I was all set to write about the anticipation surrounding the final season of “Game of Thrones,” which will begin tomorrow, when the invitation arrived. Would I be interested to see an exhibit that focused on the final days of Jesus Christ? It sounded like a more fitting subject to write about, given the week ahead, and so I went. I hope you’ll find the time to see it, too.
Some 500 volunteers—among them carpenters, electricians and artists—built and installed “Walkthru” in the garden of The Terraces in Ayala Center Cebu. In his message during the opening service, Rev. Macky Sabayle of Bradford Church said the exhibit was conceptualized some five years ago and was inspired by the Stations of the Cross, a tradition more familiar to Roman Catholics than to other Christian groups.
As someone raised by a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, I used to wonder why my Catholic friends had far more elaborate rituals for Holy Week. Some Protestant churches held a Good Friday service; more common was an Easter Sunday service that began in the nippy pre-dawn air and usually ended with a shared breakfast. My Catholic friends had, in addition to Easter Mass, a meditation on the Seven Last Words on Good Friday, Visita Iglesia and Stations of the Cross. (Binignit during Holy Week was something we had in common.)
However, Pastor Sabayle said, all Christians can find meaning in the Stations of the Cross tradition because “it brings us to the core of Christianity: how Jesus Christ died for us.” The commentator Karen Armstrong explored the same point in one of her books. “Christians knew that Jesus Christ had saved them by his death and resurrection; they had been redeemed from extinction and would one day share the existence of God, who was Being and Life itself,” she wrote. “Somehow Christ had enabled them to cross the gulf that separated God from humanity. The question was how had he done it.” (The book in question is “A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” published in 1993 by Random House.)
To compel visitors to imagine what Jesus endured, one of the stations in “Walkthru” features two large wooden crosses. Visitors are invited to try to carry one of the crosses and walk a few feet, which I imagine those with the right amount of muscle and a healthy absence of self-consciousness might do. Two other stations near it show wrought-iron replicas of the crown of woven thorns that Christ’s captors placed on his head to mock him, and the scourge they used to tear the flesh from his back. These intimations of violence have a point. “At the cross,” Pastor Sabayle said in his message, “Christ took upon himself everything we deserved. He died on the cross as our substitute.”
All throughout the exhibit, written messages seek to drive home a personal connection between the Gospel accounts and the guests viewing them. Station 10 urges visitors to think about their families and to pray for “healing, unity and restoration,” if need be. Another station invites visitors to say a prayer of thanksgiving for a person who means a lot to or has done so much for them. At this point in the exhibit, however, it wouldn’t be surprising to find visitors transformed into participants. We may not expect a religious experience at the mall, but this meditative walk makes one possible.
Before “Walkthru” opened, members of the Bradford congregation prayed that those who go through the exhibit would find in it “a place of healing and refuge and rest.” Or as Pastor Sabayle put it: may those who go there “enter broken but go out healed.” Why not go and see for yourself? “Walkthru” will stay open until Easter Sunday in the garden of The Terraces in Ayala Center Cebu.