Stations of The Cross

And as if by magic, the wonderful Catholic Anarchy posts a link to a set of Stations of The Cross that illustrate my last post well. A quote from Nicholas Lang, the Rector of Saint Paul’s where the paintings are hung, gets it just right.

There are those who find them absolutely compelling and profoundly moving and some who find them very difficult to look at. They are reminders not only of the suffering of one person–Jesus, God’s Son–but of the suffering that continues in our lives and the lives of people all over the globe. The events they depict are not meant to comfort us but to make us think deeply about why Jesus was hung on a cross to die and why people continue to be crucified in a variety of ways because of who they are. If when we walk station to station, we do not see the cross in the pain experienced in Iraq and in the Middle East and in Africa and in so many other parts of the globe–including the violence and oppression in our own cities–we have sadly missed the point.

I’ve always enjoyed the stations of the cross as a contemplation. As a child I never got it, but as a teenager the priest explained each station as we went around and spun out the whole richness, beauty and seriousness of their meaning. Does anyone know the history of this ritual? The painter of these stations, Gwyneth Leech, understands this well.

The commission to paint stations of the cross for Saint Paul’s gave me an extraordinary opportunity to explore crucifixion iconography in light of current events. The year that I worked on the commission, starting in March 2004 was dominated by conflict in the Middle East, especially the war in Iraq. The many photographs of the torture and humiliation of captives, whether by soldiers or by insurgents turned the Way of the Cross into a contemporary narrative.

The paintings are also my response to the seeming deluge of images of grief in the press – the grief of families around the world, as well as in the United States, who have lost loved ones to war and to terrorist attacks. I decided to reference these contemporary expressions of suffering and grief that come in the form of newspaper imagery, underlining the enduring message of the road to Calvary and the universal nature of its emotional force.