Exaltation of the Holy Cross
This weekend we dedicate, each year, to a feast that has gone by two names over the centuries: “The Exaltation of the Cross,” or “The Triumph of the Cross.” The origin of the feast was a commemoration of the finding of the Cross by St. Helena, and then, not much later, her son, the Emperor Constantine, won a major battle after having had a vision of the cross, with the words: “In this sign, conquer!” BUT, of course, the point of the feast is in thinking about the “contradiction in terms” that the name implies, for in that contradiction is the meaning of the Mystery of Christianity and, really, the Mystery of God. It is in this inner tension that is implied in the feast that our lives are lived and we draw near to the essence of God and our own authenticity at the same time. So, the sign given to Constantine was a truly “double-edged sword.” He could, indeed, overcome the world under the sign, but only through weakness. He got the first part, and missed the last part!!! So, often, do we!
First, let’s look at the contradiction we find in the very title of the Feast: The “exaltation” of the Cross. The word, exaltation, is akin to the more familiar “triumph,” which we all know to mean “to gain victory over,” and means a rise or intensification in power; the Cross is the symbol of surrender, defeat, death. So, in a sense we are celebrating the power in surrender, or the victory in defeat, or the finding of true life in death.
The mystery of the universe, we are being told, is somehow encoded here. Life is found in death. A friend of mine in Maryland, thirty years ago, entered a career that he probably shouldn’t have entered. He spent the first few years smiling and making contacts, and thinking he could rise, and he did rise in that career—quite high, actually, but each step up the ladder, took more of his energy, his attention, his time, and his marriage tottered, he didn’t know his children well, and then, he reached a point where he couldn’t seem to go any higher, and younger people coming up the ladder were after his job, and finally, it all fell apart…his job was downsized, and he was out. When I ran into him about 8 months later, I expected him to be depressed, and despairing. Yet, he told me that he had never felt so free! He and his wife were falling in love again, he was free enough to enjoy getting to know his kids—now in high school. He said to me, “It’s an amazingly freeing thing to be bankrupt and starting over at 54. At first, I felt terrified, and then I felt energized, and now I just enjoy life.” His wife, who had also had to adjust to less income, said, “It’s no longer about amassing things, but about life unfolding.” I said, “Can I quote you?” And here I am several years later quoting them, at last!
Two other acquaintances I have known over the years had been in a relationship for almost a decade. It had begun in a rocky way. Neither had come from wealth, but both had come from families with connections and a social position due to politics. BUT, the two “kids” were from families of different parties! And the parents objected to the quickness of the relationship, the fact that the kids weren’t married, the fact that they had married the “enemy,” and they brought all sorts of pressure on them to break it up. But they were determined and stayed together for over a decade………without marrying. I wondered why they hadn’t married, but you learn not to ask too many questions, and so from a distance, I silently watched, and finally, they split. Both of them told me, separately, that they felt like a burden had been removed. Now, instead of living with a situation that was not fulfilling simply to prove people that they could, they were free to be themselves and to grow into who they needed to become.
I worked with another Trinitarian priest in our high school outside of Washington DC in the late 60’s/early 70’s, and he was chair of the science department and had taught biology for years. He was a “legend in his own time,” with a truly eclectic classroom. He had a reputation for being a demanding teacher, but fair, and most of all, for being eccentric and creating interesting “surprises” in his class room…he had once substituted a live frog for a dead one without his students knowing about it, and when one was called up to the front of the class to do a dissection, he reach out to the teacher to get the frog to pin it down, when it jumped at him, and he ran screaming from the room, to everyone’s delight! That was Fr. Mike. Always joking. Then, a younger teacher, who took science far more seriously was employed at the school, and began to systematically move the curriculum on a more disciplined, focused track toward academic excellence, and Fr. Mike realized he “had to go.” He grieved his transfer. He went into early retirement. We thought he’d curl up and die….THEN, he took a vacation to Texas, fell in love with a little parish outside Victoria, and moved himself South and took up pasturing a flock. He’d been a priest for 40 + years, but had never pastored a church, he’d always taught. He had a total Re-Birth! He spent the last years of his life as productively as he’d spent the early years, with wonderful energy and great spirit.
When I was the pastor of a small country church in Maryland, I had eleven prisons in my parish boundaries, so I did a LOT of prison chaplaincy. When men first arrived in an institution, they went into a depression that lasted from 4 to 8 months, as their “past vision of themselves” died. Then, after a bit, they found new energy, and felt like new people, and wanted to use the time they had in jail to do the inner work they needed to do………then, again, about 3 years into a life sentence, the depression hit again, as their “pipe dream died,” and they realized that no matter what they did, they weren’t getting out…and that second depression lasted a bit longer…but they came out of it, too, with a determination to be “all” they could be…many doing degrees, reading things they’d only heard about like Plato and Aristotle, Emily Dickenson’s poetry, or the Bible or the Quran. And, not always, but often they, then, became mentors to guys who had a chance to go back outside, so that they wouldn’t fail and return.
The point of the sermon is NOT to look for ways to get fired, or to break up with your girlfriend, or transfer careers, or to go to JAIL, rather it’s that there are things that need to die so that LIFE can come…and those things, people, are US, and our projects. Everything we are and everything we start is finite, because our life, here, is finite. And “endings” are so difficult for us…for it’s our “projects” (whether our love lives, our work lives, or out hobbies and avocations) that allow us to “make our footprint in the sands of time,” and to say, “Here I am!” Losing them is like death, itself. Yet….this feast tells us that it is in losing them that LIFE is born anew….which is also a foreshadowing of what will happen at our physical death: at that moment NEW LIFE WILL ARISE.
So, this feast isn’t so much about the triumphing of our religion over other religions as it is about the eternal triumph of LIFE over death! God has built that into the universe. Life gives birth to life which gives birth to life…and even death itself, is just a “transition,” a “door” into greater life.
Now, most of us agree with this message…….intellectually……..we, too, have seen it’s truth too often to doubt it, but we don’t know it “interiorly.” Our heart of hearts HATES change! So, we resist. And I think God smiles at our resistance. For, after all, God made us and knows us “through and through.” Unless your Bible reads differently from mine, you’ll remember that when Christ faced painful transition and death, He sweat drops of BLOOD, for Heaven’s sake! That’s there to teach us that it’s OK to fret and resist a bit. We all need time. We all have the right, like our father, Jacob, to wrestle with God. It’s just that God wins…but…the point of this reading is to reassure us that when God wins, it is Good News, for God is a God of CREATION, of LIFE, and NEWNESS (which is what the Resurrection teaches us), and that in EVERY single death/defeat God is inventing New Possibilities for Life for us.
I don’t know about you, but I needed to hear that, today. I don’t know what fears (if any) that you’ve brought to today’s Mass, or what memories of “deaths” and “diminishments” that you carry. These readings whisper to us of an ancient Truth so easily recognized and so universally forgotten by us in difficulty: that whatever it is we fear; there’s nothing that God’s New Life can’t top! So, be at peace. This feast is our feast. It tells us our lives are headed for endings that become beginnings, and that LIFE is what is promised us, always.
Let us pray as we near the table of the Author of Life, that our fears may be converted to trust in God’s goodness, and that we may, through the spiritual strength we receive, here, make of our lives…and our projects…however short-lived or long-lived they may be…BENEDICTIONS of goodness and peace in our world. And may God bless you all. +
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