The Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal's "Grande Salle" was crowded and I found myself sitting right up front, almost in the trumpet section.  I had heard the concert band's rendition of "Give us This Day" many times during the week, but on this final worship service of Westgate's music tour, I found my eyes welling up.  Good music, and not a night sleeping on a church floor, can do this to a principal.  The concert choir later brought the congregation to its feet with the African folk song "Hlohonolfatsa," a response not common in the Mennonite worship circles our kids have served in.

The church prepared lunch after the service.  As I forked through my potato salad, a woman joined my circle of chairs.  In halting English, she expressed her pleasure that we had chosen to come all the way to Montreal to serve in worship.  To be able to hear as many students as she had that morning, she claimed that she would have had to go "to one of the big Mennonite places."

Big Mennonite Places.  It is clear that she considered herself a member of a small Mennonite outpost, and saw Winnipeg being, at least in relative terms, an epicentre of Mennonite presence, and perhaps, of some influence.

This notion of Big was clearly stated by Canadian Mennonite University's Irma Fast Deuck's address at the most recent Westgate Bursary Banquet.  Irma adapted Brian Eno's essay, "The Big Here and the Long Now" to Westgate's reality.  As I later trundled along Highway 17, and shared views of Lake Superior with my bus bound students, I recognized that I am living the "small here and the short now."  I was in a Westgate moment, where we were passing through, living for the moment, not thinking too far ahead or too far back.  (Well, some Gr. 11s behind me were reading and discussing Les Miserables for a pending test).

Contrast this with the Long Now, recognition that the moment we live in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.  As Irma phrased it, "The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes, and this helps form and develop a Big Here.

To me, the small here and the short now of a senior choir and band tour, and a myriad of other day-to-day and year-to-year Westgate experiences, give shape to our school, church and Christian community's Long Now and Big Here.  To the eyes and ears of our new Francophone friends, it was clear that our Westgate music makers are a part of this Here and Now.   This alone was worth the small here of 63 hours of bus time and the short now of 6 episodes of Glee.