“For some cultures, events aren’t strung together like beads on a necklace. Not at all! Their experiences coalesce, perhaps like shapes in coloured clouds.”
The Window Maker
Westminster Abbey’s massive stone towers make you feel puny. You can’t escape their immense, relentless gravity, which has shaped the surrounding cityscape of London and exerted a distorting influence on much of the colonized world.
Saint Saviour’s is a shack by comparison, raised for the spiritual edification of the rowdy, greedy, grasping men who clanked and clambered up the canyons and trails of the Cariboo, determined to shake and claw gold out of nature’s riverbeds and innards. A clapboard chapel at the farthest reach of Christian mission, it remains a testament to the impermanence of human endeavour.
The stained glass that so briefly animated St. Saviour’s apse window has long since faded from living memory, its image of Mary Magdalene blown to smithereens before it had transformed the light of a single sabbath. But the story of that shattered image and the memories of my great-great-grandparents—Rev. Christopher Newman and the love of his life Anna Armstrong—are recorded in Barkerville’s historic archives.
Writing about them has been a transformative experience for me. Their story reminds me that every human construct eventually collapses; faith is the act of holding on to what we believe so that our lives have some sense of purpose and meaning; enlightenment is as much an act of desecration as creation.
Kyle Welland
March, 2010