Assembly of the Archdiocese of Canada: Banquet Remarks

Calgary, Alberta Thursday, July 16, 2026 Christ is in our midst! It is a good thing to sit down together at the end of a long day — and this has been a long and full day, beginning with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, business meetings, instructional talks, lunch with your clergy wives, an open floor with you this afternoon, and now, finally, a chance simply to eat. I am grateful to Archbishop Irénée and to everyone who has organized this evening, and glad that our business, for a few hours at least, can rest. This evening has been styled a banquet, and it is worth pausing on that word for a moment. Trace it back far enough — through the French banquet , the Italian banchetto , the Old High German bank — and in every case you arrive at the same humble origin: a bench, un banc . A banquet, properly speaking, was not a meal at separate tables, but a meal taken together on a single long bench. Whatever our actual seating arrangement tonight, that is the older and better sense of the word, and it is the one I would like us to keep in mind: a banquet is what happens when people do not eat apart from one another. There is something fitting in that, for a week built around the theme of generation to generation — because a bench, unlike a chair, does not really allow you to sit apart by age or seniority. The old and the young end up shoulder to shoulder on it, whether they planned to or not. It is, I think, no accident that in most traditional icons of the Mystical Supper, the Apostles are shown gathered around the Lord not in individual chairs, but on a bench — one continuous seat, one company, undivided. Which brings me to a second table, further back than that one — the wilderness, where our theme’s own psalm spends a good deal of time talking about food. The psalmist recalls Israel fed, astonishingly, by God himself: “He had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the doors of heaven, and had rained down manna upon them to eat… man did eat angels’ food.” And yet the psalm does not let that gift go unquestioned — it also recalls how quickly the people grumbled and forgot what had been done for them. Which is exactly why the psalm insists, before and after that story, that this must not happen again: that what God has done must be told, deliberately, to the generation that did not see it, “that they might set their hope in God, and not forget his works.” The manna was a gift. The telling of it was a task. I do not think it is a coincidence that when the Church wanted a word for how she hands down her most central act of worship, she reached for exactly that logic. Saint Paul, writing of the meal Christ gave us the night before He suffered, does not say he invented or improved upon it. He says: “I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you.” Received and delivered — that is the whole of tradition in two words, and Paul uses it about a meal, given at that same long bench the icons remember. On a fundamental level, the Church has never really handed down bare information. She has handed down a table — from the manna in the wilderness, to the bread and cup Christ gave His disciples, to the Divine Liturgy we will serve together before this Assembly ends. God feeds His people first, and only afterward asks them to tell the story of having been fed. Which brings me, at last, back to tonight. This is a smaller and more ordinary bench than either of those — but not, I think, unrelated to them. We have sat together, we have eaten, and some of us will go home and tell others what happened at this gathering: what we heard, what troubled us, what gave us hope. That, too, is a small instance of the very thing our theme asks of us. It requires no pulpit and no program. It only requires that we not let the evening be forgotten. So let us give thanks — for this meal, for this company, for the Archdiocese that has gathered us here, and for the God who, in every generation, insists on feeding His people before He asks anything else of them. And let us rise from this bench, as from every bench the Church has ever kept, with something worth telling to those who were not here to taste it themselves. Thank you, and bon appétit to us all.