The Reverend John Ernest GARDNER

1939 - 2020

THE REVEREND JOHN ERNEST GARDNER 'In the wild we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven.' - Father Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community The Reverend John Ernest Gardner, most recently of Ottawa, Ontario, died on November 15, 2020, at the age of 81. John, born in Regina on August 31, 1939, was the unconventional and fiercely independent first child of Arthur Ernest and Eva Luella Gardner. He received his B.A. from Carleton University, studied theology at the College of the Resurrection (Mirfield) in West Yorkshire, England, and received his S.T.B. from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. In 1963, John married Linda Carnall, with whom he had three children, Mary, Susan, and Stephen. John and Linda separated in 1981 and subsequently divorced, and in 1985 he married Beve Danells. In 1964, John became curate at St. Barnabas (Chester) in Toronto, then deacon at the Cathedral Church of Saint Michael and All Angels in Bridgetown, Barbados. Afterwards he became rector of St. Mark's in Port Hope, Ontario, then of St. Luke's in Peterborough, Ontario, St. Peter's in Edmonton, Alberta, and Saint Michael and All Angels in Regina, Saskatchewan. He retired as a priest in 2002. For more than half a century, John spent his summers sunburned and cursing at maps, retracing Canadian fur trade routes by canoe. He had made a lifelong study of the early contact period, and he understood the water and land through which he travelled. In 1972, he and his family paddled up the Missinaibi River from Mattice into the Moose River to James Bay. In the mid-1970s, he founded a program called North Canoe, and over the next half-dozen years he led 400 teenagers down the Mattawa to Lake Nipissing and along the French River into Georgian Bay. In the late 1980s, he and Beve crossed Canada by canoe, starting on the Fraser River near Vancouver, finishing the first leg of their journey in The Pas and wintering in Wainwright, then wrapping up 8,000 kilometres from where they had started, on the Saint John River in New Brunswick. John continued canoeing until 2015, when his final trip ended with his first heart attack, in a storm on Amisk Lake, southwest of Flin Flon, Manitoba. John was a committed and dramatic cook. He spent years teaching himself Cantonese, French, Caribbean, and Indian cooking. He once set a kitchen on fire while roasting a goose. In the midst of cooking marathons he would quote his favourite writers, such as priest and chef Robert Farrar Capon. 'Bread is old,' he would declaim to his children, Sempre libera from La traviata playing loudly in the background. 'God gave us plants for cultivation, that we might bring forth wine to make us glad, and bread to strengthen our hearts.' Friends and family members will miss his wonderful meals, and the joy he took in making them. He was a man of large appetites. He ate rich food, drank red wine and Barbados rum, and loved women. He read widely and had eclectic tastes. He loved Dante, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Pepys, Giovanni Guareschi, Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald, CBC Radio's Ideas, and David Attenborough. John disliked sanctimony and spent much of his time with the poor, the oppressed, and those in prison. As a young man, he studied criminology and counselled men in prison. He played snooker in pool halls wearing a cowboy hat he claimed to have gotten from a member of the Hell's Angels. He picked up hitchhikers and gave money to people who were down on their luck. After his retirement, as a volunteer with a restorative justice support circle, he befriended a man who had served a long prison sentence for rape and murder, and counselled and employed him for odd jobs for more than a decade. John is predeceased by his parents, and by a parade of very good dogs, including Nelson, Benjamin, Augustus Caesar, Jael, and Max. He is remembered with love by his three broken-hearted children, Mary, Susan, and Stephen, by grandson Brandon, sister Florence, brother Bill and wife Francine Portenier, his oldest and dearest friend Bob Zeller, his final dog Byron, and Linda and Beve. Services are postponed due to the pandemic and, once it is safe for people to gather, will be held at St. Mark's in Port Hope, Ontario, where John's ashes will be buried next to his mother. Condolences may be sent to the family at inmemoryofjohngardner@gmail.com . Donations, if desired, may be made to Idle No More.