OTTAWA, ON—A well-known investment and securities strategist had a word of investment advice for his listeners at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on Parliament Hill at the beginning of June.
Tom Caldwell, chair of Toronto-based Caldwell Financial Ltd., told more than 500 politicians, diplomats and other leaders to seriously consider investing in a personal commitment to Jesus Christ.
During his speech, replete with self-deprecating humour, Caldwell firmly established three assumptions that he suggests buttress his own faith and belief system:
Spiritual vacuums don’t exist, he says. Everyone believes in something or someone. Secondly, he says, any god but the real God will let you down or even kill you.
And thirdly, when government erases all mention of God, it leaves space for more dubious faith in money, fame and otherwise worthy goals like self-sufficiency.
Caldwell’s pointed advice was delivered in the context of a prayer breakfast that has become an annual Parliament Hill event since its founding 41 years ago. Senator Len Gustafson, a long-time breakfast supporter and onetime parliamentary secretary to former prime minister Brian Mulroney, outlined the breakfast’s stated objectives.
He noted the breakfast is “Christ-centred but not just a Christian event.
“It does not seek to convert people to Christianity. Rather, the aim is simply to meet in the spirit of Jesus and pray together.
“This means we seek to love those around us just as Jesus loved those who were around Him. It is recognized that Jesus is at the centre of our event when we share a spirit that is both welcoming andcompassionate.”
Caldwell, who holds an honours economics degree from McGill University, used a youthful escapade to illustrate one way to blend economic reality with Christian conscience.
Growing up agnostic, he said the closest he came to religion was his penchant for pilfering the alms box in a neighbourhood Catholic church to fund his movie-going habit. Some 47 years later, after he became a serious Christian believer, he decided to pay back what he had taken—with compound interest.
Not long after paying that debt, he met with representatives of a Catholic priests’ pension plan. Among those in the group was the incumbent priest of the church he had stolen from. He confessed his misdemeanour and was apparently forgiven: his firm ended up administering the pension fund.
Jack Murta, a former Mulroney cabinet minister who works with the parliamentary prayer breakfast group that sponsors the national event, says the 500-plus attendance was the largest in its four-decade history.
In line with the tradition, party leaders or their representatives read the Scriptures at the event, including Liberal leader Bill Graham and NDP leader Jack Layton. Government house leader Rob Nicholson stood in for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Roger Gaudet represented Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe.
Harper missed his first breakfast as prime minister because he was at a western premiers’ meeting in Gimli, Manitoba. Duceppe seldom attends the event.
Special passages for the 2006 breakfast included Psalm 146, Isaiah 43 and John 15, as well as the theme Scripture, Ephesians 4:31,32: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. And be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.”
