From Our Walls to the Cross: A Hidden Story of Good Friday

Parishioners approach the cross in veneration during the Good Friday service.

Each Good Friday, we are invited to approach the Cross in adoration. We come forward in silence, to touch, to kiss, to venerate a symbol of the wood upon which Christ gave His life for the world.

This year, the cross we venerate carries a story that is quietly formed from the life of our parish.

Some years ago, when structural work was done to stabilize the church’s tallest steeple cross, a large wooden beam—once part of that support—was carefully removed. Rather than discard it, Fr. Sylvester entrusted it to a parishioner, with the hope that it might one day be used for something more.

With guidance from Fr. Garland, that beam was transformed into the veneration cross now used on Good Friday. What once supported the cross above our church now becomes the cross we approach in prayer, connecting the physical life of our building with the spiritual life of our parish.

Most recently, this cross has been given an even deeper significance! A relic of the True Cross (a fragment of the very wood of Christ’s crucifixion) has been placed within it. In this way, the cross we venerate is not simply symbolic, but literally connected to the cross it represents.

A relic of the True Cross, loaned to our parish by Dcn. Matt Paulus.

There is something profoundly fitting in this: wood from our own church, shaped by the hands of a parishioner, now holding within it a relic of Christ’s Cross. It is a reminder that our faith is not distant or abstract, but incarnational, rooted in real places, real materials, and real lives.

On Good Friday, as we come forward to venerate the Cross, we are invited to pause and consider what we are truly encountering. Not just wood, but love poured out. Not just history, but a continuing story of salvation. Not just the Cross of long ago, but the Cross made present to us—here, in our parish, in this moment.

And perhaps, in that encounter, we are reminded that we, too, are called to carry the Cross, and to be transformed by it.