“At 40 below, denominations disappear,” the bishop told the final ecumenical prayer service in Toronto for the 2014 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity on Jan. 26.
When survival is at stake, whatever distinctions there are to be made between Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox and Protestant are less important than the unity necessary to get through another winter’s day, MacDonald told about 300 gathered in St. Paul’s Basilica on Toronto’s downtown east side.
“We as people of God are challenged with an urgent task,” he said. “To come to understand our common profession of salvation as an effective way in which our proclamation means something in the world.”
Aboriginal Christians can teach the rest of the Church important truths about unity, according to MacDonald, who now serves as Anglican bishop for Canada’s aboriginal people and president for North America of the World Council of Churches. When Native American people pray in four directions they are putting into practice a truth embedded into the Bible as early as second chapter of Genesis and carried through in the four Gospels of the New Testament.
Praying in four directions involves looking at the truth in four directions — and acknowledging we can never quite possess or express all of it at once.
“As our elders have taught us, we never speak meaningfully about the truth unless we see it from at least four different directions,” said MacDonald. “That necessity of walking around the truth, of coming to understand it and also knowing that our capacity to understand truth is always tentative, fragmentary, partial.”
Canadians wrote this year’s prayers for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and Canadians have a particular contribution to make to the struggle for unity, according to MacDonald.
“We as the Church in Canada should realize that in the particular diversity, the wonderful diversity that we are, from the many places from which we come and from the truth that God has planted since the beginning of time among our indigenous people, that we have a special place, a special role, a special calling to proclaim the Gospel this day in its sacred power.”