At the prayer vigil on Tuesday evening after the catastrophic fire at St. Anne’s Anglican in Toronto, Father Don Beyers, the parish priest, mentioned that he was supposed to be flying that night to London to meet with the rector of the famous St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square.
They were to discuss a lecture that the rector had been invited to give at St. Anne’s. The topic? Imagining the church of the future.
With a glorious past in cinders behind him, Father Beyers noted that any such imagining was now more urgent. We were in the empty lot across from church, now open to the sky after its dome roof had collapsed. And there we prayed and sang Precious Lord by Tommy Dorsey.
Passersby who never darken the door of a church heard that. The physical church was darkened to ashes inside; but the church, the body of Christ, endures. When I first heard the news that St.
Anne’s Anglican had burned last Sunday, I assumed it was arson. I didn’t always think that way. In 1997, I was attending a seminary attached to Holy Family, a Catholic church in Parkdale, Toronto, when it completely burned.
A spark from repair work was the cause, if memory serves. On Christmas Eve 2016, I entered my own parish church on Wolfe Island, Sacred Heart of Mary, to find it filled with smoke. There was plenty of smoke, but little fire, and we never did find the exact cause.
But it wasn’t arson. Since then though we have become accustomed to vandalism and arson against churches, with dozens .