To the editor:

I share this wintry survival message from the perspective of a 71st December. I share this with you, my readers, in a spirit of prayer, as we advance toward an eco-friendly spirituality.

Here we are in one of the most wintry falls in recent memory. In writing this December message, it’s my hope that we can find some spiritual brightness.

Now, in my 71st December, with aging taking a toll on the physical side, I am now finding myself turning more and more to a spiritual side. The explosive “crack” of a frozen tree trunk protesting fierce degrees of cold; that merciless look in myriad eyes, returning our gaze from their wintry sky-world. These are bear-claw things that have proclaimed the coming of winter ever since the first nomadic hunters first migrated into these northlands deep in the endlessly wintry millennia of the Pleistocene. My 71st December, a third reading of Canadian author, Fred Bodsworth’s, “The Sparrow’s Fall.”

Set in the fiercely wintry environment of the western Hudson Bay’s lowlands, ancestral homelands of the Atihk-Anishinee, people of the caribou. The Novel chronicles the heroic inner struggle of Hunter, Jacob Atook, a lone hunter trying to reconcile conflicts between his own culture’s traditional beliefs and a Christian belief that he finds to be both reassuring and disturbing.

Hunter Atook struggles mightily to reconcile his newly found belief in a loving, caring creator, a “God” whose loving care is extended to the entire world of his creation. To the little fallen sparrow, to both great and small, to one and all.

How do we reconcile this reassuring new belief with his ancient traditional knowledge of reality? The harsh realities of the world that he now finds himself hunting in, so that he and his wife and their unborn child may survive a starvation winter? Jacob knows that the new generation of prey animals is inescapably and unceasingly consumed, killed and eaten by the predators in their own struggle to survive. How can he possibly reconcile belief in “The Sparrow’s Fall” with his knowledge of reality?

Understandably enough, the book ends with Jacob continuing to believe in both his traditional spiritual knowledge and in the reassuring new belief that sparrows fall.

Our spirituality is a living thing. It never stops growing, never stops advancing, forever reaching skyward. Season’s greetings to one and all.

Dave Cree Hassig

Colton