NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 9, 2005
Turkey
A Proclamation was tabled in the Canadian Parliament, in January 1957, declaring the second Monday in October: “A day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada is blessed.” This was back in the days of Louis St. Laurent, when all parties acknowledged that Canada was unambiguously a Christian nation.The traditions associated with the North American Thanksgiving are much deeper, of course. The Proclamation of 1957 established the current date of the festival. A former act of Parliament, in 1879, had placed it on November 6th. Americans look back to the pilgrim service of Thanksgiving when the Mayflower landed; Anglo-Canadians to the service of Martin Frobisher, when he first touched the earth of Newfoundland. That we are further north, explains plausibly why we came to celebrate our Thanksgiving earlier than the Americans celebrate theirs. The associated customs -- the turkey, the pumpkin pie, and other fixings -- began to be imported into Canada by the American Loyalists, fleeing north from the troubles after 1776. Beneath such recorded events, our harvest festivals are rooted in the commonality of the European Middle Ages. The idea of community, of the all in all of “Christendom”, is something that has disappeared from the surface, but as an underground river it flows still. Yet Thanksgiving, in English-speaking North America, has always been a more “secular” than “religious” festival -- has been celebrated mostly out of church -- owing, I should think, to the great variety of Christian denominations into which we fell. The reasons for the Reformation have largely passed; were products of an age that no longer holds us. Yet generation after generation is born into the schisms of five centuries ago. Notwithstanding, the instinct to unity remains, and in the sight of the harvest has always been asserted. We celebrate Thanksgiving “in the fields”, as it were, more than in our separate churches, because we remain, under the surface, one people. This is something about the United States and (to a diminishing extent) Anglo-Canada, that has long intrigued me. The organizing principle of religion in most of this continent has been laissez-faire. Yet, in the absence of anything resembling an established church, we recreate a semblance of it in our public life. American patriotism, and its now-defunct British-Canadian variation -- a patriotism resplendent with Christian imagery -- owes much to the vacuum created when pilgrims and pioneers left old established churches behind them. It expresses a kind of “small-c catholicism”, in which people of every background, economic class, and locality, acknowledge something through their common citizenship. And what they acknowledge is an allegiance, to what is finally the common God. Believers among the Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Pentecostalists, Anglicans, Mennonites, Lutherans, and even protestantized Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, went their separate ways by so many dispositions. But they eventually, instinctively, reassemble, and recover by increments even the doctrinal basis upon which the original Christendom was built. One sees this today in, for instance, the recovery of the natural law tradition among the most earnest Protestants in the United States, whose ancestors left the Catholic Church to be free of it. Or in the craving for the full Mass, and for a richer liturgical environment in churches that were once stripped down to “bare essentials”. Today, we have another element in play, in the “political correctness” that has grown out of the revolutionary squalor of the 20th century, and now turns its mysterious wrath on Christianity itself. In the large scheme of things, I think there is a new forking in the road, as decisive as the Reformation. I sense this everywhere in political life, but also in the daily life around me. What remains of the whole heritage of Christianity -- whether Protestant or Catholic -- is being consciously consigned to dust by so many. But among those who are not discarding Christianity, a movement towards unity is gathering, whose ultimate destination will be, I expect, Rome. On one level, it is a circling of the wagons, as Christians find themselves surrounded, especially in our cities, by people who do not share any part their moral and spiritual outlook; who disagree, fundamentally, about what is right and wrong. We struggle to affirm what the last Pope aptly described as the “Culture of Life”, in the midst of this encroaching “Culture of Death”. Thanksgiving is a standard around which to rally: for it affirms Life, directly, in the eloquence of the harvest. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top