Compassion: key to being Canadian, Anglican.

Dear editor,

In the car this morning, just long enough to hear Shelagh Rogers interviewing 1950s Canadian Football league star Normie Kwong--the new lieutenant governor of Alberta. He recalled Prime Minister Paul Martin's early-morning call and the half-hour he and his wife spent considering what response to make to the request.

Right off, he said, "I remember the slights ... of being Chinese, and growing up in Calgary," and I got the impression that by accepting this honour he saw himself, at least in part, a symbol of the Canada that yearns so fondly for fair and tolerant treatment for all. Is that not why we have taken the trouble of enshrining in our constitution the Charter of Rights and Freedom--Canada's most precious gift to the world?

It is a gift we Anglicans need to treasure. It is derived from our religious inheritance. For it contains the compassion of Jesus that shines not only through the Gospels but disinterested history as well. It contains the genius of Elizabeth I who instructed her archbishops to describe the formularies of the English church in language broad enough to avoid pushing people to unnecessary extremes. Why, in our time, it should now become necessary to turn our backs on a set of principles so eminently sensible, beats me.

To be members of the Anglican Church of Canada, not some other place, imposes some very real imperatives.

We are a Christian community in a culture that is slowly but deliberately choosing not to eliminate the French fact. We are choosing not to assimilate First Nations people, slowly learning, in fact, that that was never an option. We are choosing to ensure that full rights of citizenship are accorded to members of the many minorities in our cultural mosaic. And why? Surely at some level, we remember the slights, we feel compassionately for other people, and become determined that no so-called "spiritual" leadership ought ever to be allowed to trample on it. Over the years, Anglicans, individually and collectively, have played a large part in forming and instructing it. It now speaks back to us.

While scouring the communique from the primates' meeting in Newry for any reason to be optimistic, do we remember the slights and determine to keep the faith?

Do you suppose that 35 archbishops who have not the slightest clue what it means to be Canadian will persuade us to set aside our most cherished insights?

Canon Cal McMillan

Wolfville, N.S.