Greg Zanis is driving along a winding country road in Kane County, searching for the spot where a motorcyclist was struck and killed. The end of an eight-foot wooden cross, painted white, hangs off the back of his pickup truck, above a bumper sticker that says, “Life Is Short. Pray Hard.”
The south-suburban landscape is dotted with his crosses. Zanis says the roads out here can be treacherous because of their soft shoulders: when people run onto them they often overcompensate, reacting with a quick jerk of the wheel. Do that, he says, and “you make your car roll,” even if you’re doing only 35.
At a third farm an elderly man sitting on a parked tractor with his grandson calls out as Zanis approaches, “You’re the cross guy. One of my friends pointed you out to me one time.”
In Zanis’s view, “there’s one God, and we all have our own personal idea of how we’re supposed to reach him. You don’t need a preacher, you don’t need a rabbi.” He believes his cross ministry–which he calls Crosses for Losses–takes a powerful symbol out of the church and brings it directly to the people. But it’s not simply piety or even altruism that has inspired him to construct his life around strangers’ deaths. In alleviating (some have said “hijacking”) mourners’ grief, he seems to have found purpose in his own life.
Still, he seems to enjoy the recognition. He described himself to me several times as “famous” and excitedly pointed out that photos of his crosses have won Pulitzers–or, as he put it, “My crosses have won two Pulitzers.”
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He has 61 scrapbooks in his basement, most related to the cross ministry. They contain newspaper clippings, photos, and fan mail, such as the note from a teenage girl he met in a Mississippi gas station whose friend had just died in a car crash. “I’m so glad I got to meet you,” she wrote. “You rock. I hope you will never forget me because I will never forget you, because how could I forget you, cross guy? I hope I will see you again someday. I am going to miss you bunches.”
He tells a story about erecting crosses in April 1999 after a car carrying a couple of Pakistani teenagers collided with a train. He noticed a church steeple near the crash site and organized members of the church’s congregation to pray with him at the crosses. Later he placed a granite marker engraved with the victims’ names in front of the crosses. Their parents, he says, “always wanted to be Americans, and this was the final thing.” He says proudly that the parents embraced the community that had comforted them in their grief: “They’re Christians now.”
