Sanctuary Easter Video

I know—that isn’t the most exciting name for a project. But exciting or not, it was an incredibly fun and rewarding project to work on. Essentially the Sanctuary community told the story of the Passion of Jesus from the garden to the cross; they did this primarily through narration, and a few of them added some pizzaz to their storytelling as they embraced the characters they were. We used The Message translation of the Gospel according to Mark, and the community threw in some of their own personal touches to the script as well.

We undertook this project for a couple of reasons. The first being that storytelling is so important to our life as a community. Not just the stories we tell each other, but the stories that we tell and participate in in the broader communities as well (eg, municipal, provincial, international). And the story of Jesus is so well known and very core to our community, that it simply felt right to enable them to participate in the telling of that story, especially at the time of year this was released (the video was released on vimeo.com and facebook.com on Good Friday 2018). So, for the month of March the community under the guidance of myself (Lyf) recorded sections of the Jesus story and then I edited them together. I had a picture in my head of what this could look like and I was pleasantly surprised that it looked almost exactly as I pictured it. What a gift.

The second reason for this project is simply that engaging in a creative activity, no matter how small that engagement may seem to be, is vital to the overall health of our community and to the individuals within this community. Our current cultural and technological landscape provides us with a great (albeit equally dangerous) opportunity to share our creations so broadly. Being able to share this on Facebook and Vimeo (soon it will be on YouTube as well) meant that over 1,000 have seen the link and over 400 people have watched this video. Even going back as recent as 15 years ago, something like this just wasn’t feasible.

I am looking forward to new and exciting ways of engaging the Sanctuary community through multifaceted arts projects! Stay tuned for more.