I took these photographs yesterday afternoon outside a local Roman Catholic church.
Now, obviously the church intended a thoughtful answer to their question -- it was so forcefully stencilled, after all -- so I pondered long and hard on it. My carefully considered answer:
WHAT IS MISSING?
a) a budget
b) an even rudimentary sense of aesthetics
c) a large statue of Buddha wearing a Santa hat. If I possessed either of said items, I would have definitely taken a picture of them parked in the creche to post because it would have made a most cool visual rebus of sorts.
My official answer is (d) all of the above.
I first saw this visual monstrosity during Advent and figured that, come Christmas Day, there would be a cheery wooden bundle of joy in a manger. (Well, provided the original carpenter did not fashion the Christ Child. If s/he did, then it would look less like a smiling swaddled Lord and more like a mutant chunk of plywood that it really would be kinder just to burn.)
But no. It is more than a week past Christmas now and still the horrible red sign hectors innocent passersby. The creche is ugly and empty. It suggests the sort of place where the Virgin Mary might have abandoned the infant Jesus before going back to her crack pipe. My fingers itch to fashion a curtain for the structure and stick a sign on the outside suggestion homeless people might like to kip there while the weather remains warm at night -- at least someone would get some good use out of it. Plus I wouldn't have to read that awful sign.
There's a hopeful sign on the Catholic church suggesting that it's a safe place for returning Catholics, or words to that effect. Translation: We're desperate. Thrice-divorced? Come on by! Belly up to the altar!
Sorry, but if you can't even spring for a li'l baby Jesus to lay in a fake manager to provide an answer to your own extremely abrasive and ill-painted sign, you don't deserve to survive as a religious institution. You just don't.
If they bring this out next year, I'm not responsible for the Buddha welded with industrial bolts to the wood. Or the arson charges. I'm just sayin'.
2 comments:
If I'm correct and that is Holy Name Church, then I know the priest (married Rebecca and me, baptised all my siblings, best friend of my father, etc...). And if you went into the Church, you would have seen the most elaorate, expensive nativity scenes in the city (or close to it).
Not that that changes anything about the hectoring message. But the answer to the question, you'd find it if you came into the Church, see, which is his point.
You can carry on hating him now.
It is Holy Name church!
I don't hate the guy, but come on...admit it's one of the most homely, miserable creches you've ever seen.
He should at least stick up a sign saying "WHAT IS MISSING?" "COME INSIDE AND FIND OUT".
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