Seasons of Bliss by Ruth Glover

Author:Ruth Glover
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9781441239358
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

A nation, a democracy, was being born from a sense of adventure. It was in the very air. The pioneers—those who trekked across country by prairie schooner, Red River cart, bumboat, wagon, or on foot—breathed free and found it exhilarating.

The population—growing slowly at first, then with greater impetus—was made up almost entirely of people whose causes had been lost elsewhere. Most had faced injustice, degradation, hopelessness; almost all bore wounds of bitterness and scars of despair. These wanderers—of widely differing nationalities, with strongly held religious convictions and greatly divergent ideologies but bonded at heart by experience and understanding—were slowly but strongly being welded into a united people.

These people knew that the real tragedy of life was not in living where men differed sharply but rather to dwell where differences of opinion were forbidden. In Canada there was room enough to absorb the differences—the backgrounds, the characteristics, the idiosyncrasies, the ideas of all; enough room to fulfill the dreams and the desires of all, and sympathy enough to know that your neighbor had suffered even as you had, dreamed as you do, and both of you need tolerance and brotherhood.

Their very northern-ness was significant, settling them a long way from ease and warmth and softness. It made them tough; it made them tenacious; it caused them to work hard. It made them know their need of each other.

Their satisfaction came from rare experiences: biting a plow through sod that had lain virgin ever since time began; clearing away bush whose tangled resistance gave ground reluctantly but promised much; throwing up living quarters from sod or logs that were captured in their nativeness and tamed or tussled into obedience and usefulness; building their own churches . . . electing their own school boards . . . educating their children.

For them all—their Canadian beginnings were full of harsh suffering and adversity; it was what they had in common. It welded them into a people unique—proud of what they were accomplishing, proud of what their children would become.

For all of them, the church was central, vital. Usually it began in a home that was a simple soddy or cabin—people gathering together for worship, for fellowship, for the strength they needed, and received—from the Word and from each other.

The church was the one institution that gave hope when, to all appearances, there was no hope. It gave encouragement where there was sheer, almost insurmountable discouragement as people struggled to keep body and soul together. The body might know great deprivation, but the soul—thank God!—would be fed. And weary shoulders, having come bent and bowed into God’s house, would be lifted; faltering feet would turn back, with renewed strength, to the seeming impossibilities of the task.

Most of their social life was within the church—all-day meetings, revivals, church suppers, Sunday school picnics, youth programs, children’s Bible-memorization competitions, quilting bees.

Song fests! Was ever singing heard to compare with the sounds—musical or tuneless, tremulous or sepulchral, harmonious or strident—that swelled within the sanctuary of God? Be it log or

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