The Storefront Jesus of Ridgewood Place
by Naomi Solomon
Storefront Jesus looks out onto not very much for the spraypainted son of all creation: some parked cars, some litter, a tree trunk almost naked of branches, and, on the far side of a chain link fence, the blank wall of one side of the Ridgewood Wash-N-Fold. He looks tired but calm, as if tired is the normal and unsurprising state 
of things, and the wind rattling his metal grating is like the prelude to a sigh that never gets released: a long, sharp intake of breath that leaves him slightly shaky, all puffed up with no place to go.
There are days when the deep sunflower yellow of his sprayed-on aura looks cheap: the gaudy shine of a thin-paged, gilt-edged bible in the hand of a street-corner evangelist, coming with the expectation of pamphlets filled with Doomsday cartoons and too much italicized text. Those days Storefront Jesus seems abandoned, as if behind His corrugated gaze there might be only dust and empty soda bottles, a broken folding chair or two. As if He is a flimsy patch over a hole and not the modest wrappings of greater things hidden within. As if passer-by should look down and walk faster, caught somewhere between the uncomfortable solemnity of witnessing a stranger’s funeral procession and the driving need to not be preached at, not today when there’s a glower to the sky and the parking lot is full of honking cars.
Other days there seems to be a true glow as the light hits the yellow paint and glints off the bits of exposed steel like the quick, intense shake of a spray can, as if Storefront Jesus were reminding the other churches in the neighborhood, the huge institutional-looking churches, the traditional ones with all the stone walls and pointy bits, that there is glory to be found in the small things, too; that if you just make a small place holy, it will be holy, too.
Then maybe the congregation can see and make this glory as easily in a storefront as in a cathedral, and maybe they have already fixed it so that when those doors roll up and Jesus disappears above the entry way, the storefront church is flooded with light, light glinting neatly off of simple polished pews and hardwood floors kept just so by proudly bent backs and strong arms, light shining off an altar of family rosaries and household reliquaries, lacquered ceramic vases filled with whatever is brought in this week: flowers or tree branches, carefully twisted pipe cleaners, tinfoil blossoms held in place with copper wires. At the back an elaborate organ hidden away like an inheritance, like a million mouthed thank-yous to generations come and gone, which through an incredible feat of soundproofing the congregation has managed to keep a massive and gleaming secret, out of the neighborhood’s awareness.
[img via Naomi Solomon]
