Ken Lyotier: Feb. 7, 1947 - Nov. 27, 2021
Ken Lyotier was living down and out in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when the revelation came to him that would lay the foundation for the next four decades of his life. It was the late 1970s, and Mr. Lyotier was one of many broken men living in a neighbourhood marked by poverty and hardship. A friend had taken him for his first soup-kitchen visit, which he recalled years later in a CBC Ideas episode as a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder experience of eating soup out of repurposed plastic margarine containers amid the poorest people he had ever encountered. “It was a very uncomfortable experience to be that close,” Mr. Lyotier remembered in the 2005 episode. “But as I was chewing on a crust of bread, I started to get high. It was like a psychedelic experience. Maybe for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a place where I belonged. “God, I was so hungry for that. It’s probably what real communion is like – here we all were, eating together, just people being people.” That sense...