We faced a bit of a dilemma this past weekend. One of our daughters kindly offered the use of her condo in Toronto while she and her partner were away. We wanted to take in a couple of exhibits, at the McMichael Gallery and the Royal Ontario Museum. Perfect, except that the schedule meant we would miss Palm Sunday worship at Trenton United or any other church, but we decided to take the opportunity.
As we waited in the long line to enter the ROM on Sunday we first heard then literally saw the bell pealing in the tower of the Anglican Church of the Redeemer at the corner of Avenue Rd. and Bloor St. Emmanuel College, the seminary I attended in the late 1970s, is across Avenue Rd. from the ROM and just down from the Church of the Redeemer, and I've been in the sanctuary on a number of occasions through the years. We looked at each other with a certain amount of dismay when we heard the bell.
When we emerged from the Death: Life's Greatest Mystery exhibit we could see congregants emerging from the church so we went across and in after a friendly exchange with the priest at the door. It would appear that they'd held a palm procession along Bloor and the worship service was long over. But they'd held a palm cross-making event immediately following and we were invited to take a couple of crosses already completed. It was a friendly atmosphere with people of all ages creating and visiting.
We also went to the front of the sanctuary decorated with the liturgical drapings for the day and bundles of palm fronds. We didn't get to participate in the meaningful hymns of Palm Sunday yet we had a sense of what is the great mystery of the celebratory and sombre beginning of Holy Week. It was an unexpected highlight of our time in Toronto and it was good to see that this congregation is upholding its Christian witness in a changing society.
Church of the Redeemer, Toronto
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