Poem Meditation by Jennifer RahimThe cross, so central to Christianity, can be an illusive sign, difficult to fully embrace and comprehend. At best, we see “dimly” what this key to discipleship represents. Yet understanding is perhaps less a requirement than the agreement, in faith, to “take up” all the circumstances of our lives and “follow” Jesus (Mk 8:34). Following though is tough business. We like to do things our way. So very slowly, we learn to trust being led and, at various stages, connect differently with Peter’s confession: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). Such moments are seminal. Jesus is recognised as the one who embodies the big picture of our individual and collective story. These are potential turning points when, like Peter, we stand before God in our fundamental poverty. We do not have the answers. We do not know the way. Jesus, the Christ, does. Only from this place of mature self-acceptance can we willingly take up our cross and follow – a commitment that needs constant renewal.
Triumph of the crossThe point is that no one disposition contains the whole meaning and power of the cross. Moreover, we are never always victors or losers, victims or victimisers. In fact, we are most likely a bit of both as Cynthia Crysdale suggests (Embracing Travail, 20). A good way to come home to this paradox of our human nature, in which neither side is escapable, is to have as a starting point the “Word” on the cross as an act of love given as unmerited gift for all: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:13-17). What we celebrate as the Triumph of the Cross lies in these two words used by St John: “loved” and “gave”. We are not dealing with a recipe for winning divine favour or a manual for spiritual success. We enter a love story about a Father who gives what is most precious, a Son, who returns that love by becoming nothing, stripped so we may clothe our poverty, with his divinity (Rom 13:14). We offer our neediness and belovedness to a God who does not lord it over our vulnerability or whose divinity does not stand aloof from our imperfections. So the cross is not merely about a love that gives us back our dignity. It is our dignity.
Spiritual growth entails bringing a wider affective range and experiential balance to our prayer life. We cannot remember God only in suffering, nor can we make God a save-the-day super hero. God is equally in our highs and lows, our certitude and ambivalence. Crysdale provides a useful insight for retraining a tendency to end up, one way or the other, with a one-dimensional relationship with the greatest sign of our Christian faith and hope. She writes: “Jesus’s death and resurrection is not justice as retribution but love and sorrow” (156). The suffering of Jesus at the crucifixion displays God’s detestation of sin, but it is also a profound communication of what God, the Father, feels about sin: extreme sorrow for humanity’s refusal of his love. From this perspective, following the Triumph of the Cross with Our Lady of Sorrows makes sense. Crysdale unintentionally gets at the logic when she gives consideration to the image of “God as a grieving mother, pained at the suffering of her son, longing to bring healing to a broken world” (7).
The image may prove a challenge for some because it so obviously evokes the divine feminine. Yet that God weeps for us is not such an inaccessible reality. Jesus weeps bitterly over Jerusalem as he approaches Calvary: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes” (Lk 19:40-42). The cross as a communication of grief for loss, should help us to act less out of guilt and fear, in short unworthiness, and more from a place of freedom and a desire to partner God in the search of the vulnerable ones, including what is “lost” in ourselves. Nicodemus risks his Jewish identity to be transformed by this radical lesson about eternal life. The suffering and triumph of Jesus will continue to appeal to our particular needs, but the full embrace of the cross will always be a requirement of love, which is the beauty and pain of the Pièta, a mother’s grief for the death of Love that cannot die. This is the mystery we celebrate when we “look to the one they have pierced” (Jn 19:37).
Prayer: Lord, thank you for your cross.
Miss I-Tired
I hear her calling to the houses she knows.
At Lydia’s gate always stopping for a chat
and rest before she takes up her weight again,
holding the same pain at her wait, her head
leading her feet onward to the next station.
Dotsy’s name sings out. A brief exchange.
Then she teases Nathaniel, coaxes him to speak.
He plays her game and pronounces a string
of indecipherable words. Her joy erupts,
embracing the entire mountain. Complete.
She moves on. Behind her, the entire ocean
straddles her back – all the time going up
to a home way past my seeing. Her eternal
prayer showering Rose Hill – Lord, I so tired!
From Approaching Sabbaths