Glenmary
Home Missioners
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Cincinnati, OH 45246
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Glenmary Challenge
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This article originally appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Glenmary Challenge
Bringing Home the Way of the Cross
Stations created in the 1980s for Glenmary’s Vanceburg, Ky., mission are challenging a new generation to think about the meaning of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
By Karen Hurley
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| Still Amazing!: Charley Campbell, the artist who created a series of contemporary stations, is a member of Holy Redeemer in Vanceburg, Ky. His stations, incorporating Lewis County locales and dogwood blooms (above), continue to amaze—and inspire—the over 500 high school and college students who come to Mass at Holy Redeemer while volunteering at the nearby Glenmary Farm. |
Almost every Catholic Church has a set of “stations” to provide visual images of Jesus’ passion and death as an aid for praying the Way of the Cross. And during Lent, especially on Good Friday, many Catholics now take to the streets of their home towns to substitute appropriate local “stations” in this prayer to link Jesus’ suffering to the injustices in their own area. In my home town of Cincinnati, for example, our annual Way of the Cross/Way of Justice stops at the county jail, the drop-in center for homeless men, a shelter for battered women and so on.
But Glenmary’s Holy Redeemer mission in Vanceburg, Ky., has a set of stations that bring home Jesus’ passion and death in a unique way. Local artist Charley Campbell used the public and private spaces of his community as the subject matter for the stations he created over 20 years ago and which still hang on the walls of this mission church. These stations include the local fire department, health clinic, laundromat, jail, thrift shop, funeral parlor, dogwood trees, and more.
He has given the everyday life of Lewis County a permanent place inside the church, and he has made a permanent connection between what goes on in this impoverished rural community and the central drama of our Christian faith: the dying and rising of Jesus. (There are 15 stations in Charley’s set: the traditional 14 plus one for the resurrection.)
So what effect have these stations had over the years?
Charley, a man of few words, downplays the impact of his art. “They seem to make more of an impression on outsiders,” he says. By “outsiders” he means visitors, including the volunteers who come to the Glenmary Farm just a few miles away,
But he concedes that the Holy Redeemer community prays the stations every Lent and uses the 1993 booklet that he and Paul Ritter, then Glenmary’s communications manager, created. The booklet, as the introduction puts it, invites a wider audience “along a contemporary Via Dolorosa, an untraditional Path of Sorrow, focusing on the societal as well as spiritual suffering in our world today.”
Joe Grosek, Glenmary’s volunteer director based in Vanceburg, says, “The kids who come through the Farm each year are very impressed with these stations.”
All of the 500-plus college and high-school students involved in Glenmary’s Group Volunteer Program are exposed to the stations when they attend Mass at Holy Redeemer during their week of service. Joe says that somebody is always asking, “What’s up with these stations?” “Tell us about these stations.”
And many volunteers take photos and videos of the stations home with them. Some want to know if prints are available for purchase, Joe says, but Charley has never gotten around to that.
Charley, who spends much of his time making stained-glass windows, like the ones he made for the new chapel at the Glenmary Farm, lives in the county with his wife Carol. Their children are all grown and moved away. They have been members of the mission parish since moving to Lewis County in 1972 so Charley could take a job in the glass workshop set up by Father Pat O’Donnell.
Charley loves the places he has memorialized in his stations. And now, he says, “they are pretty much gone.” In fact, he says, some of them were already gone by the time Glenmary Challenge did its 1993 cover story on his stations.
“All of the old houses I used are fallen down now,” he says. “And the old jail is gone, too. I loved that old jail.”
What would Charley do differently if creating the stations today?
“It would be great to include the faces and hands of those at the old folks home,” he says. “I could depict the suffering of God through their suffering.” |
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