Meditation for the Feast of the Holy Cross
“And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men to me.”
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 shaped and governed by the Cross, the liturgy of eros redeemed, the liturgy of the redemption of desire.
I have often been struck with the coincidence of the late summer 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 in the resumption of studies at our Colleges and Schools. 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 that belongs especially to academic communities. The cross is the meeting place of such lovers, too.
