Oh Canada!

“And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.”
 (On the extinction of the Venetian Republic, William Wordsworth[1])
[1] An English poet who helped pioneer the Romantic movement.

​Oh Canada! There are at least two ways to make that exclamation from our national anthem. You can say it with pride and excitement and vigour—Oh Canada! Or you can say it lamentably as if something were bitter sweet—Oh Canada! Ever since I woke up and realized that we weren’t in Kansas anymore as a Christian nation (c. 2005, though in reality this was probably in 1982), every Canada Day has been bitter sweet for me.
                                                         
Bitter sweet: something that is a mixture of positive and negative (e.g. A family wedding where a loved one cannot be present; or a beautiful sunset over a ragged battlefield; etc).
 
We certainly have much to be thankful for as Canadians: the sheer natural beauty and bounty of this land; the freedoms we presently enjoy; wealth; our Christian heritage and cultures; etc. Yet many of these good things risk being lost. Certainly the beauty is likely to remain though its natural and economic abundance hangs upon good stewardship and prudent economic policies. Our freedoms are also slowly being forgotten as classic liberalism (the freedom of the individual) is slowly being eroded in favour of more authoritarian definitions (e.g. you’re ‘free’ if you believe what the group or government tell you). The Christian faith and morals and pursuit of truth that undergirded our society have systematically been attacked—the church too asleep from liberalism to notice. The image of a strong Christian nation has been replaced with a less unified multi-cultural and culturally Marxist one. The past graces are intermingled with present follies. Much like the Venetian poem by Woodsworth, we can expect most of our glories to be past rather than present as faith, freedom, family and flourishing all languish.
 
What shall we do to stem this tide: get angry; become violent; aggressively turn to politics? Now there is certainly space—at the moment—for civil discourse and engagement but those are ultimately tools of this world. Like a hard fought battle for every inch of the battlefield what Christians must do is fight for one soul at a time through the Gospel all the while we witness to the truth of the Gospel. This is where our hope must lie. It is only through the Gospel transformation of individuals that ultimately a whole society will be transformed for good. Then we would be able to say, Oh Canada once again.