On August 26, 2024, at St. John’s Church Jordan, there was a requiem mass for Beverly Carleen Whittingham. It was held at the same Church where Beverly and her husband, the Reverend Keith Whittingham were married 43 years ago.
The music sung at the requiem mass was also performed at the Whittingham’s wedding, The music was led by the Avanti Singers directed by Lesley Kingham. Their melodious chants enriched the time in which Canon Wittingham served as rector of St. Barnabas Anglican Church in St. Catharines.
The eulogy was given by a long-time friend of the Wittingham family the Canon Paddy Doran. It revealed the secrets of a faithful life in Christ’s service, which were true to the biblical injunction of prayer and piety in private. This was shown in her work in the courthouse, which through her compassionate and careful interventions tempered justice with mercy.
My appreciation for the requiem mass at St. John’s Jordan was enhanced by my walk to the parish from my home in downtown St. Catharines on a beautiful sunny summer morning. This eight-mile pilgrimage trek was through a landscape miraculously protected from pressures for urban sprawl by the only surviving serious land use planning tool in southern Ontario, the Greenbelt.
The lands between Jordan and St. Catharines are the best in the world for a wide variety of nutritious tree fruit and grape crops. One of the happy signs along the way was a vendor of Niagara seedless grapes, a crop that was only being developed on an experimental basis in my youth. The variety of the types of agriculture was astonishing. There is an impressive tract of land for racing horses.
Around 1976, while the urban boundary of St. Catharines was being proposed, a wise suggestion by the planning commissioner of the Niagara Region, Alan Veale, a lay Anglican active in St. George’s Church was put forward. This was that a hydro corridor be used as a buffer between urban and agricultural uses. Along the walk, I witnessed how the Greenbelt had firmly enshrined his proposal, as tree fruit crops were growing under the buffering corridor where it crosses near Regional Road 81.
Back then, farm leaders in Niagara battling sprawl conducted a tour to convince politicians that their farms were significant businesses and should, as a result, have a well-protected landscape. One of these visionary advocates was an active member of St. John’s Jordan, Howard Staff, whose tombstone is now prominent in the almost two-century-old graveyard surrounding the historic church. Going through this sacred space I observed how his ancestors were buried there going back to 1807. Among those buried in this cemetery below spectacular trees are Manley Ball, the last of his family to operate the ghost town which he sold to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, immediately upon its creation. His family protected the old-growth forest which is now the core of the Balls Falls Conservation Area.
From St. Catharines to Jordan the beauty of the landscape is enhanced by the fact that the formerly treeless river valleys are now dominated by a Carolinian survivor species, the Black Walnut. Its revival was encouraged by the appreciation of the farmers of the district (then Louth Township), of the Black Walnut by the Mohawk Chief George Johnson.
Taking heed to his words in 1887 an area farmer J. Honsberger told a meeting of fruit growers, “The walnut is a native of my native place, and a few years ago the last one disappeared; and being determined that the place was not to be devoid of walnut trees, I began putting nuts in the ground and I grew some trees.”
At the requiem mass, I reconnected with the Reverend Kevin Block, author and former rector of St. Barnabas. One of his sermons that I vividly recall is that every day his first thought was the health of the adjacent Twenty Mile Creek near his home. It was appropriate that on the day of the requiem mass this stream usually bone dry in late August, was full of water. I viewed a double-breasted cormorant, happily fishing.
The beauty experienced at St. John’s Anglican Church is vividly summarized in the last verse of the great hymn, sung at the requiem mass. It is Guide me, O thou great Redeemer.” The verse says, “When I tread, the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside; death of death, and hell’s destruction, land me safe on Canaan’s side: song and praises, I will ever give to thee.”
Requiem Mass Reveals Hidden Treasures
On August 26, 2024, at St. John’s Church Jordan, there was a requiem mass for Beverly Carleen Whittingham. It was held at the same Church where Beverly and her husband, the Reverend Keith Whittingham were married 43 years ago.
The music sung at the requiem mass was also performed at the Whittingham’s wedding, The music was led by the Avanti Singers directed by Lesley Kingham. Their melodious chants enriched the time in which Canon Wittingham served as rector of St. Barnabas Anglican Church in St. Catharines.
The eulogy was given by a long-time friend of the Wittingham family the Canon Paddy Doran. It revealed the secrets of a faithful life in Christ’s service, which were true to the biblical injunction of prayer and piety in private. This was shown in her work in the courthouse, which through her compassionate and careful interventions tempered justice with mercy.
My appreciation for the requiem mass at St. John’s Jordan was enhanced by my walk to the parish from my home in downtown St. Catharines on a beautiful sunny summer morning. This eight-mile pilgrimage trek was through a landscape miraculously protected from pressures for urban sprawl by the only surviving serious land use planning tool in southern Ontario, the Greenbelt.
The lands between Jordan and St. Catharines are the best in the world for a wide variety of nutritious tree fruit and grape crops. One of the happy signs along the way was a vendor of Niagara seedless grapes, a crop that was only being developed on an experimental basis in my youth. The variety of the types of agriculture was astonishing. There is an impressive tract of land for racing horses.
Around 1976, while the urban boundary of St. Catharines was being proposed, a wise suggestion by the planning commissioner of the Niagara Region, Alan Veale, a lay Anglican active in St. George’s Church was put forward. This was that a hydro corridor be used as a buffer between urban and agricultural uses. Along the walk, I witnessed how the Greenbelt had firmly enshrined his proposal, as tree fruit crops were growing under the buffering corridor where it crosses near Regional Road 81.
Back then, farm leaders in Niagara battling sprawl conducted a tour to convince politicians that their farms were significant businesses and should, as a result, have a well-protected landscape. One of these visionary advocates was an active member of St. John’s Jordan, Howard Staff, whose tombstone is now prominent in the almost two-century-old graveyard surrounding the historic church. Going through this sacred space I observed how his ancestors were buried there going back to 1807. Among those buried in this cemetery below spectacular trees are Manley Ball, the last of his family to operate the ghost town which he sold to the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, immediately upon its creation. His family protected the old-growth forest which is now the core of the Balls Falls Conservation Area.
From St. Catharines to Jordan the beauty of the landscape is enhanced by the fact that the formerly treeless river valleys are now dominated by a Carolinian survivor species, the Black Walnut. Its revival was encouraged by the appreciation of the farmers of the district (then Louth Township), of the Black Walnut by the Mohawk Chief George Johnson.
Taking heed to his words in 1887 an area farmer J. Honsberger told a meeting of fruit growers, “The walnut is a native of my native place, and a few years ago the last one disappeared; and being determined that the place was not to be devoid of walnut trees, I began putting nuts in the ground and I grew some trees.”
At the requiem mass, I reconnected with the Reverend Kevin Block, author and former rector of St. Barnabas. One of his sermons that I vividly recall is that every day his first thought was the health of the adjacent Twenty Mile Creek near his home. It was appropriate that on the day of the requiem mass this stream usually bone dry in late August, was full of water. I viewed a double-breasted cormorant, happily fishing.
The beauty experienced at St. John’s Anglican Church is vividly summarized in the last verse of the great hymn, sung at the requiem mass. It is Guide me, O thou great Redeemer.” The verse says, “When I tread, the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside; death of death, and hell’s destruction, land me safe on Canaan’s side: song and praises, I will ever give to thee.”
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