Cross of Stones

My life is like any other. I function on the same frequencies as everyone around me. Like all of us, the bad and the good have shadowed my trail, and my existence is as precious as yours is, or as an Indian man's, or a cancer-inflicted girl's. I am an equal of equal importance, nothing more. All that separates and defines me are my unique experiences, and I've had a filling share. I've lived through elementary school psychology sessions, and anorexia, and my continuation dance, and my grandmother's funeral. I've been evacuated from my home on my thirteenth birthday to flee the Missionary Ridge fire, the effects of which still hang heavy on my home's forests. Plenty of unique links in my chain have made me who I am now, but only one unearthed a strong feeling of pride and sense of belief within me. In one week, my faith was born from a cross of stones.

It was senior year, two thousand and seven, the time of April when Colorado spring teeters on the edge of summer. It must have been a Monday, because I knew what had happened for two days or more. My neighbor worked for the school district and had let my mom know what transpired, so the incident lingered in my head. My home of Bayfield is a small town. You drive by a gas station, a grocery store, another gas station, and you're gone. News spreads as fast as the town coughing bug, all zaps of lightning. This news was big. I knew it, and so did everyone else. Who couldn't?

I walked from the student parking lot. The crosswalk bridged to the main lawn, off-center to the right of the building, as it always had. On the grass I saw more students congregating than usual. Most kids filed straight to the doors in the mornings. Not then; it was full and in motion. My feet led me off the sidewalk, and in seconds I saw in full what had tickled my peripherals.

Stones. There were hundreds of them. Not pebbles of driveway granite and shale, but hefty bulges of rock, all bigger than cantaloupes. They hugged into a mosaic of a Christian cross spread wide and tall, twenty feet by twelve, stark and gray. After a few minutes of eavesdropping, I learned that the freshman and sophomores had taken the rocks from around campus to fashion the crucifix. Lower on the lawn's canvas were words of comfort. The specifics I can't recall, but they amounted to "love" and "remember" and "never forget." Other kids were kneeling down. Each stone had notes from my classmates, carefully written in colored sharpie. Some wrapped around the rocks in paragraphs and others had shorter quips of care. Still others bore hearts and designs of flowers. They were all originals. Not a single stone was bare. The cross was for Carly and her brother, victims of a careless drunk driver.

That week the halls rang with loud quiet. It was five days of somber concern. Teachers mechanically taught and students laughed in hushes. There was a school assembly where the principal and faculty told us of the many things we could do to help the grieving family. A drive for money donations started. Posters bearing the brother's and sister's pictures grew from the walls like sad, sour ivy. Death was the word, one that, to my plain high school community, seemed an impossibility. Bayfield kids don't die. They can't. Yet the deed had been done. It was hard to forget with the cross on the lawn.

I lived in a fervent religious community, but was not raised in a house of faith. To me, the word itself meant next to nothing. A man named Josh Billings once said, "If there was no faith, there would be no living in this world", though I had lived fine enough without it, even during that week. That was why I had no gripes about the stone cross. I wasn't offended religiously like some of my friends or held any low emotions against it. During those days I never once thought of God's plan for my two dead classmates. It was a tragedy that had happened and nothing more. If someone had willed it, I didn't want to know. What I knew and what I felt was my high school merging. The faux divisions of grades condensed into one student body that walked out to the cross during breaks like a migration or pilgrimage, but they did it together. The connection is hard to give justice to. It was a deconstruction of all the petty differences and cliques, a melting down or cleansing of something partitioned off into something whole, and better, and humbling. I was a part of it, in the middle of my school's finest hour. I didn't feel faith. I felt pride. It was only later that I realized they were the same.

Other things happened to the cross after its first week. Someone close to me decided to stage his senior prank with it. He moved each rock by himself in the night. He spelled out words like "fuck" and "shit" to express his feelings of what the cross meant to him; greed. Good things happened too. By graduation day a framed aerial shot of the stones sat tall on display in the school office, resting on an easel. My band and I played "A Hymn Song on Philip Bliss" in honor of our fallen peers at our spring concert. I still didn't recognize my pride as faith. Not until that summer did it dawn.

My summer grounds job that year was for the school. I mowed every campus lawn, and the high school green was my favorite. For three full months it cradled the imprint of the cross. A watermark in the grass, it seemed absorbed into the flat, a tint of mint on an emerald quilt. In every way, that cross remained long after it was gone. I mowed and was proud.

Like millions of others, I now live with faith. It has influenced my life as I never expected it to. Unlike others, my faith can't hang from my neck or over my mantle. It was found and polished from a loss, a school, and a cross on a lawn.

My faith is rock and pride.