Corpus Christi, Texas is a hole. It’s a humid, hot, culture-less bastion of foul smells, cracked streets, and heart disease. The beaches are filthy and I wouldn’t wish the water on my worst enemy. But, a local church, the Abundant Life Fellowship, has just broken ground on a $1,000,000 construction project to build the biggest goddamn cross in the United States, so it’s all good!
Priorities.
Since Christian architecture appears to be little more than a long game of one-upmanship, Pastor Rick Milby of Abundant Life Fellowship resolved to build a gaudy, behemoth reminder of the suffering and death of his savior instead of doing something productive with that million bucks, like helping turn Corpus Christi into something other than a place where dreams go to die.
The product of Milby’s construction project will stand 210 feet tall and will be 95 feet wide. It will be the biggest cross in the Western Hemisphere when it is completed, presumably by the end of the year.
A letter of support from Gov. Greg Abbott was read by state Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, at the Jan. 31 groundbreaking ceremony because a 210-foot, million-dollar cross being built in a city whose biggest draw is a two-story Whataburger is the pinnacle of fiscal conservatism.
The cross will be visible from five miles away by land and ten miles away by plane, because Jesus needs to anticipate his arrival to this ostentatious obelisk when he returns… in a golden helicopter…
Even though Corpus Christi is a hurricane-prone hellmouth, Milby is convinced the cross will be fine, even in the most devastating of weather events. He told KRIS, the city’s NBC affiliate:
“The cross is sitting on a foundation that’s 38 feet octagon. It’s three feet deep with steel and concrete, has 24 piers that go 48 feet into the ground. So if it were to blow over, it would pull up about three acres of land with it.”
I’m no construction expert, so I’m not exactly sure what that means. But, it is my experience, that even the most secure of things can come toppling down, especially if America again reaches a level of sin that is “offensive to God.”
Corpus Christi is a hole, soon to be a hole with a titanic, million-dollar cross right off Interstate 37. It’s humid. It’s hot. It lacks anything worthwhile to see or do. To get a burger-to-grease ratio in favor of the former would be considered a literal miracle. Corpus Christians (goddammit) have an almost symbiotic relationship with mosquitoes.
But instead of doing anything to make the city worth existing, Pastor Rick Milby and his open-wallet acolytes believe it is more important to erect a large monument embodying the stimulating excitement and pleasure they receive when they think about their savior.
I suppose it’s fitting that the city’s name is Latin for “body of Christ.”
