By Bp. Anthony Burton
When in 1989 Charlie Arthurson was elected the first Indigenous bishop in Canada, he retired to his church in LaRonge, where he locked the doors and spent the day weeping uncontrollably, as he took the measure of the historic responsibility that had overtaken him. On August 30 at 8:15 in the evening, thirty-six years after that tearful retreat, he passed peacefully into the near presence of God, his loving wife Faye at his side, as she had been throughout their marriage.
Bishop Arthurson and I were joined at the hip for fifteen years, and though I was on paper his boss, he was more a father to me than anything (and actual godfather to our eldest child Caroline).
As first Indigenous bishop, he was continually under pressure to champion various and often conflicting ideological agendas, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal. He knew his own mind, however, and frustrated all attempts to coopt him. He was not to be bullied.
He knew his calling was to eschew ideology or easy answers and instead to focus on Jesus Christ. He was a man of granite integrity, who knew both who—and whose—he was.
Entirely without airs himself, he viewed pomposity, cant or flummery in the church with quiet amusement. His rapier sense of humour was legendary.
He was a memorable teacher: “If you have a fight in hockey, you leave it on the ice.”
As he drove hundreds of thousands of miles of unpaved roads to reach isolated communities, he never turned on the car radio. He thought it more profitable to pass the hours alone singing hymns.
Born in 1937 in Norway House, Manitoba, Charles Arthurson married school teacher Faye Bryer in 1968. He was ordained in 1972 in the Diocese of Keewatin. He served in the parishes of Shamattawa, MB 1966-70 (as Catechist); Norway House, MB (1972-73); Big Trout Lake, ON (1974-76); Split Lake, MB (1976-78); Sioux Lookout, ON (1978-83). In 1983 the Arthursons moved to All Saints, La Ronge, SK, from which he was elected Suffragan Bishop of Saskatchewan in 1989.
He was seamlessly and profoundly Cree, Christian, and Anglican. He embodied an essentially Augustinian spirituality, seeing himself as a pilgrim in the service of his master, making his way home.
He took with utter seriousness the baptismal liturgy’s call to be “Christ’s faithful soldier and servant unto his life’s end.” Indefatigable, he continued to serve any parish that needed him until his late eighties. He would say that he hoped to die at the altar. (Needless to say, he viewed retirement as just another recondite invention of the modern church, best ignored). When I would phone him, he would interrogate me to assure I wasn’t becoming a slacker.
All bishops are pontifexes, bridge-builders. In one respect Bishop Arthurson built bridges between the Cree and the non-native worlds. But he was a bridge also to a 175-year succession of Cree missionaries to their own people, beginning with the Revs. James Settee and Henry Budd in the 1850s.
At age eighty-eight, he was a bridge as well to a generation of clergy, now passing into memory, whose commitments were less provisional, whose spirituality more coherent, whose vision more comprehensive, less narrowly partisan.
He walked with us and now he walks ahead.
History will surely be kind to him; I think it likely that he will be revered in death in ways he was never widely understood in life.
He leaves to mourn Faye, along with their children Devon and Ritchie, a host of friends and admirers, and a Canadian Church immeasurably better for his service and example. TAP
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She has been the Bishop of London since 2018.
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When in 1989 Charlie Arthurson was elected the first Indigenous bishop in Canada, he retired to his church in LaRonge, where he locked the doors and spent the day weeping uncontrollably, as he took the measure of the historic responsibility that had overtaken him. On August 30 at 8:15 in the evening, thirty-six years after that tearful retreat, he passed peacefully into the near presence of God, his loving wife Faye at his side, as she had been throughout their marriage.
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