Fashions of the Cross

By Barbara Groark

I’ve been getting ready a slide show of ourselves to rotate automatically in the background for some time and someplace over reunion weekend. As I looked at each person in the yearbook, I wondered about the stories they could tell by now, whether comic, tragic, or in between. How many births, deaths, joys and complications have there been in our lives up to this point? Many, I think.

Over Labor Day weekend, a friend died in a car crash, 59 years old, driving in Maryland, probably listening to his GPS system, which may not have pointed out a stop sign. He was a priest, and our relationship was in the professional vein rather than personal, but I am feeling it like a family loss, and am unable to sustain work of any kind but the minor physical kind for very long. The whole community locally is feeling a big gap, like a hole in the atmosphere.

Father Teclezghi Ucbaghiorghis was from Africa, Eritrea to be exact, where legend has it that the Queen of Sheba settled with her son after her visit to King Solomon, as described in the Bible and the Koran. He grew up in the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia but then joined the Cistercian order of monks - apparently Mussolini’s army were not the only Italians to move into Ethiopia in the period before World War II - and thereby joined up with the Roman Catholics. He grew up in a sometimes war-torn society that included Muslims, Communists, and animists. He was sent to the United States to do missionary work, I suppose. Or maybe to disturb our American complacency.

He occasionally spoke in his talks about his childhood, much different from ours – playing soccer barefoot with his friends in rural fields, working for his father as a shepherd, where the possibility of lions going for lunch was a real possibility. His mother was illiterate but with an excellent memory, but he himself as a boy read psalms to his father as his father worked. His elder sister had a cross tattooed on her forehead because his parents had dedicated her to God. He became a multilinguist and was on a team of people translating the Bible into his native language before coming to the U.S. He had a lot of humor, and it was fun to hear him use American slang and correctly (or incorrectly) use English-language puns in talking.

For a year my downstairs neighbor has had an American flag stuck in the garden plot by her entrance. There also used to be a newspaper picture, covered with plastic against the rain, of her relative, a young man in his twenties who died as a U.S. soldier in Iraq. That plastic-covered photo finally wore out and has been gone for six months, but the flag remains. A fourth-grade class in a local school had ‘adopted’ the soldier to write to and keep in touch with, and their story was in the local paper when it was announced he had died. He was my neighbor’s husband’s cousin, and though the family’s grief was real – they all took the long drive to the burial in the National Cemetery near Washington, D.C – and though my neighbor implied she herself had anti-war sentiments, she also said, “He was where he wanted to be,” and doing what he wanted to do. He died being true to himself and what he believed.

Whenever I study grief, my own or others’, Emily Dickinson’s poem 561 comes to my mind. I hope you don’t mind if I finish by just copying it here (the unusual punctuation and capital letters are Emily’s):

561

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long –
Or did it just begin –
I could not tell the Date of Mine –
It feels so old a pain –

I wonder if it hurts to live –
And if They have to try –
And whether – could They choose between –
It would not be – to die –

I note that Some – gone patient long –
At length, renew their smile –
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil –

I wonder if when Years have piled –
Some Thousands – on the Harm –
That hurt them early – such a lapse
Could give them any Balm –

Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve –
Enlightened to a larger Pain –
In Contrast with the Love –

The Grieved – are many – I am told –
There is the various Cause –
Death – is but one – and comes but once –
And only nails the eyes –

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –
A sort they call "Despair" –
There's Banishment from native Eyes –
In Sight of Native Air –

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –

To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they're mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like My Own –