THE LAST WORD - the tale of jc1654 - tracing a small bronze replica of the crucifixion - Brief Article

Some months ago a thin bearded man appeared in my office, propped a ladder against my wall, climbed aloft, and nailed a thin bearded man to the wall. This latter thin man, I should say, was bronze, and six inches tall; he was also wearing a bronze loincloth and a bronze circlet of thorns. The cross to which he was nailed was walnut, fifteen inches long, and seven inches wide.

The first man, having hung the second man, departed, without a word. I sat and stared at the small bronze man, and pondered, not for the first time and not for the last, his most unusual life, his cruel death, and his astonishing return-perhaps the most interesting and significant story in the long thousands of years that human beings have told stories of magic and power to each other.

But I also saw, as if for the first time, the crucifix itself, and wondered about this macabre talisman-not so much its long history as symbol (some fifteen centuries), or extraordinary artistic renditions (by such geniuses as Velazquez), or its historical inaccuracy (Christ would have been crucified naked, for greater humiliation), but as a thing made by human hands some two thousand years after the incident depicted occurred on a dark afternoon in Judea.

In short, who made the little Christ in my office, and how did he get here?

He is, I discovered, JC1654, from the Jeweled Cross Company of North Attleboro, Massachusetts, a company named for its very first product, a rhinestone-studded crucifix made at a kitchen table for a wake in 1922. The Jeweled Cross Company, which today makes more than a million religious items a year, cast JC1654 from a mold carved by its in-house sculptor; it milled the cross from walnut grown in Pennsylvania, and cast the tiny bronze sign above the corpus, inri (Iesus Nazaraenus Rex Iudaeorum, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews"), the Roman insult to Jews carefully reproduced in America two thousand years later.

From Massachusetts, JC1654 was sent to a store in Oregon. This store sells church supplies and devotional products, among them some one thousand crucifixes a year of the more than a million sold annually in the United States-numbers easier to digest, perhaps, when you remember that rosaries carry tiny crucifixes, and there are crucifixes for automobile dashboards and holy water fonts, and crucifixes for keychains, pendants, medals, sick-call sets, pyxes, processional crosses, and altars, among many other uses.

From the store on the main street of a city, JC1654 traveled north four miles, in a van, in the company of forty-nine identical JC1654s, to a carpentry shop at a small Catholic university, where the university's carpenter, a quiet man whose hobby it is to build altars, hammered the bronze corpus to the walnut cross with brass nails (this is the K model JC1654, which is designed to be assembled at the place of display). The carpenter hammered the tiny bronze inri sign into the cross above the corpus, too.

Hammering Christ to the cross fifty times took him a long time, he says, because he was trying to be especially meticulous about his work, because walnut is a strong wood not easily pierced, because the infinitesimal brass nails (called "brads") are almighty difficult to handle, because the bronze corpus is fragile, and because the job had an altogether strange cast to it, truth be told.

From the carpenter's shop, JC1654 was carried across campus by the thin bearded man who entered my office one day without a word and hung Christ on the wall above my door. He's been here for a few months now, has JC1654, and I've developed an affection and respect for him. He traveled all the way across the country to be here, for one thing. And he rather elevates the room, which otherwise is a thick jungle of papers and books and motley visitors.

And he reminds me, every time I glance up from my desk, that once there was a man who so loved men and women and children that he let himself be beaten and scourged and stabbed and broken, and let himself be nailed to a massive cross with massive nails, and let himself be killed, slowly and with unimaginable pain, so that people he never knew would have the chance to live in the unimaginable love of the Creator of everything we know.

And he reminds me too, every time I look up and catch the dull bronze glint of his sagging body, of all the millions of men and women and children who have given their bodies and lives for others, and give their bodies and lives now, right this minute, so many of them silent in their struggles and never to be celebrated or sainted after their difficult lives and obscure deaths.

None is Christ but all are Christ-like; and that, finally, is why I bear such affection and respect for JC1654, for he reminds me to love, and there is no greater law, nor more difficult work, nor deeper joy. So said the mysterious man depicted on my wall-and I believe him.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. He is the author of Credo, a collection of essays, and-with his father, Jim Doyle-of Two Voices, a collection of their essays.

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