Via Lucis

We often speak of the spiritual life as a journey or pilgrimage (early Christians were called People of the Way), but not until i picked up Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love did i realize that Christian churches are designed with the metaphor of journey as well (think processional, think aisle). Our Roman Catholic friends have the Stations of the Cross in their churches, a moving meditation (literally and figuratively) as pilgrims go from station to station, usually within a church building, meditating on images of what the Empire believed was the final chapter of Jesus’ life.

At Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston, Ontario, another kind of pilgrimage took place a few years ago on the Sundays between Easter and Pentecost. Using Mary Ford-Grabowsky’s book, Stations of the Light, as a spring board, a visual artist, a poet , the minister and several other kindred spirits met in the fall to deeply engage eight Biblical stories of resurrection. Independently of one another, the poet and the visual artist went to their respective studios to create. On each of the Sundays between Easter and Pentecost, there was a time in the worship service when the visual artist’s response to the resurrection story was front and centre, and the poet’s words, which took the form of contemporary psalm, were read. The minister asked a resident musician if he could play some meditative music in worship to give an opportunity for those in the pews to reflect on this Sunday’s visual gift. He responded not only by playing but also by composing. Today, there is a Via Lucis, a Way of Light, in Sydenham Street United’s sanctuary, as the works of the artist are hung in a journey around the sanctuary, and the psalms of the poet are paired with each piece. After Pentecost, when the congregation had had their own pilgrimage from Light into Light as the installation was known, there was an invitation to the general public, and some 200 people responded.

Most moving for me in the images were the decidedly Canadian touches: trilliums bloom in the garden where the women encounter the resurrected one, the northern lights appear above doubting Thomas (recast by the poet as “Honest Thomas”), and fish swirl and splash in a way i KNOW is Canadian but cannot say how. I had a wish that the Holy Spirit might be portrayed as a Canada Goose, but the artist likely has a lighter touch than i do.
The project took a decent amount of lead time for strong preparation. First, the minister read the book, then enticed some others to read it. The group met to wrestle with the Biblical stories. The poet and the visual artist were given a few months to create (and, in the case of the visual artist, to attend to framing, lighting, having the pieces professionally photographed for use on the worship bulletin cover, and hanging them in the sanctuary). Blessed be the patient ones who did not let their enthusiasm get ahead of the project! They not only created works of great beauty and fresh reframing of familiar stories, they also opened up a new path, a new pilgrimage – via lucis, the way of light.

If you could imagine such a project in your church, what Biblical stories linked by a common theme might you choose? Sydenham Street chose a journey into light – what journey might your church embrace? Be comforted by? Be challenged by?

Who are the artists in your church? Would there be some wisdom in using a mix of church and community artists, and how might you invite artists outside the church to participate?

Are there any art forms that make you so uncomfortable you can’t imagine inviting them in (Country music or hip-hop, modern dance, multi-media installations)? How do you respond to the critique that if a particular stream of music is not welcome in your worship space, neither are the folks who embrace that kind of music?

What is the journey, the via, that your church is called to make at this time in its life?