January 08, 2005
Ottawa, Ontario

Check against delivery

Your Excellency the Governor-General, Your Excellency Ambassador Miranda, Faith Leaders, fellow Canadians:

Across South and South East Asia, along the east coast of Africa, towns and lives have been swept away. The sea has become a cemetery. We are a nation and a world assembled in grief and resolved to help. In this dark moment, the people of the world have become its light.

We see before us a picture of loss and devastation. We feel within us an urge to reach out, to comfort those who cannot be comforted, to make whole families that will not be whole again. We mourn their dead. We seek to take away their despair and give them hope. We seek to take away their suffering and give them peace.

We salute the aid workers -- those on the ground and those here playing co-ordinating roles in bringing to helpless people the essentials of life. We salute the armed forces of many nations, the members of the Canadian military who have been deployed to the eastern shores of Sri Lanka, and our police serving in Thailand. We marvel at the selfless acts of charity, the overwhelming sense of goodwill -- what the president of Indonesia has described as a “manifestation of global unity.”

In Canada, such is the nature of our country that the impact of Asia’s deadly waves echoes here in the grief of those who lost family members, and in the anxiety of many who still wait for word. In cities and communities across our country, South Asia’s pain is our own.

Thousands of Canadians from the 13 affected countries are shattered by the devastation that has been visited upon nations they departed, but never left behind. Others pray for friends, colleagues, loved ones who were on vacation or working in the region. So many have experienced loss. This is a tragedy of a million griefs.

The tsunami rose in the Indian Ocean as many in Canada were sitting down to Christmas dinner. Some describe the death and damage it wrought as the first truly global disaster of a newly mature world – a world in which stark images of distant ruin are brought instantly into our homes. A planet that daunted intrepid explorers of old, a world once regarded as impossibly vast, has been transformed into an intimate community. Oceans may separate us from South Asia, but we are a family.

Today, right now, we are connected by compassion. We must nurture that connection. We must let those in distress, those who have so few earthly possessions and so much unearthly pain – we must let them know that we will be steadfast. We will help to raise them up. We will be there for them – now, and tomorrow as well. For all the tomorrows it takes.

There have been countless reports from South Asia these past two weeks. There is one that I find myself thinking of frequently.

Along the south coast of Sri Lanka, Our Lady of Matara Church sits across a narrow road from the ocean. The church is known throughout the country for its small statue of Mary and the Baby Jesus. The faithful have long made pilgrimages to see the artifact, which was pulled from the sea by fishermen some five centuries ago.

On the morning of Dec. 26, communion was just beginning in the church when the waves came. The parishioners were so close to the sea, they had no warning. At least seventeen people died in the sanctuary, where they had come to worship God.

The pastor survived. He struggled to save the statue, but a wall of water swept it away. History has it that the statue was lost twice before, once when it was misplaced for many years, and once in a shipwreck at sea. Both times it was recovered. And it would be so again. Three days after the tsunami, the small statue was discovered, undamaged, in a nearby garden.

The pastor said of the likeness of Mary: “She came from the sea. She knows how to swim.”

As a human being, as a person of faith, I’m not sure exactly what to take from this. It’s heartbreaking to imagine the horror that must have been brought to that most serene of places. And yet each time I think of it I find some hope, a renewed sense that true faith is unshakable, eternal. That’s the human instinct, of course – to search for a flicker of hope in even the most dire and dark of circumstances.

We see it in the response within our own borders. In Thunder Bay, two young boys, aged five and seven, decided on their own to give their Christmas money – all $50 of it – to the Red Cross. A 10-year-old boy in Lennoxville, Quebec, went door-to-door in his community and raised more than $1,000. A child in Halifax donated a piggy bank with $8.53. In Mission, British Columbia, a seven-year-old girl who had for two years saved her money to buy a puppy instead donated the $400 to the victims of the waves.

Many of our children are for the first time glimpsing their world. They see that we are, and will always be, at the mercy of natural forces beyond our rule. They witness not only the destruction left by the deadly waves but the rudimentary lives of many of the Earth’s people.

They begin, our children, to understand that our own fortunes have been prosperously cast. They marvel at the blessing and the wonder of our place in the world. And some surely ponder the responsibilities that ought to come with such a blessing.

They are not alone. We in developed nations are looking out on the world and our people are coming to grips, some for the first time, with the true disparity of wealth, of promise and, all too often, of fortune and providence. We have a window on the precarious nature of so many lives. We have a window, and it can be unsettling to look through it.

How will the young people of today interact with the world of tomorrow? The tsunami may prove to be a formative event, shaping their views, guiding their beliefs. Perhaps they will be dedicated as no generation before to responding in times of need and to altering the destiny of the left-out billions – to being not only good citizens, but good citizens of the world. Through our own actions, through the actions of government, of mothers, of fathers, of grandparents, we must dedicate ourselves to forging a legacy of caring that they will be proud and determined to build on.

I thought of this as I watched images of a memorial held last week on Phuket. Toward the end of the ceremony, many of those in attendance set paper lanterns alight and released them. They rose into the night sky. They ascended slowly, gently. People couldn’t take their eyes off them – these delicate, elegant patches of light, of hope, set against the pitch darkness of anguish.

It may seem futile to seek hope in the domain of such despair. But when we reflect on the generosity shown by the world, when we think of young children so eager to help diminish the suffering of people they have never met in places many had never before heard of, we not only seek hope, we find it.