The Very Reverend Michael J. Pitts
Advent 2000

Greetings from the Dean,

Welcome to Christ Church Cathedral’s web site. Whether you are a visitor to Montreal, looking for information, or a member of the Cathedral Parish, seeking the latest news, or whether you have found us while surfing the net, I hope you will find something useful and of interest here. I always enjoy trying to answer the messages I receive, or passing them on to the appropriate member of our staff.

As I write this at the end of November, we have just celebrated the feast of the Reign of Christ, which we keep, each year as our festival of Dedication. Our building is now 141 years old. (Christ Church, as a community, is rather older, having existed since 1760). It is rather interesting each year when we celebrate the beginning of a new year for us, at the same time as beginning of a new year for the whole church, for the next Sunday is Advent Sunday. Advent is a time to speak and meditate on hope, on new beginnings and on new life. Changes are certainly afoot in our world and in our church. Aside from the recent elections in our own country and in that of our neighbors of the United States, there are much larger and more sweeping changes going on, not only in the political relationships in our world, but in the under girding philosophy and understanding of what it means to be human. The culture of enlightenment and modernism, which has driven our western society since the sixteenth century is giving way to something new, so new and undefined that as yet all we can call it is post-modernism, a culture in which the very existence of objective truth is called into question, and yet a culture in which much greater inclusiveness and tolerance of difference seems possible.

The church throughout the world, and in different ways, is struggling to understand and come to terms with those changes. Here in Canada, in our Anglican church we have to come to terms with a more specific and local question – how to deal with the legacy of soured relationships between the Native and the immigrant peoples of this land arising from the history of the Residential Schools and many other aspects of our past. In Montreal we have to face also the results of a changing demography for the Anglican Church in our Diocese.

These are but a few of the whirlwind of changes and change, which swirls around us as we stand on the threshold on the third millennium. In the sermons preached in the Cathedral each week we are nearly always dealing with some aspect of that change. Some of these addresses are posted on this site. If there is one theme of the Advent season I would single out here, it is the promise that we can always meet change with hope. In fact the message of Advent is, above all, that there has to be change for the Reign of God to come into our lives, our church and our world. So, far from fearing change, I believe we should embrace it, and seek to discern in it the presence of God and the guidance of the Spirit.