About Colin D. Mallard

Colin Mallard was born in England during the Second World War, immigrated to Canada and attended university in the United States.

In 1968 he was a graduate student at Boston University School of Theology, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. At university he was one of five theological students to grant sanctuary to a young soldier, Raymond Kroll, whose unit was being shipped to Vietnam.

Being from Canada, he was with the assistance of his family, able to help resistors and deserters get out of the country and across the border. It was, at the time, a kind of modern version of the underground railroad.

In 1969, while still in seminary he accepted a position as a co-minister of the Universalist Church of the Mediator in Providence, Rhode Island. The church was a beautiful complex built around 1870 with a two story wing of classrooms, an auditorium with a large balcony, and downstairs a kitchen large enough to feed perhaps a thousand people

It was situated in an area that had become a black ghetto. The white trustees approached him and a fellow student in the hope of creating a ministry that served the people who lived around the church, regardless of their color. Before long the church was open every day. They developed an "Alternative School" for children in the daytime and a "Drop-in Centre" for teenagers in the evenings.

A police officer in plain clothes told him "the one thing we hate more than niggers is white nigger lovers." Later his car was searched and he was charged with "illegal possession of a deadly weapon" —a knife he'd had since he was a boy scout and still had in the car from a recent camping trip—The case was eventually thrown out of court.

One evening towards the end of his second year the church was destroyed by fire. Incendiary bombs had been strategically placed and then ignited. By the time the fire department arrived it was already too late.

He said of that time, "these events shook me deeply. When I arrived in America as a student, Kennedy was the new president and it was a time of great hope and possibility. Then came the assassination and a long string of events that showed me the underbelly of a nation, which despite its ideals and promise, was at times a violent and dangerous place, something I had not encountered before.”

From an early age he had been deeply interested in spiritual and philosophical matters. This was accompanied by a strong desire to be of service. It was clear to him that all human beings were brothers and sisters, all children of the same Creator. It was this love of the spirit and service that took him into the ministry and in the end took him out of it.

That deep interest drew him to study both Western and Eastern philosophy, in particular Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta. Early in 1990 he went to India in search of "someone who knew." Later that year he met the Indian Advaita master, Ramesh Balsekar and shortly afterward the French Advaita master Dr. Jeanne Klein. He was fortunate to study with Dr. Klein for a number of years before his death and for nineteen years with Ramesh.

In 1975 he returned to Canada and worked on Vancouver’s skid row before moving to Vancouver Island where he served two rural parishes. He left the ministry altogether in 1981.

In 1985 he went to Hawaii where he ran a spiritual retreat centre and taught meditation and Tai Chi. Following that he worked for ten years as a psychotherapist with families of abused children. The state of Hawaii believed the family could best raise its children and so provided the necessary resources to help them do so.

He returned to Canada again in 1997 and worked as a psychotherapist. He produced a small local journal of Perennial Philosophy, "The Mountain Stream." During his life he also did such esoteric things as work as a magician’s assistant, a mountain guide, a photographer, a taxi driver, a restorer of classical cars, all before "retiring," in the Comox Valley. Since then he has devoted his time to writing and photography.

Click to view newspaper clippings of the sanctuary and Church of the Mediator