Crosses of gratitude
<p>Tom Goonan explains in his house on Friday how each cross is tagged and labeled before it is given as a gift to priests, churches, friends and others.</p>
<p>A sanded and polished red fir cross, with “INRI” inscribed at the top, lays on the kitchen table of Tom Goonan's home. "INRI" is an abbreviation for "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum" or "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews," which was posted on the cross by order of Pontius Pilate.</p>
<p>Unfinished crosses rest on one of Tom Goonan's garage shelves prior to sanding on Friday, May 6, 2016. Goonan has made nearly 200 crosses since August of last year.</p>
ATHOL — The invigorating smell of fresh-cut wood lingers in Tom and Toni Goonan's garage, where Tom tirelessly labors at his woodworking craft.
Rectangular boards of ponderosa pine, red fir, cedar, white spruce and tamarack are stacked throughout the shop, ready for Tom to trim, smooth and transform into symbols of gratitude and faith.
"Feel that wood. You can feel the moisture in it," Tom said Friday afternoon, sliding his hand along one of the boards. "Once I cut the cross out, then it will start drying and all of this here will end up in the cross beam."
Since August 2015, Tom has crafted nearly 200 crosses from wood he found more than 100 miles up the St. Joe River "where no man goes hardly," he said.
"Theses (trees) are dead down, huge, and it's basically the only area in Idaho where those trees grow," he said of the lightweight, water-resistant white spruce he has found in those quiet meadows.
Tom, 71, and Toni, 65, are parishioners at St. Thomas Catholic Church in Coeur d'Alene. Tom began making the crosses to say "thank you" to the Catholic priests for their prayers and ministry. Father Mariusz Majewski, pastor at St. Thomas, was the first recipient of Tom's symbolic handiwork.
"Why the crosses? To basically show appreciation to all of the priests," Tom said. "I mean, what do you give them, a box of candy or a piece of cake?"
The majority of the crosses gifted to the priests are about 20 inches tall and 13 inches across the beam, but Tom has crafted larger ones for the Catholic club at North Idaho College and for St. Thomas Church.
"Even my wife asked, 'Why do you make them so big?'" he said. "So you can’t lose them."
Tom and Toni didn't realize how much of an undertaking it would be to embark on this endeavor of gratitude, but Tom is on a mission to show his appreciation and share this special symbol of faith with priests throughout Idaho and the country.
So far, his crosses have been sent to priests in about 10 states, even "all the way to Pennsylvania."
"It just kind of mushroomed into a pleasant, uplifting feeling to share," Toni said.
Every priest in the diocese now has one of Tom's handmade crosses, on which he uses a hot nail to burn "INRI," which is an abbreviation for the Latin "Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum" meaning "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews." He also burns into the wood small crosses where the nails would have been placed as well as representations of the wound in Jesus' side and the crown of thorns. Every cross is neatly labeled with the kind of wood, and Tom has a binder with photos of each careful piece he has made.
"For the love of our priests, that was the whole reason behind it," Tom said.
He also burns his initials into the bottom flat of the vertical beam.
"If they don’t like ‘Tom Goonan’ I can say ‘Thank God,'” he said with a smile.
Tom is extremely attentive to detail and appreciates the aesthetic qualities of each type of wood. Some cuts are a little longer or thicker or denser, and the grain in the wood, the age and the placement of the limbs makes each piece different. He has found some of the logs and dead-standing wood he has hauled home to be 300 years old.
"I can take the same log, the same cut, and I can’t get two to come out anything alike,” he said. "It keeps it interesting."
Tom and Toni plan to continue their St. Joe hikes and keep turning the fallen old-growth trees they find into crosses they can present to priests and other people who have touched their lives. Toni said they would like to send one to every women's religious community in the state. And although they do not view it as a business, they have sold a few to offset the costs of sending them as gifts and are considering selling more to raise funds for the Knights of Columbus, of which Tom is a longtime honored member, and Holy Family Catholic School.
Toni explained that Tom’s crosses, "without the corpus, are interpretive."
"You can look at your cross and you can see Jesus resurrected, you can see Jesus in his passion, you can see friends of yours going through sorrowful things or you can see friends of yours healed, or you can see friends enjoying whatever," she said. "It’s just a symbol of faith and hope and love. Wood is a very living thing. Even though it’s a dead tree, it’s living, warm and beautiful."