“David, they are calling for our flight. Come on!” The urgency in Linda’s voice was palpable, as was her frustration with me. Linda needs to be the first on board; I like to squeak on just as the gangplank is being raised.
“Just a minute, Linda. Don’t you know what this is? This is Pierre’s birch bark canoe.”
“Quit drooling and take a picture already. We need to get down to our gate and get on board.” Linda was towing me down the airport terminal as she scolded me.
“But, but, but, I remember seeing pictures of Pierre Trudeau in the mid-70s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and paddling that canoe, Linda. Oh man, what an ending to an amazing cross-Canada trip.”
And it had been an amazing trip; something good for our Canadian souls. We had been to Newfoundland for a week where we had toured as many of the outports as we could in that limited time. We had been blessed by the amazing storytelling people of the Rock, though all the while God tried to blow us off of it with autumn gales and deluges. We actually believed one of the local characters who told us a story about the weather we were experiencing being totally out of character for Newfoundland, which usually had a maritime climate as mild as Vancouver Island. (We had no idea we were being told a “serious” story until the following December when a General Assembly Moderator was our guest at Lac la Hache and was texting his wife on the other side of the country in St John’s, Newfoundland. He was greatly concerned about a five-foot snowfall and gale force winds that had her housebound. “All par for the course for us Newfies,” he said. I advised him he needed to preach some sermons on the Ninth Commandment as his people obviously had some serious storytellers among them.) At any rate, after our own windy Newfoundland adventure we had boarded a plane and ended up with a short layover in the Canadian capital where I had stumbled on Pierre’s birch bark canoe on display in the Ottawa International Airport.
The subsequent flight from Ottawa to Calgary was about four hours long and it gave me ample time to contemplate why Pierre’s birch bark canoe was so significant to me. It was partly because the birch bark canoe is a Canadian icon and historically entwined with our story as a land and as a people from indigenous times. It was partly because the birch bark canoe is the direct forerunner of the cedar canvas canoe, which is my favourite craft for anything you can possibly do on the water. But mostly it was because the birch bark canoe, and its successor the cedar canvas canoe, had allowed me to finally penetrate something of the aloof intellect and seemingly arrogant character of a man that had so puzzled me and yet had influenced Canadian history perhaps more than any other.
I started being politically engaged when Pierre Elliot Trudeau became prime minister in 1968. I understood the man even less than I understood myself, and yet I voted for him time after time until he took a fateful walk in the snow in 1984. It wasn’t until 10 years later that I finally understood something about the man, at least on one level. That year, thanks to Terrance and Brian McKenna et al, the documentary Memoirs was released. It contained footage of a somewhat grizzled Trudeau, dressed in a buckskin jacket and paddling a cedar canvas canoe. Seeing the footage of his expert solo paddling and learning that he was a devoted paddler most of his life revealed much. To me, the rest of the documentary was far less revealing about the man than that single bit of footage.
It was some time later that I discovered for myself the famous essay written by a young Trudeau after a canoe trip of about 1,000 miles from Montreal to Hudson’s Bay. Originally published in French in Jeunesse Etudiante Catholique (1944) and much later in English in Wilderness Canada (1970) and titled, “Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe,” Trudeau wrote about the significance of canoe tripping: “For it is a condition of such a trip that you entrust yourself, stripped of your worldly goods, to nature. Canoe and paddle, blanket and knife, salt pork and flour, fishing rod and rifle; that is about the extent of your wealth. To remove all the useless material baggage from a man’s heritage is, at the same time, to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.” Trudeau goes on to say that on such a canoe trip one will discover great resources from within oneself, and then continues with this statement that connects with me, though a much less experienced fellow paddler: “Nevertheless, he will have returned a more ardent believer from a time when religion, like everything else, became simple. The impossibility of scandal creates a new morality, and prayer becomes a friendly chiding of the divinity, who has again become part of our everyday affairs.”
I get it; and I get it most profoundly on my knees in a canoe with a paddle in my hands, there being little room for much else that works in a canoe on a wilderness river or lake. I get it; that that kind of efficacious, mind-blowing, spiritually revolutionizing and physically revitalizing faith flows out of simplicity, whether forced or intentional, and it changes everything; no, that’s not right, it has the power to transform every part of me. That kind of faith and prayer flows like a river out of simplicity. Simplicity is about letting go of what the Quakers called “cumber.” It is about intentionally becoming unencumbered physically, mentally and spiritually. I believe it was what our Lord was meaning when he taught his disciples to “seek first the kingdom” and “sufficient are the troubles of the day” and encouraged them to live simply, one day at a time (Matthew 6:33-34). And Jesus promised the rewards would be great.
But some of us, at least I do, need a vehicle or method for simplicity and discovering the profound spiritual fruits promised. One of mine is kneeling for long periods of time paddling a canoe. Others include spiritual retreats, etc. What is yours? Whatever it is, as the ice comes off with the Easter warmth, I encourage you as I encourage myself, to get it launched.
