As much as any people, Canadians are justified in our tradition of treating summer as the season of hard-earned indulgence. Spend a winter in this country anywhere east of Tofino and you have won entitlement to days of warmth and ease from June to September. Yet there was a time when Canada's summer began not in stored-up indolence but in the bloodiest sacrifice a nation could call upon its citizens to make. At Dieppe in 1942 and then again on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Canada asked its young men to run against the guns in hope of freeing the world not only from tyranny but from unadulterated evil. That, too, was part of a Canadian tradition, already embedded deep in the psyche of a country then so young, of heroism and self-giving at Ypres, Passchendaele and Vimy Ridge. Our remembrance of those events conventionally comes with the cold of November 11. But in May 2013, federal finance minister Jim Flaherty was part of a small Canadian delegation that visited European battlefields where Canadians fell, en masse, fighting for freedom in two world wars. Flaherty's recollection of the visit appears in the new issue of Convivium magazine, the publication that Calgary native Father Raymond de Souza and I oversee with the goal of fostering faith in common life. Beautifully spare and evocative, Flaherty's essay is more than an exercise in memory. It is a meditation on service so consuming it portends sacrifice of life itself. "The starkness is sorrowing," Flaherty wrote. "We are a small group—no one else is present. We walk on the beach at Dieppe where these young Canadians died. They never had a chance there on the beach, facing the machine guns above. Now we see some of their graves, row on row of individual tombstones. Some bear no name but the inscription 'Known only to God.'" Sorrowing. So perfect a word for the segue from starkness to a knowledge so intimate it belongs to God alone: the intimate knowledge of the name of the one—of the many—who fell, bloodied, for service, in sacrifice. Sorrowing. Such an Irish keening word from a man who was so proud of his Irish storytelling heritage. Was, of course, because Flaherty died unexpectedly in April, only three weeks after retiring from his cabinet post. As Father de Souza wrote in his eloquent National Post column, and expanded on in his Convivium farewell for Flaherty, the country was shocked and saddened by the loss of the minister who deftly steered us through the global financial calamity of 2008-2009. Yet from that sorrowing, from his posthumously published words, comes a call to set down at least some of the cynicism toward political service that we carry with us as the mark intellectual and conversational fashion. There is something of the unthinkable in thinking of gratitude moving from Canadians, so blessed to live in this country, toward politicians such as Jim Flaherty, who serve and sacrifice to bring our blessings to life. The majority of us, in our public language at least, seem as incapable of associating politics with sacrifice as we would be of wading ashore in the freezing waves of Normandy onto narrow beaches thanatic with gunfire. Our images of political service are invariably hyper-crowded with clichés of self-interest, self-importance and silky sinecures. The very way in which the last words of a man as powerful as Canada’s finance minister came to be published in our small magazine forces recognition of the superficiality of such stereotypes. Father de Souza and Flaherty fell into conversation last year during a mutual airport stopover, and the finance minister spoke movingly about the effect of visiting Normandy. As a good journalist does when a good story is being told, our editor asked Flaherty to publish his thoughts in Convivium. The minister demurred, calling himself "not much of a writer." Several months later, his text blew in over the transom bearing the simple directive: "Edit as you see fit." No communications minions massaged the message. Neither party agenda nor political ploy was presented. No hint of the globules that gum up so much of democratic life. Just stark, authentic, heartfelt words from a man, albeit a politically powerful man, addressing the matter that moved him most: service and sacrifice even unto death. We are entitled to indulge our sorrow at the loss those words convey. Yet thankfulness becomes us, too, as we remember the great and true tradition that has forever given our country life. This piece was originally published in the Calgary Herald on June 5, 2014.