The True Cross

This being the eve of the Feast of the Holy Cross, I thought I might post something related to that subject.

First, a reader on the weekend kindly writes in response to Providence at Ground Zero:

Concerning the Cross at Ground Zero, if you follow Dawn's links you'll eventually get there, but here's a shortcut.

It's worth visiting the link above, though I can't figure out the original source/writer from this page. I found this moving account of the steel cross at Ground Zero:

I actually met the man who found it.  He was introduced to me by the Fire Department Chaplain, Father Brian Jordan.  Frank Silecchia is a huge, gentle man with hands three times the size of mine.  Born in Brooklyn of a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father, he is a simple man with native eloquence and Faith to move mountains.  We stood in the muck and mire midst the spirits of shattered dreams between the cross and the remains of the North Tower as he told me his tale.

Many of the buildings surrounding the World Trade Center had been crushed by the falling debris. In the hours and days following the massacre, rescue workers risked their own lives in the desperate hunt for survivors.  This brought Frankie into one of those tottering shells, the Customs House, Building 6.  Eventually he reached the basement, and there, in the center of the building, was a crater, and rising up out of the crater the steel cross, fully erect.

It was the morning of the third day.  For twenty minutes he stood there, and wept.

It had been part of the North Tower, and as that structure came down, this cross had passed through the roof of the building,  plummeted through floor after floor after floor, down, down, down until finally coming to rest where he found it.

Another story of a Cross takes place on August 21, 1991. The scene is the area outside of the Russian parliament building, which was surrounded by a 100 tanks during a coup attempt against the new government. The tanks were facing thousands of peaceful demonstrators who were supporting the encircled holdouts, including Boris Yeltsin, inside the building. A group had handed out 4,000 New Testaments to the Russian soldiers poised to storm the parliament.

Father Alexander Borisov had spent the night praying for his country. When he learned from a foreign radio broadcast that three people had been crushed by tanks, he decided to hold a service to commemorate the dead. On the morning of August 21, he made a large wooden cross and, accompanied by the choir from his church, went to the place where the victims had died. The blood was still on the asphalt. For some reason, the rain could not wash it away.....

After the memorial service,

Just as he and the choir were about to leave, they received news that the putchists had been arrested....

Passing through the troops and guards, along with the choir he made his way to the parliament building:

Moments later he emerged on a balcony, where he took a microphone and preached to the tens of thousands assembled there. The choir ... then sang a joyous and grateful hymn of praise to God.
[from Candles behind the Wall by Barbara Von Der Heydt Eerdmans, 1993]

And finally, this from the Orthodox service of the Holy Cross:

Come, ye people, and looking on this marvellous wonder, let us venerate the might of the Cross. For a tree put forth the fruit of death in Paradise; but life is the flower of this Tree on which the sinless Lord was nailed. Reaping incorruption from it, all the nations cry: O Thou who through the Cross hast laid death low and set us free, glory to Thee.

Of course, the Cross of Christ is no mere earthly or political symbol. It stands alone in history and in the cosmos as the place of our redemption. The crosses that we build, place in memorial, or in front of which we pray amount to our reaching out to the True Cross, to which all the nations have been drawn.