This week I sat in a backyard socially distanced circle by the lake with a dozen of my favourite people. Lake Ridge Community Church, like all organizations in our city, had found creative ways to connect over zoom and with facebook videos, but we knew that nothing could ever beat being close to those we love and care for. This was a group of those people. Neighbours and friends who have been a part of our church for years, and most of whom I had not seen for months, sat around to visit, joke, care for each other, and plan for the future.
The unexpected conversation that started around our circle was all about our family ethnic origin stories. Each person around the circle had a remarkable heritage. We were a group of Dutch, Scottish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, French, English, Filipino, First Nations, Swedish, and Indonesian. We told stories of our grandmother’s cooking, places we’ve visited, and then came jokes about Newfoundland, perogies, and unpronounceable last names. It was beautiful.
What I learned was that each of these friends, who I love and miss, represent the story of Canada. Our nation is a nation of people who have learned to live together, care for each other, and share hope in spite of our challenges or differences. We are truly a country of neighbours.
When the French began to farm land up along the St. Lawrence river, plots were set up as long narrow strips of property, each with a frontage to the river. This model gave rise to an early and thriving community culture because neighbours could see each other. A farmer could offer a protective eye over their neighbour, but also invite them over for a meal, or to care for children and animals. They found that they were not independent of each other, but profoundly interdependent.
Here on the prairies immigrants came from far and wide in response to posters advertising a land of optimist and opportunity. While the promise of these posters was sometimes far from reality, Graham Chandler writes about magazines created to invite people to move to Canada for the good life, “With artistic covers portraying an idyllic prairie life of blue skies, golden crops, happy families, friendly neighbours, and sunshine.” Built into the fabric of Canada’s pioneering history is this sense that life in Canada comes with good neighbours. They would be as essential as water or any other resource. The quality of neighbours could make or break a farmer or new community. A community in conflict would certainly not last long. Neighbours helped build barns, churches, and main streets.
Even more, people discovered that those who did not look or talk like them could be good neighbours and partners in creating this new life in Canada. A South African and a Chinese Immigrant could thrive side by side, and people of Jewish and Ukrainian Orthodox faith could find a common cause as neighbours. This history has set the stage for how we create neighbourhoods of peace and prosperity today. We care, forgive, and allow our lives to be influenced by others in an exchange of trust that has resulted in neighbours and neighbourhoods that not only demonstrate peace, but actively work for it.
Even our worst failures as a country – the way one group would treat another with hate – is profoundly important to share and remember. We cannot forget the times that racism cut into the fabric of people and communities. It still does. Canada does not work if we step over, hurt, or neglect our neighbour and the great responsibility and privilege we have as neighbours to each other. Canada was not made in some distant past, it is being made and re-made with every generation that decides to love their neighbours as they love themselves. This Canada Day we remember that we are a country of neighbours, no matter where you came from.
