Money Talks

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? -Gabrielle Roy

Suggesting the church could function as a Third Place (the place of community that is neither home nor work), the workshop leader asked us to take out a five dollar bill and look at the fine print on the side of the bill showing Canadians at winter play – hockey on the pond, learning to skate, tobogganing. My middle-aged eyes had a hard time with the tiny text, but when i got focussed, i was delighted to read this:

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We had three places – the school, the church and the skating rink – but our real life was on the skating rink.

This sent me on a quest to see what other quotes are on Canadian money. i discovered that we put out a Canadian Heritage banknote series between 2001-2004. Check out the Bank of Canada web page (you’ll have to poke around a bit to find the series, but once you do, scroll over the bills, and all kinds of elaborations pop up – www.bankofcanada.ca).

i am not a student of money (seems i can’t hang on to it long enough to be collector), but i wonder if Canada is the only nation to have quotes and images from our artists on our money? For the record:

$5 – the above quote from Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater and the image of children at play;

$10 – “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow/between the crosses, row and row,/that mark our place, and in thy sky/the larks, still bravely singing, fly/scarce heard amid the guns below” from John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields. The image is a Peacekeeping scene.

$20 – “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” Gabrielle Roy, and images are by Haida artist, Bill Reid – Raven and the First Men, and Spirit of Haida Gwaii

$50 – from the UN Declaration on Human Rights, this quote: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and the image is Barbara Paterson’s statue of the Famous Five women who made sure that Canadian women are considered persons

$100 – “Do we ever remember that somewhere above the sky in some child’s dream perhaps Jacques Cartier is still sailing, always on his way always about to discover a new Canada?” from Miram Waddington’s poem, Jacques Cartier in Toronto. The images are of exploration: a canoe (is anything except Maple syrup more Canuck?), maps, radar.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? Our money talks, and says something about who we are as a nation.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? Can you think of some arts that have helped you to know a culture (your own or another’s) more deeply?

Have a look at the Canadian money in your pocket/purse. What does it tell you about what Canadians value and celebrate?

Have a look around your church, both inside and outside. What does it tell you about what Christians value and celebrate? (below is the Jubilee Church in Rome)

If you were designing a new building for your congregation, what would it look like? How would you communicate visually what Christians value and celebrate? (below, a different kind of church)

You Can Always Go...Downtown

The Presbyterian USA Old Stone Church in downtown Cleveland is a graceful old beauty, almost lost amongst the skyscrapers of finance. I say “almost” on several fronts. Location, location, location – Old Stone Church fronts onto Public Square, which is a combination park, impromptu concert venue, and bustling public transit hub. Beyond that, Old Stone is offers a subtle mix of traditional Christianity (some of their windows are Tiffanys) and arts offerings such as weekday yoga and their own art gallery, managed and animated by Beth Giuliano.

Currently, The Gallery at Old Stone boasts an installation of photographs and text by students from three schools: Euclid, Ohio, Manassas, Virginia and Sierra Leone. Deeply moving, as these young people reflect on their identity, what helps them succeed in school and what difficulties they face getting an education. The Gallery at Old Stone is committed to a strong vision to exhibit local, regional and national artists whose art speaks to the downtown core and its vitality. The gallery seeks artists who strive to be an active part in the dialogue towards the city’s faithful revitalization. (See the church’s website at www.oldstonechurch.org for more info.)
In our conversation, Beth and i noted some similarities between Cleveland and Winnipeg – particularly the challenges of our respective downtown cores (what some of us like to call “historic neighbourhoods”). Out for a walk near my hotel last night, i was struck by the quiet: storefronts boarded up, an absence of pedestrian and vehicular traffic...i walked for blocks and couldn’t find even a corner store to buy a copy of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper whose title has always appealed to me. We spoke of people we know in our respective cities who are afraid to go downtown, particularly after dark. i’m in a hotel on Euclid Avenue in a section of street that has had a great restoration and make-over, including the installation of a wonderful transit corridor. Alas, construction took so long that many shops closed up, and the area, it seems to me, is struggling a bit.

Later in the day, i rode the double-long bus called the Healthline out to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and i was struck, as i often am riding public transit in Winnipeg, that i was the only white person on the bus. Which set me to thinking about the fears we have about downtown, and how aggressive panhandlers are named as a problem, and sometimes even gangs, but rarely do we (at least in Winnipeg) talk about race as a factor in the downtown’s struggle. Americans are pretty forthright in naming White Flight, the exodus of white folks to the supposed safety of the suburbs and shopping malls. We Canadians mostly like to pretend we have no race problems. But the face of our downtowns, and the faces we see on public transit, tell us something.

Are you afraid or even wary about your downtown?

Do you use public transit? If not, why? If so, what do you notice about who is riding with you?

What role might downtown churches play in a city’s faithful revitalization?

What would a “faithful revitalization” look like to you?

Open Up

Bev Orr of Saskatoon’s St James Anglican/The Refinery (www.refinersonline.org) told me about a minister from a very conservative background who, in his retirement, has taken on a job auditing some city employees. This new context, where nobody treats him like The Minister or The Pastor, has made him realize how isolated he was all those years in the church. In his new setting, there is no pretence, no fake politeness – and he’s lovin’ it. He says, “I can’t believe how big my God is getting. And I can’t imagine how big my God is going to be.” Bev said, “It just sent chills down me, because here’s this guy from this very narrow place, and he’s just doing this:

She went on, “And that’s what we’re doing here, too, at The Refinery. For everybody that comes, whether a congregation member or a community member, it just makes their God get bigger, or their world view open up. ” Formerly the parish hall of St James, the congregation decided to welcome community artists to use the space, and well-used it is, from yoga & tai chi & meditation classes to live theatre, visual arts and book launches. The line between sacred/secular is erased. Thank God.

It seems to me that drawing lines doesn’t work so well with a God notorious for coloring outside the lines, that the desire for purity, for separation, doesn’t serve religion well. It’s the impulse that gives us the nasty fundamentalism that leads to Inquisitions and the oxymoron of “holy war.” i’ve been thinking about church as space, which is leading me to think about church architecture. On a recent trip to Spain, i was awestruck by the Cathedral of Cordoba, not so much the Cathedral as its earlier incarnation as a mosque. Mercifully, the mosque (or mezquita, as it is known there) did not get the full Christian make-over, and much of it is still intact, including some 580 amazing pillars topped with red and white candy-cane arches. In its days as a mosque, the doors would stand open to the world. Visually, the eye would follow the forest of pillars out into the massive courtyard, where the vertical theme continues with orange trees. Other doors opened out onto the market place, a reminder that all aspects of our lives are holy – possibly even something as mundane as buying a piece of fruit or a pair of shoes. All of this was by purposeful design to blur the sacred and the secular, or perhaps even to unify them. While medieval churches were similar, the mezquita’s Christian make-over came later. It shut up the doors, some permanently, and the sense of airiness, the sense of expansiveness, was sealed off and lost. How, when and why did Christians start building places of worship as fortresses, or sanctuaries removed from the real world?

If someone unfamiliar with Christianity/religion were to look at the outside of your church building, what would they see? What lessons might they take from the architecture?

What does your building communicate about God? About your congregation?

What changes could you make to your building to blur the line between sacred/secular, inside/outside, us/them?

Sacred Space

April Fool’s Day seems a fitting day to begin a Sabbatical. i hit the road to the Benedictine community of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, not too far from a sign for Lake Wobegon of Garrison Keillor fame. i’ve been working through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict, which offers a cycle of daily readings of the old saint’s rules for Benedictine monasteries and Chittister’s insightful commentary on the rule.

St John's Abbey church

Chapter 52 of Benedict’s rule is The Oratory of the Monastery, and emphasizes that the place of worship is a place set aside. Chittister offers the advice of a creative writing teacher: “Write every single day at the same time and in the very same place. Whether you have anything to say or not, go there and sit and do nothing if necessary, until the very act of sitting there at your writer’s time in your writer’s place releases the writing energy in you.” It is only by making space for a thing, whether the thing is writing or an encounter with the Holy, that the thing can be experienced.



The church where i live and work, like many in the United Church of Canada, has undergone a renovation to make the sanctuary more user-friendly for the performing arts. Multi-purpose space is all the rage, and makes utilitarian sense. After all, we worship once a week, not four times daily like the Benedictines.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides?

mosque/cathedral of Cordoba

The Roman Catholic cathedral in Cordoba was one of the world’s most beautiful mosques before the reconquista, the program to wrest Spain back from the Moors and secure the country for Christianity. For three centuries of Moorish rule, the mosque had been a site of worship and community in a city where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side. The mosque was once a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims, second only to Mecca itself. When Cordoba was conquered, the mosque was slated to become a cathedral. And so, plunked in the middle of one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful spaces with its more than 800 marble pillars and astonishing mosaic, tile and inscription, is a cathedral. A cathedral that would have been alright on another site, its own site, but here looks like a carbuncle. This embarrassing bit of Christian imperialism is only somewhat softened by the fact that the mosque stole its pillars from a Visigoth church, who in turn had stolen the pillars from a Roman temple. The concept of co-existence didn’t have much traction during the Spanish Inquisition.

But what of today’s temples? i recall the excitement in the Toronto of my youth when the CN Tower was built – then the world’s tallest free-standing structure. But it wasn’t long until the TD Bank built a monolith of its own – you guessed it, taller than the CN Tower. These are temples of another empire whose enterprises also aspire to world domination.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides? Is interfaith sacred space possible, and, if so, how will we get there?