Our Sunday school in our small 1940s Ontario village — so much smaller and therefore so much more “ours” than the great, post-war world of Toronto  — was of a scale with the little church in our little village of Thistletown.  In the cramped basement of the steepled Anglican church, we shared space with a great octopus of a furnace, a sink and some closets for choir gowns. There, on Sunday mornings, while adults attended church physically and spiritually above us, we in this cloister received our lessons and sang our children’s hymns and learned to recite the creeds and confessions that would mold our so malleable little minds.

I never questioned the chanted admissions that I “like lost sheep, had gone astray” or that there really was ”no health in me.” I felt just fine and I felt all the finer if I had the occasional responsibility of acting as a technical assistant to illuminate those confessions for the benefit of other little folk in my little world. 

To guide us in the singing and recitations, we had a lantern slide projector, and a few of us, boys all, who had reached the mature age of eight were allowed the responsibility of working this wonderful machine. We would take a big glass slide, hold it upside down and backwards and push it into place in front of the lamp just behind the bellows of the focusing lens, each movement watched by a band so vigilant to prompt, to criticize, to usurp. Then, as we adjusted the focus, everyone could see the projection of a loving Jesus-as-shepherd and the words to the hymn on the front wall. It was a mighty responsibility and we felt so grown up to be given the job, proud of our ability to work this intriguing piece of technology. To be given charge of the projector was to be given responsibility for the whole class, for we controlled the slides that guided the lessons.

Once, when a missionary friend of one of the teachers came to speak to us at Sunday school, I was on duty at the lantern and was given a stack of slides to be projected as accompaniment to the lady’s talk. Why were missionaries in our small world always ladies? No matter; this was guys’ work I was called upon to do and it would be a work to remember. There were at least a dozen glass plates of photographs in that stack and they were all mine to manage. I carefully inserted the first slide and switched on the lamp, and looked up to the front wall to adjust the focus.

As I did so, I saw, displayed in full colour, a group of starving children, eyes bulging, cheeks hollow. Their rags barely hid the emaciated bodies as they clutched each other in the pitiful vulnerability of babies. They stared with those great vacant eyes directly at me.

The missionary began saying something about the work of the China Inland Mission, the impossibility of feeding all these hungry souls, and how so many of these children died, and something more about baptizing, but I wasn’t listening well by then. When she called for a new slide, I was frozen. I had never seen this kind of tragedy before, and now, here in front of me, bright-lit and larger than life, were dying children. This was all terribly wrong, and suddenly I could not stay trapped at the machine. I ran.

I know I got up the steps and outside before someone came after me and I remember too exhausting myself in their arms with the breathless, choking sobs of childhood. The world outside, not all little lambs and kindly shepherds, had been glaringly projected into the small, safe nest of my awareness, and the memory of those sad children would be burned forever into the retina of my soul.