So here I am in the green walled bunker I work from deep inside the terra nova central building. Executive Pastor Phil Taylor is being kept in an undiclosed location. He sublets it from cheney. Terra can yet afford our own undiclosed location.

I am sitting thinking about hope. Even the word eats into me. It runs to the edge of my desparation where I wonder if hope will fail. I always hated rollar coasters and lately I feel like that is the track I am on. Blind curves, sensory stunning drops, shrieking all around me. God, I hate rollar coasters! I sure can’t see this through if the ride is much crazier.

And then I am suppossed to write on hope. We pray in the men’s group for a guy, one the the Terra guys friends, who has lost his wife and mom in less than a year. Hope? Are you serious? I’ll get egged!

But something real comes out when things get odd. As one of the early fathers, St. Neil of North Ontario said, “Some get strong, some get strange, sooner or later it all gets real.”

COuld it get real if it was not perfect? Could we find hope in all the real unanswered and painful pieces of life? Could it be real in the unfinished dust of the unfinished floors of the Arts Center? Somehow things got suspended. The light was different, the walls, the way things were talked about that were usually hidden all came out.

So we went upstairs welcomed by Petro, the night caretaker of the Arts Center. We get special key acess to the secret floors. I feel special, and like it. The room is dusty and filled with brick, exposed beams and monument square and Troy rooftop views framed in 19th century windows of various size. Roman is salivating, and it is not just leftover from dinner @ Jose Malone’s. Roman likes Jose’s, and he is Dominacan. Considering I know about as much Spanish as George Bush, I trust that reccomendation.

He was lighting and setting up cameras while Nate, the barrista with the “tell your mom to stop text messaging me” t-shirt, is putting out a painting canvas. I am busy bringing up electrical chords through the stairwell thinking how grateful I am that Deidre Healey runs the Arts Center and how glad I am that I do not set up chords all the time @ Terra.

Shelly came in and sat on the stool and answered questions. She told me that she felt a year ago she would have been able to go through it. She did. She answered all the questions meant to give us some primitive snapshot of the soul. Unfortunately sound problems made it unusable.

Later nights were the same. Nate painting words on canvas and glass my neighbor gave us from his window sales facility. Nirvana and Moby playing on his CD player. We would shift light, seating, cameras and cables all over the vacant floor, moving from building to bulding over the 5 building facility. (The 5 buildings of the Arts Center are neighboring row houses on River Street. They were built independantly and with varying floor heights. Now the artchitectural trick is wedding them into continuous, usable space). Every time we move, we disturb decades of stale dust.

The discussion begins. I ask about advent…do you know and undestand it? It serves as a precursor to Christ. It exists in four parts: hope, peace, joy and love. Yet we know these things as defined by absence…like a circle without edges is not a circle, but only empty space, so too is hope withouth despair meaningless. I want to ask you, I tell them, questions about each. We are all dead in (fill in the blank) years. Don’t let pride get in the way of truth.

The red light flashes. there is a pause. “speed”, says El Directore, who heads down the elevator to allow for this confessional space to be more private, for a moment. The answers come to my mind like sound clips now as I think of it. It was a times where confession met craft, truth and film gave views, maybe personal views, but real views to the absence and presence of advent.

It’ll be in the usual places (search terra nova church under Google video or youtube) and will be shown @ Rev Hall during all the advent services.

So I want to thank Roman, he really ceated the films we have been watching. I think he would agree though, the most important pieces came when people spoke truths, brave truths and had some sense of courage. I so proud of this congregation and those who represent it and their Christ with honesty and faith and love.