After decades of writing, Patricia Bartlett has taken the next big step — compiling some of her favourite pieces into a book she will launch next week at Black Bear Books.
Glimpses of Glory contains reflections on life and faith — Bartlett is a member of Cranbrook’s Saint Aidan Orthodox Church — and a couple of fiction stories, including the Second World War’s Dunkirk evacuation, which brings tears to her eyes.
“It still does every time I talk about it,” she said. “If they hadn’t been rescued, the war would have gone in a completely different direction. The people took their destiny into their own hands because the war machine couldn’t get them off.”
But Bartlett’s spiritual side gives the book its focus, with segments often including scriptures and taking a closer look at God’s presence. After all, she said, God is around us and in us.
“People go chase God all over the countryside,” she said. “We need to be experiencing God in our day-to-day lives — that’s why we have day-to-day lives.”
Bartlett was a freelance journalist and columnist for many years, so making her writing public isn’t something new, although her faith as an Orthodox Church member plays a large part in this publication.
“As you progress, you have to learn to stop lying to yourself,” Bartlett said. “You have to be out in the open. ... By putting it out there, you’re being honest with everybody else.”
The author has lived in Creston for 20 years after she and her husband, Paul, brought their five children to Creston when he got a job as the youth pastor at the Erickson’s Evangelical Covenant Church. It’s the most recent stop on a long journey: Raised in England until she was three years old, Bartlett spent the next six years in Richmond, then Montreal and southern Ontario, joined the Armed Forces, and lived in northern Ontario for 12 years.
That was where her writing career took off, with a couple of columns appearing in local newspapers; one covered spirituality and another featured her musings on life, “à la Erma Bombeck,” she said.
“I’m at home in the winter with five children, in minus 35 or 40,” she said. “You can get mad or you can stand back and laugh.”
The dozen years in northern Ontario led directly into the move to Creston, and after a few years, the family joined the Orthodox in Post Falls, Idaho, in 2000. It wasn’t simply a change of belief — for Bartlett, it was the culmination of years of searching.
Bartlett was baptized Anglican as an infant, and began to question her beliefs at age 12 when she discovered science — which ultimately helped her to realize God exists. But the belief in God wasn’t enough, and she tried Wicca, Word-Faith and the Pentecostal, Baptist and Evangelical churches. With many, she found that individual members had expectations above and beyond those of the church itself.
“When people make up their own belief about who Jesus was, that’s how you end up with the 20,000 Protestant denominations we have today,” she said.
The Orthodox Church, though, lived up to its name (meaning “right belief”) and finally offered the freedom and unity she was seeking.
“It answered a lot of questions that Protestant churches weren’t able to,” she said. “All of these different groups had a part of the truth, but would emphasize ‘this’ to the detriment of another part. Even though some truths are hard to follow, they’re still part of the truth.”
As someone who searched for, and found, God in many places — the unexpected: reading the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or weeding the garden; the expected: the laughter and love of family, according to her book’s introduction — Bartlett hopes her book will encourage others to do the same.
“I pray this small collection may serve as a guidepost for others,” she says in the book’s introduction. “Sometimes, all we need is a slight change of view to turn frustration into wonder.”
Bartlett will launch Glimpses of Glory from 6-8 p.m. March 19 at Black Bear Books in Creston, and 2-4 p.m. March 21 at Lotus Books in Cranbrook.