 | E-mail this story |  | Write letter to editor |  | Order a classified ad |
| E-mail this story | | Write letter to editor | | Order a classified ad |
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Here he rose through the ranks of his Church to become Bishop of the Arctic Diocese. He retires in August. The lines italicized line below are excerpts from his poem "Frobisher's Bay."
It was the 1960s and for some reason they never boiled tea that trip. One week on a dog-sled from Salluit to Wakeham Bay in Northern Quebec, across frozen white tundra, and the British priest went without a cup of tea. Instead he drank endless cups of coffee brewed by his Inuit companions.
"It wasn't until later that I found out why," said Bishop Chris Williams of the Anglican Diocese of the Arctic. "They knew I took sugar in my coffee and not in the tea.
"They felt I needed the sugar to maintain my strength and withstand the cold," said Williams. "It was touching and humbling."
Williams is retiring this August after over 40 years with the Church in the North. He begins a farewell tour of Baffin Island this week.
"It's like being a pop star," he said.
Barren Bleakness;
Men, far from home, make witness to their faith.
Williams holds a ceramic igloo in his hand. The igloo is the size of a soft-ball sliced in half and there is a slit across the top for the coins and a hole in the bottom for the day the thing fills up.
"They used these things to raise funds for the Canadian Northern Diocese back when I was in school in England," said Williams.
During his school years at the University of Durham in England, he was visiting at a friend's house and noticed a similar ceramic igloo on a shelf and asked what it was for.
The answer changed his life. After graduating from the seminary in June 1960, he was in Yellowknife two months later. One day he slipped off the Con Mine dock and fell into Great Slave Lake. A sort of baptism.
"It was slippery and I fell in," said Williams with a smirk.
He then flew to Kugluktuk in Max Ward's Single Otter float plane, which took off from the old float base on Back Bay where the big white gas tanks still proudly proclaim Ward's eternal ownership.
Nearly all 300 Kugluktuk residents gathered at the edge of the dock when the plane landed. It was an event in 1960. And Williams stepped off a little confused by all the faces he saw.
His flight overshot a planned stop at Echo Bay, and it took a hip-boot-wearing, cotton-sweatered Bishop John Sperry, who greeted the 24-year-old Williams, to straighten things out.
Thirty-one years later, Sperry delivered the sermon when Williams became a Bishop on Jan. 13, 1991, at St. Jude's Cathedral in Iqaluit.
How remote that possibility must have been from Williams' mind back then. All he knew that day in Kugluktuk was the place reminded him a little of Wales, a place he visited when he was young.
"I used to love visiting Wales, with its hills very much like Kugluktuk's," said Williams.
The Lord's Supper,
Shared as never before in this vast land.
The Anglican Church changed considerably over the last 40 years, said Williams.
"I believe it is a truly indigenous church."
He said more than 80 per cent of the Nunavut clergy are Inuit, along with two of the three assistant bishops.
Once William retires he said there is a good chance his successor will be an Inuk.
Some of this success Williams attributes to the absence of a celibacy rule for priesthood in the Anglican Church.
He said celibacy keeps aboriginal followers from joining the cloth.
"I knew a Catholic priest who petitioned Rome to lift the celibacy restriction for aboriginal priests up here," said Williams, who is married.
He fell in love with Rona Macrae Aiktken and married her on March 18, 1964, in Salluit, Que. She was a nurse and Williams was a priest then. The couple were two of the 13 white people living in the Nunavik community at the time. They went to black-and-white cowboy movies together at the mission.
They had two children in Salluit, Andrew and Judith.
Andrew now works as press secretary for the Northwest Territories legislative assembly and Judith is a biologist for the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development.
Warmth, Love, Fellowship;
Now a home to many.
Williams gave a lot to the North, said Debra Gill, executive officer for the Diocese. "He's been around for a long time," said Gill. "He's seen the changes, he knows the language."
Williams oversaw the translation of the New Testament into Inuktitut, which was completed in 1992.
He said it is impossible to understand a people unless the language is understood. "Without the language you do not understand thought patterns," said Williams, who has travelled extensively throughout the North.
Williams ministered in Kugluktuk in the fall of 1960, then moved to Taloyoak in January 1961. He stayed there until April of that year and then left for Iqaluit for two months. That June he left for Salluit, Que., where he spent 11 years. He and his family left in 1972, and he worked in Cape Dorset from 1972 to '75 and in Baker Lake from 1975 to '78. The family then moved to Yellowknife, where they remain today and where Williams plans to retire.
As God spoke to Opened Hearts: We reply, Father, thy will be done.
Now Williams is flying ... literally. The 66-year-old bishop -- he will be 67 in May -- is taking gliding lessons in Edmonton.
"I was told you shouldn't be learning to fly if you're over 60," said Williams. "But I've broken rules before."
He's learning to judge the glider's speed by listening to air rush over the wings, to land, to steer, but he still hasn't done it alone.
"I don't know what it's like to be up there alone. There's always an instructor telling me to watch that or do that," said Williams, who chose to fly because he couldn't hike anymore and he didn't want to go scuba diving.
No longer strangers,
sharing the same Lord's Supper.
"To be out there on a winter's night with an igloo glowing from its light inside. To be out there and have the sky, stars and Northern Lights -- just the quiet you can never get in our modern day and time.
"So quiet you can hear the lemmings under the snow."
