Prayers for peace

One year ago, I stood in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I pressed my hands to the stone, closed my eyes, and asked: What is your story? Images flooded my mind: fire, smoke, incense, screams. I pulled my hand away. On either side of me women faced the wall, heads bowed, swaying slightly or standing completely still. Some women pressed their entire bodies against the stone.

The wall’s crevices were crammed with tiny pieces of paper. More than a million prayers in every language are tucked into the wall every year. Local charities receive faxed, emailed and mailed notes and place them in the wall. Rabbi Rabinowitz receives hundreds of letters every year addressed simply to “God, Jerusalem” and he places those in the wall. Twice a year, the Rabbi and his assistants bury these notes in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

If you had one chance to write a prayer, what would it be?

On a used plane ticket from my pocket, I wrote “peace” and added it to the crumbling paper mortar between the stones. I put my hands to the wall again and looked up. In a cranny above me a pigeon roosted among green tendrils of young plants. She cocked her red-ringed eye down on all of us.

For months I have been folding paper doves to create a one-minute animation for Christian Courier’s Fall campaign. The use of paper pulls towards two larger stories: the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the origami cranes of Japan. It is eerily prescient to have begun creating a visual in the spring that speaks to a war in Israel none of us could have predicted, but it makes the message of hope even more urgent.

Paper and wire

Paper, birds and trees are images that have represented Christian Courier for years. When we began discussing how to create this year’s campaign, Angela reminded me that I had talked about bleaching newspapers, folding origami birds, and hanging a hundred of them from my ceiling.

As we explored the idea of paper, birds and trees, I discovered the sculptures of Naoki Onogawa. Onogawa folds hundreds of tiny, tiny cranes and fastens them to sculpted trees. In his artist statement he writes about how folding origami cranes is a tradition with a long history. After World War II, people the world over began shipping their origami cranes to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Crates of them. Literal tons of paper cranes. All of this, because of one 12-year-old girl.

‘Peace on your wings’

Sadako Sasaki was two years old when the atomic bomb fell at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the year the first CC (then called Contact) was mailed. The radiation gave Sasaki leukemia cancer and at age 12, the doctors gave her one more year to live. She knew the senbazuru story: if you fold one thousand paper cranes, your wish will come true. Her wish was to be whole again. Her friends gathered to help her. Towards the end of the one thousand cranes, Sasaki changed her wish to one for world peace. She said, “I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world.” She died in 1955. When her story spread, the whole world began folding cranes. Over 70 years later, thousands of people still leave wreaths of cranes at her monument in Hiroshima.

Cranes don’t only show up at her monument. Onogawa visited the Tohoku region in Japan in 2011, after the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster. “In the midst of all that I felt and saw, I happened to notice a bundle of one thousand paper cranes placed at the wreckage of a local school building swept away from the tsunami. I was taken aback by the sight of it.” Now he creates tree after tree after tree, “with the intention of giving origami cranes a place to belong.”

In our Fall Campaign animation, “Be Our Wings”, belonging goes two ways. Your hands are the place that the dove of CC belongs: at the same time, it is a reader who carries one dove of hope into the world.

Every year we want to offer you a story that holds integrity to where CC has been and where it is going, a story you can find yourself in, a story with cracks and mouths you can slip your own prayer into.

Well-creased prayers

“Peace” and “hope” are intangible concepts of a reality we crave. Humans turn instinctively to the tangible: mailing a prayer to God via a wall in a divided city, shipping one thousand wishes for peace to a country that still has the taste of nuclear bombs in its mouth. We needed to use paper – the physicality of Christian Courier – to draw it into the tangible realm.

When I explained my concept to fellow artists, they told me that I could accomplish the animation in a much shorter time if I used computer software to replicate one paper bird. But that is not how Christian Courier works, and that is not how hope and peace are drawn into our midst. We ask nothing less of our readers than to carry light – hope – into every domain of your lives, to write your prayers and fold them into every crack and crevice of history and time. We are crazy enough to believe that together – writers and readers – our actions add up to influence our neighbourhoods for Christ.

The animation we made is the result of months of conversations and brainstorming, hours of folding close to 500 tiny doves, two days of gluing them to a metre-high metal tree, and hours of taking pictures one at a time to create one minute of video.

What effort is it worth, the story we’re part of?

One prayer

Is it paralyzing to face the spectre of war with only words? Yes. But it is not new. The doves in the video are folded from front covers over seven decades of Christian Courier’s journalism. The issue you hold in your hand is only one, riding the backs of over 3,000 previous printed issues. For longer than I have been alive, writers in this publication have cast their words like pebbles into the mouth of conflicts too big for any one person to resolve. There is no shame in being small.

When Angela talks about faith-based journalism, think of each page of Christian Courier turning into a handful of doves. Or think of every monthly issue disseminated to mailboxes throughout North America, each one salting a circle of conversations with hope. Faith requires a daily release: our best efforts, entrusted to God and to you.

Every small action you take – sharing a copy with your friend, renewing your print subscription, donating five dollars, sending a letter to the editor – is your own way of folding another bird, forming another issue. The future of this publication is in your hands, and the hope of the world is at all of our fingertips. If you had to speak one word, what would you say our hope is for?

Peace.