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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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May 2006
Term Paper Changes Life
Debra Feiguth
Active in the Jewish student movement, Marc Torchinsky had been to Israel twice, had represented Jewish students all over western Canada and had helped raise money to move a plane load of Soviet Jews. While much of his participation in Jewish life was more cultural than religious, he also longed for a deeper relationship with God.
“Something happened as I was reading,” Torchinsky, now 35, remembers. Christianity had never appealed to him. “But as I read through the New Testament all my fears towards Christians just melted. They fell and dropped away.”
Although he was confused and scared, he also felt warmth and peace. “It was as if the words jumped off the page and entered my heart,” he says. This was the most dramatic of the events that led to his eventual conversion to Christianity and his decision to become an Anglican priest.
Raised in a conservative Jewish family, Torchinsky received a parochial Jewish education, studying Yiddish, Hebrew and Jewish traditions for the first seven years. After his bar mitzvah, he went to a public junior high school, experimented briefly with drugs and alcohol but maintained involvement with the Jewish community, working as a counsellor at a Jewish day camp.
As a student at the University of Winnipeg he travelled to Israel for the first time. “It really was a wonderful experience,” he says, especially of going to the Western Wall. “Something was going on there for me. I couldn’t explain it; I couldn’t articulate it. But I certainly felt a presence.”
During a second, longer trip to Israel, Torchinsky spent some time at a Jewish seminary. “I saw something there that I had never experienced in my own life. I saw the love of God in the hearts of his people.” Through seminarians and families in the community, “for the first time I saw what godly people were like.”
Looking back, Torchinsky sees the hand of God in his life. Instead of joining the Israeli Army as he had planned, he returned to Winnipeg and went back to university.
“Frankly, I never wanted to be a Christian,” Torchinsky says. Although he had had some contact with Christians, “I never really knew what Christians were about, except that there was always this fear whenever I saw a cross.” Everything to do with Christian holidays produced anxiety in him.
In the Canadian military as an infantry soldier he experienced anti-Semitism for the first time. A fellow soldier who claimed his grandfather served with the SS in Germany yet professed to be a Christian “wasn’t too impressed with me being there.” But one day in the trenches Torchinsky shared with him what it meant to be Jewish. The other fellow shared about being a Christian.
While he had never blamed Christians for the centuries of persecution experienced by the Jews, Torchinsky wondered: “If Christians were so loving, where were they in all these actions in history? And so there was a real barrier there in terms of relating to Christians.”
Torchinsky went to the University of Manitoba where he studied history and religion. That’s when he was awakened to the person of Jesus while working on his term paper on anti-Semitism.
It was a confusing time. His ties to his family were strained; a long term relationship was ending; and he really didn’t want to believe that Jesus was the Son of God. But he asked God to show him if it was true, “and he did.” “He picked me up out of the rubble, gave me a good shake and said, “this is where it’s at.’”
Then he met a Ukrainian Orthodox girl named Sherry. This relationship was different. “The greatest gift she gave me was she treated me with kid gloves,” he says. “She recognized that I was on my own journey. She allowed me to grow.” Her parents also accepted him. “They have a wonderful model of what a Christian family life should be.”
Torchinsky graduated from university in 1994, and he and Sherry investigated a gamut of churches, ending up at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, where they felt they could grow as Christians and explore the faith. Sherry was on her own journey. She hadn’t experienced the Bible in a deep way, and was seeking closer ties within the Christian community. It wasn’t until shortly before his baptism in December 1995 that Torchinsky professed Christ. Several months later he and Sherry were married and moved to Toronto, where Marc enrolled at Wycliffe College and Sherry finished a Master’s degree in history at the University of Toronto.
After ordination Marc served as curate at St. Mary’s, Richmond Hill in the diocese of Toronto for two years, and then as rector and regional dean at St. Michael and All Angels in Pierrefords, Quebec in the diocese of Montreal for three years. Today Sherry and Marc live in Trenton, Ont. with their two young daughters, Hannah 3 1/2, and Sophia, 7 months. Marc was called back to the military in 2004 and is currently serving in South West Asia on a six month tour as a chaplain with the Canadian Forces.
For a young man, he has been on a long journey. “I have been transformed,” he admits. “I am no longer the person I was. My faith in Jesus has transformed my identity. I am proud to be an Anglican Christian and priest. God has called me to this.”
As for his heritage, “I am still a Jew and I always will be a Jew. My faith in Christ has informed my understanding of this. The richness of God’s grace and God’s unending love has given me a greater sense of who my people are, of who I am.”
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A
few years ago Marc Torchinsky (right), then a student at the
University of Manitoba, faced a major assignment for a course on
anti-Semitism. ‘For some reason an idea popped into my head to see
if the New Testament was anti-Semitic or not.’|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |