Rev. Fran reflects on the nature of oral communication, how what we speak and what we hear are crafted in a community of context, how those words may lead us to action, and how everything is connected, like mist on the morning water, like stars in a clear night sky.
Rev. Fran Dearman was born and raised on Vancouver Island and spent her formative years in a cottage her parents built with their own hands, where a string of houses lay along the old road from Duncan to Lake Cowichan and the nearest signpost said “slippery when wet”. She recalls those days as akin to growing up in an Emily Carr painting: the shimmering light of the train steaming past in the night, the quiver of the ferns, the mist rising from the fields. A long-time member of First Unitarian Church of Victoria, she likes to think of herself as a “founding toddler” there.
Fran’s first career was marine, serving ten years as a ship’s officer on Great Lakes freighters, alongside twenty-three years with the Naval Reserve. After studies at Vancouver School of Theology and ordination at her home congregation in Victoria, Fran served as parish minister in Anchorage, Alaska, then returned to Canada to serve a series of congregations as Interim Minister. Fran retired to her family home in Victoria five years ago and serves as Chaplain to Public Service Branch 127 of the Royal Canadian Legion.
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