A rt & Soul
Jo Kadlecek
Witness to Eternity In the last days of 1999, my husband and I traveled to Sydney, Australia, where, as elsewhere around the world, people were bracing for the chaos they feared the new millennium would bring. One late afternoon, the sun setting, we walked from the Opera House as a series of lights switched on across the Sydney Harbor Bridge. With each light, it was as if an enormous hand was writing out a single word: “ETERNITY.” There was no mistaking the letters that had been shaped across the world’s largest steel arch bridge in Australia’s largest city. Nearly 160,000 vehicles cross the bridge daily, connecting commuters and tourists to the suburbs and beaches. The bridge is both the center and the symbol of Sydney, and as 1999 ended, city officials chose to display “eternity” across it. Why “eternity”? Why not “Happy New Year” or, given Y2K fears, “Good Luck”? When the entire world would be watching the televised events from Sydney first because of its time zone, why had Aussie organizers chosen “eternity” to define their celebration? My husband, who had once lived there, knew the answer. He told me that from the 1930s to the ’60s, a strange piece of graffiti, written in white or yellow chalk and always in the same perfect copperplate script, appeared on sidewalks throughout the city—the word “eternity.” For years no one caught the messenger chalk-handed, but around every corner “eternity” greeted them. Hurrying to work, meandering home, people literally stepped on the word. Speculation fueled the urban legend until, some 25 years after the word first appeared on a sidewalk, the reverend of a small Baptist church walked early one morning towards his parish. He saw a slight, gray-haired man bending over, chalk in hand, and recognized him as his church’s janitor. “Why, Arthur,” said the minister, “are you Mr. Eternity?” Startled, the man looked up and answered, “Guilty, your honor.” The newspaper sent a reporter out to cover the story, and Arthur Stace kept
writing his word. He’d rise early, before the crowds; he’d pray and go where he believed God directed him, writing “eternity” every hundred yards or so on the pavement. He saw his mission as evangelistic but never wanted publicity. In fact, he feared it. In 1967—two years before Stace died at age 83—another reporter learned more of his story. Stace had grown up in cruel poverty, landed in jail as a teenager, and shipped off to France as a soldier during World War I. He returned to Sydney alcoholic, partially blind, and jobless. Hungry and hopeless, he went to a Baptist church he’d heard was serving meals. There, he heard a preacher talk about eternity. That single word—“eternity”— rang in his head. He broke down and sobbed. His life changed radically. He’d barely been able to write his own name and “couldn’t have spelled ‘eternity’ for a hundred quid,” he told the reporter, yet, he’d encountered the Person of Eternity and so spent the next 30 years writing the word at least 50 times a day. “I think ‘eternity’ gets the message across,” he said, “makes people stop and think.” That it did, so much so that his word, and his story, stayed in the minds of local Aussies; a statue was erected in Stace’s honor, a documentary film made of his life, numerous poems written about his chalk ministry, and the National Museum of Australia named one of its galleries the Eternity Gallery. Producers of Sydney’s 2000 New Year’s celebration wanted to honor his legacy, impressed that Arthur had “reinvented” himself by bringing meaning into people’s lives. Not only did the word symbolize a local story, but organizers also called it the ideal message for the New Year: “This celebration should be eternal in human life.” We took a photograph of the Sydney Harbor Bridge that night, and today it hangs in our living room, where it reminds me of a broken man’s faithfulness and love for the Risen Jesus, literally written across the city where he lived. When I think of Arthur Stace chalking his eternity “sermon,” I imagine him experiencing a mix of joy and fear—joy in his task, fear of being caught, yet
compelled to continue. According to the gospel of Matthew, the first witnesses at Christ’s empty tomb felt a similar mix of emotions: “...the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples” (28:8). Afterwards, the desperate men and women who had followed a young rabbi named Jesus, now slain, kept out of the public eye, gathering secretly behind closed doors, hoping no one would catch them as they grieved his death. They were guilty by association. If local authorities had murdered Jesus, what violence might await his followers? So they hid. The last thing they expected was a message of hope, and certainly not from the most unlikely witnesses in Jerusalem—women, secondclass citizens who weren’t allowed to testify in court. No wonder the women were “afraid yet filled with joy”—they’d encountered an entirely new reality in the midst of tragic uncertainty. Why did the Resurrected Jesus visit a handful of desperate women 2,000 years ago in a cemetery? To show them his eternal reality. To send them off with a new identity and purpose. To give them hope. He then did the same for his disciples, who in turn led the early church, who then told others throughout the world until the news eventually reached a far-off land called Australia. Many, many years later, a hopeless drunk sitting in a church was given a new chance and a new mission because he met the Resurrected God-Man. And that made a difference for all eternity.
y t i n r e t E This essay was adapted from chapter two in A Desperate Faith: Lessons of Hope from the Resurrection (Baker Books, 2010).
Jo Kadlecek is the author of 10 books and a member of the communication arts faculty at Gordon College.
41