Opa's Gift

I have a crucifix in every room of my house. One was a gift from my in-laws, one belonged to my uncle who had Down syndrome, another comes from Mexico. The one in my kitchen was attached to a wall rosary that was 6 feet long. But the one I love most hangs right beside the front door.

That crucifix hung in our home when I was a child and was a gift from my paternal grandfather. I always remember it hanging over the doorway in my parent’s bedroom in Amsterdam and later on in Canada, but I’m not sure why it was there because we didn’t go to church.

After my parents split up the crucifix ended up in the bottom drawer of my mother's dresser. When I left home, I took the crucifix without asking. I don’t remember why I felt the need to have it. I just did. And I don’t know why I didn’t ask if I could have it because my mother would surely have given it to me. I hung it up in my new home but in a somewhat hidden spot. I didn’t want to look “too religious.”

This particular crucifix consisted of two separate pieces. The cross portion was made by my grandfather who happened to be a carpenter. But the metal corpus had come to him while he was on a journey.

During WWII my grandfather had been arrested by the Nazis. I don’t know why and it’s unlikely I will ever find out. The War was not something we were allowed to talk about with my grandparents. We weren’t taught that this was wrong, there was just an unwritten rule that it was not done.

Somehow my grandfather escaped from the Nazis and he went into hiding. Some cousins suggested he hid in a convent in northern France. Perhaps he hid closer to home. We will never know for sure. But at some point, after the war ended Opa returned to Amsterdam, and as the story goes found this particular corpus in a bombed-out building in Rotterdam.

In my twenties I went through some very difficult times and the crucifix went back into a dark bottom drawer and stayed there for a long time. Sometimes I would take it out and look at it as I found it rather beautiful in a melancholy way. I wondered who the original owner was and what had happened to them during the war. I imagined my grandfather finding the corpus and carrying it home with him. Was it still with its original wooden cross then? How did my grandfather feel when he drove the little nails into the wood to attach the body to the new cross?

Eventually, I returned to the Church and I resurrected my crucifix from its tomb in the bottom drawer of my desk. It was dusted and blessed and hung in a place where it would not be overlooked by anyone in my home. Wherever it journeys in the future I pray it will always be in a visible place, sparking conversations around its origins but even more so about Who it depicts.