SUMMER SERVICE

Every year, Sri Lankan Catholics from all over make a pilgrimage to Ontario’s cottage country

- Randy Boyagoda

God has a sense of humour: drive two hours north from Toronto to escape the summer heat, and even in an old church overlooking Georgian Bay, it’s hotter than it was back home. The heat is thick and it slows you down and reminds you of stories your father told about going to a “jungle church” in Sri Lanka every August, as a child, in caravans that set up tents and huts around the building for days and nights of prayer and song, feast and play, all in muggy, snake-infested lands. He loved those pilgrimages, but fear of the slouching beast of Ontario summer traffic trumped hope of renewing an old devotion in Upper Canada.

When I was growing up — “back home” for me is 1980s Oshawa — we never made the trek to the Canadian Martyrs’ Shrine, which is Canada’s nearest approximation of Our Lady of Madhu, in Sri Lanka. Founded in 1926 near Midland, Ontario, the shrine honours the seventeenth-century martyrdoms of Saint Jean de Brébeuf and his companions. It has since become the proxy destination for other Catholic immigrant groups seeking to continue pilgrimages and devotions associated with their home countries and religious communities. Last July, under the cover of family life and the writing life, I drove there to pray with some Sri Lankans.