Monday, June 21, 2010

Extreme Make-over

A wave of Italian immigrants to 1950s Toronto was followed by a curious culture clash, as police officers kept breaking up gangs of Italian men hanging around on street corners – vagrancy, loitering...or, according to my pal Vince from Winnipeg’s Italian Holy Rosary parish, a culture clash. The immigrants were used to piazzas, the ubiquitous public squares in their home country. Most piazzas have a house of worship on one side of the square and a house of government on the other, with bars, cafes and shops on the other sides. They are places of intersection, places of meeting and mingling, “thin places” as Celtic spirituality might say – places of encounter with the Holy. In this case, the Holy as met in neighbour and stranger.


St. Angela de Merici, a founder of the Ursaline religious order, urged her sister-nuns to “be like a piazza” – be open, gracious, hospitable, and engaged in the world. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, took this vision to church, inspiring a historic cathedral designed for a lost world to demolition and reconstruction. Pews? Gone in favour of chairs which are both more “traditional” in the cathedrals of yore, and also free up the cathedral’s space for other uses. Storefronts attached to the diocesan office boast Cafe Ah Roma and a Ten Thousand Villages shop. An attractive outdoor garden with street access (above), gives neighbouring university folk a place to enjoy their coffee breaks and lunch. An art gallery has been incorporated into the reconstruction as well. And, the cathedral’s upgrade made it Cleveland’s largest geothermal heating and cooling system, cutting electricity costs from $78,000 to $35,000 in its first year of operation – and making a green witness to the wider community. The welcoming lobby of Trinity Commons boasts two soothing floor-to-ceiling fountains and inviting benches, a public space of serenity in the heart of the city. Trinity Cathedral has clearly reinvented itself (or perhaps “restored” is a better description), offering hospitality not only to church folks, but to the city.

i am just back from Toronto, busily preparing itself to host the G-20 (at a security cost estimated to be 6 times higher than the security for the FIFA World Cup). On my way to meet relatives at Smokeless Joe’s downtown, i chanced by the security fence – some ten feet high and much tighter than chain link. There was already an enormous police presence on the streets, bigger than any i can recall seeing in Canada – ever. Shops and businesses inside the security perimeter are closing for the duration, with a loss of wages for the workers, including a congregation member appearing in a show at the Royal Alex theatre.

Canada has no history of piazzas (could it be our winters?), but we increasingly have a story about the disappearance of public space. When Toronto hosted the Du Maurier Jazz Festival, that city’s public Nathan Phillips Square became corporate space, owned by the sponsors. While churches are hardly “neutral” space, we do have the gift of uncontested space to offer our communities.

If your church were inside the security perimeter, what would its ministry be during the G-20? Would you join the other businesses, and shut down or relocate for the duration?
Would you offer hospitality to journalists? To protesters? To diplomats? To police?
Would you hold a worship service lifting up the wounds of the world that your church thinks should be on the agenda of the meeting?

No comments:

Post a Comment