The Great Solitude

Before Canadians across this "Peaceable Kingdom" head off to cottage country to celebrate 140 years of Confederation and the British North America Act of 1867, I thought it would be appropriate to share a rather touching but little known sermon that was delivered forty years ago on the "Great Dominion's" Centennial.

From A Centennial Sermon
by Blair Fraser, Ottawa Editor, Maclean's

"Two weeks ago tonight I was dining, by moonlight, in an outdoor restaurant beside the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, outside Cairo. A short walk over the brow of the hill, looking even more enigmatic by night than by day, was the Sphinx, the oldest surviving artifact known to us of civilized man. Both are rather disquieting reminders -- the Pyramid of man's endless preoccupation with a question he still cannot answer, the Sphinx of what limited progress man has made, in all the ages from those remote beginnings until now, in matters he still deems important. (As a sculptural expression of the essential riddle of life, that earliest of artifacts has never been surpassed.)

"It was an environment that would provoke anyone to reflection -- forty centuries looking down upon you, as Napoleon said to his doomed army -- and the stimulus was no less genuine for being hackneyed and trite. Yet we have in Canada an environment, a stimulus perhaps equally hackneyed, but equally provocative, too, a milieu in which not merely forty but three hundred centuries look down upon us with the same imperturbable indifference that greeted the first man over the land bridge from Asia, just after the first retreat of the polar glaciers. We have accessible to us something that until the day before yesterday was accessible to man almost anywhere, but that now is increasingly rare -- the cleansing experience of solitude. The temporary disappearance, or at any rate the illusion of disappearance, of those barriers that man has contrived to place between himself and Reality.

"Not everyone requires or responds to this experience of the cleansing wild. But in a country to which almost anyone who wants to may come, and from which anyone who wants to may go, a land whose endowment of comfort will never be better than second best but whose avenue to escape will always be open, we may expect that the people who do so respond will be the ones who want to stay here.

"In that expectation lies hope. We all, I'm sure, have many hopes for Canada on this Centennial day -- that she may grow, thrive, prosper in all things. To these I would add one hope more: that Canada will not so greatly grow, and not so grossly thrive, as to destroy this heritage of solitude which makes us what we are and which our children will know perhaps better than we how to value."

An address given at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah, Montreal
July 2, 1967

Hat tip to Paul Wells of Maclean's magazine.