Encouragement

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That Man On The Cross
© 2006

by

Stephen A. Peterson


To many of us students at Father Thomas Scecina Memorial High School between the 1960’s and 1970’s senior English Composition and Literature class, Sister Rita Clare Broecker, a Franciscan, was the most disciplined and dynamic teacher we had ever. A veteran teacher who had taught a few years as a Professor of English at Marian College in Indianapolis, Indiana, Sister would bring what could be a very dull class to life. She was plainly in love with words, with their uncanny power to reveal to an open mind the beauty and emotional vibrance contained in them. And she had the ability to communicate word pictures that made persons, places and things of old come to life. In Sister Rita Clare’s English class poems, novels, plays, stories, musicals and operatic works were not just assignments to be read or listened to as arduous classroom exercises; they were invitations to live life more fully, magical pieces that could reveal intricate patterns of meaning, lessons to be learned, and beauty within the ordinary seeming events of life. In other words, Sister Rita Clare revealed lessons of life through the various media referred to as Literature.

Many afternoons when her classes were over, Sister Rita Clare would conduct individualized help or tutorial classes lasting about an hour to help struggling students. I was one of these struggling English Composition and Literature students. During these sessions, we would talk about what we had been reading in class, home or elsewhere; about current events (mainly the cold war and its significance) and about my own struggles with fellow students, self, parents and teachers. One day, during one of the after school sessions just months before I was to graduate in June, 1966, Sister Rita Clare started telling me about the importance of faith to her immigrant German parents and their attempts to communicate their faith to her. “The one thing that always stuck in my mind was the death of Jesus Christ on a cross. All through my life, Christ on a cross struggling to breathe, in terrible pain for more than six hours, people making fun of Him, cursing Him, beaten mercilessly then forgiving His tormentors even now is so powerful when you think about it. It convinced me to enter the religious life, to pray daily for my sins and the sins of others and to give to others the gifts of imagination that they may hear God’s calling to service for His sake.”

At the time, I had just turned sixteen and I thought I knew it all and ready to go out to conquer the economic and academic worlds and life itself. From perhaps the most difficult and disciplined teacher I ever had, I learned that Christianity is for the weak. For to come to the realization that everything you DO is worthless and that faith in the Man that died on that cross is revelation that cannot help but change the way one sees the world and oneself. I began to read the Bible, seeking to learn more about the Jesus who so haunted Sister Rita Clare Broecker. This Jesus who Sister encountered as a youngster years before I was born directed her to a religious life and appeared to be a dominant factor in how she lived that life. In 1988, Sister Rita Clare Broecker’s struggles with that question ended. She went home to be with the Lord after dealing with cancer. I am willing to bet she is still giving lessons in a most magnificent manner in the land of the living and certainty.

As for me, when I finally had my own encounter with the Lord in the mist of human conflict, it wasn’t the vision of His Resurrection though an extremely important event in my walk and faith, but the continuous vision of the battered and broken figure of the “Man on the cross” that humbled my pride in self and has given me freedom, purpose and meaning in this life wherein many others struggle to find themselves. A struggle they are bound to find no peace unless they become weak and look up to and at that “Man on the cross”. Is this why so many young and old are tormented, depressed, lost and are suicidal in today’s world?

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