he has received a written apology from Rev. Drennan for the latter's dismissive comments, Edgar says he believes it is insincere and is seeking a deeper apology. Ellen Campbell, executive director of the Canadian Unitarian Council, one of Edgar's letter targets, had this to say about the photographer's campaign: "Robin has a particular view of cosmology which is not widely shared and he has hoped this view would be adopted by our religious community. And he has felt that we should be adopting this set of beliefs. "One of the basic principles of our community is a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and what that really means is we don't (force any one set of beliefs on everyone). I think that Robin has been quite insistent on having his view of the universe accepted." "I'm not trying to force anyone to believe this," Edgar says in response. "I'm just saying that the eclipse's similarity to an eye is God's way of saying, 'I see.'" People can judge for themselves on Aug. 11, 1999, the date of the next solar eclipse.
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In January 1992, Montreal photographer Robin Edgar was sitting in bed writing a list and picked up a nearby book to prop up his paper. It happened to be the Bible. He opened it randomly for guidance, as some people do, and came across a passage in Ecclesiastes: "The eyes of the Lord are 10,000 times brighter than the sun and they observe every action mortals take."