My First Cornerstone

A GUY I KNEW was starting a coffeehouse, in the old YMCA building downtown. I was over there, with some friends, a few weeks before the grand opening. On one of several telephone-wire spool tables (de rigueur for coffeehouses in the 1970s) there lay a few issues of what even this small-town boy could see was an underground newspaper. The countercultural scene at that point was winding up for its long slow sad fade-out – transition, rather, to the mainstream (i.e. people were still writing and recording the soundtrack of future car commercials). A very-late Boomer, I was used to arriving after the party was already over and gone. Not that the counterculture had ever been much of a presence in our Midwestern town – no sit-ins or riots, no concerts other than “C” or “D” level bands at the local college. The religious revival among the hippies, like everything else, seemed to be happening on the other side of the planet, though bits of “the Jesus Movement,” had finally been trickling in via books and music, this soon-to-be Joy of a New Dawn Coffeehouse – and the underground Jesus Freak newspaper I happened upon there.

I’m pretty sure one of the issues I paged through that day was Number 29. The faded yellowed copy I pulled from the archives the other day has a photo inside that I very much remember, of Resurrection Band in front of this huge stack of amps and speakers – something that would have really jumped out and stuck with me. The colors weren’t faded then: not by a long shot. In a few more issues, the paper would switch to full-color, but that summer they were still printed three-color “split-fountain” (as I learned when I was taught to do it myself a few years later, reprinting articles as tracts). It was a half-rainbow as blue faded into yellow into red, with loopy whimsical cover art and that logo in the now-quaint then-hip Arnold Boecklin type-font that still takes my breath away when I see it.

By the time I joined the staff, the art department had outlawed Arnold Boecklin as part of a move to drag the publication – kicking and screaming – into the Eighties. I’m not sure they came to embody the Eighties quite as well (which may not be a bad thing, after all.) But they sure nailed the Seventies. I’ve seen plenty of old underground newspapers since then and I can say with confidence that Cornerstone came to leave them all in the dust. Just by outlasting the competition – for reasons not insignificant – this particular underground newspaper was able to assimilate and perfect the best of an era. The paper became indisputably, as the slogan said, “The National Jesus Paper.”

The moment, for me – when I first encountered Cornerstone – didn’t seem nearly as significant as it does now, as I strain to try to remember the details. I can just barely picture myself, looking like an extra from That Seventies Show, off to the side of this under-construction coffeehouse, paging through carnival-colored papers – unaware I’d stumbled upon a personal destiny of sorts, a version of the moment when a figure appeared to brothers on a beach and shattered their routine forever with the charge: “Follow me.”

I probably didn’t even read the articles – the media was the message, as in the case of the Incarnation. The message was this: that the Incarnation had really happened. That God had, in fact, really become a human being after all. Cornerstone confirmed a suspicion that I’d nursed through long teenage years in an increasingly alienating church culture that following Christ was not a matter of hiding from the world, or waiting around doing nothing until Jesus took us out of it. Following Jesus meant engaging the culture head-on, mind, body and soul, creatively, with compassion and intelligence, and a paradoxical mix of humility, audacity, seriousness and joy.

That’s a lot to take in at a glance, but it was enough. I’ve been working out the implications of that vision of the Incarnation, and my own implementation of those implications, ever since. Not that it’s been a straight line from there to here – hardly. But through all the hairpin turns, detours and dead-ends, what has brought me back and sent me on my way was the same vision that got me started on this journey. Often the reminder comes in the form of that characteristic audacity, for example, when somebody asked that simple question “What if we turned this magazine into a music and arts festival?”

Indeed – "What if?" We’re still working on our part of the answer – as a part of that ongoing project of working out the implications of the Incarnation. And if many people who have come to know and love Cornerstone Festival have no memories of when Cornerstone was a magazine, or “The National Jesus Paper,” or that typewritten hand-out cobbled together on a magical missionary tour of a busload of Jesus Freaks thirty-five years ago this Spring, it’s all part of the same story – a still-unfolding story that still surprises us, too. Even now, all these years later, the prospect of a new issue of Cornerstone still makes me giddy as a teenager. When we get the program back from the printer, I sit and turn the pages with a very familiar sense of wonder and gratitude. The media is still the message, and the message is still the same: the Incarnation really happened. Joy to the World. The Kingdom of God is upon you. And, as always, "Follow me..."