Week of Prayer for Christian Unity annual service to be celebrated at Saint Paul University on Jan. 22

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is observed from January 18 to 25. The Christian Council of the Capital Area will be collaborating with the pastoral services team at Saint Paul University to hold an Ottawa Week of Prayer for Christian Unity service. It will take place at the de Mazenod Chapel on Thursday, Jan. 22 at 12:10 pm.  The Rev. John Perkin from First Baptist Church in Ottawa will preach. Watch for coverage of the service in our next issue of Perspective.

In the meanwhile, we offer this excerpt from a speech Archbishop Stephen Cottrell of the Diocese of York delivered at Lambeth Palace on Nov. 18 after he returned from a visit to the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem. He offered some reflections on Christian unity and interfaith relations in the current global context:

“And if we allow the ideologies of hatred and separation, and the dehumanizing of one set of people, then what will this do to our own humanity, and who might we choose to turn on, and who will turn on us?  The tectonic plates are shifting, and there is a real danger that the values, standards and rights we have cherished will be eroded and overridden to our shame and detriment.

“In each of the holy sites I visited, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and of course at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, I was received with joyful and gracious hospitality, by Orthodox and Roman Catholic sisters and brothers alike. This is the spiritual and theological foundation upon which our vision for peace must be built: for as Christians, as we come closer to Christ, we also come closer to each other. We see the face of Christ in each other. Or if we find that too hard, see the face of others reflected in the eyes of Christ, who looks on each of us with the same steadfast, tender and compassionate gaze of love. For it is Jesus Christ himself who makes the hero of some of his most famous stories people of another faith: a good Samaritan, a Syro –Phoenician woman, a Roman centurion, and the one leper who comes back and says thank you is a Samaritan too. We must also, therefore, see and honour the image of God in our sisters and brothers of other faith communities.

“It is this theological vision which is what our world needs and is the greatest bulwark against the erosion of human rights and human dignity, which is the image of God and the face of Christ in every human person. This is the Christian vision, and the recovery of that vision in our social and political discourse can enable us, as those great women in Ramallah asked us, to hunger and search for justice and build peace in the land of the Holy One  – and in our own neighbourhoods as well, where we see an increase in antisemitism and Islamophobia and where we are less and less trusting of each other, and this threatens to tear us apart.

“I know our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters will have themes in their own traditions that seek to bring us together, not in a way that dissolves our difference of belief, but that recognizes we all need to flourish.”

Archbishop Cottrell’s entire speech describing his experiences during his visit to the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem at this difficult time can be read on his website.