For these last few stations, I found that I had very little to say.  Sometimes tragedy is best dealt with in silence.

A line of people stood looking at a small table.  It was empty, but they’d been told that there was a television on it, and asked to describe that television.  “Use the phrase, ’it is,’ at the start of your description,” John Poole told them.  Hesitantly, people offered their phrases.  “It is black.  It is old.  It is a tube television.”  John then asked them to describe the television with the phrase ‘you are.’  “You are too far away from the couch.  You are heavy.  You smell like cigarettes.”  That last phrase stopped John in his tracks, it was so evocative of childhood, of grandmothers who set their ash trays on the top of warm TVs so that the stale smell of cigarettes rose like incense.  Finally, he asked them to describe the television with the phrase ‘thou art.’  “Thou art laughter when I’m feeling lonely.  Thou art conversations with my friends.  Thou art rest when I’m tired.”

We were in Chicago for the Fully Alive! retreat, practicing improv in the sanctuary of Grace Place church.  The retreat was the brainchild of myself and my colleagues Jonathan Melton and Stacy Alan.  Jonathan and I are both fans of Sam Wells’s book “Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics.”  My own fascination with this book led me to Second City over the past summer, where I enrolled in a week long intensive course.  So Stacy’s suggestion that we shape this year’s Provincial Gathering around the theme of improv seemed like the continuation of a great and important pilgrimage.  At the same time, we knew that it would take some work to connect improv with Christian theology, while allowing retreat participants a chance to experience the joys of actual improv acting.  What Sam Wells needed a book to accomplish, we vaingloriously hoped to do in two days.

We were deeply fortunate to have John Poole there to teach and lead.  John has been an improv actor for years, and he chose exercises that illuminated the life of faith.  To call an object “thou art” is to invest it with meaning and power, and this leads to a sense of the sacredness of all things, even televisions and toasters.  More, it helps us to understand our relationship to the material world, and this deep awareness of objects and things is essential to Christian spirituality.  As Simone Weil said, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

John was a wildly inventive retreat leader.  He made up two important games on the spot.  One was a sermonizing improv game.  A handful of people stood in a line.  He asked the audience for a random suggestion, and someone shouted out “poodles!”  He turned to the line of people and told them that they would now preach a sermon about poodles.  Pointing at people in turn, he had them each add a word or phrase to the sermon, playing off of what the person who went before them had said.  He used the same method for a game in which participants pretended to be parents trying to argue their children out of becoming Christians.  Many arguments against Christianity were raised, many of which showed the shallowness of our culture and ended up making Christianity look quite good.  We were sharing Grace Place with the homeless community, who were eating breakfast downstairs.  One of the improvisers said, “If you become a Christian, you’ll have to hang out with the homeless, and might even get to know their names.”

We found, as the day went on, that we simply didn’t have enough time to do everything we’d hope to do.  We would have benefited from more time set aside for theological reflection.  The material was so rich that we needed a week of improv, not a weekend.  And we also needed time for relaxation and community building.

We got some of that on Saturday night, when we split up into groups and went off to dinner, and then to an Improv Olympics (IO) show.  We had gathered a diverse group of students and young adults together.  There were international students from India and China, music students from Wisconsin and Ohio, theology students and environmental studies majors from Illinois and Michigan.  We had artists and engineers, medical students and poets.  And we came from a diversity of religious backgrounds: Episcopalians, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Baptists, Buddhists, and Hindus, as well as those who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious.  The IO show was almost guaranteed to surprise and challenge assumptions.  For some, moments of crudity in the improv we saw was liberating, for others it was simply offensive.  When the improv troupe asked for a suggestion from the audience, someone from our group shouted out “eucharist!”  We were treated to a thirty minute show of improvisation around the theme of eucharist, and for me this became almost anthropological – I was fascinated by the way that the actors picked up the theme and changed it, exhibiting a variety of understandings of the eucharist, most of which were radically different from my own.  If you want to understand how the church is perceived by secular society, shout out “eucharist” at an improv show.

My first reaction, when I sat down to pray this station before painting it, was “no, not yet!”  I felt like I’d moved towards this moment all too quickly.  Jesus is already being nailed to the cross?  Really?  But I’ve just begun to sit with these stations, to immerse myself in them, and my understanding is still so small.  And, as a painter, I’ve just begun to understand what I’m painting.

While painting these stations, I’ve gotten increasingly more chaotic and less controlled.  The early paintings, which probably don’t feel that controlled, were really labored over.  They were thought more than felt.  But in the last few paintings, I’ve begun to trust myself more, to pull colors off the palette out of instinct, to give the paint more freedom to move about the paper.  I don’t know if this has made for better paintings or worse, but I do know that I’ve learned a freer process.

And, in an odd way, I think that the stations are all about freedom.  Dying daily to self is a way of seeking freedom, a setting fears of inadequacy aside, of caring less about being judged by others.  Always the harshest judgement comes from ourselves.  Always its our own broken and bitter persons that mock and beat us.  For us to find freedom, these mean spirited and negative aspects of our personalities have to die.  They fight this death, and we fight it, because we don’t know who we are without them.  Yet its from this tension and this battle that the central paradox of the Christian spiritual life arises.  By allowing ourselves to be nailed to the cross, we discover a path to freedom.  It’s through our wounds that we are healed.

This tenth station presents a challenge to me, since I’ve been portraying Jesus as naked throughout this entire series, which means that the effect of seeing him stripped of his clothes is somewhat diminished.  I’ve been painting him naked because that’s the way I feel when I enter into periods of great suffering.  Naked, exposed, my dignity undefended.  That, of course, is part of the difficulty and challenge of suffering.  It leaves one naked before a world that may or may not be sympathetic.

So I couldn’t paint him being stripped of his clothes.  I decided, instead, to try to give him an expression that could be read as naked – an expression on a bruised and ruined face, a face that injury has stripped of its beauty and peace.  His lip is swollen, his skin purpled, and there’s a look of consternation, maybe even horror, in his eyes.  Then, because I was looking at Hans Silvester’s photos of people from the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, I decided to paint his face in a manner similar to the way they paint their faces.  They are better artists than I am, and the effect on my painting isn’t nearly as striking as the way they decorate their skin.  But I wanted to contrast Jesus’s expression with a symbol of peace, so I painted white crosses onto his cheek.

I hope that this hints at the power of redemption.  The cross is an insane symbol for the early Christians to have adopted, since it symbolized torture and suffering and the brutal use of power.  But the early Christians understood that everything could be redeemed, without exception.  So they set out to redeem an obscenity, the torture instrument that had killed Jesus himself.  They claimed it as a symbol of love and peace.  Let it serve as a reminder that the suffering we experience as we walk to our own personal crosses can and will be redeemed.

“He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.”  It’s a harsh thing to say about God, but not the harshest thing in the text for the ninth station.  “He has besieged me and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes.”  Who is this God who causes pain?

I’m of many minds about this.  I have, of course, felt this way about God at certain points in my life, and I think it’s commendable that the stations give voice to such a heartfelt and authentic complaint.  At the same time, I think it reflects an understanding of God that I don’t really share anymore.  I think that God journeys with us through the dark times, but doesn’t cause them.  And if prayer is a reaching towards God, I can’t conceive of God shutting it out.

Yet the dark times do reach for us, and I wanted to weight my painting with a creeping feeling of inevitability.  No one wants to enter into this darkness, although many spiritual teachers say that it’s purgative, that it will help us let go of the parts of our souls that need to die.  Maybe a time spent in darkness will help me to let go of pride, or shame, or the memory of some distant hurt.  But I would rather free myself of those things without the darkness, if only I could.