At the beginning of one winter, the Grandmother selflessly asked her family to leave her behind to die. To everyone's astonishment, when they returned in the Spring, she was thriving. A moose or elk had fallen part way through the ice near her camping spot and she had been able to kill the animal and eat it over the course of the winter. She became a symbol of resourcefulness and endurance to her people and so the place was named in her honour.

I was shocked by the matter-of-fact way in which this story of voluntary euthanasia was related because the Crees have such great reverence for life. Elders are highly respected and their views carry enormous weight in their villages. In the north, abortion is almost unknown, and most households have, in addition to their own children, a child or two who is being raised on behalf of someone else. Today most people die in a room packed with relatives of all ages at prayer. Euthanasia is unthinkable.

Cree Christians have much to teach our consumerist society. We need to be reminded that people matter more than things, that identity is primarily the kind of person you are rather than what you do for a living. We need old people for who they are. We need every child God makes.

My wife, Anna, and I have a six month old boy and a two year old girl. Our son is a sacrament of the present moment, wordless, beaming with love, incapable of distinguishing between absolute and creaturely goodness, completely vulnerable. Our daughter sticks foreign objects up her nose, etches drawings into the piano with a nail, extorts attention on threat of tantrum, tortures the dog, dances and laughs continually and carries her father's heart in her hands. Like all children, they are not adults-in-training but something in their own right. They draw out the best in us.

In a mysterious way, parents and children teach us something about God who is Father, Son, and the Love that they have for each other. They naturally school us in love, demanding from us self-sacrifice and a reorientation of values. Whether they are ours by nature, adoption or grace, the elderly and the young complete us.

Anthony Burton
Bishop of Saskatchewan