Over the years, I’ve made several videos for my Stations of the Cross series. I’m including here YouTube videos from over the years as well as additional Zoom meditations that were created by myself and in collaboration with other folks over this unusual and challenging Holy Week.
It’s been a profound decade-long experience creating these bodies of work, I hope that they bless you the way that they’ve blessed me.
Stations of the Cross for Syria
The Stations of the Cross in this series take participants on two journeys: one through the death of Christ and another through the violence that has broken out across Syria. Each station incorporates images from the Syrian uprising and as you move through them a historical chronology of the unrest in Syria.
Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration
Stations of the Cross: Mass Incarceration is an attempt for Christians to engage in prayerful reflection and study of the issues surrounding mass incarceration.
The series combines images from the history of mass incarceration in America with those of the last day of Jesus’s life. The Stations begin with the advent of the War on Drugs because at the time of its start in the 1970s there were roughly 300,000 men and women incarcerated in the U.S; today there are over 2 million.
The Stations of the Cross are an ancient devotion meant to ground viewers in the story of Jesus's death, the Passion narrative. It is the story of the execution by empire of a political dissident and it is at the very heart of the Christian faith.
The 14 Stations in this series address just some aspects of the legal, historical, and cultural context of mass incarceration. By pairing events in the Passion narrative with events in the history of mass incarceration, I invite viewers into a new understanding of a God who suffers with those whom we have pushed to the margins of society and hidden from view in an increasingly powerful Prison Industrial Complex.
Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness
Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness addresses the cross-cutting theological implications of mental illness. The artwork in this series expresses some of the experiential quality of mania. As the colors darken, I hope to illuminate the darkness of depression as well as some of the implications for social justice presented by American society’s mistreatment of those with mental illnesses. The narrative shape of the series comes from Kay Redfied Jamison’s book Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. This book shepherded me through the first year after my diagnosis and helped me to understand the central point of this series of work: people with mental illness experience the world in ways that illuminate great truths about the very nature of human existence.
The stations illustrate the words of artists profiled in Jamison’s study of creativity and bipolarity, as well as some mentioned in another of her excellent books, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, August Strindberg, and Virginia Woolf are just a few of the artists included in this series.
This is a Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness meditation with spoken prayers from yesterday’s Maundy Thursday observance at Trinity Lutheran Church in Norristown, PA.
And, here’s a Zoom meditation on Stations of the Cross: Mental Illness led by the Rev. Mitzi Plummer Johnson from Saluda and Columbus UMC in Asheville, NC.
Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys.
I was thrilled to join this Zoom meditation on Stations of the Cross: Refugee Journeys led by the Rev. Sarah Hedgis and the Rev. Claire Nevin-Field of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (Philadelphia) and myself.