April 30 to May 15
Art Credo: Art Exhibition and Sale

St. John the Evangelist (154  Somerset Street W., Ottawa)

May 6 -7
The Marriage Preparation Course is designed to help participants to learn and grow through online presentations given by professional speakers, online small group discussions with trained facilitators, and couple conversations.

All couples are welcome, and participation is not limited by gender, age, or previous marital status. Information and registration forms: https://www.ottawa.anglican.ca/marriage-preparation

Next workshop will be in September.

May 14
Plants, Books, and Crafts sale. 

8:30 a.m. to noon. All Saints’ Anglican Church, Westboro, (347 Richmond Road, Ottawa) 

In support of Fikelela, a ministry of the Diocese of Cape Town, and the PWRDF. A gently used children’s toys table will be set up to fundraise for Ukraine.

May 26
Bishop’s Gala

(see details here) 

May 28
St. Helen’s Art Fair

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Thorne Centre developed as an Anglican congregation, as an outstation of the Mission of Leslie.  In 1893, construction began on this stone church and the first service was held in Saint George’s Church, Thorne Centre on 3 August 1894.  

In 1899, the mission was reorganized into the Mission of Thorne West, and it consisted of Saint Stephen’s Church, Thorne West; Saint James’s Church, Leslie and Saint George’s Church, Thorne Centre.

A quick glance at this house of worship would assume that it has much the layout of a nineteenth century one-room schoolhouse, with an entrance porch at the front, and the worship space consisting of an auditory box.  Such a preliminary appraisal would miss both obvious and subtle aspects of this frontier house of worship.

One striking aspect of Saint George’s is the lustrous silver hue of the rubble stone construction. A closer examination reveals that there are other hues of stone in the walls, including black, brown and even gold, the latter giving Saint George’s something in common with the cathedral in Ottawa. It is true that the pitch of the roof on this house of worship is not as steep as we find on most churches built in the High Victorian Gothic Revival style, but it is much steeper than would be found on most one room schools.  The pitch of roof chosen for this building when combined with the eave returns at the front was meant to give the impression of a perfect triangle—perhaps as a symbol of the Trinity.  And once we see that, we notice the corbel (or triangular) arches on the windows, such as no school in the region would have featured.

Saint George’s was a very functional house of worship.  The entrance (a later iteration perhaps of an earlier porch) features double doors to facilitate funerals, with the worship space being only one step up from the ground.  The vestry very likely was built a generation after the church and is constructed of a material known in the region as Boyd Block concrete (manufactured by Boyd Brothers Ltd. of Osgoode). The vestry also features a corbel window.

In 1907, the name of the mission was changed to the Mission of Thorne & Leslie, and it became a four-point parish with the addition of Saint Matthew’s, North Clarendon. In 1915, the mission was divided in two; the one being the Mission of Leslie made up of Leslie and Thorne Centre; and the other being the Mission of Thorne, made up of Thorne West and North Clarendon. In 1924, another re-organization resulted in the Parish of Leslie consisting of Leslie, Thorne Centre and Greermount.

There were future reconfigurations, first as the Parish of Thorne & Leslie in 1931, then as North Clarendon in 1932, then again as the Parish of North Clarendon, Charteris in 1933. By 1939, the parish had churches at Charteris, Greermount, North Onslow and Thorne Centre. In 1954, Otter Lake (known to Anglicans as Leslie) was added to the parish, and North Onslow transferred elsewhere.  Half a century later, this church became part of the Parish of the Northern Pontiac with churches at Campbell’s Bay, Danford Lake, Maniwaki, Otter Lake and Wright. 

If you would like to help the Archives preserve the records of the Diocese and its parishes, why not become a Friend of the Archives?  Your $20 membership brings you three issues of the lively, informative Newsletter, and you will receive a tax receipt for further donations above that amount. 

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So is his newly published second book, a memoir, Father Rick Roamin’ Catholic. It too is a story of transitions. He takes readers on a journey through them all; you won’t want to put the book down, eager to hear what’s around the next corner. A great storyteller, Prashaw invites us to the kitchen table to listen along with his niece (who is among “the nones” – no religious affiliation nor church attendance, Canada’s fastest growing religious group – Pew Research 2019) and his great nephew. He regales them with fun memories and personal discoveries from some of the most profound moments of his life as a kid in a big, Catholic, northern Ontario family, a journalist, a priest, a husband, a politician, an advocate and a dad. Gently but honestly, Prashaw also leads readers through the heartbreaking topics of abuse by clergy and the church’s role in Residential Schools.  

Prashaw’s son Adam, with childhood wisdom, once said, “God is big, very big. God is bigger than the sky.” From Adam, and from life, Prashaw has learned that God’s plan is not always precise: “My faith was now more Roamin’ than Roman Catholic, a God bigger than any catechism taught me. Be who we are. Love who we love. A believer, still standing.”

Thank you, Rick (and Friesen Press) for sharing your story! 

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Each year my social media fills up with reminders to celebrate mothers and the best ways we can honour the mothers in our lives and in our churches. It also fills up with reminders that Mother’s Day is not a festival of the church and so we, as clergy and lay leaders, should resist all attempts to mention Mother’s Day at church.

Like many in the church, I have a mixed relationship with Mother’s Day. There have been many years, in the nearly 20 years since my own mother died from cancer, where I have found a reason to avoid church altogether on Mother’s Day. It was often easier to skip church than to respond to well-meaning questions from fellow church members about what I was doing for my mother that year, or when I planned on becoming a mother myself. 

That avoidance became infinitely more difficult once ordained! Now I HAD to be at church each Mother’s Day and so also had to reckon anew with how we as a church celebrate, or do not celebrate, mothers and Mother’s Day. And, as someone who is both a priest and a mother, but whose journey to motherhood was neither straightforward nor easy, I am acutely conscious of the ways that we can care for or alienate those in our midst on this day.

Is there a place in the church to celebrate women, mothers, and all those who offer “mothering” to us, of all shapes and sizes? I think there can be. But how we do it matters. 

Many will be quick to remind us that Mother’s Day is not in our liturgical calendar; it is not a feast or festival of the church. Which is true. Neither are many other days which our churches acknowledge.

So perhaps consider not having it as the main focus. Pray for mothers and all who mother, but don’t single anyone out or worse, alienate all those who would like to be mothers by asking all of the mothers present to stand and be applauded. Instead of giving flowers out, if your church is located next to a cemetery, have a bucket of flowers that anyone can take from, to take flowers home or to take flowers out to mark the grave of someone who has offered mothering in their lives.

Acknowledge that this day is fraught with emotions, both positive and negative, for so many. Talk about how hard it is for those who don’t have a great relationship with their mother; those who cannot, but may deeply want to, have children; those who have lost children and those who have lost mothers. Naming aloud these complicated relationships and reminding us all that God is present with us in the joy and in the pain around motherhood is a powerful and important way of showing how we include all of the diversity of our church.

And instead of limiting ourselves to seeing motherhood as solely women who have children, I invite you to consider the aspects of motherhood that we admire – qualities like support, nourishing, and protection. Talk about those qualities, and give thanks for all those people in our lives who exemplify and offer us those qualities. These people might be mothers or significant women in our lives, but they might also be dads, friends, or people in our churches who offer that kind of love to us.

Lastly, remember all of the incredible imagery of God as our mother in the Bible: God as the protective mother bear, God as the soaring mother eagle, God as the mother labouring to bring her children into the world, God as a midwife, Jesus the mother hen gathering her brood under her wings. Perhaps Mother’s Day is another opportunity for us to consider how to become more Christ-like, how we are called to embody the amazing love of God for all of those around us.

However you do, or do not, celebrate Mother’s Day this year, my prayers are with you. May you know the abundant love and care and nurturing support of God our Mother.

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The online lecture series marking the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa wrapped up on March 13 with a remarkable lecture from British public theologian the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells, Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Visiting Professor at King’s College London. 

While all four of the free lectures, now posted on the Diocesan YouTube channel, have been gifts for all to enjoy and share broadly, this last one on “Re-Imagining Church” seemed to be particularly apt as the diocesan church reconsiders the Shape of Parish Ministry. Wells offered abundant inspiration.

Welcoming Wells, Bishop Shane Parker quoted American theologian Walter Brueggermann’s description of him as arguably having “the liveliest, most agile, best-informed, critically disciplined mind in the entire Christian community and he has a baptised heart of honesty, compassion and passion to match.”

All that was evident as Wells began by reflecting on questions as expansive as “What if we are the early church?” and “If there hadn’t been a fall, would Jesus still have come?” and “Why was there creation?”

That last question is one of the great questions, Wells said. “The answer I’m going to suggest to you is that That-which-lasts-forever, which you and I call God, chose to be in relationship with something beyond itself….

“And then astonishingly, and this is the great claim of the Christian faith, that relationship was constituted by God becoming one of us…. That is Christmas,” he said. Easter, Wells went on to say, demonstrates that “whatever we do we cannot push that relationship away, however much we might reject it,” and the Ascension shows “that the whole point of all things was that God would finally be with us in essence forever.

“What we’ve arrived at is the heart of what church and what heaven are fundamentally about and that is being with one another,” Wells said.

Our churches, however, are structured on a different model, Wells said. It is a model based more on a view of that Jesus came to fix our human problems, like a plumber coming to fix a broken pipe, rather than coming to be in relationship with us. Wells added that we see our problem as our limitations, and all the things we do not have enough of, but it is, actually, isolation. 

“If our human problem is isolation, what we need is one another, and that’s something we already have. We have everything we need. We just have to turn our alienation from one another into ‘being with’ with one another, and that’s what I see Jesus and the Holy Spirit doing….

“My thesis for you tonight, is that the church of the future that I’ve been asked with you to reimagine is a church that focuses on what our true calling is as human beings, as disciples, as the body of Christ, and isn’t preoccupied with a kind of personal escape from present reality, which is the way salvation has too often been conceived.”

He then turned to describing how St.-Martin-in-the-Fields church, where he has been the vicar since 2012, lives out these ideas. 

Wells traced beginning of the decline of the church in the U.K. back to the government’s creation of “the welfare state” and the National Health Service in 1948. The church celebrated the creation of these social services, he said, believing they would end poverty and inequality. And then, he said, the church disasterously “stopped doing interesting things,” in health care and education, for example. 

The reason why St. Martins “has such a high profile in the United Kingdom, is because it never stopped doing interesting things,” Wells said. “It is those interesting things that are our understandings of the kingdom of God.” The Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields is renowned for its music. Amnesty International began at St. Martins, and the church is known for its work with the homeless.

In 2017, St. Martin’s founded an organization called HeartEdge “because we wanted to recapture the imagination of a church that we saw as captivated by scarcity….the feeling that we don’t have enough” information, resources, numbers, money, or social influence.

Wells posited that “we actually have too much God, but to avoid feeling overwhelmed “we’ve developed strong resistances to receiving the too much that God has to give us.”

HeartEdge focuses on the four Cs: commerce, culture, compassion and congregation.

Churches “seem to have created this rather lame culture by which we are a one-trick pony. We do congregational stewardship and if that doesn’t produce enough money, then we close things down. What about all the other ways that you make money in this wonderful world, most of which come under the heading of commerce?,” Wells asked.

In 1987, St. Martin’s no longer had the income it needed for its mission, so it set up its own business. Pre-pandemic, its two cafes, events business, shop, and commercial concerts business employed about 120 people. “It increased by tenfold the number of people coming across our threshold. It obviously paid the bills, but more significantly, it modelled what healthy relationships between adult human beings could look like,” Wells explained. “We still have congregational stewardship, which pays maybe about a quarter of our bills, but we’ve increased fourfold our potential income, and it has hugely expanded our ambition for what we can be doing together as a church.”

The second C is culture, which Wells likened to an “estuary, a place where the saltwater of the sea mingles with the fresh water of a river. So an estuary of culture you can imagine as the place where the creative energy of the world meets the receptive energy of the church. It’s a wonderful place of intermingling,” A classic example would be an art exhibition in a church building, The art may is not necessarily be Christian, but it provokes conversation “which is where the dynamic energy of the Holy Spirit is most at work,” he said.

The third C is compassion, which Wells said, “may begin with pity, but it ends with the renewal of the church. To take in a Ukrainian right now is to enable your church to be renewed by the extraordinary resilience and faith of the person who comes to share your existence with you.”

The fourth C is congregation. “I would like the church to cease to think of congregation as something that can be considered out of relationship to the other three Cs. It’s been our experience at St. Martins that commerce, culture and compassion have redefined how church functions for us.”

A link to the full lecture and the previous three is on the diocesan website and YouTube channel.

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When the van arrives at Centre 105 every Monday and Friday morning from 9 a.m. to noon, it brings an on-site nurse and addictions counsellor. The clinic offers on-site wound care, linkage to care, counselling and support, Narcan distribution, nicotine replacement and smoking cessation, Hepatitis C screening, education and treatment, as well as substance use assessment, support, education and treatment.

Taylor Seguin, Centre 105’s executive director, says he was very excited when he first heard about the possibility of the Mobile Clinic coming. “One of the most prominent challenges for the population that Centre 105 serves is that they have limited or no access to the services they need, including shelter, food, and of course, health care,” he said. “Our team often hears about the long wait times at the hospital, or the fear that some of our folks have, that they will catch COVID-19 if they go to the hospital. This new program, the Mobile Clinic, eliminates those challenges.”

“The response from our participants has been extremely positive,” said Seguin.

“I hate going to the hospital because it is always such a long wait. I’ve never really liked hospitals,” said Rick, who visits Centre 105’s drop-in centre. “Whenever I heard about this van that had a nurse, I liked that I could get help, right after having breakfast. The nurse looked at my leg and helped me out. I will definitely stop again if I have other stuff going on.”

Seguin praised the Mobile Clinic’s staff. “Mel and Jimmy have been amazing. We are so grateful to be able to offer this service to those visiting 105.”

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It was also the service at which the St. Bart’s 2021 Capital Campaign Co-chairs, Bonnie Robinson and David Esdaile, announced the launch of a three–year campaign to raise funds for the restoration of the Wilhelmina Geddes “Ottawa” Window and for improvements to the church facilities to make St. Bart’s an even more welcoming place for community events and concerts.

The Honorary Colonel of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, Bryan Brulotte, announced a very generous personal gift to the Regiment on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in May 2022, and to St. Bart’s for its capital campaign.  St. Bart’s is known as the “Guard’s Chapel” and their regimental colours have been laid up in the church since 1972.

Dr. McKee gave a short address to the congregation in which he spoke of his gratitude for receiving an invitation to learn about the “Irish” window at St. Bart’s and his subsequent visit to see the window in all its glory.  He called his first impression of the window: “stunning, such a dramatic narrative, impossible to capture its beauty in reproductions.”  

He added that “this extraordinary masterpiece by an Irish woman artist, Wilhelmina Geddes, is a product of a confluence of influences and connections in Ireland at the opening of the twentieth century,” he said. Dr. McKee, an economic historian, went on to describe the period in Ireland’s history between 1916 and 1919 when Geddes was working on her commission for the Duke of Connaught as a memorial for the men on his staff in Canada who fell in the Great War. 

Dr. McKee drew a parallel between the Irish Catholic community in Canada who flocked to the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1914 and whose sacrifices contributed to the evolution of a modern Canadian identity and the Irish soldiers who returned from that war to a new Ireland. Alas, their heroism and sacrifices had “no place in the new narrative,” according to Dr. McKee. 

More recently, according to Dr. McKee, Ireland has been recovering the diversity of Irish identity, including those from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, such as Geddes and others. Indeed, like Canada, he sees Ireland embracing “diversity and inclusiveness….signposts to a better future.” He is seeking to identify the contributions to Canada that Ireland has made in the past as well as highlighting the contributions Canadians have made more recently to Ireland.

Dr. McKee concluded by paying tribute to General de Chastelain who played such an important role in the Northern Ireland peace process. He then pointed us all to the significance of this “Irish“ window at St. Bart’s and the inspiration that Canada’s story provides Ireland to be “finally at peace with itself and its neighbour.”

At the conclusion of the service, there was a chance for parishioners to meet their guests and to thank them for their participation in the annual service of remembrance.  Little did the parish know that about a week later Dr. McKee would ask to return to discuss the window with Canon Clunie.  At that meeting the Ambassador presented St. Bart’s with a handsome cheque for $40,000 from the Government of Ireland as a contribution to the campaign for the restoration of the Geddes “Ottawa” window!   

In late February 2022, more good news followed, as the Honorable Mona Fortier, MP for Ottawa-Vanier, called with an exciting announcement. Veterans Affairs Canada had approved St. Bart’s application to the Commemorative Partnership Program for a contribution of up to $25,000 to support the costs of restoring the window.  Veterans Affairs also congratulated the parish on its efforts to safeguard a Canadian war memorial from the First World War.

With this support from the governments of Canada and Ireland, together with the generous contribution from Bryan Brulotte, the St. Bart’s Capital Campaign is well and truly launched.  Work on the window is planned for the summer of 2022.  Support from friends of St. Bart’s is still welcome and will help ensure the successful completion of the project.

To make your contribution, please drop your cheque at the parish office, 125 MacKay St., make an etransfer to  stbarts.campaign@gmail.com or donate through Canadahelps.org 

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Dean Beth Bretzlaff thanked those who attended “in-person and online as we offer prayers for peace in Ukraine and around our world, shared times of silent reflection, and find solace in sacred music. May this time be a blessing to us and to those we hold in our hearts today and in the days ahead.”

There were readings of sacred texts in three languages. Senior Rabbi Eytan Kenter from Kehillat Beth Israel read the texts in Hebrew. Sahada Alolo, Manager of Community Engagement Multifaith Housing Initiative, read the texts in Arabic. And the Rev. Canon Doug Richards, Vicar of Christ Church Cathedral, read the Biblical texts in English.

The Men of the Cathedral Choir with director Andrew McAnerney then sang The Kontakion of the Dead, a poetic feature of the traditional funeral service in the Orthodox Church, set to a hymn-like chant from the Kiev Tradition.

The service ended with a responsive reading of the Pledge of Transformation, a commitment made by Together For Hope partners, a sister organization to the Coventry Community of the Cross of Nails, which is open to partners of other faiths and no faith.

Offerings were to benefit Ukraine through the Red Cross. 

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Deborah says it was fun training the elders how to use the technology. “Mental health for the elders was very important during the pandemic because they have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that they weren’t able to see…It was for them to connect with their loved ones during the pandemic, to keep communicating, doing a lot of wellness check-ins, to make sure they are supported emotionally, mentally, in any way. It was a way to keep the communications open to their families who reside in the North and here in Ottawa.

“We had a virtual elders Zoom meetings,” she said. “So everything is always theme-based according to what elders would like to talk about. One of the things they have done is a lot of different clothing patterns, sewing mittens or making parkas, because clothing is also our identity and it has distinct meanings for a child newborn to an adult. Every design has a meaning for each gender as they grow, so these are the things that we capture to pass on, transfer to our l children who are here accessing our programs, so it is wonderful to work with elders in that way.”

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