The city of Ottawa

I arrived in the city of Ottawa on Wednesday and move tomorrow, Sunday, to my final 10 days of retreat in a prayer cabin in the woods surrounding a Christian conference centre which is 25 miles west of the city. I have done the sites in what is a beautiful city. This is the capital of Canada and it has gorgeous parliament buildings. It is quite a small city and is easy to get around.

I am staying at a hostel near downtown which was a former prison. I am staying in one of the original cells which is kind of cosy! It is very hot today at 27C and humid and the cell has no windows. It is to get hotter and more humid tomorrow and a heat warning is in place!

I attended midday communion in the Anglican Cathedral on Friday. I shared in the Eucharist at the Cathédrale Notre-Dame at 5pm today. The service was bilingual, French and English, which was interesting. Tomorrow morning I hope to worship at the Ottawa Mennonite Church.

I am looking forward to getting home again to my family and to my church family. Miss them all.

Blessings, Mike

The inside of Cathédrale Notre-Dame

The outside of the Cathédrale

Changing of the guard, Canada style, at the Parliament buildings.

My cell!

A different life

I have been able to have some good times with Darren McCartney, the suffragan bishop of the Arctic, who I had known when he was in Carrickfergus.  He had recently bought a boat which we managed to get out in among the icebergs.  Normally as bishop he has to fly to each remote community but he is having a boat specially built that will enable him to sail around the communities when the sea is free of ice from August to October.  

Then today I helped him paint the outside of his house.  Not too many bishops I know would do that. It is a still a pioneering kind of place here where you just muck in to do whatever needs done.

Darren's boat and 4x4 truck, a different kind of life from other bishops.

Among the icebergs

The sea-lift ship waiting for the ice to clear.  Among other things you can see new cars being delivered.

Due to the cold water we needed to wear survival suits.  There is no harbour her so containers are craned onto a barge which is landed on the beach and its cargo removed. 

Canadian Coastguard ice-breaker.  On the left is a rifle in its cover just in case we meet a polar bear.  Polar bears can swim for 18 hours non-stop so are a real danger among the ice-flows and they are hungry at this time of year.

We took a break in this beautiful inlet.  A cup of tea, some fig rolls and  midday prayers.

Solitude

It's a beautiful evening here in Iqaluit.  Temperature is 2C and the bay is full of icebergs again, blown in by the wind on the high tide.

Sarah has arrived home this Monday evening having left Sunday lunchtime.  She flew to Ottawa, a three hour flight, then to London, a six and a half hour flight, then to Dublin, just an hour, and then a 2 hour coach journey to Belfast arriving at 6pm.  The children collected her in Belfast and brought her home. I had a short Skype call with her and she is sleep deprived so hopefully a good sleep will put her on her feet again.  Having been away for 8 weeks it will take some time to adjust back to the ways of the Metropolis of Carrickfergus after the small scale life in Iqaluit.

My time now moves into a different phase.  Part of my thinking was that I should have period of solitude and quiet and that is what I am having now.  The enforced restrictions and lack of distractions require you to think more deeply and re-establish disciplines of prayer and quiet that get lost in the busyness of life.  I now have an opportunity to have time just to listen and to recapture a deeper relationship with God.  Its hard to explain what that means in practice but I find this helps:

Mother Theresa was once asked about her prayer life.

The interviewer asked, “When you pray, what do you say to God?”

Mother Teresa replied, “I don’t talk, I simply listen.”

Believing he understood what she had just said, the interviewer next asked, “Ah, then what is it that God says to you when you pray?”

Mother Teresa replied, “He also doesn’t talk. He also simply listens.”

The greatest gift you can give someone is simply to listen to them. It is the greatest gift God gives us. He listens, as no other can, to our deepest thoughts and feelings, our dreams and fears. Correspondingly it is the greatest gift we can give God, to listen for his insight into our lives. Just praying, opening yourself to God, is an act of faith, of trust.  That is what I am going to try to do for this next few weeks.

"Be still and know that I am God."  Psalm 46:10

Blessings,

Mike

Meal planning?

Hi all,

As I leave tomorrow, this will likely be my last piece of writing.

We have had a fairly quiet week, but busy enough. Since Tuesday, we helped out in the soup kitchen every lunchtime as they were short staffed at times. I think I imagined having less to do when we were here, so I brought craft for that. But I have actually spent very little time crocheting and never did any embroidery. We have spent more time with other people than I expected and became connected to the soup kitchen for our time here. At the same time there has been more time to read and pray than at home.

Buying food here is very different than at home. There are three places to buy food (strictly speaking, I think there may be a fourth, but it sells only country food) - Baffin Canners, Arctic Ventures and North Mart. Baffin Canners is the cheapest, but carries a small stock. Strangely it has the best range of herb teas. Arctic Ventures is the nearest thing to a department store here as it has an electrical department, clothes and local books. It has less lines in food though than North Mart. So most of our shopping is dome in North Mart and it is the closest too. Although all are within walking distance. Last night we had Karen and Darren round for a meal. I found a pasta recipe off the BBC website (no recipe books here) that I liked the look of called Spicy Pasta with Broccoli and Tomato sauce. So armed with my shopping list I headed over to North Mart. Well first off there was no broccoli, so I substituted a red and a yellow pepper. Then there was no spring onion, so I substituted a red onion. Usually there are broccoli and spring onions, but the shelves were very bare last night. Then lastly there was no chilli (hard to believe I know), so after looking at the pathetic looking herbs I decided that oregano was the healthiest looking and would have to substitute for chilli!!!!!!!! Thankfully there were plenty of tomatoes, so I even had a choice of variety. Tomatoes seem to be the last thing to go here. Amazingly the Pasta with Pepper, Tomato and Herb sauce tasted fine. Garlic, cream cheese and cream do help! :)

Back in Ireland on Monday evening so see you all soon, God willing. :) :) :)