CHAPTER 1

SOMETHING HAPPENS

Here in the east end, it’s nothing new to see a rundown European church – Polish, Ukrainian, Italian – suddenly turn Asian, its faded signs freshly painted over in Korean or Vietnamese. Along Barton Street, everything from Satan to cannabis has its house of worship. In this neighbourhood, churches loudly promise everything from cancer cures to “glorious rapture” (better, I guess, than the regular rapture). They are just a few of the many enterprises that explode into life, like aliens from a more cheerful planet, cleaning and painting the empty storefronts, putting up a brave face for months or years, waiting for their offerings to catch on, their sparkly display windows gradually turning dull and dusty, before eventually turning off the lights for good, covering the windows with a fresh set of newspapers and heading home.

The first I saw of the Resurrection Church was graffiti: a few words hovering around a logo that looked different every time I saw it drawn with magic marker or brush or spray can. Sometimes it looked like a math problem, sometimes like some weird musical notation, sometimes like a single staring eye.

THEY RETURN!

Just this past summer, on a hot day down by the railway tracks, I had been searching for praying mantises with my friend Sam Shirazi. We had gone down to the end of Markle Avenue, just off the rarely used train line that curved through our neighbourhood into the north end; a no man’s land of belching chimneys (mostly gone cold) and vast catwalked factories and crumbling parking lots. Markle led to an abandoned chain factory in the corner of an empty parking lot rin