Weighing approximately 450 pounds, spanning 6 feet across and towering 12 feet, the cross on stage in the Nationwide Arena is definitely larger than a wooden cross on a necklace from Ten Thousand Villages.  A necklace does not require a special handmade device of plywood and carpeting for transportation, either.

The cross, made from 45 sheets of inch-thick colored glass (shipped from Pennsylvania) is a creation of Jerry Holsopple, a professor of visual and communication arts at Eastern Mennonite University.

The glass on the cross is broken.  “It symbolizes what it is really about,” Holsopple said.  “I realize how broken our lives are, and that’s just part of what it is being human.”

Holsopple began work on the cross after the convention planning committee approached him.  “They wanted to know if I could do a big cross,” said Holsopple, whose largest cross at the time had not exceeded three feet.

It took three days to break the glass for the cross.  To create a thin fracture, Holsopple would slam the sheet into an anvil, fracturing it into pieces.  After a while, he started to notice a pattern with the glass—red glass broke into little chunks, and blue glass into “shimmers.”

Once the pieces of red, orange, yellow, blue and brown glass were broken, Holsopple began laying the glass chunks into the steel cross frame.  He started with brown and gold at the bottom, attempting to follow the traditional earthly and heaven idea.  Holsopple used orange and red glass to symbolize blood streaming out of a wound.

With little slivers of glass, Holsopple created rays on the cross, and at the top, symbolizing a crown of thorns, Holsopple placed brown and gold glass.

After filling the cracks between the glass with roofing granules—a bed to catch the epoxy—the cross was ready to be filled.
On “epoxy” day, as Holsopple referred to the 25 time-sensitive minutes before the epoxy catalyzed and hardened, a team of four EMU students and Holsopple’s daughter and wife gathered to pour the five gallons of epoxy into the cross.

The epoxy—made only in Ohio—dripped “thick like molasses” from little plastic cups folded into funnels, and filled all of the cracks in the cross.  Then the cross was covered for seven days.

Those seven days of waiting were challenging—“What happens if it doesn’t work?” said Holsopple.  But it was soon time for the unveiling.

“It’s sort of like giving birth,” said Holsopple, “especially when you start to see the light coming through the brokenness…it somehow makes it beautiful.”