Posts Tagged ‘Holy Cross Day’
Planting Seeds at the Cross – Br. Lain Wilson
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Br. Lain Wilson
Holy Cross Day
There is a fundamental and inescapable absurdity to what we celebrate today.
Part of this is the simple fact that we celebrate today something that was once a tool of state execution. The cross was a brutal presence in Jesus’ world, and in Jesus’ life. It reveals a world that was broken and unjust. In this respect, the cross of Jesus is an enduring testimony to the brokenness and injustice that persists – and has persisted throughout the centuries – in our world and our hearts.
The world, despoiled and dominated, cries out for healing. The Cross planted into the heart of creation bears witness to all the ways in which this world, because of our actions and inactions, has gone off-kilter. Read More
Behold the Cross – Br. Luke Ditewig
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Br. Luke Ditewig
Holy Cross Day
Behold the cross. Love that makes no sense yet is for us all.[i] Look and pray with each of the Gospel writers.[ii] With Matthew, remember Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, and Pilate washing his hands.[iii] Remember our betrayals, denials, our faults and lies, our thirst for power and revenge. Remember how we have cried “crucify” in word and deed, with silence and inaction. Pray with humility saying: Forgive.
With Mark, pray Jesus’ lament—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”—with its trust—My God—and agony—in feeling abandoned.[iv] This is the first line of Psalm 22 of which Jesus knew the rest. “[Why] are you so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? I cry in the daytime but you do not answer, by night as well, but I find no rest. Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel. Our forebears put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them.”[v]
Pray specifically your pain and hurt and remember back how you have received love. Cling to God’s past provision as hope in today’s desolation. Pray both pain and trust. Read More
The Cross is Everywhere – Br. Keith Nelson
Feast of the Holy Cross
[John 12:31-36a]
The cross is everywhere. The geometric figure of a horizontal and vertical line intersecting one another is an archetypal form, noticed in nature and reproduced by hand by most humans in most cultures. But I am referring only to the cross we know best, in all its stylistic and material variety. Picture in your mind’s eye simply two or three of the probably hundreds of crosses you have seen in your life. I immediately think of the plain wooden cross above the pulpit in the Baptist church of my childhood, the garish crucifix that hung over the temperamental photocopier in the Roman Catholic high school where I taught theology, and a simple brass cross with a tree in the center, a gift from my mom when I told her I might want to become a monk. In flea markets, Bible outlets, laser light shows, ancient catacombs, and war memorials; as two sticks tied together on the corrugated aluminum walls of a shack in Jamaica or Colombia or India or Louisiana; as a gilded masterpiece commissioned by royalty and venerated by pilgrims in Rome or Jerusalem or Canterbury; in polished mahogany, in precious stones, in welded scrap metal, in glow-in-the-dark plastic: the cross is everywhere.
But beyond this literal and material sense, there are at least two other senses in which the cross is everywhere. Read More
Love was His Meaning – Br. James Koester
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Whenever a man expresses an interest in our life, David, who is the novice guardian, invites him to make a few visits to us here to the monastery. Over these visits he gets to know us, and we him. During those visits, he has a brief experience of our life. He joins us for the Offices and the Eucharist, shares in some of the household chores that need to be done to keep this place running, and is invited for countless walks along the river or endless cups of tea, so that individual brothers can have a conversation with him.
For a number of years now, when it is my turn to have a conversation with a prospective member of the community, I ask him the usual questions. Where is he from? What does he do? How did he find us? What is he looking for? I wait for him to ask me questions. Eventually I ask him the one question, indeed really the only question that I am interested in. I ask him if he has ever fallen in love before. For whatever reason, most men, when I ask that question are completely taken aback. It is not a question they are expecting. But for me the question, or in truth the answer, is essential.
Now, just to be clear, I am not interested in the ins and outs of his love life. I don’t want to know the gory details of his romances. I just want to know if he has ever fallen in love and what that experience was like for him.