I didn’t, to my knowledge, know Stewart Strang, even though we frequented some of the same places: Halifax’s tennis courts, the Starbucks at Coburg and Robie.
I went to his funeral anyway on Thursday because I happened to read the obituary that appeared in these pages earlier this week. It began this way: “Stewart Charles Strang is presently nonexistent. He died December 16, 2019 at the age of 57. It wasn't his idea; God came up with it all by himself.”
In the 178 words that followed, which he wrote himself, a reader learned that his father and his brother are also nonexistent. “Terribly, terribly nonexistent. So nonexistent that other people who are nonexistent look completely existent compared to them.”
Along with discovering that his mother “is a living Saint,” we also read that Strang was a good tennis player and bad actor as a youth, and that somewhere along the way he acquired the title of Reverend, then “went on to write a plethora of novels and, disputably, had the most successful underground publication in the history of the country,” before drinking the profits away.
As the obituary careened to a close, Strang described his journey as “to smash open the doors of religion and open the way for love, acceptance, and forgiveness. The result??? Well, something got smashed.”
Then he bid the world memorably adieu. “So long, and thanks for all the fish,” he wrote, which just happens to be the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
This, I discovered at his funeral, was utterly consistent with the man whom you see in the photograph with this column.
The service, at a church in Clayton Park, was only attended by a few dozen people, but numbers can be misleading, as they were in this case.
'A juggernaut of a guy'
Strang, the church heard, “had a big heart, body and, most of all, soul.' He was “a juggernaut of a guy.' He was “weird, terrific and beautiful.'
There was truly no one like him, an old friend declared, adding that, as often as this is said at places like funerals, in Strang’s case it was utterly and undeniably accurate.
One speaker bluntly called him “painfully naïve” in his thinking “that all the evil in the world was a misunderstanding and would go away with God’s love.'
But he also added that Strang’s life “was an act of worship and dedication to love” until “the very last moment,' that came earlier this week when this human juggernaut, who suffered from Lewy body dementia, died by medically assisted suicide.
The service took just an hour. That was long enough to learn a few things about Strang: how he loved the Boston Bruins and Pittsburgh Steelers; how he possessed a Rain Man-like knowledge of music ephemera (the program included the words to Hand Your Heart to the Wind, from his favourite album, John Stewart’s Bombs Away Dream Babies).
How he was stylish — leaning heavily upon tie-dyed shirts and billowing sweaters — and stuck to a diet that consisted almost exclusively of coffee, pizza, fried chicken and steak.
How he was, in the words of his friend Paul Yeo “familiar with violence,' until, at age 16, he went to beat on someone one night at St. Andrews United Church and instead had his “Damascus Road experience”— encountering the spirit of God, which he described as “pure love.”
Everything changed for Strang after that.
Tim Outhit told me that Strang, who was a groomsman at his wedding, used to be the Dist. 16 councillor’s “bodyguard” back when they attended Queen Elizabeth High.
“Stu was a rebel without a cause,” he said, “until he became a rebel with one.”
He started praying and meditating for long hours every day, sometimes walking the family dog through the streets of Halifax while thinking his elevated thoughts.
A ministry for 'misfits'
Somewhere along the line, years later, he took religious training in Australia. Then there was a break with mainstream Christianity, because, as Yeo explained, Strang was against anything that “got in the way of genuine love.'
So in 1992, right here in Halifax, he founded Selah Ministry, named after a mysterious word that appears at the end of verses in the Book of Psalms.
The speakers at his funeral said that it was meant to create a community where “misfits” like him would learn his twin beliefs of “love of God” and “love of neighbour.'
It was nothing grand. There was no budget. Instead Strang found the members of his community “one person at a time” on street corners or wherever they happened to be.
Some of the people from that community were there Thursday morning, sitting together in the pews at Grace Chapel.
Other people were there too. Old friends, like Outhit and Yeo, and a few men who had faced him on the tennis court.
One of them may have been present earlier this year when the hallucinations known to accompany his illness seemed to have begun.
Thursday we heard how, looking across the net while preparing to serve, Strang saw three demons.
He bounced the ball. He threw it skyward, for perhaps the last time.
Then, as seems fitting given everything I know of him, he served to the demon in the middle.
