The Beehive

I recently visited my hometown, Montreal—a bustling metropolis of several million people. Like a beehive, the city teemed with life, its residents stacked one upon another in endless apartment towers and green less tenement buildings, each churning out a living as they brave the noise, traffic, and the constant hum of renovations aimed at modernizing the city for the future.

They once called Montreal "the city of a hundred steeples" because of the countless church spires visible from any high point on the island. It was shorthand for a place where Catholicism once bound the community together and preserved the unique French culture that defined life in the city during my boyhood in the 1950s.

But times have changed.

The people have largely abandoned religion in favor of a kind of aspirational socialism that has since morphed into an old-fashioned capitalism—where every bee fends for himself in the exhausting pursuit of the honey needed to hold a place in the hive.

Oh, the steeples remain, but now mainly for the tourists and sightseers. The buildings are mostly empty—like the souls of those who grind out their lives in a city that has become a home to the world, yet one increasingly without a heart.

What Montreal needs is revival—not economic, political, or cultural. It already has a steady diet of those. No, what it truly needs is spiritual revival: a wholehearted return to the search for God. A revival that redirects the city's energy inward and upward toward the One who gives life—and gives it meaning—beyond the grubby business of simply making honey.

I am old now. Years ago, I planted a kingdom seed in that city—one that has grown into a small but vibrant flower blooming in the drab inner city. My prayer is that God will raise up other dreamers—ones who will see that Montreal is a field achingly ripe for harvest.