Day One
I’ve always been quite enamored of the 10,000 hour rule. It’s the supposed rule of thumb that doing something – whether it’s writing recipes, or replacing car engines - for 10,000 hours brings a certain level of mastery to a subject. It’s an idea that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. But, the idea comes from an article first published more than forty years ago in American Scientist. At the conclusion of a paper about chess grandmasters the researchers wrote:
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade's intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions.
This article launched a whole body of psychological research about practice and expertise. The overwhelming conclusion being that expertise takes time and dedication above all else including natural talent.
If you do something 40 hours a week, for 52 weeks that’s a little more than 2,000 hours. So - if we follow this 10,000 hour experiment - approximately five years of full-time dedication to a subject is the sweet spot. If practice makes perfect, it’s when you’re five years into practicing something that you start to achieve a level of expertise. But, for the greatest of chess grandmasters - that level of mastery is only possible after a decade’s work, closer to 50,000 hours than 10,000. Mastery requires practice and dedication. And sometimes demands weird things from us, too. I claim to be an expert in almost nothing. But, there is one thing that I’ve poured tens of thousands of hours into: the Stations of the Cross, the fourteen artworks that tell the story of Jeus’s death from his condemnation by Pilate to the placing of his body in the grave.
In my work as a liturgical artist, I’ve created ten different Stations of the Cross series of artworks. I created my first series in 2010 and my most recent in 2022. Twelve years. 10 series. 145 individual artworks. The creation of each series takes hundreds of hours. Days, weeks, and months of work poured into each of the ten series. I don’t claim to be a master, but I have immersed myself in this very particular way of telling the Passion story for many years and have learned some things along the way that I think are worth sharing, something that I’ll be doing here throughout this Lenten season here on this blog.
I first became interested in the Stations of the Cross because of how deeply visual it is as a devotional practice. I first saw them sculpted into the walls of cathedrals in Germany when I was a teenager, but saw more modern adaptations in the Roman Catholic churches in South Louisiana where I sometimes attended mass with my grandparents. I soon realized that, for many Christians, the Stations of the Cross are a place of healing. A place of sanctuary within the sanctuary. A place to encounter a God who knows unbearable pain too.
The Stations of the Cross visually depict moments in the Passion story. In the traditional Roman Catholic version there are fourteen stations. This version includes scenes like Veronica wipes the face of Jesus which is an apocryphal story and part of Roman Catholic tradition, but not based in the Gospel. Catholics in the Philippines use what they call The New Way of the Cross which dedicates an entire station to the penitent thief. These depictions of the Passion vary widely in medium and context. The Stations of the Cross are sometimes sculptural and carved into the walls (or otherwise part of the architecture) while more modern Catholic sanctuaries might have stained glass or painted versions. Whatever the medium, when displayed in a physical space, the person praying the Stations of the Cross moves from depiction to depiction, station to station. Central to this experience is the physical movement from one moment in the story to the next.
The Stations of the Cross emerged as a devotional practice to imitate the pilgrimage made by hundreds of thousands of Christians through the Via Dolorosa, the path supposedly taken by Jesus through the city of Jerusalem as he carried the cross toward Golgotha. Today, that path begins where the Antonia Fortress, the military headquarters built by Herod the Great, once stood and ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a total distance of around 2,000 feet. The route that pilgrims take today dates back to the eighteenth century when consensus began to emerge on where exactly these things happened. Nine of the stations are outdoors and in the street, while five of the stations are inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Stations of the Cross are meant to replicate this pilgrimage through art. By contemplating fourteen paintings (or sculptures, etc.) which tell the Passion story, a person can experience the journey with the cross through the heart of Jerusalem. But, the Passion story isn’t just about Jesus’s journey with the cross. It’s a story about suffering in every age, in every place. Jesus was born in the most ordinary of circumstances, in poverty and obscurity. And he died the same way. The death of a common criminal. So, what does it mean to love and worship a God who died on the cross?
For me, it has meant living with the Stations of the Cross, using those fourteen moments in the Passion story to tell other stories about human suffering, suffering in our midst.
If I had to sum up the thousands of hours I’ve poured into making Stations of the Cross artworks, it would be with this: you can’t fully understand the Passion story if you can’t also see and hear it in stories of suffering right here and now. Over the years, my Stations of the Cross series have addressed the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Syrian uprising, the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality, mass incarceration, mental illness, climate change, the crisis at the U.S./Mexico border, the plight of refugees around the world, and the ongoing COVID pandemic. I will be posting paintings from these series every single day during this Lenten season. I invite you to follow along as I share artwork and stories from the years I’ve spent living with the Passion story.