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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 25, 2006
Conviver
This is the weekend when we traditionally celebrate the birth of St John the Baptist -- especially if we are in Quebec. He was the Precursor, “filled with the Holy Ghost even from his mother's womb," and the pageant of his Nativity comes down to us through the Middle Ages, as the midsummer echo of Christmas. Here is a day on which a saint’s birth is celebrated, not his death. (St John’s beheading for the pleasure of Herodias is a separate commemoration, August 29th.)In the 1630s, our French precursors began lighting St John’s fires, on the banks of the St Lawrence, reviving the custom of their own ancestors, going back perhaps even behind Christendom to the pagan celebrations of the solstice in Gaul. The king lit this fire, in Paris. Canada and St-Jean-Baptiste are of a piece; both of us children of aged parents; he of Zachary and Elizabeth; we of Britain and France. Calixa Lavallée's national song, “O Canada”, was written for the Quebec celebrations of St-Jean-Baptiste in 1880. I love the original words, by Judge Routhier, more Catholic than nationalist. It is unfortunate the thing became caught up in politics, till we had Parliament actually tampering with the words. For it was a song that belonged to the people, not to the politicians. The reader must remember that the French fathers of our nation came bearing the standard of the Christian faith to a New World. Our children are taught, in the schools today, to despise their accomplishment and the heritage they bestowed; but it was through them that Canada came into being, “filled with the spirit from the womb”. Read, when you can, the Jesuit Relations -- from which I learned about our first St John’s fires -- to know what real nobility is, and self-sacrifice. The courage and audacity of these men is astounding; but also, their gentleness and learning. They had no doubt that they were preaching Love -- a manly, tough, but protective love, and for the salvation alike of colonist and savage. They knew that without this Love, founded in Christ’s, no conquest could avail them. And to the Canada that grew from the St Lawrence, and spread her arms from Atlantic to Pacific (“and he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth”), Quebec had, until so recently in her history, a religious calling. She it was who imagined herself bringing Christian redemption to the Canadian wild. It was she who laid the foundations of our Church. Much has been said, and much can reasonably be said, against the claustrophobic order of old Quebec; against a Catholic Church too jealous of her worldly powers, that held her, perhaps, in an embrace too tight. Yet much of the complaint is also specious. Men changed, and no longer wanted God; were called to the attractions of mammon instead. Having no patience to reform, they destroyed. A society built around the Gospel message of eternal life, and answering to the deepest call of human need, went looking instead for the quicker pay-offs of politics and business. Outwardly, the province became rich and fat -- got hot running water, and video games. But in the words of our forgotten master, “What advantage is it to a man, who gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Or again, where he says: “They have their reward.” French Canada today is, perhaps even more than the rest of the country, a dry, postmodern spiritual wasteland, from which the warmth of religion and family, the humility and chastity of generations past, the poignant continuities of life, have been bled. The beauty of her architecture and material culture has been smashed and scarred; the delight of her hymns and songs and dances; even the poetry in the toé and moé of the old Joual. No piety remains in La Fête de la St-Jean. We have, as elsewhere through the West, the spectacle of a people outwardly prospering and “progressive”, but with no future and nothing to live for. You knew the old Quebec by the joyful voices of her children. From the new Quebec, they are gone. The old hypocrisies are replaced by the new, the old corruptions by the new corruptions, but I cannot believe in the large view of things that French Canada has gained by her deconsecration. Or that she could not now gain by re-consecrating to her old mission: “Je me souviens.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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