Honouring Lois Wilson: A lifetime dedicated to the common good
'I would always respond to what the community called me to do,' says the United Church minister
At 96 years of age, Lois Wilson has devoted virtually all of her lifetime to her community.
She's a United Church minister, a community organizer, the first female moderator of the United Church of Canada, a president of the World Council of Churches, a staunch human rights advocate who visited South Africa, South Korea, and Argentina — all in one year, and a former independent member of the Senate of Canada who found common cause with both left and right.
Wilson never stops inspiring the many people she has met along the way. In September 2022, on her 95th birthday, that inspiration resulted in a collection of essays written by people who have worked with Wilson. Former parliamentarians, human rights activists, church ministers, university professors, environmentalists share their own work for justice, peace — and the common good. The book is called For the Sake of the Common Good: Essays in Honour of Lois Wilson, published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
"I hope that this helps unite us and spurs us on to do some things together. It is obvious that I didn't do anything on my own. It was always with other people. And you won't get anywhere if you're on your own... we need to remember that," Wilson said at the book launch.
IDEAS producer Sean Foley spoke to Lois Wilson about how her Christian faith has guided her through life and the importance of community.
Here is an excerpt of their conversation.
Sean: A lot of the Christian churches see nature and creation as really another holy book. And I'm wondering about your relationship to nature. It seems like it's been very profound in your life.
Well, I was brought up every summer on the lakes. We went camping in a canoe and never came back for a month. So yeah, it's part of my own spirituality now having been connected with nature. But I don't replace God with nature. What do you do with earthquakes and volcanoes and tidal waves, all those things? I mean, they only look upon the sunsets.
I think that the Christian Revelation is much broader than what we see in nature, although the natural world needs to be appreciated and its creatures, as the Aboriginal people say, are all our relations. And in Christian theology, that has never been emphasized. There needs to be a theology of the environment for sure.
But I don't go along with nature worship, because nature can be terrible, too. I mean, nature can be very healing in some ways, but is it nature doing the healing or something in nature? I think to worship nature is not a good idea.
So your family used to go camping when you were young — real camping — what kinds of influence do you think your parents had on your spirituality, your view of community and things like that?
Oh, very much so. I mean, my father was a minister and he didn't want to get called back for a funeral or a wedding. So we got lost. We went on to Lake Superior, went on Lake of the Woods, and we went never to be heard of till a month later when we came back and we were — it was a 20-foot canoe and there were nine of us, and we paddled and camped and learned about the stars and learned about animals and learned about fish and learned about the natural world. And I loved it.
Ever since, it's been part of my own spirituality to be immersed in that, because I realize that that's the ground of our being. And my father used to say, 'all those people with cottages. All they do is stay in the cottages. What's the point of that?'
Do you think that your childhood experience of that kind of camping – did that prepare you for being able to go all over the world and travel?
I don't know. I never thought of it, but it could have been. You see, the reason we went on Lake Superior is we lived in Thunder Bay, and at the time there were no roads out, so the only way out was the lake. So that's what we did. And my father was very adventuresome in that way.
And in Thunder Bay, I understand, is where you really begin to — at least in the book, I get the sense that was where you marshaled a community. You were part of some community activities.
Well, that was much later as an adult. We came back as ministers, my husband and I. I had heard there was a program in the States, it came out of the Second World War where the the Lutherans had looked at each other and said, 'how come we didn't know what was happening in our communities, [about Hitler and the Holocaust], and how come we didn't do anything about it?'
So those two questions, what's happening in the community? What can I do about it? There was a Lutheran minister in Minnesota who developed a program to address this, to mobilize all the community resources to answer those two questions. And I read about it in Time Magazine. So I got in my car and went down to Duluth to find out what was going on and came back and adapted it. We called our program in Thunder Bay Town Talk, and it was inviting everybody and every institution in the community for the month of November to focus in on those two questions. What can you contribute to this? Do you have a resource person you could bring in to address it? And let's share it. And we did.
It was famously wonderful because it was fully interactive with radio and television and schools. And I remember one of my children came home from school and instead of asking, What did you do on your Christmas holidays? She was asked to write on a Town Talk issue. So it thoroughly permeated the community. And they put the archives in the Thunder Bay archives up there. That convinced me that my work was with the community.
It's amazing that it caught on so well. Do you have a sense of why that happened?
Well, I didn't want to do it — at that point, I was so ignorant that I was sure a man should do it. And I looked all over, but nobody responded. So I finally thought, Well, I want to do it, and if nobody else is going to do it, I'll do it! So my church gave me two years leave and I did.
Incredible
And it changed my life.
Yeah. These life-changing things that happened to you, to what degree do you attribute that to God's grace?
I attribute a lot of it just to the spirit, the Holy Spirit. I hardly ever had an original idea myself, but I would always respond to what the community called me to do. And it was constantly calling me to do this, or you know, why don't you do that? Looking back, that's what I think it was, because it wasn't my idea. None of them were my ideas. But I was able to respond to them because I saw that they were in continuity with what I understood as the purposes of God in the world.
*Excerpt has been edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Sean Foley.
Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to For The Sake of the Common Good: An Appreciation of Lois Wilson.