By KEVIN SPURGAITIS
Kenny Caveney calls it a ” kick in the heart with a boot of love” when he found Jesus on a cold slab inside the Don Jail. He was just a short-timer, doing another 30-day-stretch for fighting and drinking. Or was it for kicking in a church window? He doesn’t exactly recall. He was just an abrasive 17-year-old clamouring for identity.
Despite given unsavoury monikers like Hop-along Cassidy, welfare bum, the brawler and the bruiser, Caveney fought for respect and more apt titles: Duke, the Jesus Freak, K.C., a friend of J.C. and the “bishop” of Cabbagetown. Yes, the pugilist is a preacher-man. Caveney will rap about Jesus to just about anyone who cares to listen, especially the so-called street children of Toronto: the prostitutes and the paupers.
“Hey, Jesus knew we were a bunch of (expletive), but he died for us anyway,” says Caveney, with a Cheshire cat’s grin.
Whenever volunteering at the Little Trinity Anglican Church, the 64-year-old usually looks slightly disheveled, sporting a tattered, denim shirt and an unkempt comb. He also lacks savoir faire with his language peppered with all kinds of jive and expletives. But for the past 15 years, the retired counselor has served inner city refuges for young people and homes for wayward people. He still co-sponsors recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, and helps mend troubled teens. He talks to them straight, encouraging them to get off the street and into post-secondary schools.
“When you know you’re loved, it’s a special, special feeling. I talk about my Jesus friends all the time … and Jesus friends are the ones who love you despite yourself.”
Active in former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society movement in the 1970s, Caveney shared the vision of a multicultural, tolerant and caring society, where every citizen could strive to achieve individual goals while forming the collective Canadian identity. The bishop is a friend to Canadian humanitarian Jean Vanier, former Toronto mayors like John Sewell, as well as John Howard Griffen, the acclaimed writer of Black Like Me.
Perhaps his own working-class musings are better related in his seven books of poetry independently published in Toronto. Feverishly jotted down on diner napkins sometimes, the compositions naturally flow from the bishop’s nib and are about Jesus and poverty — Jesus and loneliness. In his poem entitled “My Friend in Need,” he writes: “Who is going to love me when I grow old, will I sit in my room alone and cold … Where do we find this man of good will? Do we drink a beer? Do we swallow a pill … Take me fast in my sleep, don’t let me suffer in a real bad way.”
Writing is his salvation, says Father Terry Gallagher, of the Scarboro Foreign Mission. “He had a hard beginning. He kept hitting bottom (in the drug culture and boxing) … He knows what it is like to be considered a nobody. He knows what it is like to be broken. And he knows what it is like to be reached out to by caring, concerned people.”
Caveney is the bishop of the unorthodox church, according to Fr. Gallagher. “You don’t get these ecclesiastical titles unless you have been deeply immersed in the life of other people.”
He says Caveney was, and perhaps still is, the invisible man like many others from Cabbagetown.
“Ken is breaking the barriers for us (in the church), and helping us to see Jesus is that squeegee kid and the guy sitting on the corner holding his hand out with a basket. That guy is another Ken Caveney,” he says.
“As bold looking as Ken is, he possesses the Spirit like thousands of others in our cities, but we don’t necessarily know them. We don’t meet them.”
Caveney is the walking, cussing embodiment of Cabbagetown, the subsection of Toronto stretching along Parliament Street on the west and the Don River on the east. The area was once populated by mainly poor, working class denizens of Anglo-Celtic decent. Following the Second World War, though, many parts of the original Cabbagetown were bulldozed — real estate now blanketed by the Regent Park Housing Development. And with the gentrification of properties in many of its pockets, Toronto’s historically shabbiest neighbourhood is just a memory — a mindset— these days.
Orphaned along with two brothers and sisters at the age of 15, Caveney become a middle school dropout, a ringleader of a Cabbagetown gang and an alcoholic, as well as a Bennies (amphetamine Benzedrine) fiend. Caveney made ends meets with his two ‘dukes.’ As a welterweight, professional prizefighter at the old Palace Pier, he pocketed no more than $25 per knockout. More money was made on the street hustling pool, though, or pummeling other toughies in hotels as a thug-for-hire. But he’s boastful about never becoming a pimp. Caveney hates pimps.
He’s now resigned to receiving monthly disability cheques out of his tiny one-bedroom ‘digs’ in the Esplanade. Trading illicit pharmaceuticals for the prescribed and over-the-corner variety, the bishop contends with his heart condition, asthma and type-one diabetes. And, of course, there’s those anger management issues.
“Old men dream dreams and young men have visions, don’t they say that?” Caveney asks.
Caveney has never been the easiest guy with whom to get along, according to Former Primate of Canada’s Anglican Church, Bishop Ted Scott. “He’s quite pushy when he wants to share — quite volatile. And his faith is pretty direct and blunt.” However, arguably one of those most spiritual, yet irreverent guys in town, he is still respected, Scott says.
Theologian Tom Hurpur once wrote in one of Caveney’s forwards: “Paradoxically, while the church exists to draw people into fellowship and preaches a Gospel of love for God and neighbour, too often it has but little to offer in practical terms to those who feel most alone. For the most part, the most rejected segments of our society feel it has little or nothing to say to them … Ken Caveney, or the bishop of Cabbagetown has known what it is to live the life of the street, to be looked on with scorn or simply neglected by the mass of respectability …”
Fittingly, Harpur first met Caveney on the church steps during a squabble. Still in his church robes after a service, Harpur says he grabbed him and asked what the (expletive) he thought he was up to.
“The symbolism was potent. The formal cleric versus the cabbagetown outsider. We argued, he threatened and we parted, both angry. Shortly thereafter, he apologized and he has been on my case ever since. I mean to say on my side.”
Harpur admires his “determination and pure grit.” The bishop just appreciates being seen. It’s like a “kick in the heart with a boot of love” — Caveney’s refrain.
Originally published in the Catholic New Times, January 2004
