Orange County Crucifix

230

We didn’t have a retreat today. Instead we got to do spring cleaning on the church… a cavernous affair with stained glass streaming light upon the color treated cement floor. We divided into groups, cleaning pews, windows, confessionals, floors and various accoutrements. I decided to work the ladders cleaning the windows, as everyone else was scared of climbing them. I hate ladders. They wobble and I’m sure I’ll die falling off one; I’ve always had dreams of that. Javy and I would move the ladder around he’d clean the bottom of the windows, I’d clean the top, 2 to three stories higher than the slick cement below. The walls braced the ladder well, and I wasn’t too scared after the first few.

We were done, and I looked at the Crucifix hanging mid air above the altar, it was dusty, and I asked the overseer if we could clean it. She agreed, and we moved the tall ladder precariously through the aisle, a few times almost toppling over.

The corpus was a beautiful bronze casting, 2 times the size of a normal body, perhaps more, majestic, silent, beautiful. I almost cried as I cleaned it. I took care of the hands, as a medic would, I daubed the feet, with soft cotton, embracing them in my hands, and kissing the memorial wounds. I cleaned down one side and then up the other. I cleaned His chest, wondering what it would have felt like in real life, strong, proud, to the very end or clammy and suffocating, fragile as a real human. I cleaned his crown, getting pricked and stabbed by the intermeshed five inch thorns sharpened to conical points. My thin hands couldn’t even fit through to clean his hair, the thorns so dense, so painful.

I wish I would have been alone. I wish I could have poured torrents from my eyes. Been overcome by the sorrow and joy. I wish the bronze of my memory was in front of me now.

247am