"I'm what the world considers to be a phenomenally successful man. And I've failed much more than I've succeeded. And each time I fail, I get my people together, and I say, "Where are we going?" And it starts to get better." - Calvin Trager
Saturday, April 07, 2007 Eleventh Station: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross
This Lent, Christ Church Cathedral gathered a community of artists (and a few of us non-artists)to construct a stations of the cross. We drew stations randomly at the beginning of Lent and got to work. You could use any medium you wanted, and there were a couple opportunities for the artists to gather and share their process during the season.
I drew station 8 -- Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem -- and at some point I'll probably put that one up and my reflection on it. But as we end the Triduum today, I wanted to share one of the most powerful stations I'd ever seen: Phoebe Dent Weil's expression of the 11th station -- Jesus nailed to the cross. You see the image above.
There is much I could write about this piece and what it brings up in me. But I think it best just to leave you with it, the photo that inspired it and Phoebe's words:
"The photograph was taken in the immediate chaotic aftermath of an event of stunning horror inflicted by human beings against other human beings. A kneeling and weeping man tenderly covers the bodies of the dead lying on the ground. There are two guards attempting to keep order: one at the center wearing and Arab keffiyeh who motions towards a grief-stricken boy to keep at a distance; the other, off-camera on the left, whose white glove hinders the approach of the photographer. Between the two guards stands a young man whose impassioned grief can hardly be imagined; the cry of anguish, the outstretched arms, the half-kneeling stance -- all a total-bodily response to the deepest experience of pain and loss with its accompanying despair and anger and questions shouted to God, to the Universe, to all of us, "Look at this! Behold the horror! Why?" Behind him stands a weeping young boyh who reaches out to support him with one hand and comfort him with the other.
"It is a daring move to connect the act of nailing Christ to the Cross with the continuing acts of violence in Iraq that confront us daily in the news media, but the connection for me was immediate. In my interpretive rerarrangement of the photograph I have placed an image of the Crucifixion by the late 16th century sculptor, Giambologna, behind the main protagonist.
"We tend to resort to a kind of psychic numbing to protect ourselves from experiencing the depths of anguish that such horror demands. So, also, with the event of the nailing of Christ to the Cross: a moment of torture of one human being by another, the physical pain, the anguished cry of the victim confronted by the dark forces of the torturer who drives in the nails. The outstretched arms of the victim become the embracing arms of compassion in the face of those dark parts of humanity where compassion is absent. I have transformed the weeping boy who reaches out to comfort the grief-stricken man into an angel."
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"Christ's example is being
demeaned by the church if they ignore the new leprosy,
which is AIDS. The church is the sleeping giant here.
If it wakes up to what's really going on in the rest
of the world, it has a real role to play. If it doesn't,
it will be irrelevant."
- Bono
Episcopalians for 
