47
A Sign of
Things to Come
Reflections on Justin Trudeau’s Sunny Ways
“A
Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”
Justin
Trudeau
On Monday, October 19, 2015 Penny
and I drove to the Wyevale Public School in Tiny Township, Georgian Bay to vote
in our Canadian federal election; and Monday evening, to our delight, young
Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and son of the
flamboyant Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who served four successful
mandates in his fifteen year reign, won the election with a startling majority
and swept out Stephen Harper’s Conservative government of divisiveness and fear
and ushered in the new wave of his platform promises— a politics of inclusiveness,
openness, hope, and heart.
“Canada
is back,” Justin Trudeau proclaimed, with his beautiful wife Sophie by his side
smiling like an angel; and my heart went out to them, because after a decade of
Harper’s brand of politics—“He’s a spent force,” I said to the volunteer who
phoned a week or so earlier to solicit my vote for the Conservative party. “I’m
sorry, Harper has to go”—it was time for our country to elect a Prime Minister
who was in sync with our country’s true spirit; and young Justin Trudeau (he’s
43, and the second youngest Prime Minister of Canada) symbolized our hopes and
dreams and gave us a vision of what this country needs.
Harper’s
government tried to belittle Justin Trudeau with negative adds like “Nice hair,
but he’s just not ready,” but the more they tried to pull him down, the higher
he rose in the poles; and by the end of the longest campaign in Canadian
history Justin Trudeau’s numbers rose high enough for the pollsters to predict
a minority Liberal government, which Justin exceeded brilliantly by winning a
resounding majority; but I knew he was going to win.
I
couldn’t make book on it, because it was a personal insight for my benefit
only; but I have to share it in today’s spiritual musing, because it speaks to
something much bigger than our federal election. It speaks to a sign of things
to come…
I’m not a
fatalist by any means, because I believe we all have free will and can change
the course of our destiny with free choice; but life is much more complicated
than that, and it took me years to reconcile free will with our destined
purpose—and I believe we all do have a destined purpose that we are called to
serve from the day we are born.
Short of
writing a whole book, which I’ve done, the simplest explanation that I can
offer to reconcile the paradox of free will and destined purpose is simply
this: we are called to our destiny by the
choices we make; and Justin Trudeau was called to lead the Liberal Party of
Canada out of the decimated state that the former leader Michael Ignatieff left
the party in and build it up again and lead it to victory, which he did magisterially
last Monday.
Justin
didn’t have to heed the call to lead the Liberal Party of Canada when Michael
Ignatieff stepped down in ignominy and went back to teaching with his bushy
academic tail between his legs, he had a choice; and I’m quite sure he agonized
over it for days and weeks, discussing it with his wife (and perhaps with his
mother Margaret and close friends) before heeding the call to his destiny of
becoming the Prime Minister of Canada; like his father, he sought his own
counsel in the end and finally accepted his fate, and the rest remains to be
seen. But as strange as it may seem, I believe I caught a glimpse of what’s
coming…
The
cycles of life puzzle people, and during the post-election analysis our sapient
political pundits made reference to cycles in politics; saying things like the
cycle of Stephen Harper’s government is over and a new cycle is about to begin
with Justin Trudeau’s victory, giving us a pundit’s proffer of what’s to
come—but why cycles, anyway?
“To
everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,”
said the Preacher in Ecclesiastes,
pointing to the cycles of life that evolve ineluctably out of the
enantiodromiac dynamic of natural evolution. “A time to be born, and a time to
die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to
kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time
to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to
cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and
a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to
keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to
keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time
of war, and a time of peace,” continues the Preacher; and then he asks the
fateful question that has mystified theologians and philosophers for centuries:
“What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboreth?” And that’s the mystery
of cycles, and our personal destiny.
My answer
to this haunting questions presupposes a lifetime of relentless questing, but
it satisfied my need to know; and the best response that I can give was hinted
at by something that the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung said in an interview
late in his life: “As each plant grows
from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is
meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck.” Implying that man,
like the acorn seed, is teleologically driven to realize his destined purpose,
and will do so if he makes choices that coincide with what he is meant to be;
and I believe Justin’s destined purpose was to become Prime Minister of Canada
and usher in a new zeitgeist. But, as I said, how I came by this perspective was
meant for me alone, and I risk incredulity sharing it.
Nonetheless...
Stephen
Harper ran a negative campaign, using attack adds to belittle Justin Trudeau and
the leader of the official opposition Thomas Mulcair, but then focussing on
Justin as he began to rise in the polls and Mulcair’s New Democratic party
slipped into third place; but Justin took the high road and ran a respectful
and positive campaign, which was dubbed “sunny ways,” and the impression that
the long and protracted campaign had upon me came to a head while watching one
of the leaders’ debates on TV.
Both
Harper and Mulcair attacked Justin, saying that he was only there on the
strength of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s name and not on his own merit, which they
disparaged by saying that he was naïve and just not ready; but when Harper attacked
Justin’s father with an animus intended to mortify the son, I witnessed
something that sent a chill up my spine, because when Justin rose to his
father’s defence I “saw” (it was as much a feeling as it was seeing) the spirit
of a new zeitgeist of positive politics flow into and possess young Justin, and
whether it was a vision or my imagination, I saw him grow in stature and Harper
and Mulcair diminish, and the look in their eyes was one of awe and fear, and I
knew in that moment that Justin had
just been ensouled by the spirit of his destiny and would become the Prime Minister of Canada; and as I watched him shaking hands and snapping
selfies with his fellow Canadians at the Montreal Jarry metro station the
morning after the election to thank them for his victory, I knew in my heart
that his brand of politics was a sign of things to come.
───
No comments:
Post a Comment