Reflections of a Canadian Churchman

Before entering parish ministry all of my professional life was spent in the retail sector. From the time that I was sixteen I worked in a store. One thing was always consistent in the retail world: The Christmas season began November 1st. In those early days of November, we pulled out our Christmas decorations, began to display Christmas merchandise, and on went the Christmas Carols and music. Even as retailer in the ecclesiastical market – I was retail sales manager of Toronto’s Anglican Book Centre for ten years – this was the case. From time-to-time, we tried to push things a little later into eleventh month, but the reality of retail is simply that a retailer needs to get a good start on the season if the books are going to turn from red to black in that last quarter of the year. As a retail manager, I found Christmas came even earlier. In the month of May, I would receive a sales visit from one of my favourite sales reps, a gentleman named Stephen Wright, who would lay out stack ...

Athena and I were talking recently about how “The War” informed life for our generation. While it is true that we were both born a good twenty-five years after the end of World War II, it formed a strong part of our shared cultural narrative as Gen-Xers. The war was ever-present in the conversations of our elders – in their storytelling, in their hopes and fears, and in their response to challenges of the day. On the one hand, it seemed to us that it had just happened and that we had missed it, and on the other that it was already an event of mythic proportions. My maternal grandfather, Frank Rason, was member of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (R.C.E.M.E.) and served in England, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In England he met my grandmother, Joan Edwards, and married her before the war was over, sending her home to become one of the many war brides who, barely adults, left all they had to begin a new life in a new land. Thus, our family came into being because o...