Before I talk at all about the cathedral, though, I'd like to talk about the town. The town is not kidding. That isn't to say that nobody in the town has a sense of humour, not at all. It's just to say that there's a marked difference between somewhere like Gravelbourg, and somewhere like Calgary. Our other trip this summer was down to Calgary to see the Calgary Stampede (the greatest outdoor show on earth), and in Calgary, they are kidding. For a week every year, the entire city pretends to be a bunch of cowpokes, buckaroos, and hayseeds. Everyone wears jeans, everyone wears plaid shirts, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats. And then, as soon as the week's over, all that stuff goes back into mothballs, waiting for the next year to roll around, and Calgarians get back into their uniforms: Golf shirts and khakis. Along with black socks and sandals.
But in Gravelbourg, they're not kidding. It's not just that they're advertised as being french, and they all pretend to be french for a week during "Gravel Days" or whatever. Nope, they're not messing around with the idea. You go into stores, and everyone can speak perfect english. But they also would much rather speak perfect french. And they're very happy if you speak french to them.
Now, how did that happen? How on earth did this island of French culture and language survive in the midst of this prairie ocean? Well, I've got my theories, and I think that if you're tempted to check it out, check it out soon, because there's no guarantee that it'll be around for forever.
The Cathedral. Oh my. It's immense. It's colossal. And it's spectacular. And it's in the middle of nowhere. It was built and the town around it, complete with convent and schools, according to the vision of Pere Gravel, the priest of the town. The guy whose vision set it up. It seems so strange to me to even have the thing there in the first place. It's the sort of building that belongs in a much bigger centre, right? Why put a cathedral in the middle of nowhere?
Well, Pere Gravel had a dream, a vision. He saw not a town, he saw a community. We feel as though a cathedral with that level of magnificence belongs in a larger centre because we know what we know about churches: That on an average week, about ten percent of Christians will be in church on Sunday morning. And it'll pretty much be the same ten percent. And so we figure that to support a cathedral, you have to have an awful lot of people around to make a go of it.
But imagine, if you will, a community in which it's a small centre, with a much bigger commitment. Imagine, if you will, a community in which the people are bound together by their faith, and it touches their lives. I get the feeling that there's a reason why Gravelbourg has hung together as well as it has, despite being French in the middle of english Canada. Because they were knit together with purpose and vision. And this highlights the problem that they're encountering, which is the problem encountering communities, and churches, all over this great nation of ours.
La Jeunesse.
Or, in english, the young people. A number of times, in the town of Gravelbourg, people told us that the cathedral is great, the town is wonderful, but the young folks of today just aren't into it. They don't show up for church, and they can't wait to leave Gravelbourg. The cathedral, as great and wonderful as it is, is incredibly fragile, as fragile as any of the vacant churches that dot the prairies, and there are a lot of them. Every small town, every community had a church, and for the most part, they're boarded up and vacant. And that's the fate that awaits the cathedral in Gravelbourg as well, if not immediately, then sometime soon. And when the cathedral folds, I get the feeling that the rest of the town will as well. All churches everywhere pretty much are having a problem with 'la jeunesse,' and the small towns are a bellweather for what will be happening in the future with bigger centres. We, as of now, in mainline churches, inherit Christians who move into the big cities. But what do we do with the young folks? Without them, the churches in small towns become boarded up, and crumble to dust. We get smug in bigger centres, thinking that it's a small town problem, but guess what. It isn't. Churches close every day, all day, for one prime reason: The church in question finds out that it is realistically only one generation away from losing everything.
The big churches, the mainline churches, the small churches, the country churches, it's all the same thing. You're only one generation away from losing it all. The unbroken legacy of faith that has stretched back to the time of Christ and his apostles, the faith that survived the massive persecutions of the roman empire, the faith that spread past the borders of the middle east, that withstood the caliphate onslaught at the battle of Tours, the faith that survived the relentless attempts from every side to quash and destroy it, that faith has found it's greatest foe. Apathy.
You and I have a profound responsibility. As churches close, as they empty, we have a chance to fight this last and greatest foe. We have a chance to confront apathy, and shake the world out of its sloth, out of its complacency, before it's too late. We have a chance to say to the masses who make up our church population on paper, yet who are far too busy to ever show up, we have a chance to say to them
"This still matters. This is still important. This faith of yours still has life and strength and power and authority. It's not a relic trapped in the past, it still has something really important to say to you here and now. It talks about the human condition, about life and death, good and evil, failure and redemption, everlasting glory and the secret desires of the human heart. Those things haven't changed as long as there have been people, but we assume that they have. But here we are, living in the same world, with the same problems. Take the yoke of Christ upon you, and learn from him, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light."
You may not believe me, but either way, head into see the church in Gravelbourg before it's a museum. Head in to see it alive and full of life and music. See the murals whilst the vaulted ceilings fill with words as old as civilization. And if you think it won't happen, take a look at the churches in europe that have become condominiums, or the churches in Quebec that have become the same. Or the churches in small town saskatchewan that have become museums as well, this is happening right in our own backyards, because we're living in the last believing generation.
But we always have been. Remember that we are, forget your thought about how the church will always be there, and treat the church, your church, as something worth saving.
PJ.
Gasp! Glue factory!
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