When religion closes, people open new paths!
This cartoon by Naked Pastor* with just a few strokes he manages to say a lot. On the right we see the entrance to a space called “THE LASTING SUPPER”, that is, “the Last Supper that lasts”. A man in the doorway shouts: “DOORS CLOSING SOOOON!” — “The doors are closing soon!”.
On the left, however, comes a group of very different people: an elderly person with a cane, a person with dark skin, someone with hair blowing in the wind, a person with a rainbow shirt and a person in a wheelchair. They don't seem desperate: they walk together.
This is where the irony arises. Those who are inside speak with the language of urgency and exclusivity - as if faith were a limited event - while those who arrive embody precisely those lives that often remain on the margins of traditional religious discourses. Hayward plays with the tone of spiritual advertisements and with the fear of "being left out", showing how sometimes certain communities talk more about closing than welcoming.
Read with a feminist theological perspective, the scene almost becomes a visual parable. elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza Has often talked about how religious structures can transform into spaces of control, where someone decides who is worthy of sitting at the table and who is Not. yet, In the gospel, jesus' Table was an open place, crossed by fragile bodies and different stories, not an exclusive club with limited access (Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 1983).
The cartoon seems to tell us precisely this: while someone shouts that the doors are about to close, the real community continues to move. And it does so with plural faces, with different identities, with visible fragilities. It is a faith that does not run out of fear, but walks together. A faith that is not based on deadlines but on relationships.
Perhaps this is Naked Pastor's strongest provocation. Institutions may restrict admissions, but people continue to look for each other, to support each other, to build new spaces.
And in that slowly advancing group we glimpse another idea of the Church: not a door that closes, but a road that opens every time someone decides not to leave anyone behind (Hayward, Naked Pastor; Schüssler Fiorenza, 1983).
Because in the end, rather than asking who can get in before the door closes, perhaps the question is another: what kind of table are we preparing, and for whom?
* David Hayward, known asNaked Pastor, is a former Canadian pastor who, through simple and ironic cartoons, lays bare (hence the name) the contradictions of churches and human relationships in the light of the Gospel. Discover our comments on his cartoons ongionata.org/tag/nakedpastor/
