The Bible No One Spoke About: A Family’s Silent Faith

Family History-sort of

When I think of my family and its history of religion, the large ancient Bible in the photo above plays like a silent movie. It was always around but never spoken about.

We have historical roots in Scotland, where the  Buchanan clan castle still exists close to Drymen but is in ruin. According to the internet, it has become an explore-at-your-own-risk location. Apparently, the Buchanans weren’t keen on paying taxes, so they removed the roof to avoid residency tax. My dad wasn’t great with finances, so that tracks.

But this is an article about faith, the spiritual path. In that regard, I can only talk about traces of ideas and feelings, whispers in the dark from a time long past that pushed me forward.

If there are historical influences in my life, they have shaped me into an introverted extrovert. I enjoy spending time with friends, engaging in creative activities, participating in sports teams and bands, writing songs, and going on outdoor adventures. However, alongside this outgoing nature, I have always felt a deep, persistent pull toward introspective thoughts about the mystical.

I always felt something was happening that no one around me could explain. Or were they choosing not to share the secret?

The Secret Bible Hidden in Plain Sight

The one thing that stands out about my parents and any evidence of a spiritual path is the mysterious and never-mentioned Bible, which sat prominently in our home.

Life evolved for us in many homes, and in each new apartment or townhouse we landed in, that Bible would reappear in the same spot.

My father was in the Air Force, so being a military family, we were transferred from military base to military base every two or three years until I hit high school, when Dad retired.

Transferring home from one place to another allowed this Bible to dissolve and reappear like a magic trick.

When it was time to move to the next base, we didn’t have to pack up our stuff. The military took care of that. A small team of men would knock on our door with a truck full of empty boxes, fill them, and bring them to the next town.

In the meantime, Mom, Dad, me, and my two little sisters would drive, fly, or take the train from province to province, arriving at our new home stuffed with unpacked boxes that the moving company delivered.

In one case, we lived at a motel for a month before our new home was built. That’s the longest disappearing act the Bible has ever accomplished.

Once everything was unpacked and sorted, and we all had our beds again, the Bible reappeared, as usual, settled with majesty on a fancy cloth on top of an old dark wooden chest of drawers at the entrance of our home. It was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door.

Magic Moments of imagination

As I grew in height, I viewed the Bible from various angles. When I could reach it independently, I opened it up when nobody was around, expecting something to happen. I could easily slip away into the picture of Jesus with the children on his lap, imagining myself there. As the years went by, ogling that Bible was a silent pastime. It felt like it was on pause, waiting for something.

It was a thick tome, like an ancient revelatory source of wisdom in the captain’s quarters, kept company by the inkwell, feather pen and captain’s log on a wooden ship. I imagined this secret treasure of a book seafaring from horizon to horizon. It was magical.

The fine edges of the pages were gold, and the paper was parchment-thin. If you opened it, there was a family tree. On those introductory pages was evidence that the Bible had been given as a wedding present in 1867, originated in 1886, was handed down from family to family, and now resides at my sister’s house in 2025.

You must, then, be a religious family.

You might be assuming at this point that I came from an overtly religious Christian family. Who else would go through the trouble of putting this book on display?

But here’s the thing. It was never spoken about. Not Christianity nor the bible. And there were a few other vapour trails back to Christianity. There was always a picture of Jesus somewhere in the house. The same picture got hung up from house to house. Jesus, his head gently tilted to the right, looked downwards in his off-white robe and appeared very comfortable in his skin, ready to bless all comers. Also, a cross hung somewhere in the house. Always. But Christianity was never mentioned.

Thinking back, I am glad no one spoke of it. It gave the mystery some power. It allowed my curiosities to be galavant and unfettered. I can still feel it. Perhaps it was my first experience with the power of the open question Here is a link to my last article on the power of an open question

What Religion?

If that house had an overt religion, it would have to be politeness.

We were taught to behave—to be rosy, pleasant, good children. We weren’t allowed to put our elbows on the dinner table, and exiting this often pressurized table was by parent permission only. We had to ask to be excused.

A weekly allowance was given, which we did not receive unless we did our chores, did as we were told, and did not speak out of turn. This was a place of law and order.

Much later, the century caught up with us all… But that is a story for another time.

The Source of Mystery

As I navigated the big and small years and all the rooms I slept in, I thought all the rules and behaviour ordinances were somehow connected to that Bible. I was suspicious of its unspoken power.

My sisters and I, and only in the 3 years we lived in Nova Scotia, were forced to attend church, but my parents didn’t come with us. An elderly neighbour picked us up in a yellow car. I remember the big brown wooden buttons on my home-knit red Sunday sweater that my Nana had made. The only time I saw my dad in the church was Later in life when we were stationed in Kapuskasing, Ontario. It was great fun because he played piano in the basement of a church full of raucous singers who, as far as I was concerned, looked like they were having a lot more fun in that church than the other churches I had been to previously.

The churches I had seen without him were vaulted castle churches with old ministers speaking from a big book and a silent audience. I listened impatiently to monotone words that I didn’t understand but somehow ended up in the choir; refer to this article to hear more about the choir and my idea of my first experience of what prayer might have been like.

Dad, the Book Reader and Storyteller

There was always a sense of history from my dad. Mom was more introverted. She didn’t make displays of being a seeker of any kind other than a vast array of skin products and bath bombs. Her profound wisdom showed itself later in life when I needed it and when I was smart enough to notice.

But Dad was an engaging storyteller. A gift passed down from his eastern shore moonshine-running uncles. Dad could weave a spell with the best of them, and we all loved it when he started a story.

Born in Nova Scotia, Dad was forever connected to the mighty Pacific, so full of pirates, ghost stories, and the royal navy.

Love for the unexplained

His interests were mysterious subjects. He revelled in the unexplained, like the mighty Mayan race, one of his all-time favourites. He never went without a book, and he consumed volumes on a variety of subjects like true crimes, anything about World War 2, the paranormal and spiritually mystical. I never saw him read anything fictional.

But he never, ever, mentioned that Bible that sat on royal guard at the front door. He walked by that huge Bible every day. On his way to work and coming home, tall and black in his military ironed and shiny best year after year.

He told me all about books such as Seth Speaks and tales of Edgar Casey’s ability to heal people and see paranormal things. When we were camping, Dad loved to talk about UFOs and military secrets around the campfire when everyone else had gone to their sleeping bags. It was just the two of us, and the fire would be down to a lost city of glowing coals.

Once, he was reading a book on astral projection by Robert Monroe when I was 17, and in the middle of reading it, he reported that when he was a young boy, he would leave his body at will. At some point, he lost the ability, and he didn’t know what it was called until later in his life when he read about it.

And boy, did he love ghost stories. Nova Scotia is rich with ghost stories. His storytelling times were often stories from the book of the Bluenose Ghosts.

A Real Ghost

Our family visited and stayed overnight many times at a house that was undoubtedly haunted.

It was my great aunt Peggy’s house on the ocean shore in Barrington, Nova Scotia. – It was haunted by Hiram, my great-grandmother’s dead husband. This was perhaps where Dad got his fascination with Halloween characters- especially vampires. He was a little boy in that house full of ghosts and storytellers.

I know the stories of the ghost Hiram are true because many times, as I was supposed to be asleep upstairs in that centuries-old house at night, I heard Hiram the ghost walk down the stairs and flush the toilet almost every night. It was just matter-of-factly normal that he was there, and was rarely mentioned. It was a little scary but exciting and pointed again to this mystery that called me.  “What is going on around here?  There’s something going on that no one can see or talk about.  It’s behind a veil. What is it!?”

Books, Books, and More Books

As I got older, I got into those books Dad was reading and added more. I read the Course in Miracles, the Celestine Prophecy, Bringers of the Dawn, The Four Agreements, books by Gary Zukov, Be Here Now, Echart Tolle, Deepak Chopra books and tapes, you name it.

But as I consumed these books and thought that they must be having an effect on me, I noticed something unsettling that I hadn’t thought of before. The books weren’t helping my dad. Not that I could see. Or not the way I assumed that they should.

Early on, I thought those books were guiding what I thought of my Dad’s my dad’s path. But as the years went on and I became old enough and observant enough to see how deeply troubled he was, and after he admitted to me his mental anguish, I realized that all that reading had to be surface hobby reading and didn’t do anything for him other than fill up time and entertain.

As I pondered the ramifications of what I was seeing in my father, I began to wonder about religion and philosophy. What use is it if it’s not doing anything practical for you?

To be honest, if I was going to decide now if my dad had a philosophy that he did his best to live by, it would be having fun, playing music in bands, enjoying smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and generally being the life of any party and playing with kittens. That’s the happiest I ever saw him.

A Choice is Made

At a certain point, as I eagerly inhaled all the latest popular books, I noticed they weren’t helping me either. I ended up after each new book being very good at pretending I knew something profound and, even worse, living a fantasy that I was better than people who didn’t know what I thought I knew. Oops!

This embarrassing revelation made me think something extreme needed to be done. If I want to pierce this veil, it would have to be something out of the ordinary that not everyone is doing. I would have to figure it out, put a lot of time into it, and breakthrough or break in so I could break out.

At this point, I had a strong feeling that if I didn’t do something about it, I would spend the rest of my life without going as deep as I could into the mystery and so would never feel at home and satisfied. I decided to turn inward in meditation.

When my father was in his Seventies, I left town for half a year to live in a tent, meditate and study in the Arizona desert.

Upon my return, I visited Dad. We sat on a back porch on a calm fall day and talked about my time under the vast starry sky that was the Arizona desert. He said he was very proud of me for doing something so out of the ordinary and extreme.

We sat in silence for a while, and he looked deep in thought and happy. Then he inhaled, looked straight at me like he was about to announce something big, and with a smile and a twinkle through the rising waft of smoke from his cigarette, said, “Well, son, did you figure it out?”

Looking back, I’m unsure if I would have entered the deep river of meditation without being privy to my father’s meandering journey from one enigma to another.  Now I smile and remember that momentous question he asked, and a part of me wishes that I had asked him, “Ok, Dad. Once and for all, what was with that big old Bible?”

But mostly, I am glad I didn’t. If there is one thing I have learned from my father, it is that there is power in mystery.

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