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Having Harold as a friend helped me test who I was and what I thought I could do. One of my funniest memories was going with Harold and his friends to toilet paper the home of a local radio celebrity after one of the Saturday dances. On my own, I would never have dreamt of doing such a thing. Yet there I was, on the darkened streets of residential West Edmonton, sometime after midnight, with Harold’s extremely clean-cut friends, launching arcs of beautiful white cottonelle over the trees and bungalow of this radio personality who went to their church.

I played a similar role for another friend in highschool. In this case, I was the provocateur. My friend Zeke was a tall, clean-cut Baptist. Blonde, tan, terrific in both sports and studies, he was, not surprisingly, popular with the girls and the teachers. We were classmates in the advanced academic program, and we became good friends after I jokingly told him to go f*k himself.

We were both smart young men and our friendship served as a chance to test our religious sense of self. I was a young Catholic with a penchant for questioning and I challenged Zeke on religious issues while he in turn would talk to me about his beliefs. Our goal was never to convert each other. Rather, we had a respectful way of learning about each other’s faiths through good-natured debate and honest dialogue.

Why then would Indonesian missionaries at SWUN be fixating on Tibet? Was there a component of identity-building involved? Was Tibet a kind of Holy Grail for the missionaries? I’m not sure. There are times when Tibet elicits a strong sense of desire from outsiders, a desire I have yet to fully understand. Perhaps it’s the mystique of Tibet and/or Tibetan Buddhism. The mischievous part of me wants to say the missionaries made a past-life aspiration to connect to Tibetan Buddhism and that what’s drawing them back is karma.