Friends,

Behind the altar are two sets of beautiful new benches, and if you pull those back there are four discreet doors that open if you give them a good push. The far right one houses materials for the Ghanian Church that uses our space on Sunday afternoons. The far left one houses things for my Day School Chapel services. Until this week, the contents of the middle two were a mystery to me, as I simply never took the time to open them up and peek inside. When I was going through some things with Susan Harris, who is currently one of the leads for the altar guild, we opened one of these and I found three beautiful crosses and a pair of brass candle sticks.

I am deeply curious about these things, and the discovery of them are so new, that I haven’t had a chance to talk to the people who know far more than me! Most of what is to come in me imagining, and if you are one of those experts in St. Luke’s history, know that I look forward to be corrected by you.

The largest cross is made of wood and has no discernible markings on it. It is constructed in a a way that it appears designed to be pushed against a wall while on top of an altar. Prior to the changes made int he 1979 prayer book, altars were typically against the wall with the congregation and priest facing the same direction during the Eucharist. My bet is that this cross was on top of our altar when it was against the wall, or something like that.

The smallest cross is made of brass and appears to be in very good shape. On the back there is an inscription that it is in memory of “Leslie Joan Anderson 1955 - 1957”. When I read it, the dates punched me in the gut. If you google her name there is an ancestry page in Spanish about her that identifies her father as Colonel Ferd Anderson Jr. and her mother Florence Anderson who lived in Alexandria and worked in the nuclear program in the 50’s at the pentagon. He died in 2013 and his services was held in Lincoln Nebraska at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Their parish administrator is working on getting an e-mail address of his surviving children, so I can send them a picture of the cross. I think that cross is going to move to the cabinet to the far left. We need a cross to be on the “big” altar during the Day School Chapel.

The third cross is the largest and must be made of thick plates of copper, because the patina on this thing was insane. When we picked it up bluish grey dust just sort of went everywhere. Susan Harris took some polish to it. It is able to be redeemed, but it is going to take some serious effort. I just took a dry rag to it just to get the dust off, and you can just start to see ornamentation and very small cursive engraving on the bottom portion. I cannot wait to see mysteries this cross reveals.

There is no doubt that these things were stored responsibly and with love. Each was wrapped in nice cloth and stored in a safe place. Maybe post-renovation there was no longer a use for them with the new configuration and they were stored there as they were too meaningful to throw away, and then largely forgotten. As time went on, fewer and fewer people were left in the community that remembered the stories of these things, and the corrosion on the metal cross slowly began to build up and covered up the lettering on it’s base.

These things are meaningful because of the stories that accompanied them. Especially, if they are used in worship the meaning grows with time. People may say something like, “I remember when I was little and grabbing that chalice for the first time thinking I was so grown up.” They could be oblivious that the chalice was dedicated to a lost parent, sibling or child, but the meaning compounds none-the-less. Taking these things back out and using them resurrects their power to hold meaning to some degree. I am not sure if anyone remembers when Ferd and Florence Anderson went to Church here and when they lost their daughter, but I wonder if the Day School students will remember the shiny cross looking down on them from the big altar years from now. With use comes risk. What if it falls, or gets carried away?

Drawing out meaning, especially when something needs to be healed generally requires risk. We see this all of time in Jesus’s ministry. Jesus loves to fail at getting his rest in the Gospels. He is always going off into the wilderness to catch a break. What ends up happening is his departure from civilization draws those who are poor and hurt to the wilderness, because they are the ones desperate to receive healing and good news. Would you take a risk to be healed if you were well? Of course not. Paradoxically, those least capable of traversing the wilderness take the risk, and are rewarded with an audience with God. In my favorite Gospel story in Mark 5, a woman afflicted with twelve years of hemorrhaging, risks everything just touch the hem of Jesus’s cloak, and he stops everything to address her in the midst of the crowd. Christ’s presence has a habit of drawing out the broken things, so in the open they can be healed.

The hurt we cherish the most is often kept safe in that easily forgotten cabinet in our soul and it is developing a patina. That corrosion has been developing over time in that safe, forgotten place and it has made the story of how we got here in the first place impossible to read. There is hope for resurrection, but first it needs to be drawn out in the light for people to see. There is risk in doing so. Stories will be remembered, some of them painful. People may not treat it the way we want it to be treated. However, once it’s in the light it can be cared for, and it may even find some healing, even if it’s not the healing it imagined.

Blessings,

Nick