My Home and Native Land by Susan Barclay

Point Pelee

I don't know what it's like to grow up as a First Nations Canadian, but I know what it's like for a white Anglo-Saxon protestant whose family has been here two to three hundred years. My maternal grandmother's ancestors arrived from Londonderry, Ireland in 1768, while my grandfather's predecessors emigrated at least as early from Cork. They settled in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland respectively, pioneered the land and fished the sea. We can well imagine, looking from the position of all our modern conveniences, that the hardships were many and life fragile. Most of us take their perseverance for granted, but we stand on the shoulders of their labour.

Grand Pre, Nova Scotia

My grandmother's parents were farmers. Of their eight surviving children, only three were boys and as young men all were keen to relocate to Ontario for work. After a time, they persuaded their parents to move as well. My grandmother, the youngest child, was seven then. When she was twelve, her father succumbed to influenza. Her mother remarried but developed stomach cancer, and by fifteen my grandmother was an orphan. She went to work as a seamstress in one of Toronto's infamous sewing factories.

Heart's Delight, Newfoundland

My grandfather also lost his father at a young age. He too was the baby of the family. His older siblings left the "rock" for Toronto and he and his mother followed when he was fifteen. But my grandfather didn't like it and they returned to Newfoundland for two more years. When he was seventeen, they came back to Toronto for good, but it would be another 25 years before Newfoundland joined with Canada. For years Grandpa worked for the iconic Canadian company Massey-Ferguson.  

At the New Brunswick border

During my growing-up years summer vacations included only a few destinations, and unless we were camping in Ontario they all began with the letter N: Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and New Jersey (where my aunt lived with her husband and family after marrying an American). No one in my family traveled by air and it was a long drive to the east coast, but we entertained ourselves with I Spy, the Alphabet Game, and I Packed My Grandmother's Trunk. And thank goodness for the radio, though it wasn't much help in Quebec when you only had grade school French!

Quebec City

These were the years that included the grade 6 class trip to Ottawa and the grade 8 trip to Quebec City. Memories were made indeed! I have a photo of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau just after he emerged from his limousine on Parliament Hill, and I'll always remember my first taste of tourtiere and the visit to Ste Anne de Beaupre. 

Pre- Confederation Bridge days

After university, and as my grandparents aged out of long car trips, my Canadian travels expanded. My mother and I drove to Prince Edward Island one year and took the Ontario Northland Railway to Moosonee another. I took my first plane trip and went to Vancouver alone. Several years later my husband and I took our children to Alberta. We drove through the northern United States, then up through Lethbridge and Calgary to Banff and Lake Louise. We came back to Ontario through the prairies and Manitoba. All of it was beautiful and very different. We are blessed to live in a country with such diversity.
 

Capilano Suspension Bridge, British Columbia

Alberta badlands

At the RCMP Headquarters in Regina, Saskatchewan

Margaret Laurence House, Neepawa, Manitoba

I am proud to be a Canadian through and through, born and bred. I am fortunate, I know, to have visited all ten provinces, though there is so much yet to see. My bucket list doesn't include the territories and Nunavut - I don't expect I'll ever make it there. But my husband has never been to British Columbia and I wish I'd gone as far as Vancouver Island when I was so close. This summer I get to go back to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, then up to the Viking settlement and across to Labrador which I've never seen before.

Moosonee, northern Ontario

I could go on and on about my love for this great country, all that it represents and all that I've been privileged to see. Instead I'll conclude with this final thought: it's so easy to take what we have for granted. Let's do something different in honour of Canada's 150th birthday this year. Every person has a voice. Every Inscribe member has a gift for words. Let's take up our pens (or whatever tool you prefer) and make a stand for what we believe is required to keep Canada one of the best places in the world to live. Write articles, blog posts, letters to the editor, your member of parliament, your MPP or MLA. Canada has a great past. Let's do our part to shape its future, that God's hand of blessing would continue to rest here.

God keep our land glorious and free.  
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In addition to her posts here Susan maintains a website at www.susanbarclay.blogspot.com

Our Heritage - Marcia Lee Laycock

Beginnings. We like to celebrate them. We mark birthdays and break out the cake and ice cream each year. We recognize anniversaries and send cards and well wishes. And of course, we party hearty on Canada Day in this country and on the 4th of July in the U.S. Beginnings are important and it’s good that we take time to think back to when our countries first began. They both had founding fathers who were concerned about the spiritual needs of their new countries. We see it in the constitutions they drew up and in the songs they picked as their nation’s anthems. Our heritage is a spiritual one. Unfortunately, that emphasis has been forgotten.

A young man came to our church as a guest soloist one Sunday. We had just celebrated Canada Day and, in the town where we lived at the time, it was all wrapped up in the Stampede. Fire works on the first were a little anti-climactic since they’d been booming into the skies for a few nights already. The excitement of the rodeo overshadows the Canada Day events in that town. But this young man had been the singer/preacher at Cowboy Church, held at the stampede grounds earlier that morning and had been asked to come and sing for our congregation. He has a rich, booming voice and his first song caught our attention.

Then he said he was going to sing O Canada, our national anthem. I thought, well, okay, I guess that’s appropriate in a way. Then he said that he had discovered that our national anthem was actually a prayer. That got my attention.

As he started to sing the congregation rose to its feet and joined in. Then, after the well-known chorus, our voices faded away as Trevor continued alone singing words that stunned me. They are, indeed, a prayer -

Ruler supreme, who hearest humble prayer,
Hold our dominion within thy loving care;
Help us to find, O God, in thee
A lasting, rich reward,
As waiting for the Better Day,
We ever stand on guard.

When the song, originally written in French, became our national anthem, this and other references to God were left out. Over the years, the original intent of the song has been completely lost.

How sad. How tragic. Though the song had been sung since 1880 it became official as our anthem in 1980. It took only one hundred years for God to be left out. How frightening. As Trevor finished singing on Sunday morning, he gave a warning that our country is a long way from what it should be, spiritually. He encouraged us to pray.

Perhaps it would be fitting to sing the anthem every day – as it was originally written. After all, it is a prayer.