Surveying More Cruciform Objects

Once years ago I was talking with the chaplain of our local university’s Episcopal Campus Ministry who had, for reasons I can’t now remember, invited me to lunch. She was new on the job, new in town, and new to me; in the course of the hour we spent together, I learned quite a lot about her, including a good bit of romantic history, which confidence I hadn’t actually invited, but people do want to tell you things sometimes.

At any rate, we had finished our lunch and walked back to the Campus Ministry house when my companion observed, pointing to the cross on the front of the house, that she’d never really liked crosses all that much. She saw them as symbols of oppression.

All that to say that I have not been exactly insensible to the existence, out there in personal-belief-land, of — how can I put this? — diverse theologies of the Cross.

The cross above, for example: what can we say about it? Those curlicues which seem to arise organically from the bronze-wire medium suggest the offering-up of childhood despair at the fate of a succession of beloved Slinky toys. Or perhaps the maker is one of those people who have straight hair but wish they had curly hair, or curly hair and wish they had straight, so that for this believer the Cross becomes a simulacrum of unrealized, and ultimately unrealizable, longing. The substitution of a blue gemstone, secured by another wire curlicue, for the corpus acknowledges God’s role as rock and fortress, although I don’t know who would build a fortress out of turquoise.

From Totally Crosses

Meanwhile, there is this:

Now, in this cross we have abandoned the abstract and the suggestive for the representational and the narrative.

Scenes from the life of Jesus Christ decorate an elaborately designed lighted wall cross. At center, Jesus sits behind a mirror, and when switched on, Jesus is illuminated by a divine pale light.

When the light is off, we see ourselves. When we turn the light on, however, the countenance of the Savior becomes divinely apparent. Does He exist behind our faces? Is He in fact our own hidden identity? Inside each of us does there lurk a Christ-figure longing for recognition? These are the challenges with which this cross confronts us.

From Aspen Country

And finally there is this cross, with which it is difficult to argue,

uncluttered as it is with any evidence of unpleasantness, only the little valentine heart motif invoking the warm and comforting country-themed stencilled decor of the early 1980s, in which geese also figured prominently. Which is odd, because I can’t think of many things less comfortable than coming face-to-face with a live goose. Perhaps the allusion points to the Lord’s sufferings at the hands of His enemies, albeit in a veiled and indirect manner.

This cross does seem to have received its own clean-lined and uncluttered stigmata, the symbolic resonances of which I find myself at a loss to unpack.

From Cross Member Crosses

All crosses:
[Rating: 33/100]