DART Stations of the Cross Meditation Guide

Dear Friends,

our downloadable meditation guide for riding the rails this good friday is accessible in our links section to the right -- click on DART Stations of the Cross Guide and you will be able to download and print a PDF to take on the journey. Please note the instructions on the guide to bring supplies/check for the Dallas Aids Services, as well as a cup, camera, and journal to record and share your experiences.

peace to you this Holy Week,

cdp, community pastor, churchinthecliff.org

PDF Coming Today... For Real

So Scott and I and others are re-learning the humble lesson of how long last minute tasks take to do when collaborating with a group. The PDF downloadable meditation guide is ready, I just sent the wrong 'final draft' to scott last night so he was unable to post it. In my defense I had just gotten back from the doctor to have my stitches removed and said doctor declared that I have a 'wound infection' and so I am on some drugs and likely not thinking straight. The pdf is done and beautiful and will be up later today. if you would like it in the meantime please contact me cdpinkerton@gmail.com.

The downloadable meditation guide is already moving folks even in its draft form. I share here some feedback from a friend who previewed the guide. she is living in another city and engaged in a new church plant:

oh, corina, this is so beautiful.... it makes me want to scrap all our holy week liturgies and just do this. thank you for sharing it.
truly, reading about your stations in the last few days has made me pause and think about the churchiness of our worship... on the one hand, i love it (after all, one of my cpe colleagues christened me "liturgy girl")... on the other hand, i think of all the room outside the liturgy there is for creativity, for reaching out, for re-thinking what church and church space can be. my congregation thinks of itself as a missional one, outward facing, and yet so much of what we do is invite people in... why not go out to them instead? what might that look like?
we are a mere infant church, only months old, and so at this time it seems appropriate to go with what is known--too much, too new, too fast is a recipe for burnout... and yet i want to take time to pause, in this holy week and after it, to think about how we might hit the pause button on our churchiness and see how else we might co-create in our worship with our living god...
thank you, friend, for inspiring these thoughts.

And I say thank you to all of our writers, artists, volunteers. God is on the move, and PDF meditation guide will be here soon.

love to you all

cdp, community pastor, churchinthecliff.org

Action Meditation to benefit Aids Services of Dallas

Our downloadable meditation guide will be availalbe tomm (Wed). I wanted to post the intro to the guide today to give people more time to gather donations for dallas aids services, (aidsdallas.org) before friday. see below for requested items. peace, cdp

DART Stations of the Cross
dartstations.blogspot.com

DART Stations of the Cross is a community response art installation. It is presented by CityGallery - an interdisciplinary group of artists, poets, philosophers, theologians, social activists and musicians that uses the city of Dallas as their gallery. DART Stations of the Cross explores Good Friday through meditation and mass transit. It is an opportunity to move through the final hours of Jesus’ life and enter into Jesus’ journey — living it, reflecting on it, and seeing how it impacts our life now.
Participants are encouraged to provide a response through images and stories from riding the rails. As a public art experience, Dart Stations of the Cross will be on Good Friday, April 10, between 4-8 pm. Participants are invited to join Church in the Cliff, an emergent congregation in Oak Cliff, for a guerilla Good Friday service at 7pm at Westmoreland Station before returning via train to Mockingbird Station.

Note: the last train to catch is the 5:54 pm if you plan on both disembarking at the 8th and Corinth stop
(our ‘action meditation’) and participating in the liturgy at Westmoreland station at 7 pm.

Things to Bring for the Ride:
Journal to capture reflections or stories
(please share via our CitygalleryFlickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/1061070@N21/)

Digital Camera for images & video to share via our CitygalleryFlickr group

Checkbook for Contribution/Material Goods (new socks/underwear, laundry detergent, toilet paper, toothpaste, facial tissue, razors, & deodorant) to benefit Aids Services of Dallas. These items will be collected by a volunteer at the Dart Stop at 8th & Corinth.

Open Eyes for an Art Experience that is a Life Experience

Press

Morning Everyone,

I just got off the phone with Keri Mitchell, managing editor of the Advocate magazines and the article on us in the cliff dweller/advocate is out! it is called Holy Railin'-- check us out at http://www.advocatemag.com/oak-cliff/magazine/Holy_Railin.html

I also paste the body below. Scott, Lara, Sara Jane and I are checking in today to finalize our pdf down loadable meditation guide and also to prepare for our good friday guerrilla liturgy at 7pm at Westmoreland. Please contact me or scott with any ideas on this, we would love everyone's ownership of the day. one week from today. peace to you all, cdp

Each year on Good Friday, it was tradition for City Church to turn its art gallery space into an experiential version of the Stations of the Cross. “It’s an opportunity, in a contemplative way, to walk through the final hours of Jesus’ life and enter into the story of Jesus’ life and death — living it, reflecting on it, and seeing how it impacts our life now,” says Courtney Pinkerton, community pastor of the church, which is now called Church in the Cliff. When the church moved from Uptown into our neighborhood, it began meeting in the Kidd Springs Recreation Center and lost its permanent gallery space. So when the discussion turned to Good Friday, “somebody probably just made a joke and said, ‘DART Stations of the Cross,’ and the next thing you know we were like, ‘That’s a great idea,’” says Church in the Cliff’s artist in residence, Scott Shirley. Between Mockingbird and Westmoreland are 14 DART rail stations along the red line, and the church is creating a meditative guide for each station that corresponds with one of the 14 Stations of the Cross. Participants can either stay on the train or follow the guide to occasionally disembark and have an “art experience,” Shirley says. (For example, one station shows the scene where Jesus is stripped of his clothes, and people can exit the train to donate clothes to a nonprofit.) Some public art will be detailed in the guide, but other stations might have “guerrilla art,” Shirley says, where not even the church will know beforehand what artists have planned. “Having that sense of uncertainty where you don’t know if something is set up or not — an art experience or experience of life? — that’s something that shocks people into considering their environment,” Shirley says. “The idea is people are then forced to reconsider spaces they normally take for granted, and at the same time reconsider issues.”
Find the DART Stations of the Cross mediation guide at churchinthecliff.org. The guide can be followed anytime during Lent, the Christian season leading up to Easter Sunday, but the public art and “guerilla art” experiences will be on Good Friday, April 10, between 4-8 p.m.

Love as Sublation

I have been reading G.W.F. Hegel lately and have been struck by his idea of love as sublation. Sublation, for Hegel, involves a movement of cancellation, preservation and elevation. Love, he says, is identity in difference; that is, the differences between the two people (or more) are overcome in a relationship of love. Some things are cancelled. Some things are preserved. All are elevated.

Lent is, liturgically speaking, a purgative season; a time of cancellation, if you will. Lent is often characterized as a time of dying to the self, but perhaps that is putting it too strongly. Lenten practice is not about eliminating the self but rather purging the self; cancelling some things and preserving others. The goal is resurrection; a time of elevation, if you will.

If God is love, then in Hegelian terms she is a movement of cancellation, preservation and elevation. God, as the active power in our lives, is purging us; cancelling some things, preserving others, and elevating us in ways we could have never foreseen. Let us make room for love.

Entering into this creative process of experiencing the Stations of the Cross has invited me into a spiritual and social exercise. Writing the meditations was a process of "entering in" to the journey or a collective consciousness of what "entering in" means. This will be the first time I have ever entered a Dart Station or taken a ride on it. Ironically I pass one of these stations everyday and scan the faces of those who do and create my own stories about their journeys and what causes them to "enter in." Meditating on the suffering Jesus rattles, inspires and challenges me on a personal, spiritual and social level. How then does the suffering we encounter in community and throughout the world speak to the act of "entering in?

In working on the guide, I'm digging into the notion of reparation. Growing up Baptist, this was not a word that was used. Sure, there was plenty of guilt, but we just told God we were sorry and that was that. We were never asked to compensate the victim. In fact, we were told that was not possible because the victim was Jesus and nothing could make up for his suffering and death.

Pope Pius XI saw it differently:

The creature's love should be given in return for the love of the Creator, another thing follows from this at once, namely that to the same uncreated Love, if so be it has been neglected by forgetfulness or violated by offense, some sort of compensation must be rendered for the injury, and this debt is commonly called by the name of reparation.

We owe a debt. One of the ways we can repay it is by taking this pilgrimage of prayer and meditating on Jesus's suffering.

Now, I'm not sure I can buy the metaphysics that makes me responsible for something that happened 2000 years ago. However, it's a powerful thing to contemplate the path to the cross. The way of the world is self-interest. Jesus spent his life exhorting people to choose God's way, the way of compassion and justice. These two ways collide in Christ's death.

Have things really changed in the last 2000 years? There is God's way and the world's way. Most of the time, we're not even conscious of a choice between the two or the implications of that choice. Maybe our reparations are in choosing God's way. Maybe we should compensate those who are suffering now because we do not have to suffer. Maybe our meditation should be imagining a world in which compassion and justice are the rule. Maybe we should, in the words of Pope John Paul II, make the "unceasing effort to stand beside the endless crosses on which the Son of God continues to be crucified."