Notes from the Seminary: Chapel Anniversary, Holy Week, Good Friday Workshop on Jonah’s Sign
by Marc Delannoy
The Toronto Chapel, March 2022
On Palm Sunday, April 10th, 2022, the 20th Anniversary of the Chapel of the Congregation of the Christian Community in Toronto was celebrated. I am sad not to have been present but am very pleased to see the photos displayed in the foyer and the book produced for the occasion.
Interestingly, I see in many photos my home congregation’s priest, Rev. Susan Locey. Year after year, month after month, she has been so steadfastly coming to my home congregation in Ottawa by making the five-hour drive from Toronto to offer my tiny affiliate community the Act of Consecration. What wonder to see how Susan was so instrumental in bringing about the building of the Toronto chapel for the local congregation! There I see Susan, in photo after photo, presiding step-by-step the chapel’s becoming. There she is with a decorated shovel in hand, breaking the earth to mark the beginning of construction. There she is at the setting of the foundation stone in the part of the chapel upon which now rests the altar. There she is surveying the chapel building among other priests, notably Rev. Oliver Steinrueck, who grew up in the region, Rev. Hartmut Junge and Rev. Werner Grimm. What was my surprise to learn that Rev. Grimm, who was ordained in 1955, had worked with the original founding priest of the Toronto congregation, Dr. Koehler! Dr. Rudolf Koehler was one of the 48 founding priests first ordained almost a hundred years ago. With admiration and gratitude, I salute Rev. Locey’s work, past and present. How compelling to see how the Toronto congregation with this chapel construction taken up under her leadership in the year 2002 would ultimately become the home congregation, so generously open to the use of its facilities, for the present Seminary of The Christian Community in North America!
Rev. Susan Locey, Rev. Oliver Steinrueck, Rev. Werner Grimm and Rev. Hartmut Junge in 2002.
During Holy Week 2022, workshop mornings on the theme of forgiveness were offered by the Seminary to all members of the congregation, as well as students. Especially clearly stands the picture of Cain and Abel’s story: two brothers, both offering sacrifices to God on altars. Yet when one of the brother’s offerings was not accepted by God, anger ensues. Will Cain succumb to his anger after his deep, almost existential disappointment? God himself speaks to Cain, warning him of “sin crouching at the door” (Gen 4:7) and yet giving Cain an opportunity to rule over his passion - like a king, in God’s eye, it was suggested by Rev. Patrick Kennedy. Tragically, this was not to be, as Cain was overcome by vengeful desire and became a murderer.
It is thus with Cain that sin is first presented in the Bible, and not, it turns out, during the Adam and Eve story with which we are so familiar. This implies that, at the dawn of human history, a tendency towards vengeful justice pressed itself into our inner natures – a tendency deeply ingrained in human psyches and working in the world – through us all – even today. Very memorable for many was a walk, in groups of two or three, to talk together about two powerful images: the blood of Abel, spilt on the earth and crying from the ground to God’s ear, juxtaposed with the blood of Christ Jesus spilt on the earth on Golgotha. “How do these pictures work in your soul?”, it was asked. Fruitful discussions ensued.
The Altar Painting of the Chapel in Toronto, April 2022
On Good Friday, instead of the workshop setting, Rev. Kate Kennedy gave a talk in the chapel on the theme of Jonah’s Sign as expressed by Jesus not long before his passion, when he was asked by what sign he came. Of what does Jonah’s sign consist? When God asks him to prophesize in the faraway foreign city of Nineveh, he decides not to obey the godly command but to flee literally in the opposite direction! (Don’t we often do just this when called by the Divine?) Jonah’s path is downwards: down to the shore, down in the boat he sails in, down in the sea he is plunged in, down in the great fish’s belly and down to the waters’ very depths! What great suffocation! What great darkness! Is this Jonah’s – and Jesus’ – sign? And Jonah prays from the depths of the Sheol – the realm of the dead – for God’s mercy and grace…
Is this not a path known to us all – of being “down in the dumps,” of “being down”? Don’t we all know this condition? We can understand it at many different levels, including at its highest expression as historical and spiritual fact. This was Jesus-Christ’s passion from Gethsemane to Golgotha. His three-day death is the same amount of time Jonah was in the whale. The motif of “going down” is expressed in our Creed, for Christ was “lowered into the grave of the earth.” In the Sheol, as Jonah was, Christ intervened by becoming “the helper of the souls of the dead,” again from the Creed. Ultimately, Christ Jesus’ resurrection was a forceful upward motion from one realm to another – from the realm of the dead to the realm of the living. Likewise, was Jonah ultimately spewed up from suffocation and darkness to freedom and light on the shore by the great fish through God’s fateful intervention.
Rev. Kennedy pointed to the altar painting of the chapel – painted by Ninetta Sombart - and spoke of the gap between the lower painting with the crucifixion and the upper painting with the Resurrected One. Other Christian Community altar paintings I have seen in Ottawa and Montreal similarly combine two paintings, one lower and one upper, with these exact themes.
This gap expresses, she suggested, the Holy Saturday moment even as the others are Good Friday and Easter Sunday moments, respectively. In this gap intervened Christ’s creative power. With like power, we can count on him in the downward course our lives sometimes take, to be our helping guide through the shades that surround us. This is even more the case in the downward course all our lives eventually take as we approach death’s finality.
In the Toronto chapel’s altar paintings, a faint glimmer of the yellow Easter light infuses in a downward motion the crucifixion scene of the lower painting. Also, a luminous cross is seen in the halo light behind Christ Jesus’ head in the upper painting. Thus, Easter light infuses even the darkest depths of Jesus’ cross-bearing. Likewise, the cross of your life - just as the Good Friday cross - is and will be lifted and illuminated by his radiant presence.
Of note, is the pool of dark purplish blood at the bottom of this Good Friday painting: the spilt blood on Golgotha, that evokes, among other images, Abel’s spilt blood. God hearing the cry of Abel’s blood calls upon Cain and asks about his brother. Cain answered: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” A similar call is spoken by God to us all, across the ages, even as Jesus’ blood cries out, from two-thousand years ago: “Will you be your brother’s keeper?” You can be, through Christ Jesus, for he unites all, as brothers and sisters, drawing us to his Easter light through the path of his cross.
Our Author:
Marc is a Waldorf teacher living in Ottawa, Ontario with his wife, Monique.
Living abroad for four years in the recent past, Marc asked himself the following question: "Where do I find substance for my life?" The answer to this has led him to the
Seminary in Toronto.
This is a blog entry by a student at The Seminary of the Christian Community in North America. These are posted weekly by the student editorial team of Marc Delannoy and Silke Chatfield. For more information about our seminary, see the website: www.christiancommunityseminary.ca and for even more weekly podcast and video content check out the Seminary’s Patreon page: www.patreon.com/ccseminary/posts.
The views expressed in this blog entry do not necessarily represent the views of the Seminary, its directors or the Christian Community. They are the sole responsibility of its author.