St. Margaret’s Inuit congregation offers unique opportunity for sharing and reconciliation

BY LEIGH ANNE WILLIAMS

When St. Margaret’s was built in 1887 as a church for the village of Janeville outside Ottawa, it was surrounded by fields and forest. But a hint of its future destiny as an urban church that is now home to the only Inuit congregation in the “South” of Canada may be glimpsed in the shape of its walls.

St. Margaret’s English-speaking congregation may see the semicircular apse surrounding the altar only as a beautifully painted dome, but members of the Inuit congregation worshipping in Inuktitut at the 11:30 am Sunday services may see a comforting echo of the shape of the interior of an igloo.

But a church really is made up of the people who gather and worship there and not the walls of its building. St. Margaret’s brings people together from its original congregation, those who came from All Saints Sandy Hill when it was dis-established, and the Inuit congregation. Serving them all with incumbent priest the Rev. Colin McFarland is a remarkable Inuit priest. When she came to Ottawa from the North, the Rev. Canon Aigah Attagutsiak never imagined entering the ministry, but now with Crosstalk, she said her mother, who is now nearly 103, loved going to church, and her 14 children