SAINTE-ANNE-DE-BEAUMONT

Happy Feast of St. Anne!

 

While on holiday last year in Canada (New Brunswick) I went for a drive through Memramcook to Beaumont. It’s all very beautiful and on the way you pass through Belliveau Orchards with their wonderful apple trees. Much of the land across the Petitcodiac River from Beaumont was settled in the mid-1700s by German immigrants. There is an old story passed down in the Steeves (Stieff) family about how shortly after their ancestors arrived a Mr. Belliveau crossed the river in his canoe and helped the newcomers with useful, life-sustaining information and advice, one farmer to another, French and German, human to human.

 At Beaumont is Sainte-Anne-de-Beaumont Chapel built in 1842. As well as being beloved of the Acadians St. Anne is the Patron Saint of the Mi'kmaq (Lnu) people, and the chapel was used by members of the First Nations Reserve as well as the French who lived peacefully alongside them. It’s a lovely place and it’s where I wrote this song.

 

 

IN THE PLACE

 

Hey there, are you awake yet?
When you’re done hogging the blanket
Let’s go watch the dawn begin the day
Later, when we get the lawn mowed
We’ll take a drive down the old road
To where the river runs into the Bay
We’ll have a thermos full of hot tea
We’ll enjoy the quiet and the view
We won’t care about the weather
As long as we’re together
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Say there, do you remember?
That day back in December
It snowed so hard we couldn’t see across the street
We ate bread and molasses
And watched the storm as it passed us
And made a little fire to warm our feet
The sun came out and the world was covered over
With snow that was so clean and crisp and new
The cold wind made me shiver
Just like that day by the river
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Well now, you know what I’m wishing?
That we soon can go fishing
When the ice breaks on the river in the spring
We’ll go when the fish are biting
To a place so inviting
It stirs my soul and makes me want to sing
The beauty of the woods always reminds us
There is still so much living left to do
There is joy all around us
Just like the day that it found us
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

© 2013, Dale Petley (Beaumont, N.B.)

BOB & CAROL & TED & THECLA

“I think of life as a cosmic joke, which keeps getting bigger all the time. But I've learned tolerance and maybe affection for the Chasidim. They are real people, who can see light in the darkest things.”

Paul Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014)

 When I think about the earliest Christians I’m inspired by their joy. They were joyful in ways that did not depend on events and circumstances. They were joyful in trials and tribulations. They wrote things like: We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. In John’s Gospel Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” In his first Epistle St. John declares, “We write these things unto you so that our joy may be complete.” St. Paul called his brothers and sisters in Philippi to be joyful, using the words ‘joy’ and ‘rejoice’ repeatedly, and famously proclaiming “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice.”

The joy of the earliest Christians was not caused by self-satisfaction over accomplishments but was simply the way that they were learning to be in Christ. They believed that they had died. They also believed that they had been born again and that the life they now lived was utterly identified with Christ. Sometimes they took on a new name as a new creature in Christ. Moreover they saw themselves as one body in Christ so much so that they held their goods in common. They saw their oneness not as some flimsy, ethereal, longed-for-yet-never-realized condition but as the fundamental reality of creation. Your early-church Bob, Carol, Ted, and Thecla understood that they were married to Christ and in Christ were one body. In chaste virginity, a Thecla, for example, was not seeking isolation but deeper fellowship. Even when she went to live in a cave she knew she was never truly alone but always moving into closer communion in the Body of Christ.

The unity consciousness of the earliest Christians was no regression to a childlike, pre-personal, oceanic feeling of oneness. They were not blurring distinctions and ignoring real contrasts in favor of a hazy, lazy, vague unwillingness to engage the world. That’s just self-protective avoidance, and avoidance is merely a veiled form of aggression which is why it turns hateful so quickly.

Attempts to manufacture such a sense of unity often are destructive of nature and tend to reduce human beings to concepts and abstractions. Only love can truly celebrate unity while not obliterating diversity. Love bears witness to unity while celebrating its own nature within all the glorious, scandalous particularity of life. We do not make unity, but simply let go of the obstacles keeping us from realizing it. Unity, like love, is the very nature of things. If we do not realize and ‘see’ the unity of life it is only because we are turned away from it to an image of our self and this makes us afraid of love because real love is self-emptying. It is joyful, though, and eternal, and it leads us to see light even in the darkest things.