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Standing on the place itself, you could feel their presence. We drove out a farm road as far as you could go and a retired couple who were clamming gave me the directions. We made our way across the fields of corn, oats, hay and clover. We drove along several farms and found a little hand painted sign that read "historic site" that marked the way. Being there on that warmish Saturday morning with clear blue sky above and a vista of water and tidal flats, somehow made the scene appear to have been scrubbed clean of the horror that the place once knew. There were more than six thousand of them: mothers and grandmothers, little children, men, boys, uncles who were taken to the spot where they were loaded onto small boats that ferried them out to the British transport ships which lay waiting in the Basin. You could almost hear the sound of their sorrow . . . the weeping, the sobbing, the unanswered prayers. You could almost feel their coarse linen clothes brush against you as they moved by. If you squinted your eyes, you could almost see pathos parade down the embankment and onto the sea grass flat. It was almost the same time of the year in 1755 when the people from the Grand Pré region began their exile. People and places have history. You can feel it, see it, reach out and touch it if you wish. The story of the expulsion of the Acadians is a powerful one of resistance, exile and return. Ultimately though, it's a story about generations. Keeping not only the story alive but the wisdom and the insight alive as well. In our day, in our post-modern church, we live between exile and return. We no longer enjoy the privilege of being in the majority of Canadians who attend to church and community life. Sociologists plot the declining membership in all the main line churches over the past 40 years. One of the new demographics is the return of people to congregational and community life. People like those from L'Acadie who look for a place of belonging, a place to be connected, people with a history and an understanding of the world in which we are rooted. Here at Beaconsfield United Church as we return to community life, I think it is important that we reflect on the sacred story we pass on to our children and our children's children. You'll notice in the sanctuary in coming weeks the words of Joel, "Tell it to your children and let your children tell it to their children, and their children to the next generation." This speaks volumes of the relationship we have between our generations from our wise elderly to our lively children. We tell our sacred story in our symbols, our rituals, our actions and efforts and the way we are in the world. I invite each of you to find a place in the living story of God with his people in our time and generation as we live and grow here at B.U.C. In Christ
Shaun E. Fryday |