Thoughts on the Cross...

Probably went something like this “Oouch! Christ, that hurts. Hmmm… gotta stop talking to myself.”



A couple friends and I were talking about our childhood, especially growing up Catholic. All of us had the same experience of, when we were young children, around the ages that you are generally afraid of monsters, the dark, the things under your bed, to comfort us our parents/grandparents would point to the crucifix on the on the wall and tell us he will protect us.

“Him? Uh…he didn’t do a very good job protecting himself!”



We all laughed at the absurdity of it.


But that’s only half the story, truth be known, I never thought there was anything wrong, or odd about a mangled god. It made sense in an intuitive way that, if there was a god, the creator would want to share in the pain of living and dying, after, it’s the world the entity put together. I also didn’t think that the cross would protect me, if anything, it made me realize that there was no escape from pain and suffering. But, that god was telling creation suffering has meaning. Ahh To be a child again!



Now as an adult, I’m not Catholic, and in truth, agnostic would be the best word to describe me. But that’s a subject for a different day, today I just want to explore, the cross and its meaning in a non-Christian context.

I still mediate on the cross, even as a non-believer. Not for salvation in the religious sense, but because for me, that one icon encapsulates the inescapable truth that Buddha knew so well…life is suffering.

There’s no escape from it, although some people try their hardest:
• We try through drug use
• Through social constructs and institutions
• Through religion, self absorption, selfishness, materialism (consumerism) and vanity
• But mostly through ignorance, or more rightly, a purposeful disregard for suffering

Caesar upon his triumph, had a man standing behind him, whispering in his ear…”remember you will die.”
And so do we all.

This is our cross. Each moment we live, somewhere in the back our minds, we know we’re going to die.

When I see the cross, I mean, [b]THE CROSS[/b], not a modernistic, white-bread piece of modern art, but the blood and guts old school Catholic brand, with bleeding eyes curled up in this head, capturing, the inescapable truth of our inhumanity, of the depth of our cruelty.




I think of all the suffering I’ve seen, in life and through the media. Like the little girl, and her big black eyes, in rising muddy flood water, who died eight minutes after the picture was taken. I think of the woman in the nursing home, whose uterus fell out as she was walking, screaming, “Mary, help me. Mary, Mary.” (and yes, that did and can happen, look it up). I think of the family in Afghanistan, liquidated by an American bomb, in our name, with our tax dollars. Or the countless, quite deaths of the poor and lonely, that are occurring RIGHT this minute.

The cross, as a means of humiliating torture and death, has long along lost its sting, but remember it wasn’t just a prophet in Israel that was nailed to it. Think of Spartacus the slave that almost sacked Rome, and the countless thousands that were crucified before and after Christ. And by the way, there was no loin cloth, the victim was stripped bare. (Imagine that detail added!).

There’s also a deeper meaning to the symbol itself, at least according to the Jungian theory of archetypes, which if find very interesting.



Here’s a short-summary of Jung’s thought on the cross:

[quote]
the basic shape of a cross, has since prehistoric times
been employed in almost every culture throughout the
world and all the roughly similar shapes of cross
symbols have wildly different meanings.
the cross variously symbolised health, fertility, life,
immortality, the union of heaven and earth, spirit and
matter, the sun, the stars... it is seen a world centre and
a cosmic axis, the cross represents the human form,
with its four cardinal points it can be mapped to fourfold
systems: the four directions: north, south, east, and west;
the 4 seasons; the four elements; the four winds...[/quote]

I’d wear a cross, if it didn’t bring all the other connotations with it, hmm…erhaps an electric chair? Too bulky. I need something that a universal symbol of suffering, and misery…and here I took off my wedding ring (ok bad joke).

Wait, I know an even worse joke. In Catholic school, we’d look up at the cross and the strange letters at the top of the cross, and think INRI stood for I’m Nailed Right In.

Yes, I’m firm enough in my disbelief to say something like that, it’s taken me a long time to get to the point where the superstitions of hell has lost its power for me.

So what is does the cross say to me?

To me, it portrays the price of intolerance. And it is a focal point, for me, to remind me, that we all share in the suffering of each other. Imagine if every solider, every politician, could feel the pain of one crucified, how quickly war would end. Think on that, and maybe there is salvation through the cross.