by CCW | 15 September 2022 17:00
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. Invenio 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. Invenio 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 to 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.
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.
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. 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.
There is a beauty in that “strange and uncouth thing,” in the hideous spectacle of Christ crucified, a beauty which signals pity and mercy, not fear and judgment. Yet it means the crucifying of the idols of our hearts. “This beauteous form assures a piteous mind,” as John Donne puts it in a sonnet about the Cross. 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
September 2022
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