"The soul of hockey" is how Maurice Richard was described, the man who could evoke tears and a thunderous ovation even 36 years after he stepped off the ice.   A three year battle with abdominal cancer  brought the 78 year old to his death, and no one could have predicted over 200,000 would wait their turn to see him lying in state.  Only the finest of national ceremony would be able to capture the passion of this hero, and all eyes watched Notre Dame Basillica perform the Catholic tradition of ushering Richard through death and the hope it represents.

Canadians love to stand with satisfaction and watch the zamboni slowly move about and leave a smooth surface for the game to begin.   Often the more familiar we get with the game, the less fascinated we are with the big machine that makes effective play possible, but that doesn't mean we don't think it's needed.

All eyes watched as the church performed with dignity, meaning, and compassion the tribute to Maurice's life.  We needed the priest, the homilies, the grand music, even the building that evokes awe.  The church smoothed the surface, now it's back out of sight and the game goes on.   For all his life, Richard attended weekly mass, yet nowhere in the press did we ever read how it affected his game, his life.   Some of the statistics are obvious, 51 years of marriage, raising seven kids on $25,000 a year,  contentment in being hockey's big star on a small salary,  maybe it was the church that helped keep Richard focused on scoring the important things in life.

We may never know because it just isn't the Canadian thing to ask.

Faith matters to us more than we're willing to say is what I conclude from the latest national poll on this matter.    Most Canadians believe in God (84%).  Most agree that through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God provided a way for forgiveness of their sins, (69%).  The data collected by the Angus Reid organization and released this past Easter shows that while we are a nation who embraces Christian faith, we are also a people who are increasingly privatizing that faith.   While most believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and that Satan is active in the world today, church continues to be pretty much a zamboni experience.  Only 20% attend religious services once a week.   Closet Christians are on the rise, with 81% believing you don't need to go to church to be a good Christian.

I'm in the minority who disagree.   Isolate and privatize are words which simply don't fit the practice of Christianity, you won't find it in the Bible, and it's not how this faith came to be the world's oldest, largest, and most active.  A strong theme in the New Testament is "love one another" and our common doctrine contains multiple repeats of more than a dozen commands on how we are to be interacting with each other.

Love, encouragement, forgiveness, challenge, burden bearing, correction, these are the kind of qualities that are supposed to be regular interactions among people of faith.  Church, or the "gathering together" is where friendships that can spark into those commands, occurs.   Jesus was aggressive about encountering the world he came to embrace, our personal approach to keeping very quiet about what we believe is simply out of step with the historical truth of Christian faith.

"At any given coffee shop or street corner, look around and know that the people you see are believing the same faith elements you are," said Andrew Grenville, the author of the Angus Reid poll on Faith in Canada.  "This simply is a Christian nation."

It may be, but the zamboni analogy still persists, we only take the work of the church out to clean up a crisis,  to handle those parts of life that are awkward anywhere else.  Imagine what could happen if the teaching of the church could skate with the players during the rest of the game.