Faith of Our Fathers:
The pain of war, redemption of life
Faith of Our Fathers
By G. F. McCauley
General Store Publishing House
Renfrew, Ontario
Reviewed by Jim Irvine
With clarity and dexterity, G. F. (Gary) McCauley weaves the path of Sandy McDougall’s troubled life of a boy becoming an adult and his struggle to make a meaningful existence for himself. The weft follows a fictional path that may well be autobiographical, a path and a life held together by a warp of pain. Hitler’s war leaves a wake of brokenness that reaches from the western front to Lowvert, Ontario.
The Faith of our Fathers story begins in northern Ontario (the Diocese of Moosonee), where black flies are hungry and memories are anchored. Sandy and his pals struggle for survival in post-war years filled with pain and loss. We catch glimpses of their thoughts, hopes and fears in the face of alcohol abuse and sexual awareness.
This could be a coming of age story, but Faith of Our Fathers is more.
As a pre-adolescent Wolf Cub, Sandy endures the pain of his grandmother’s death and finds a path out of the Diocese of Moosonee through the Dioceses of Huron and New York all the way to a rural parish in the Diocese of Fredericton. It is an account of a vocation with its genesis as the senior server at St. George’s Church in Lowvert, Ontario, that leads to the cities of Ottawa, London, New York and Fredericton.
The character of Fr. William Yates holds his ground on centre stage, every bit the father Allan could never be to young Sandy. It is Father Yates’ ministry that helps to create a story of redemption, one without cliché.
But it isn’t a story outlining the vocation of a senior server to an “almost” reverend, serving as a seminarian at St. Alban’s the Martyr in White Plains, New York. Nor is it the story of a priest who discovers the forgotten thread of an unforgotten war criminal at Dorchester Penitentiary in Sackville, New Brunswick.
In the spirit of Erich Maria Remarque and Lothar-Günther Buchheim, McCauley has penned another anti-war novel. He recounts stories of collateral damage in the life of Sandy’s father Allan McDougall, a sergeant who returns a broken victor. He wears only his surface battle scars in public. The others he buries deep, wrapped in silence, nightmares and alcohol. It is Allen who pens the seed of the novel in a cheap, black, spiral notebook: “War,” he wrote in September 1947, “is simple and easy. Your worries are plain, your needs basic, your focus total. Peace, on the other hand, is a much more complicated affair.”
Peace is indeed a more complicated affair. This novel imparts authenticity to large issues, presents societal brokenness and corporate sin that eclipses the individual mores that catch our attention and our judgment.
The toll of war is immense—to the individual, to the human psyche. The toll is weighed in our anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and bigotry — in our fear of being alone and in the way we exploit those closest to us.
Skillfully weaving war torn memories in Lowvert, the death of J.F.K. in Texas, and the outrage of Vietnam, McCauley gives us a glimpses of Sandy McDougall’s monumental struggle through homosexual advances and the exploitation of mature love.
Gary F. McCauley is a native of Cochrane, Ontario. He began his working career digging ditches for the provincial government. His subsequent vocational incarnations are many, including clergyman, journalist and Member of Parliament. He has also served with the Immigration and Refugee Board and the Veterans Review and Appeal Board.
He has three children and lives in Ottawa with Máire Jacqueline O’Callaghan and their cats.
Faith of Our Fathers by G.F. McCauley is available as a paperback (350 pages) from www.gsph.com (General Store Publishing House, Amazon.com, and locally in Chapters stores in Regent Mall Fredericton and Champlain Mall Moncton, as well as in the Lancaster Mall Coles store in Saint John.
The Rev. Canon Jim Irvine is a retired parish priest living in Fredericton.
