Christ Church

Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2024 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2023 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2024
Fr. David Curry
February 16th, 2024

“Whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.”

The Annual Parish Meetings are special occasions and not just because of the culinary pleasures of a pot-luck! They are an important and crucial aspect of our corporate life as a Parish because they locate the temporal life of the Parish within the primacy of our spiritual mission and vocation. On the one hand, it is about ‘taking care of business,’ if you will pardon the commonplace expression, but, on the other hand, it is a profound moment of collective reflection about our life together in the body of Christ, a way of looking back on the year past and looking ahead to the year before us. It is a way of concentrating our attention on our life in Christ, recognising the various challenges that we have faced and continue to face.

Septuagesima is the first of the pre-Lenten Sundays that orient us towards Lent as the pilgrimage of love, charity, to use the older English word from the Latin, caritas. The ‘gesima’ Sundays point us to Easter by their very names. They signify the weeks and days before Easter: the weeks of the seventieth, sixtieth and fiftieth days. Lent itself is known as quadragesima, pertaining to the idea of forty days, symbolic of the forty years in the wilderness of the Exodus and the forty days of Christ fasting and praying in the wilderness. The ‘gesimas’ belong to the transition from Christmas and Epiphany to Lent and Easter and remind us of their crucial interrelation. Light and life are grounded ultimately in love, the charity without which “all our doings are nothing worth,” as the Quinquagesima Collect so emphatically states. “If I have not charity, I am nothing,” Paul reminds us.

The ‘gesima’ Sundays highlight the transformation of the classical or cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice by love. They speak to a profound sense of the forms of the ethical that belong to the pilgrimage of our souls to its end in God, an end in which we participate now in our life together as a Parish through service and sacrifice, through word and sacrament, and in worship as penitential adoration.

In other words, these activities that belong to human character are perfected by the divine love, the charity of God, which as Paul says, “never faileth.” That cannot be said about our human loves which are always incomplete, partial, and often in disarray. But God seeks something more for us than what belongs to human sin and experience. And as Holy Week shows, he makes a way for us out of our sin and evil. Tears of sorrow, and tears of joy. All because of the love of Christ.

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Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2023 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2022 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2023
Fr. David Curry
February 18th, 2024

“We go up to Jerusalem”

The word parish (παροικια from παροικεω) refers to where we dwell as sojourners in the land, and thus to the idea of the place of our abiding with God. The parish is where the concrete and corporate realities of our lives in faith are lived, via ad patriam. “For here we have no continuing city,” as Hebrews reminds us (Heb. 13.14), “for our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3. 20). The parish is the place of our abiding in that hope and desire for the “Jerusalem which is above”(Gal. 4.26). The distinction between the eternal and the temporal is essential against the tendency to collapse the one into the other.

We go up to Jerusalem. It is one of the great images of pilgrimage, of our journey in and through the wilderness to the paradise of God in his beauty and truth. It signals the true fulfillment of our longings and desires. We journey in the abiding love of God which shapes and moves our hearts and minds. It is embodied in our liturgy and in our prayers and praises, our service and sacrifice; they are the motions of God’s love in us.

We have persevered and endured faithfully and in good cheer through all of the ups and downs of the past year amidst the confusions and chaos of our time spiritually and experientially. It has been a year of faithfulness and commitment and for that I am most grateful to all of you. We are continuing to learn and find strength and comfort from God’s Word and Sacraments that help us to bear witness and to face the uncertainties of a divided and divisive world. It seems to me that as a parish we are gaining a deeper sense of penitential adoration and contemplation as what defines and guides our lives.

There have been of course the constant challenges of maintaining roofs and other building and operational concerns. This includes the re-shingling of the north side of the Hall roof and so too emergency repairs on the clerestory roof on the King Street side of the Church. Most significantly, the solar panels installed in the Fall of 2022 became operational in late January of 2023 and we have been pleased with how this has contributed to the reduction of our electrical costs. In the fall-out from the Covid years, it has been challenging to find workman and carpenters who are able to undertake some of the work which needs to be done. I want to thank Alex Jurgens and David Appleby for their diligence and perseverance in finding ways to get things done. We have been fortunate, it seems, to have found an excellent carpenter as a result of the pre-Christmas wind and rain storm which wreaked such havoc everywhere. We are hoping to be able to get a number of projects done in a responsible fashion. Bear in mind, that as a parish, we have long recognised that the buildings are part of the mission and life of the parish for which we have stewardship obligation.

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Celebrating an Outstanding Scholar: Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011)

The sermons, lectures, and writings of Robert Darwin Crouse have influenced generations of students and clergy world wide. Clear and concise, scholarly yet pastoral, they address many of the current confusions of a post-secular and post-Christian world by way of connecting the contemporary world to its Christian origins and principles. A remarkable scholar with a poetic soul and gift of expression, his writings speak across the ages and generations with clarity and charity. His sermons are the pastoral distillation of decades of careful reading of ancient, biblical, patristic, medieval, and modern writings with a deep appreciation for the power of the arts to draw us into an engagement with Christian spirituality. They address the waste land of modernity without leaving us in the waste land and without defaulting to a romantic longing for some imagined golden age. Perhaps no collection of sermons captures better the character and concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by bringing the perennial wisdom of Christ before the thoughtful reader. The sermons are a refreshment and a source of spiritual renewal for many a community of souls and for all times. For those of us who had the privilege of being his student and spending time at his place in Crousetown, these sermons are like being once again in his presence and hearing his voice, partaking of his hospitality and generosity of mind.

Dr. Crouse was the most outstanding scholar ever to come out of the School (1944-1947) and College. A theologian and Anglican priest, a musician, poet and preacher, he had a remarkable career as a scholar of Medieval Philosophy and as a beloved teacher at King’s College in the Foundation Year Programme and at the Dalhousie Classics Department in Halifax. He taught at Trinity College, Toronto, and at Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec (where Guy Payne first met him). He also taught at the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome where he lectured for many years as a visiting Professor of Patristics. He was a graduate of King’s College and Dalhousie University, of Trinity College, and of Harvard.

A number of the faculty and the board of the School have also had the privilege of being taught by Fr. Crouse. He baptized, for instance, Christian and Zachary Lakes, the twins of Kevin and Penny Lakes, at the School Chapel. He was one of my mentors. As Trevor Hughes, former Chairman of the Board, remarked, Robert had the nicest way of telling you that you were wrong. I think this is captured in his response to students’ comments on whatever subjects were before us: “You might say that,” he would say, meaning “I wouldn’t,” which (by interpretation) suggested that it was foolish or at least mistaken.

Sunday, January 14th, and Monday, January 15th, mark the book launch in Halifax of two books by the Rev’d Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a book of sermons and a meditation on the theme of pilgrimage, the beginning of a publication project that we hope will include many of his scholarly writings. The first two volumes are available through Amazon: Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Spirituality and The Soul’s Pilgrimage Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost.

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Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2022 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2021 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2022
February 19th, 2023

“Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age/Gods breath in man returning to his birth,/ the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage.” These are the opening lines of a lovely sonnet called Prayer (1) by George Herbert. The whole poem is a rich medley of images drawn from Scripture, from the traditions of Christian theology and spirituality, from music, from the liturgy of the Church, from domestic life, and from things remote and exotic, from things near and far way. “Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud.” It ends with two words that are not images but the meaning of them: “something understood.” Prayer in all of these various images, ranging from “the Churches banquet,” a reference to the Eucharist, to “the land of spices,” a reference to the voyages of discovery and to what is exotic, is something understood. Thus the poem is not simply a random collection of images. The point is that something is understood in and through the images and not in flight from them.

There is something understood, meaning doctrine or teaching, that is conveyed through each image and in their order and sequence. Prayer is about our lives in pilgrimage through which we participate in the ways the grace of God is conveyed to us. Thus prayer is “Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest”; a reference to a passage from Augustine about looking at the Creed and seeing yourself in it as in a mirror, being dressed in the essential doctrines of the Faith, we might say. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to them in an order of understanding. In many ways, the poem signals a central feature of the liturgy and thus the life of the Parish in these uncertain times. It is simply doctrine in devotion.

That has been the constant and recurring point of emphasis in the forms of our encounter in prayer and praise with God in his eternal motions of love which belong to God in himself and God for us in his motions towards us. We constantly seek to enter more fully into the circling motions of divine love that belong to the interplay of the different seasons, and the feasts and festivals of the Church’s life. The underlying patterns of reformed catholicism are the interplay of justification – what God in Christ has done for us; sanctification – Christ in us through the gift of the Holy Spirit; and glorification – our end in God as imaged through the Communion of Saints. As the Creeds teach us, all three moments reflect the idea of penitential adoration through a focus on the forgiveness of sins. “Repentance,” Lancelot Andrewes says in an Ash Wednesday sermon, “is nothing else but redire ad principia, ‘a kind of circling’, to return to Him by repentance from Whom by sin we have turned away”.

That kind of circling is love, the divine love seeking the perfection of our imperfect human loves which is set before us on Quinquagesima Sunday. Lent concentrates the whole idea of Christian pilgrimage into the span of forty days in terms of the interplay and interpenetration of illumination, purgation, and perfection or union that constitute the classical nature of the soul’s journey to God, itinerarium mentis in Deum, as in Bonaventure’s classical treatise. It is really all about a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God and of God with us. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. We go up with Christ. We do so in the hopes of learning more clearly the nature of what Herbert in another poem calls “two vast spacious things” that transcend our human capacities to know, namely, “sin and love.” To understand something about those is the point of the Lenten journey understood as the pilgrimage of love, the love which never faileth as Paul says but which belongs to the good of our humanity in God through the uncertainties and confusions of our world and day. That pilgrimage of love is our life in prayer as “something understood.” It is a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God.

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A spirit of respect and reconciliation is something for which we pray at every Chapel service. There can be no reconciliation without the acknowledgment of what has happened, the truth of events of the past, as it were. Reconciliation builds on truth to transcend the things of the past, not by forgetting and ignoring them, but by confronting them and yet looking beyond conflict and opposition.

The story is not a simple or a single story. It means looking back and inward to very different features of the interplay of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Canada Here is a contemporary artist, Heather Dale, performing Jesous ahatonhia, Canada’s first and oldest Christmas song:

The words were originally written in the Huron/Wendat language by the French Jesuit missionary and martyr, Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, probably in 1642. He was a linguist who took the time and care to learn the language of the Wendat people and to appreciate their thought and culture in interaction with Christian ideas and themes. By singing in the Wendat language, Heather Dale draws upon the work of Brébeuf, who, like many early and largely French missionaries, began the project of providing alphabets and thus a written form for the various first nations’ peoples. This work has continued even into more recent times with the Inuit peoples. Bishop John Sperry, for example, who learned Inuinnaqtun, translated the Bible, the Prayer Book, and various hymns into the Inuktitut dialect, one of the five dialects of the Inuit peoples of the Arctic.

This shows a very different kind of relationship between cultures and languages than what took place in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries with the Indian Act (1876-present) which reduces the native peoples to “wards of the state,” and, particularly, with the notorious Residential Schools programme. Such things reveal a much more aggressive and destructive form of imperial colonialism derived from Britain and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Indian Act and the Residential Schools programme were intended to assimilate the native peoples into Canadian life but entirely and often brutally at the expense of the cultures and languages of the native peoples themselves. Assimilation was the buzz word of the times but in the view of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission it was “cultural genocide,” a policy undertaken “to kill the Indian in the child” (TRC Report, 2015).

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In Memoriam: Queen Elizabeth II

Our parish in its history and life has existed under the reign of nine monarchs over its 251 year history since its founding in 1771 during the reign of George the Third. He provided through the auspices of the Archbishop of Canterbury gifts of “two sets of [silver] communion plate” which we use on High Feast days such as Christmas and Easter. They arrived in 1790 before the original Christ Church building was completed. Some of the silver dates to 1729. But in that long history of the Parish under monarchical rule and governance, the longest reigns were those of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth who together constituted 134 years out of 251. The longest reigning monarch in English history and the history of the Commonwealth was Elizabeth II whose platinum jubilee (70 years!) was observed in Windsor at King’s-Edgehill School last spring and remembered in our prayers at Christ Church.

Elizabeth II embodied the very model of steadfastness and devotion to duty for which we can only be thankful. Her remarkable reign was testament not to the power of dominion and domination, of force and coercion, but to the power of duty and service in and through the changes and challenges of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. She was a figure of unity in divided times.

Her passing marks the beginning now of the reign of the tenth monarch, Charles III. God save the King. We remember Elizabeth II with gratitude and thanksgiving for her long reign of devotion and duty and commend her soul to God’s gracious keeping.

O God, the King of Glory, who raises up Kings and Queens as the instruments of your justice and mercy, we give thanks to you for the seventy years of faithful, compassionate, and dedicated service of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, of the Commonwealth of Nations, and of this country Canada, for her witness to truth and order, to peace and good government and the flourishing of all who are under her reign, and we beseech your grace and mercy upon her soul at this time of her passing at age 96, ever mindful that the hearts and souls of Kings and Queens are ever in your sight to the praise and glory of your Name and for the good of your church and people; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Fr. David Curry
Friday, September 9th, 2022

“A Walking Sacrament”
An address to the St. John Vianney Chapter of SSC by Fr. David Curry
August 4th, 2022
Christ Christ, Windsor, Nova Scotia

This address can be downloaded as a pdf document (which includes footnotes) by clicking here. A PowerPoint presentation accompanying the address can be downloaded here.

Thank you, Fratres, my brothers, for being here at Christ Church, Windsor, Nova Scotia, and, especially, to those who have travelled such long distances in these seemingly ‘perilous times’ to come to what might seem to some of you to be, if not ultima thule, then at least very much next door to the farthest ends of the world!

SSC is a spiritual fellowship of Catholic Priests within the churches of the Anglican Communion, itself situated at least historically and traditionally within an understanding of how Anglicans, itself a later term, understand themselves as “an integral portion of the One Body of Christ composed of Churches which, united under the One Divine Head and in the fellowship of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Church in the undisputed Ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God, partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry of the same Apostolic Orders; and worship One God and Father through the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit who is given to them that believe to guide them into all truth,” to quote at length one of the most remarkable statements of catholicity and doctrinal restraint that is the legacy and living force of things in Canada, the Solemn Declaration of 1893 (Cdn BCP, viii). Yet, in my view, it speaks to something much deeper and much more profound and which relates to the aims and objectives of the SSC in the face of the various disorders of polity, moral, and doctrinal understanding that beset the churches in our age.

The task and challenge is to locate the spirituality of the priesthood within such a catholic vision that the Solemn Declaration envisions. That means finding ways to think about our priestly life, what it means in a reformed catholic understanding, and how it speaks to the spiritual confusions of our age. To be a priest is to be a servant of Christ in the midst of the body of Christ. What is impressed inwardly upon our lives of the sacrificial love of Christ is to be expressed outwardly in our work “to the glory of thy Name and the edification of thy Church” (BCP, p. 546). We do not live for ourselves but for others.

Yet we do so as a spiritual fellowship of priests, as those who have been called and chosen, set aside, dedicated, and charged by God’s grace to be “messengers, watchmen, and stewards of the Lord” (BCP, p. 648). It is not us per se but what is given to move in us. SSC at its best, historically and prophetically, is about the radical nature of the call to service in Christ. It is not political or worldly; it is meant to be transformative spiritually. It speaks to the very heart of the ministry: another lives in us so that Christ can live in those whom we serve.

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At this year’s Atlantic Theological Conference, The Rev’d David Curry made a special presentation on Louise Penny’s novel The Madness of Crowds and other related literature. The YouTube video of Fr. Curry’s talk is posted here; his lecture notes follow below. He also prepared a set of PowerPoint slides, which can be downloaded by clicking on this link.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well

Thank you for the privilege of offering the Atlantic Theological Conference book study. It marks a new venture and is not without its challenges. In my experience people have quite different opinions and feelings about literary works especially those in the popular realm, both about authors and characters. Some absolutely adore Louise Penny’s novels and her lead character, Armand Gamache; others, well, perhaps, not so much. My interest is not to persuade you one way or another on that score but simply to consider the kinds of ethical questions that such literature raises and the ways in which they are considered.

To that end, I would like to offer some reflections on the conference theme of “Plague, Perseverance, Providence: Adversity and the Christian Response to Adversity” by way of a brief consideration of Louise Penny’s novel ‘The Madness of Crowds’ complemented by a side-long glance at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and John Donne’s Sonnet, ‘What if this Present were the World’s Last Night.’ “It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine” (R.E.M. 1987), only we don’t, and perhaps shouldn’t. The accompanying power-point helps to highlight certain passages in the texts.

‘The Madness of Crowds’ was published in 2021 as a post-pandemic novel in her popular series of seventeen Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s detective mystery stories. The title is taken from Charles MacKay’s ‘Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’ (c. 1841) which explores a great range of examples of the psychology of mass hysteria and which is explicitly referenced in the novel.

Louise Penny’s novels belong to an array of detective mystery stories that explore a number of ethical questions and problems belonging to our contemporary world. Ethical refers to the idea or concept of what is good and right to think and do. It cannot be just for the few; it has to be for all. That is very much at issue in Louise Penny’s novel, The Madness of Crowds. Justice, as Plato shows in ‘The Republic,’ cannot simply be “the interest of the stronger”; in other words, that ‘might equals right.’ The Philosopher, he argues, must return to the Cave; his pursuit of wisdom is not a private matter. He is obliged to seek the good of all.

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Click here to download the full Rector’s Annual Report for 2021 (in pdf format).

The Rector’s Annual Reports for 2003 through 2020 can be accessed via this page.

Rector’s Annual Report for 2021
February 13th, 2022

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom”. It could be the motto for our Parish in these troubling times. It signals wonderfully what we have endeavoured to do together as a Parish in the face of covid (no longer always capitalised) and its fears and in terms of the restrictions that have curtailed worship in various ways. We have pressed on carefully but in a principled way with the protocols we have established and which have been welcomed by you. This has allowed us to continue with worship for the most of the year until the suspension of services by the Bishop, over and above the mandates of Public Health, which resulted in the cancellation of Christmas and most of Epiphany season. It is the first time, I think, in the history of the Parish that there have been no Christmas services. We have lately learned, too, that you can’t count on the weather, especially in this winter unlike any other, it seems. A “bleak, midwinter” indeed!

Yet in the face of the things that lie beyond our control, we have pressed on with the Christ Church Connections email message every week and with recordings of the 8am communion service or, when services were completely curtailed, with an audio file of the Services of Matins and Ante-Communion. Homilies and meditations, on my poor part, have attempted to provide some food for the soul in these times of spiritual famine and eucharistic fast. The upside of these things, perhaps, is that it has allowed for deeper reflection on the wisdom of the Scriptures and to the ways in which Scripture in its own voice speaks to our souls even in the midst of the storms and tempests of our disordered world. In other words, as a Parish we have not been simply in survival mode but are growing spiritually in maturity and understanding about who we are in the Body of Christ. Such things have also been an important part of our spiritual outreach to “the friends of Christ Church” further afield whose prayers and support have been most encouraging. We have also persevered with the Christ Church Book Club throughout the course of the year.

For all of these spiritual labours may God be praised. It has meant looking beyond the inconveniences and frustrations that so often beset us. It has been about keeping our minds on the things of God. We have learned to appreciate better the things which truly matter, and so, like Mary, “have chosen the good portion”, I hope, “which shall not be taken away”. It is about “let[ting] the word of Christ dwell” in our hearts and minds “richly in all wisdom”, words which we heard on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany last week which happened to coincide with the first time that we were able to return to worship since the last Sunday in Advent, 2021.

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At every Chapel service we pray “that a spirit of respect and reconciliation may grow among all nations and peoples.” That is very much our prayer for the indigenous peoples of Canada and for all of us not just today but for the foreseeable future. Here is the Canadian folk singer Bruce Cockburn singing the first verse of Jesous Ahattonia, Canada’s first and oldest Christmas song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrd4Sw0peZg

The words which he is singing were originally written in the Huron/Wendat language by the French Jesuit missionary and martyr, Fr. Jean de Brébeuf, probably in 1642. He was a linguist who took the time and care to learn the language of the Wendat people and to appreciate their thought and culture in interaction with Christian ideas and themes.

We know and use this hymn at King’s-Edgehill in a later English translation (by J. Edgar Middleton, 1926). In singing it in the Wendat language, Cockburn builds upon the work of Brébeuf who, like many early and largely French missionaries, began the project of providing alphabets and thus a written form for the various first nations’ peoples, something which has continued even into more recent times with the Inuit. This shows a very different kind of relationship between cultures and languages than what took place in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries with the Indian Act (1876 – the present) which makes the native peoples “wards of the state,” and, particularly, with the notorious Residential Schools programme (1876-1996). Such things reveal a much more aggressive and destructive form of imperial colonialism derived from Britain and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Indian Act and the Residential Schools programme were intended to assimilate the native peoples into Canadian life but entirely and often brutally at the expense of the cultures and languages of the native peoples themselves. Assimilation was the buzz word of the times but in the view of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission it was “cultural genocide,” a policy undertaken “to kill the Indian in the child” (TRC Report, 2015).

The Residential Schools were “the most aggressive and destructive of all Indian Act policies” (Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act, 2018, p. 52). It was a government programme managed by the churches – Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, subsequently the United Church, and Presbyterian – and a government wanting to be freed from financial responsibility towards the native peoples. It was a sad and shameful time in our Canadian history that reveals a betrayal of care by those who were entrusted with the care of over 150,000 children, more than 6,000 of whom either died or disappeared. There were as well incidents of sexual and physical abuse. The numbers of the missing children are imprecise because neither the government nor the churches kept records, hence the heart-rending spectacle of the discovery of unmarked graves this past spring and summer. It is as if they didn’t matter, didn’t exist.

The Indian Act programme of assimilation was part of the so-called “progressive” thinking of the late 19th century in America and in Canada along with eugenics, racial theories about immigration, and discriminatory practices with respect to social services.

The Schools were chronically underfunded. “The buildings were drafty and unsanitary and food for the children was insufficient and often rotten … the schools were also breeding grounds for diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza” (Bob Joseph, 21 Things, p. 58). Most of the children died from tuberculosis. The problem, though known, highlighted for instance by Dr. Peter Bryce who called it in 1922, “a national crime”, was largely overlooked and denied. All to our shame.

Chief Robert Joseph, an outstanding native leader, provides a moving portrayal of the sufferings endured by many indigenous students who were forcibly taken from their families and communities and placed in Residential Schools far away from their homes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_jUXiOSbp4

We can only confess our own sins, not the sins of others, but that does not mean ignoring the mistakes and wrongs of the past and their legacy in the present. It also means a commitment to the reconciliation and the recognition of the indigenous peoples of Canada as full and integral members of Canada. Reconciliation is not an indigenous problem; it is a Canadian problem which can no longer be ignored but requires commitment to the difficult but essential process of reconciliation. In some ways, it is about dignity and respect towards the native peoples of Canada.

Has anything been done? In 2005, a $1.9 billion compensation package was announced for former residential school students; in 2007, the largest class action settlement in Canada, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, was implemented. All of this built upon a growing awareness of the appalling sufferings of the native peoples in the Schools that began to come to the fore in the 1990s and which led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007. Apologies were made by the United Church in 1986, the Anglican Church in 1993, the Presbyterian Church in 1994. In 2009, Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations met with Pope Benedict XVI who expressed sorrow for the abuse and deplorable treatment of indigenous students, and on September 24th, 2021, the Conference of Canadian Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church also offered an “unequivocal apology” for the wrongs and abuses done to those in their charge, and committing as of yesterday, $30 million towards reconciliation. Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of Canada in 2008; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 extended a further apology to indigenous peoples in Labrador and Newfoundland who had not been included in the previous federal apology.

More needs to be done, certainly. The task of reconciliation remains before us and is, I think, quite movingly stated, again by Chief Robert Joseph, in words which touch upon the ideals and life of our School. It is his words which we need to hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJQgpuLq1LI

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, Head of English and ToK Teacher
September 29th, 2021
Michaelmas