by CCW | 14 September 2009 07:59
The Cross is the meeting place of lovers. That “strange and uncouth thing”, as the poet George Herbert calls it, reveals the incompleteness of our human loves and the all-sufficiency of divine love. It signals what might be called the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy which is shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire. But what does it mean?
I have often been struck with the coincidence of the early beginning of Fall with the Feast of the Holy Cross (September 14th) and especially with one of its early and associated titles, namely, the Invention of the Holy Cross. It speaks so profoundly and yet so paradoxically to the nature of the intellectual enterprise. Inventio crucis.
Invention? Yes, but not in the sense of something fabricated out of our fevered imaginations. The feast derives from the celebrated visit of Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, to Jerusalem and her so-called discovery of the Holy Cross in the early fourth century as well as the exposition or “Exaltation” of the supposed true cross in the seventh century. Inventio does not suggest fabrication and invention so much as discovery and disclosure.
In the Christian understanding of things, humility and sacrifice are de rigueur in the passionate search for understanding, the eros of intellectual life. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.
The true Cross? The actual Cross on which Christ was crucified, as Christians believe? How would one know? Surely it is worthy of the kind of dismissive scorn of an Edward Gibbons to point out that the many relics of the true Cross scattered throughout Europe would make for a veritable “Birnum Wood” of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, a moving forest of crosses. Which is the true one? And how would one know?
It is one thing to accept that there was crucifixion and that Christ was crucified. It is, after all, what we preach, says St. Paul. But it is another thing to say this piece of wood or that piece of wood was the Cross on which he was crucified. We confront the inescapable limits of historical knowing. Yet this feast, rooted and grounded in the subsequent history of the Church, bears witness to the theological significance of the Cross for the understanding of the Christian faith and for the understanding, too, for that matter, of the cultures and worlds that the Cross, it is not too much to say, has shaped, even a post-Christian world, whatever one might mean by that term.
The shadows of the Cross, indeed, reach backwards and forwards and in a wonderful and paradoxical way, we are illumined by the shadows of the Cross. In its shadows we discover the limits of human love as well as the divine love that redeems all our desires.
In a wonderful passage in the Book of Genesis, Abraham encounters the Lord, it is said, as three men or three angels, under the shade of the oaks of Mamre. A scene of exquisite oriental courtesy and ancient hospitality to the stranger or strangers in your midst, Abraham sacrifices a calf from his herd and hastens to prepare a feast for them as they “rest under the tree.” And, as the text, puts it, “he stood by them under the tree while they ate.” He is present but only as a servant standing by. They – the plural is instructive and intriguing – ask him, “where is Sarah your wife?” but then, the promise of a son to Abraham and Sarah is given by the Lord in the singular, “I”. “I will return in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.” The ambiguities of ‘they’ and ‘I’, of the three and one, are profoundly suggestive.
The son is the promised son, Isaac, the one through whom God’s promise to Abraham that “through your seed all nations shall be blessed” will be continued. But the promised son, too, is the unwitting son of the intended sacrifice by Abraham in the terrifying scene of the test of Abraham’s faith. “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?”, Isaac will innocently ask, to which Abraham will heart-wrenchingly reply, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” Indeed, “God will provide himself.” Here, Sarah, listening at the tent door, overhears the Lord’s promise to Abraham about a son and Sarah “laughed to herself”, saying in effect, how shall this be? since I and my husband have grown old.
The laughter of Sarah reverberates down throughout the centuries and expresses the ancient and, no doubt, contemporary sense of the unbridgeable distance between God and our humanity. Here the “God from whom no secrets [can be] hid” (“and to whom all desires [are] known!”) challenges the laughter of Sarah. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” In fear, Sarah denies that she has laughed. “With God”, of course, “all things are possible.” The laughter of Sarah will ultimately be redeemed by the question and response of Mary to the will of God conveyed by the message of an angel. “How shall this be?” Mary asks. As the counter to Sarah’s denial, there is Mary’s affirmation, “Be it unto me according to thy word.” But it means the crucifying of our expectations and certainties, the crucifying of our desires without which there can be no redemption of our desires. The shadows of the Cross illuminate what happens under the shade of the oaks of Mamre.
This Old Testament scene becomes the basis for one of the most wonderful icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, the icon of the Trinity and the Eucharist, the icon of the divine fellowship between God and man. We are there as participants, not just as servants standing by. Nor do we need to hide behind the tent door, listening and perhaps laughing at what seems utterly preposterous and altogether beyond even the possibility of human desire.
The Cross convicts and convinces. As a symbol, it signifies the meeting and the encounter between the human and the divine. Not in the sense that the horizontal signifies human love and the vertical, divine love. We have had, perhaps, too much of an emphasis on the horizontal! No. Our human loves, too, are about aspirations, however incomplete and misguided, confused and in disarray, and even deadly and destructive. Such is the reality of sin. The Cross convicts us of our sins. And yet it convinces us of something which is greater than our sins, the grace of God in the sacrifice of Christ. It convinces us of the divine love which sets love in order in us, if we will let it. For it means the crucifying of our desires.
The shadows of the Cross reach forward into the history and life of the Church and into the web and tangle of our own lives. “My eros is crucified”, Ignatius of Antioch said, capturing in phrase the meaning of the Cross as the meeting place of lovers. Our eros is the passionate yearning of our souls for wholeness and completeness; ultimately it is the desire of the soul for God. But it is confused and misguided, and even willful and destructive about what it thinks it wants and about how it is to be achieved. Full of good intentions, we make a mess of our lives and even hurt those whom we would love and whose good we would seek. The Cross is the ultimate statement about the violent disorder and destructive confusion in our souls. “Ye know not what ye ask”, as Jesus says, and out of our ignorance comes the vain and futile attempt even to annihilate God in the crucifixion of Christ.
But the Cross is the liber charitatis, (Lancelot Andrewes) the book of love opened for us to read precisely because of the divine love which redeems our human loves. They have to be crucified in us in order to be reconstituted by the divine love made manifest on the Cross. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” There can be no more gentle and yet crucifying word from the Crucified than this, a most convicting and a most convincing word.
It is signaled, too, in the movement and logic of the liturgy. “Lift up your hearts” we hear, and by grace we respond, “we lift them up unto the Lord.” How is this possible? How can there be this upward desiring of my soul and yours? Because of the redemption of our desires in Christ. “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.” Because of the Cross. It convicts and convinces.
“What if this present were the world’s last night?”, the poet John Donne asks, and answers in ways which reflect the redemptive power of the erotic liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer and which recalls as well the devotional and artistic traditions of the visual representations of the Crucifixion.
Mark in my heart, O soul, where thou dost dwell,
The picture of Christ crucified, and tell
Whether that countenance can thee affright,
Tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,
Blood fills his frowns, which from his pierced head fell,
And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell,
Which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?
So ends the octet but the sestet continues to relate the power of that “picture of Christ crucified”, a picture coloured with all of the horrors and agonies of the suffering humanity of Christ in ways that capture the effects of the plague in late medieval representations of the Crucifixion. But even more, it suggests the necessity for eros to be crucified in order for eros to be reconstituted.
The power of divine love imaged in the Crucified Christ counters our fears and doubts but requires as well a change in us, a crucifying of our desires in him.
No, no; but as in my idolatry
I said to all my profane mistresses,
Beauty, of pity, foulness only is
A sign of rigour: so I say to thee,
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned,
This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.
There is a beauty in the hideous spectacle of Christ crucified, a beauty which signals pity and not the foulness of rigor mortis, of death and decay, or of paralyzing and terrifying fear. But it means the crucifying of the idols of our hearts, the crucifying of our desires for all our profane mistresses whatever they may be. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind.” The Cross is the constant reminder of that constant struggle in our lives and of the divine love by which such things are made possible.
Fr. David Curry,
Meditation on the Feast of the Holy Cross
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2009/09/14/meditation-on-the-feast-of-the-holy-cross/
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