“Truly, the way to heaven is through the Cross.” These are the best words to describe the emotion that hits me as I pray before a large and simple white Cross of wood. It stands tall, illuminated against a pitch-black sky full of stars and dancing northern lights.  The temperature is over twenty-below zero and it is well past midnight. The prayer exhales from my body and condenses in the air before my eyes for a moment before disappearing at the northern edge of the world.

If you want to come to this place, you can. The Cross can be found at the Trapper’s Lake Spirituality Centre in the diocese of Mackenzie Fort-Smith. The Centre was built by Bishop Dennis Croteau, OMI, 11 kilometers out of Yellowknife and opened on September 13, 1992. It provides the space for workshops and meetings organized by the diocese and for other groups. Bishop Croteau, 92, still lives there. Although long retired, he still says Mass daily in the chapel and even chops wood to heat his cabin.

Carmen Michaud, our animator for the region, and I stayed at the centre during our two-week tour of Alberta and NWT to promote the Share Lent campaign. We were offered hospitality by the current Bishop of the Diocese, who also lives there, The Most Rev. Jon Hansen. Bishop Jon is on the executive committee of our National Council at DPCC. Ever since the day in Montreal that he showed me pictures from his home and diocese, I yearned to visit him. What a gift it was when the time finally presented itself.

The Sunday of our visit, Bishop Jon invited us to share our message with the community of his co-cathedral, St. Patrick’s. I was amazed by the richness and diversity of this Catholic community. 

“Let us be attentive to the Word of God,” he would say before the liturgy of the Word. And how attentive I felt, how alive to the psalm of that Sunday which proclaimed, “Taste and see that the Lord is Good!”

Community meals, a hike to a frozen waterfall, a visit to legislature, ice-roads, and even a visit to a snow-castle (and a snow king): our time was filled with the graciousness of the DPCC community in Yellowknife, and I will remember it forever. It was the vital backdrop to my spiritual experience at the white wooden Cross.

Now, as we celebrate the Easter Season, I sometimes find myself going back to the joy of that visit and to the peace and awe of that midnight prayer. For it truly was a moment of peace and awe in the presence of God. When I do, I reflect on what the prayer felt like, “Truly, the way to heaven is through the Cross.” This article is another attempt to reflect. I reflect because I am not yet sure I understand it.

What I do understand is what the prayer was not. It was not a prayer embracing surrender to the idea that we must suffer here on earth to get to “the other side” in Heaven. It had nothing to do with suffering for a reward. It was a different idea. 

I think)= it had to do with self-sacrifice. Not simply sacrifice, but self-sacrifice. In Jesus, the nature of God is revealed as a self-sacrificing nature. So, communion with God, our Heavenly destiny, is a communion with self-sacrificial love. There were two parts to the prayer, the white cross and the night sky full of stars and northern lights. I don’t think it was a matter of having to go through the Cross, through pain, to get to the majestic night sky and heavenly aurora dance behind it. It was not linear. It was whole, as if the Cross was one with the vision behind it, helping me to understand, “This is what it is.” 

In our work throughout the world at DPCC, we encounter, and stand with, countless people who are models of self-sacrificial love in the service of the Gospel. They are people who often exude a deep sense of peace and well-being. Many would wonder, given what they live through, how is such peace possible? Perhaps it is because we only see their Crosses, and we do not see the stars and northern lights that dance around them.