Empty Space

The other week I attended a one man play called How I Learned What I Learned. Autobiographical, the play’s “one man” was the playwright himself, and the drama focused on his growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of racially divided Pittsburgh. He took us on a journey through his life, loves, poetic and theatrical inspirations, and, throughout, his persistent encounters with overt and covert racism and adversity. It was immensely powerful as we all experienced with him, anger, joy, laughter, and grief, almost forgetting at times that we were not him.

Throughout the ninety minute performance, the actor playing Wilson constantly interacted with the audience, letting members briefly take on the roles of father, mentor, neighbor, love interest. At the end, with most of us teary-eyed and exhausted, he put on his jacket to leave, paused, and pulled out a tiny scrap of paper. Amazingly, he handed that paper to me, and then he left the stage.

The paper said this:

  Are made by old things,
     Come back. Clearly,
            Brilliant as the sun

Recently, I attended a benefit concert for a supportive housing project in Philadelphia. The performer was singer/songwriter, Bobby Jo Valentine, and the concert was held in the sanctuary of the Catholic church I attend. One of the songs had the refrain, Sometimes I just want to go home. Another stated, When you fear to take on the new, you stay small.

This particular Catholic church was built in the 1850’s. Needless to say, beautiful as it was and is, it badly needed renovation. In that process, one of the major murals had so deteriorated, it was totally scraped off. As I listened to the music that evening, I looked around at the remaining murals. Most prominent was Christ on the Crucifix in all his agony. Another was Christ agonizing in the garden of Gethsemene. There were also murals of the Annunciation, Joseph holding baby Jesus, twelve year old Jesus teaching in the temple, and the Ascension. All were colored, in muted browns, teals, and maroons except for the golden haloes over each head. The above mentioned scraped clean mural, by the way, had been of the Nativity.

So then, no more representation of birth existed, just the promise of birth (Annunciation), some teaching and preaching, and lots of suffering. There’s the old church I knew, I thought, and sometimes I do “just want to go home” to all that it has given me, made me.  Then I thought about the empty space where the mural of the Nativity had been, how it left such an opportunity for painting a vision of a new church right next to the old, and a new birth, a Nativity for us all so we don’t “stay small”.

I’m not an artist, but the night of the concert, this is the idea for a mural I came up with: raised hands large in the lower foreground, one set brownish, the other whitish, one set with small hands, the other with large, one set beside some wheat sheaf tops holding up a loaf of bread; the other beside vines holding up a goblet of juice. The hands were offering the bread to a global sea of faces, reflecting the peoples of the earth, some of whom were also holding up offerings or feeding each other. The day and the people needed no haloes; they were already “brilliant as the sun”.

That’s just one vision of the church as the “people of God”. What suggestion do you have to fill that empty space?