The cover image this month is by Christian Worthington, a Winnipeg-based Christian artist. If you have any knowledge of painting technique and history, then you have already discerned Worthington has a deep interest in the classics. Still it is not a purely classical painting: the use of light and the texture of the blood comment on the traditional image. That's the wonder of Worthington: he's a classicist and a post-modernist and, most surprisingly, he looks like he's barely halfway through his twenties.
I met Worthington last summer in Winnipeg where I had a play during the annual Fringe festival. The play was housed in a “church.” The Exchange Community Church, run by the Christian Missinary Alliance, is a storefront, with a kitchen, some offices and a sanctuary. On the one side of this church is a bar, on the other a gallery and at the back a traveller's hostel. The church is like none I've ever seen — mostly because it was populated by passionate young people like Worthington. Beards, beads, ribbons, second hand clothes, tattoos, laptops and tall cups of coffee were the uniform. God, salvation, social justice and action were the conversation. Most of the young people I met did not come from churchy families. The Message — to borrow Eugene Peterson's title — was their quest.
The church was open every morning and through it daily passed a steady stream of people. From local down-and-outs looking for help, to artists, musicians, others, just popping in for a visit. Some came to check their emails; others to make use of the wireless service. Some just came to pray, to meditate. In the evenings there were the theatre productions which had rented the sanctuary for the festival run. Neither of the plays had overt Christian themes, though both were stories of personal redemption, one from greed and the other from alcoholism. And after that, going to midnight or later, musical performers, some Christian. The place was always packed; the aroma of brewed coffee a constant. (Phil Wright, the pastor, makes a fantastic cappuccino.)
Though Wright would never refer to his church as part of the emergent movement (subject of this month's feature article by Alex MacLeod) and though the physical plant looks nothing at all like a church, it was one of holiest places I have been, because it was constantly alive, just like the faith it serves.
Christianity is always emergent — most famously when Martin Luther hung those theses on a door, but before that for centuries, and since, as many pored over The Message, and attempted to reinterpret it for their own times.
That has always been the Christian tradition, to constantly renew. Northrup Frye said the Bible is a revolutionary text. He was ordained in the United Church but he spoke those words as a professor of literature. And he meant them literally: The Bible opens with waking, with the birth, and ends with sleeping, with death. In its midst, it encompasses the full arc of life, of love and loss, of myriad challenges and endless blessings.
In Frye's Bible course, one of the exercises, strictly literary, never theological, was to go through our concordances and track the many ways a single image — like lamb, water or tree — was used throughout the Bible. The idea was to see how the same image is used in different ways, how it changes under different speakers, authors and circumstances. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, therefore, has a direct link to the Cross. I won't drag out the lesson, but it makes a good metaphor for the Christian life.
It is the ever-emergent cycle. Happy Easter — He is Risen. Again. May you too be ever-emergent. In Him.
