🧵A dance of providences:
I’ve only been East once, when I went to Ottawa. While I was there, soaking in the history, my wife and I visited the Parliament buildings.
I don’t think our culture is capable of building such beauty these days.
That is the demesne of our stronger forefathers. Their faith was strong-backed, far-capable. In the center of the buildings lies the Peace Tower, built as a memorial for the fallen of WWI. It is inscribed with a verse: “And He shall have Dominion from Sea to Sea.”
It is for this reason that Canada had Dominion Day, celebrating the rule of Christ over a country that stretched from sea to sea.
In the Peace Tower is the Memorial Chamber. It holds books filled with the names of all the soldiers who fell serving Canada.
They turn the pages so that each soldier’s name is kept alive, remembered, seen.
During this trip my wife and I were reading a book: John Buchan’s WWI masterpiece “Mr. Standfast.” The title, and the novel’s central metaphor, are drawn from John Bunyan.
Mr Standfast – Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Standfast
The Pilgrim’s Progress was a Puritan book. The man who wrote it understood what it meant to give all for Christ: he was imprisoned for not refusing to preach.
Buchan, a Scottish Presbyterian, clearly had affinity to the staunch tinkerer Bunyan who humbly resisted.
The end of the novel “Mr. Standfast” reveals that he who is humble enough to only aspire to be the ordinary Mr. Standfast may be revealed to be the noble Valiant-for-Truth, and finishes with the description of Valiant-for-Truth crossing over the river.
At the center of the Memorial Chamber in the Peace Tower is an altar that calls the Ark of the Covenant to mind.
As I approached in true reverence and stillness, I saw these words circumscribed on it:
MY MARKS AND SCARS I CARRY WITH ME TO BE A WITNESS FOR ME THAT I HAVE FOUGHT HIS BATTLES, WHO NOW WILL BE MY REWARDER; SO HE PASSED OVER, AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED FOR HIM ON THE OTHER SIDE.
John Buchan published Mr. Standfast in 1919, the year after the war was done.
The Peace Tower, and this altar, began to be designed in 1919 – the same year that Buchan published his WWI novel.
He then became governor general of Canada in 1935, and would have found this WWI memorial bearing the same words he offered as tribute.
Coincidence? Maybe.
I was in choir that year I visited. One of the pieces I had sung, mere weeks before, was Ralph Vaughn Williams’ exhilarating “Valiant-for-Truth,” which takes for its text the passage of Bunyan which tells of Valiant-for-Truth being summoned into glory.
With that song sounding in my head, with Buchan’s Bunyan quote – the same passage – giving tribute to WWI ringing in my ears, I read those words a third time on the Altar of Sacrifice.
I wept. That moment had been written and prepared for me.
Christ is the Prince of Peace.
It is not merely the architecture that is beyond us, but the beauty. How can we create honor and nobility when we have so little ourselves?
It is by Christian sacrifice that great things are built. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Canada’s soldiers. The Peace Tower. Mr. Standfast.
The common vision made all these things able to unite in a harmonious climax, overlapping and rebounding off each other. This is impossible until our Lord is the center of all; and when He is, then our architecture, our novels, our music, our men – all will cry glory together.
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