I’m not very religious, but it saddens me that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church out on the farm in Saskatchewan is shutting down. No more regular services — there hasn’t been a regular schedule for some time.
Donations the last few years have been going to the graveyard maintenance fund.
You’ll find several of my ancestors there, great grandparents that I never knew, grandparents that I loved and who loved me, an uncle Paul who died as a teenager whom I never knew, but who carries on in me, Paul…
I hear there will still be an annual blessing of the graves, and an occasional service, perhaps near Easter, or another key church calendar event.
I know this has been happening for decades all over the Canadian prairies.
Once-vibrant communities with a family on every quarter-section are steadily distilled into massive corporate farm-holding operations that only survive through scale of farming many square miles….
What I find really amazing is that this cycle took just a single century. “Breaking” the land and settling in the 1910s and 1920s, and now many families gone a hundred years later. Wow.