In 2007 the Wicker Park Grace community created original art representing the Stations of the Cross. Traditionally, there are 14 stations, each representing a moment on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion. We added a station 15 to represent the resurrection and complete the story.

The idea of creating these stations was to bring the ancient story of Jesus’ death and resurrection into contact with the contemporary stories of our lives.

Detailed digital images of all the stations are posted on blogger at: WPGrace, Stations of the Cross

If a station has a scripture associated with it, the scripture is included as a comment in the blog (scripture says…)

Working your way through the stations, praying and meditating on each one, is considered to be equivalent to going on a pilgrimage to the locations in Jerusalem which are spoken of in these stories.

Several of the pieces were interpreted/created by individual artists in the Wicker Park Grace community, but others we designed to be community art projects, like the one shown here. This is Station 3: Jesus Falls for the First time. It is a 30″ x 24″ collage on canvas board which was created by eleven people.

Seeking to place ourselves in the Jesus story, we asked ourselves, “What things cause us to fall down in our lives, and what things help us to get back up?” This grew out of the question of what might have helped Jesus get back up when he fell repeatedly that day as he carried his cross to the place of his death. The images and words to the left of the cross push it and us down. The images and words to the right are pushing the cross back up and inspiring us to keep standing back up too.