The end of the world?
Canada's unique position for creating change.
Amersfoort used to be the city we’d see from the train, my brother and I, as we travelled home for the weekend during our student days. It was the last stop of the fast “intercity” trains from Utrecht before they passed through the Veluwe forests to arrive at Zwolle. There, we would run to catch a diesel train from the 1950s to the small town of Kampen where our parents lived. The train tracks ended at Kampen; it felt a bit like the modern world ended there too.
What does one do when the world seems to end? The poet Heinrich Heine once joked that if the world ended he would move to the Netherlands, because there everything always happened 50 years later. Needless to say, that was not our reason for moving to Amersfoort, where I live temporarily with Brenda and Lydia thanks to the exceptional generosity of friends. If the world has not ended by July, or some other major event intervened, we will be moving back to Toronto then.
The city of Amersfoort does not look or feel like the world is ending soon. It is a perfect place to rediscover the Netherlands: a new and yet familiar city to explore, still close to family, and lots of opportunities for children. Lydia is having a wonderful adventure. Her parents, well, we continue to be affected by world and church news, and all the doom it seems to spell, but still there is so much to appreciate and be thankful for.
By comparison
Is there anywhere to go when the world seems to end? No. Still, moving away helps to get a sense of how things change. For example, I noticed that the city of Toronto has not moved along with the times nearly as well as Amersfoort. Toronto may not be 50 years behind as in Heine’s joke, but its subway, parks, roads, playgrounds and public infrastructure show the signs of years of neglect. Precious landmarks are closed or destroyed, such as St Anne’s Anglican church and the Ontario Science Center. Ever more one-bedroom condo buildings, of the kind that are good for investment (supposedly) but not for families, clog Toronto’s skies. There is a pattern here, and as a European lover of good government, I do not like it.
Being here, we also realize that Toronto has many things we are thankful for and dearly miss, mostly our church and Christian school communities. Both respond to American cultural pressure and political ideologies but in a distinctively Canadian way. They may be the beginning of something new and good.
Time to get organized
Moving between countries has helped me see the negative forces that are at work across western societies. The ideas that motivate them are still not well enough understood, but are coming into focus. In Canada the damage is more clearly visible than elsewhere, but there is no better place than Canada to observe and figure out what is going wrong south of the border, not just in politics but also in the church. Since the world is not likely to end before some of us get organized to take ownership, it is about time to start doing that.
