Journey to the Heart

Familiar sites, new narratives serve as sacred Stations of the Cross on Good Friday 2023

BY MICHELLE HISKEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDI RICE

Sixty years have passed since the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church, but on Good Friday 2023, 76-year-old Rev. Dr. Robert McAdory remembered that time well as he carried a cross in a pilgrimage through downtown Birmingham. Back then, McAdory was 16, and his parents had taught him to avoid places, people and behavior that could get him into trouble with white people. Segregation blocked doors to Black children and families, and other doors like college never opened for him.

This loss confronted him as he and 40 worshippers of many faiths processed to landmarks of suffering and inequity in Birmingham today. On streets of brutality and bloodshed during the civil rights movement, the group sang and prayed as they traced Christ’s journey to a sacrificial death for all humanity. They were joined by others who live outdoors along the route, or in makeshift shelters.

“We need more people and all races to do this,” said McAdory, retired pastor of Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Bessemer, who was particularly moved by the discomfort of carrying a large wooden cross for the first time.

“Jesus bore the cross alone. If we don’t bear the cross, there can be no crown. Everybody must be willing to take up the cross.”

“The Kingdom of God as it is now”

Created by Birmingham’s first Episcopal deacons, the 90-minute liturgy of reflection, prayer and singing covers 15 blocks, from Linn Park to Kelly Ingram Park. It winds through Birmingham’s financial and civil rights districts, honoring the suffering of the poor, unhoused, criminalized and racially oppressed.

This sacramental journey took root almost 20 years ago during Lent 2004. Ordained among the diocese’s first deacons two years earlier, Louise “Lou” Thibodaux of St. Thomas Episcopal Church was mired in inertia after the sudden passing of her mentor, The Right Rev. Furman Stough.

“We seek to follow you into the streets of this city, once called ‘Bombingham.’ We pursue your footsteps into the places where people continue to suffer from injustice and oppression, from their own sins and the sins of others, from things done and undone. In so doing, we pray that, mindful of the needs of others, we can be your hands and feet in this hurting world, instruments of your reconciling grace.” Opening prayer, 2023 Stations of the Cross

“I had to do something, and had always felt like the stations were chasing me,” said Thibodaux, now 78. A retired occupational therapist, she believes daily living can be sacramental, that God is right there for anyone who opens their eyes and heart. As she helped prepare stations in 2004, she recognized the divine in marginalized groups in Birmingham.

“Where Jesus falls, I thought about the ways that people fall in our society, and one way is people fall into addiction,” she said. “When Jesus is stripped of his garments, there are people we know who have to run away from war in their country with only the clothes on their back. Their suffering connects to Jesus in that way.”

Creative community service had driven these first deacons to ordination. “Pioneers of marginality” is how one describes the group. “Working on the edge of the inside,” is another. “We were all looking for a way to live out our calling that had not been had not been available to us before,” Thibodaux said.

Some wanted to make her written liturgy vivid and experiential, to give participants “an appreciation for the deep need for empathy in a society that doesn’t have much of it,” said Deacon Mark LaGory of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. “Lou conceived of the traditional Stations of the cross in a new way, by understanding our encounter with the suffering Jesus in terms of of the suffering of others.

He joined with the Rev. Carolyn Foster, deacon at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and Faith in Community Coordinator for Greater Birmingham Ministries, to determine the route and gathered sponsors. They built on Thibodaux’s liturgy with significant changes in the prayers to fit the pilgrimage.

“Birmingham’s Stations of the Cross brings the needs of the world and the church together where Christ’s redemptive love can be made manifest in public spaces and in public worship,” Foster said.

“It was a journey from my head to my heart,” said LaGory, 76, a retired UAB sociology professor whose research focused on poverty and mental health. “Every station is a heartbreaking challenge for us as Christians. Every station is the Kingdom of God as it is now.”

“Place really matters to human experience,” he said. “Our home, our city have deep meaning for us. Walking the Stations opens up a window or a door to a new way of experiencing our place.”

Hope is a powerful ending message in Ingram Park, which celebrates the journey “from revolution to change.” “Some cities shy away from the problems that they’ve had in the past,” LaGory noted. “Birmingham doesn’t do that.”

The first Birmingham pilgrimage was in 2014. Since then, Thibodaux shared it at a national Episcopal deacons’ gathering, and clergy from Chicago and Nashville have expressed interest in adapting it.

“It would be interesting for folks to look for holy spots in their own community,” said St. Luke’s Episcopal Church Deacon Affiliate Katy Smith, 75, another first deacon and music leader for the service.

In 2023, the pilgrimage was sponsored by St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Greater Birmingham Ministries and Church in the Park, First Presby - terian Church. In 2024, LaGory said the revised liturgy will call out gun violence experienced by children.

The most recent pilgrimage remains imprinted on Ginger Rueve, first-time participant and member of St. Mary’s-on-the-Highlands Episcopal Church.

“Walking the Stations downtown has only encouraged me to continue racial reconciliation work and to inspire others to have these hard conversations,” she said. “It’s not about blame, shame or the sins of our forefathers. It’s about trying to find a way to educate ourselves and learn to understand our true history.”