‘A place for all people’: A stained-glass panel at St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church in Regina shows a nativity scene with children of various ethnicities.
Outdoor births are not advised in wintertime Saskatchewan, especially if the baby is a messiah.
Nevertheless, a Regina stained glass window shows Jesus being born in the Great White North, surrounded by a diverse coterie of adoring Canadian children.
It joins a small number of Canadian depictions of the Biblical nativity, several of which have now appeared as front-page images for Christmas editions of the National Post.
Last year, the chosen window was an Inuit-style nativity scene from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The year before that, we found a window from Banff, Alta., that featured Christ being born in the Rocky Mountains.
This year’s choice, at St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church in Regina, shows Jesus, Mary and Joseph posed in a Canadian wilderness scene complete with bison, moose and rushing rivers. Around them are children representing the various ethnicities of Canada.
“It touches upon a moment in the history of St Mary’s when we recognized the changing character and nature of Canadian society and we wanted to be open to that,” said the Rev’d Canon Claude Schroeder, rector of St. Mary’s.
The original 1976 order for the window, which is still in church archives, requests the children to be “Eskimo, Indian, Scottish, French and Ukrainian.”
By “French,” the order apparently referred to “FrenchCanadian,” resulting in the plaid- wearing child just to Mary’s left. The child in the business suit is meant to represent “English Canadians.”
Keen observers might note that the birds in the scene are not only migrating out of season, but they are doing it in the wrong formation. Although the glass was cut in Winnipeg, the design comes from a studio in Wales. Thus, it’s entirely possible that this vision of Canada was created by an artist who had never seen the country firsthand.
When it was unveiled for Christmas, 1979, the St. Mary’s choir welcomed it with a special song that seemed to cast Jesus Christ in the mold of a Prairie boy. “I studied and played and worked and grew, I wondered and wandered and dreamed like you,” sang a soloist from the perspective of Christ.
Schroeder noted t hat the window was installed around the time that the government of Pierre Trudeau was championing the cause of “multiculturalism” as a counterpoint to the “two solitudes” vision of Canada.
When St. Mary’s was first built, its walls would have echoed almost exclusively with the English- accented voices of new prairie settlers from the British Isles. Now, Schroeder says the congregation includes people of Asian and African heritage — not to mention the various different types of Europeans that followed the English to Saskatchewan.
“The window is a way of saying look, it’s not just a place for English people, it’s a place for all people.”