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“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!”
(Job 1:21)
For some time now, I’ve been regularly attending Saturday night Vespers and the occasional Divine Liturgy at a Byzantine Catholic parish not too far from Guelph, Ontario: St. Elias Ukrainian Catholic Church in Brampton. I initially went out of curiosity. I was brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition and my exposure to other Catholic traditions was close to nil. In fact, for a very long time I thought that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was like the Polish Church – they have mass, like our Polish mass, but in Ukrainian! This was the extent of my familiarity with the Byzantine tradition until about four years ago, when I had the chance to study early Church history, especially the development of liturgy in the East and West.
Some of you may have heard on the news recently that St. Elias Church was completely devoured by fire on April 5, 2014. When I found out about the disaster, I went into a state of shock for about half an hour. The magnitude of the disaster didn’t truly sink in until I had the chance to make the rounds of the remains of what used to be the Church. It was heart wrenching. I cannot truly put into words what I felt. All I can say is that it was difficult to face the truth.
