After working for 37 years with the Toronto Police Service, Rev. Robert Murdock retired as a detective-sergeant in 2010.
Many people would sit back and relax after retiring from a rewarding career, but not only is Murdock cut from a different cloth, he is a man of the cloth.
After teaching courses in the Police Foundations program at Centennial College from 2009 to 2016, Murdock was inspired to explore his faith when his late wife, Pat, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
When he sought answers to spiritual questions, Rev. Naomi Miller “was just fantastic,” Murdock said.
“She seemed to answer all my questions.”
Upon Pat’s passing, Miller encouraged him to think of the loss of a loved one this way: “Einstein says energy is neither created nor destroyed. So when that love — the person that you love dies — that love still lives in yourself and in the lives of the others that that person touched. And so they live on.”
“I chose to think of it that way. And I've actually used that explanation in a few funerals that I've officiated at over the years,” Murdock explained.
Years later, when he married his wife, Maureen — who experienced the same terrible loss Murdock did when her husband of 32 years passed — their minister encouraged Murdock to look into their lay worship program.
Since 2017, Murdock has invested a lot of time in his education via Zoom, including completing intensive courses offered at the Diaconal School in Winnipeg, he was commissioned after graduating as a diaconal minister in April, and he is currently completing his master’s degree in theology from Saint Stephen's College at the University of Alberta.
As a 69-year-old man with a wealth of experience in social justice, education and pastoral care, he told InnisfilToday that he sees himself as a bridge between the generations and people who are struggling to understand how society is changing, as he can relate to his generation and those younger than him.
“I'm this older white guy, you know, with a beard and all of those things that go along with that. Yet, I have these sort of modern, affirming, welcoming attitudes that I can bring into my ministry,” Murdock said.
“I see my role really as a conduit between two generations.”
Murdock has always been willing to help others — even those his brothers in blue may have steered clear of decades ago.
Murdock was one of the first to volunteer to train as a designated sexual assault investigator in the late 1980s. These officers were trained to look into sexual assault crimes between strangers. Murdock worked in this capacity for four years, which included investigating sexual assault cases in the gay community.
Gay rights and societal acceptance of the 2SLGBTQI+ community have progressed since then, but when Murdock was investigating sexual assault crimes, he was one of the few law enforcement professionals who volunteered for the job.
Murdock also said he found he “had a knack” for delivering next-of-kin notifications. But those interactions didn’t always go as planned.
When an off-duty British soldier was killed by a bomb in a pub in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, it was Murdock’s responsibility to give the news to the aunt of the deceased who lived in the west end of Toronto.
“I was just starting to tell her the circumstances when suddenly my head snapped to the right, and my hat went flying,” Murdock said. “My hat went flying down the street because she punched me square in the jaw.”
“It was purely an emotional reaction. And then she realized what she'd just done. She threw her arms around me and was crying now and, you know, apologizing.”
The lady offered him coffee and cake by way of apology.
“She just felt so bad.”
That was not the last time that Murdock’s work with the police service transcended international borders.
Murdock explained that crack cocaine was prevalent in the early 1990s, so heroin dealers decreased the price and increased the potency of the drugs, presumably in hopes that more people would get hooked on heroin. This led to a surge in deaths by overdose, including a young man who grew up in an affluent family and had at one time seemed destined to play hockey in the NHL before suffering an injury for which he was prescribed narcotics.
A journalist interviewed Murdock about the case and was able to connect with the father of that young man. The subsequent article reached a high school principal in a major city in Australia whose son overdosed but did not suffer the same fate. With the blessing of the deceased man’s father, the principal incorporated the expansive feature into their curriculum.
“And so the dad got quite teary with me on the phone, and he said, 'Detective, if I've helped one person — if I've saved one person from this terrible tragedy,' he says, 'I will feel that my son has not died in vain.'”
“He was very grateful for that. And so that was a real eye-opener for me to see how we can help each other as human beings,” Murdock said.
“About two and a half years later, my own brother — who was addicted to drugs — passed away. He overdosed and died,” Murdoch said.
He explained that his beloved adopted brother, Mike — both Murdock and Mike were adopted from different families — joined the military because those around him said he needed discipline.
No one knew that Mike suffered from schizophrenia until he was diagnosed three years later after he was discharged.
“He was always sort of peripherally in trouble with the police,” Murdock said. “It was interesting all the times that he was sort of in trouble with the law, the officers always said he was so respectful. And I said, ‘That's because he has an older brother who he respects, and so he's respectful to the profession.'”
Mike tried many different kinds of drugs, but his substances of choice were alcohol and cannabis.
“He had mental health issues as well, auditory hallucinations,” Murdock explained. “And so he struggled for many years then. We didn't even know it because he wasn't able to articulate what he was going through.”
When Mike tried prescription drugs that were not his own — but he may have mistaken them for his own — he went into the woods near his home and was found deceased eight days later. It was ruled an accidental overdose.
When asked if he thought there was a divine reason for the suffering Mike endured, Murdock said, that’s “a very common question to be asked in ministry.”
He says it boils down to free will.
“It's not like there's a script that God's following, you know? God created life and life is, sort of, carrying on its own.”
“There are circumstances, you know, children with cancer and horrendous things — horrendous diseases. I don't think it’s karmic.”
“You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything to deserve that,” Murdock explained.
He said it’s just “the incredible variety of life,” “life circumstances” as an organism “in God's creation.”
Though his brother struggled, Murdock said that while he "can’t draw a straight line," Mike was very creative. Murdock and his children learned a lot from Mike and his struggles.
Though he lost a brother, Murdock had the pleasure of meeting his birth mother and four half-siblings at the age of 52.
“I didn't even know that I had these siblings,” he said.
Throughout Murdock’s career with Toronto police, as an educator, and as a diaconal minister, Murdock learned too many lessons to list, but the “biggest transition ever was the understanding of an issue with power and privilege.”
He spoke of how he has been given respect as both a police officer and minister, while a fellow minister in Barrie who happens to be Black has had very different experiences.
“He would go to Walmart to go shopping, and suddenly the security guard was following him, you know, because he was a Black man in the store. And then he would put his collar on, and nobody followed him because now he had privilege,” Murdock explained.
Murdock said he looks forward to meeting people and leaders of different faiths — he participated in the 2nd annual Interfaith Symposium earlier this month — as well as continuing ministry “as long as the good Lord lets me.”
He stands at the pulpit at St. James United Church (2230 Victoria St.) every Sunday at 10 a.m.
