Saint Michael and All Angels- Thursday, September 29 , 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC 

Saint Michael and All Angels - Thursday, September 29, 2016

Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou,O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust down to hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who roam the world  seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

This prayer might be familiar to Roman Catholics of a certain age and also to Anglo-Catholics. It appears in all past and present editions of St. Augustine's Prayer Book.

It turns out, however, not to be a very old prayer.  Pope Leo XIII--he who famously declared Anglican ordinations “absolutely null  and utterly void”--wrote it and ordered it said beginning in 1884 after low masses along with a number of Hail Mary's and other prayers with the explicit intention for the restoration of the Papal States and later (1929), for the Catholic Church in Russia. Its use was suppressed in 1965. So it's just a blip in the history of church liturgical practice or devotional piety.  And only liturgy wonks like myself tend to know it.  Yet I find the prayer strangely comforting and reassuring and say it fairly often. 

I think part of the reason is that it offers a somewhat more sturdy picture of angels than what we find in recent popular culture. I'm not sure we want to be touched by this particular angel. This is not an angel with a chubby face or soft, downy wings. This angel is a warrior, the leader of the heavenly armies: 

“War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon. The dragon and his angels fought back, but they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.”  (Rev. 12:7-8)

In the Biblical and spiritual traditions beginning with late Judaism, but also in Persian and other contemporary religions and continuing into Christian piety, angels have played an important role.

 

•    As the very word angel suggests, angels announce. They serve as messengers of the Most High, bringing warnings or news—hopefully good news—or consolations, often in dreams or visions. 

•   They serve, they minister, as we hear in the letter to the Hebrews.They cooperate with God in the work of creation to bring God's will to pass and serve as cosmic witnesses to the mighty acts of God.

•   They worship God ceaselessly, and in our worship we do indeed join our voices with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven. 

•   They connect heaven and earth, as we hear in today's Gospel, climbing up and down that stairway or ladder which is Christ, guiding us into right relationship with God and with God's creation, including with our own selves. 

•   They guard and protect, as we hear in various Gospel passages, especially regarding the safety of “the little ones”...hence the idea of guardian angels, perhaps each of us having one appointed by God to accompany us and keep us on our ways.

•   They heal, as we hear in the story of Tobit or in the Jesus' reference to the troubling of the waters by an angel at the pool.

They DO all this, they ARE all this. 

And this very talk of angels challenges our pedestrian and limited ideas of reality, suggesting that there is more—much more—than either our eyes can see or our minds can fathom.  Even if there were no angels, then, we might need to invent them just so that we could protect this opening toward the great metaphysical unknown that intersects our lives from time to time, or perhaps always.  I know people who have had experiences of angels.  Some of you are here right now, people who know of those uncanny times when we have been saved from disaster or plucked from danger or delivered from our own foolishness and brought, against all odds, to a place of calm and safety.  We can't quite explain such experiences, except to say that God was there and acting through some power or person or force, visible or invisible, that saved or changed our lives.  I know this for a fact.

 

But there is more. Because, as our Leonine prayer reminds us, the angels fight, they do battle, they strive against evil, they work for good.

Of course the imagery may be primitive and even dangerous.  But it may be all the more cogent for that.

We live in an age that shrinks away from religious imagery or language having to do with struggle, with spiritual combat, with invisible warfare, though it's an integral part of ascetical theology.  Maybe it's because we have become more sensitive to the real costs of war and the carnage it brings that we resist using such language.  Maybe it's because we are aware of how easily military imagery is transformed into militarism and narrow nationalism or religiously inspired terrorism.  I think of Jimmy Carter's speech in 2002 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and concluded by saying:  

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.” 

Yet we are in a spiritual struggle, a cosmic battle, engaged in spiritual warfare. My own small battles fought against my recurring vices and quotidian sins is part of a larger conflict, the dimensions of which exceed my grasp, my understanding. The systemic sins that mark our society and our world—poverty, racism, sexism, disposable people, disposable nations...we know the litany, and that only scratches the surface. And yet we are called to engage in this battle, using as weapons those outlined by St. Paul: truth, justice, righteousness, humility, love.  But we must not deceive ourselves; it is a battle, a struggle. And though the outcome may be assured, the way is long and the burden is heavy (especially for some) and the cost is high.   

And here's where St. Michael and the angels come in.  Because whatever else these angelic beings may be, they are fighters, they are warriors.  And they are fighting with us and maybe even within us in our struggles.  And they are fighting for us, for all God's creation, against forces and patterns and yes, even against that one we call Satan, “the enemy of our human nature” as Ignatius of Loyola describes him, who is not less than personal.  And we are not fighting alone.  God has given us “co-conspirators” in the fellowship of the church and in the wider human community and, beyond our wildest imaginings, in the mighty army of angelic spirits. No, we do not fight alone.

Is this mythology?  Of course it is.  

Is it true? I sure hope so.

Jesus Christ, of course, is the Lord of the battle.  It is in his army that we serve, as St. Benedict teaches.  And “he must win the battle,” as Martin Luther would have us sing.  But he has other helpers as well. You and me.  And right there, in the front ranks, are the angels.  Let us not be afraid to invoke today their fellowship and aid and protection. 

Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou,O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust down to hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who roam the world  seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

First Profession of the Monastic Vow of Br. Josép Reinaldo Martinez-Cubero- September 27

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC 

First Profession of the Monastic Vow-  Tuesday, September 27, 2016

1 Samuel 3:1 – 11
Psalm 121 
Colossians 3:12 – 17
Matthew 16:24 – 27

The Benedictine vow:Obedience,  Stability and Conversatio Morum
(Conversion of my way to the monastic way). 

Reinaldo, this is an important day for you and for our community.  Your desire and request to take this step into deeper commitment and discernment is a movement of the heart as well as the mind. Having had the privilege of accompanying you these last two years I’ve witnessed what has informed, inflamed, and challenged your desire. Your novitiate has been a time of unlearning as much as learning, especially learning to see what is already there.

Our journey to union with God requires self-knowledge, and self-knowledge never ends. It draws us deeper into the mystery that is God and ourselves. The ultimate desire of God is to be incarnated in us. Spiritual transformation demands incarnation. The inner work of formation, at it’s best, is to help us let go of our illusions and pretense so that we can be awake and present to what actually is. As we gradually learn to let go, we slowly unfold to love, grace, and freedom.

The vow is a commitment to the ongoing stripping away of illusions. The world—the system we construct around security, status, pleasure, and power, often become our gods. Thomas Merton wrote: “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. . . . “ Wisdom teachers from many traditions have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see: we have to be taught how to see. The vow is meant to be a path to decrease ego, which blocks us seeing what is there, in order to increase our access to God, our brothers, and ourselves. As ego shrinks we become more our true self because we become more Christ.

The Benedictine vow came about not as some theoretical construct, but from practical, lived experience. The vow is three-fold: Obedience, Stability, and Conversatio Morum (Conversion of my way to the monastic way). The vow names, and is essentially, our core values as Benedictines.

It‘s not about negation, restriction, or limitation. It’s an invitation to face a number of very basic demands: the need to listen, the need not to run away, and the need to be open to change

Living a vow is quite a different invitation to keeping it. Keeping it implies holding on to something that never changes. Living it involves fidelity, first and foremost to God, and second to those with whom we share the commitment. Each component of the vow is an evolving surrender of emotion, body, and spirit---the whole person--- to a God who is powerfully experienced. We do well to consider Profession not so much as an event or a fixed point, but as a spiral, as an evolving, deepening love affair.

In the cenobitic life obedience extends beyond the superior and the Rule to the other members of the community. It’s a vow of mutual collaboration. Obedience is a risky business, which is far easier to talk about than to live.  It means being prepared to take our life in our hands and place it in the hands of God. It’s not about compliance and conformity. It’s grounded in listening. At the root of obedience is the free, humble, loving surrender to the will of God as we discern it through prayer, the community, and the Superior. It’s an acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers. We need to be open to hearing the voice of God in others, especially those whose monastic experience will benefit us.

In our reading from the First Book of Samuel we see the difference between hearing and listening. Listening doesn’t come easy. That’s why we vow to keep working at it. In the reading, and in our life, there’s lots of repetition requiring perseverance and patience. We strive to listen to the deepest voice because the loudest is usually not God’s. Listening opens the door to presence. When listening and presence come together, a new reality emerges---often nothing like we initially imagined.

Monastic stability means accepting this particular community and Order as the way to God. The genius of Benedict was to situate the individual search for God within the communal context that shaped as well as supported the quest. For him, community was not simply the place where one seeks God, but the very vehicle to achieve it. To Benedict, the key to monastic life was accountability to God and the community. Accountability galvanizes community, making the difference between cohabitation and genuine common purpose. Community is about the desire to connect and be connected. It involves growth and challenge. The heart of the community is forgiveness, which is the greatest factor of growth in any person. Forgiveness is an act of letting go, which opens our closed hearts to give and receive love.

Stability is not about idealism but realism. We all need roots. Without them we cannot discover who we are. Stability does not allow us to evade our inner truth. We vow to not run away from ourselves. Stability of place and relationship are the means toward stability of heart. This helps us to see others as they really are, and allow them to be themselves rather than the selves we would prefer them to be. Only then do we discover that all God wants of us, is us.

Benedict knew that the only people who grow in truth are those who are humble. A humble person is simply someone who is honest about his own truth. The vow is intended to help grow in that truth. Growth in the spiritual life takes place not by acquisition of something new, but by the release of our defensive postures, by letting go of fear and our attachment to self-image. Only then is truth allowed to show itself.

If stability is recognition and resting in God's complete faithfulness and dependability, then Conversatio Morum is recognition of God's unpredictability, which confronts our love of safety. It demands continuous change. The goal in changing is not self-fulfillment. The goal is Christ. There is no security, no clinging to past certainties. Our chosen idols are successively broken. We vow a commitment to openness and total inner transformation. This includes and is facilitated by common ownership and celibacy. We can only come to know and love Christ to the degree that we realize that we are known and loved. Our primary relationship is with Christ. Through him we forge our link with others, and grow toward maturity in the giving and receiving of love.

Our Epistle reminded us that in our baptism we are “chosen, holy, and beloved.“ Our old life is dead; our new life is with Christ in God.

As a result we should clothe ourselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other as we have been forgiven so that love might bind all together in harmony, letting the peace of Christ rule in our hearts.” This was Benedict’s vision for his community and what the living of his Gospel-based Rule would look like. If we are serious about living this new resurrection life we must act like it. As James, our Founder wrote: “Love must act, as light must shine, and fire must burn.”

Reinaldo, as you have already discovered, conversion does not happen overnight or with the profession of a vow. Take heart from Jesus’ words, “If anyone wants to become my follower…” We are never finished; we are always in a state of becoming. We will keep running into our need for conversion at deeper and deeper levels. But God is present, and maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. We are not on this journey alone. We are all in this together. The longer we are on this path, the more we realize, and come to trust, and to surrender to the fact that we don’t really know anything. All is mystery and grace. Only such not knowing is spacious enough to hold the God we seek.

  

+Amen.

Proper 21 Year C- Sunday, Sep. 25, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC 

Proper 21 Year C- Sunday, September 25, 2016

  "Humility"
( Icon from the Prosopon  School of Iconography)

The transformation that takes place in following Jesus as Luke frames it is from the hellfire of blindness, resistance to God, and isolation to the purifying fire of the gift of seeing myself and my neighbor in God’s light, humility, and connection.  As Luke continually presents Jesus as the one who upends expectations and embodies a surprising and shocking quality of mercy to the other, this kingdom way of being human is offered in all its scandalous revolution.  Jesus bursts onto the scene as the genuinely new.  Love him or hate him, but no one leaves an encounter with him neutral.  The kingdom is among us, Jesus says, if we would dare to celebrate it and our identity within it.  The kingdom is the dawning movement from hellfire to purifying fire but it requires a willingness to have our religious and cultural categories of who is in and who is out dismantled, our personal masks and defenses removed, and then, grasping nothing and hiding nothing, to stand with nothing but our desire before the one who freely offers us his welcome into a new identity. We are asked to be simple enough to receive it, to say yes, to allow ourselves to participate in the kingdom which is to be given new eyes.  This new way is modeled in Luke in those who say their “yes”: Mary, Elizabeth, Simeon, the Gerasene demoniac, the penitent thief on the cross, and many others in the historical narrative as well as parabolic characters like the tax collector who goes home justified, the good Samaritan and the prodigal son.  The yes to receiving, hearing, seeing, and acting in the light of a new creation is salvation and the world’s hope.  As St Augustine is reported to have said, “Without God, I cannot.  Without me, God will not.”

Opposition to the kingdom from without and within is real, however.  The gospels are not a utopian vision of rainbows and puppy dogs.  I may have said a fundamental “yes” to God, but that does not relieve the struggle - actually intensifies it.  Even as we enter onto the way to Jerusalem, the way to death and resurrection with Jesus, we are ensnared in ways of thinking and acting that resemble the legalism of the Pharisees or the power agendas of the empire.  Just as the desire to say “yes” lives within us, so does resistance in the forms of power and control.  The impulsive grasping for the right answer at all costs keeps us inside our gated world and isolated in our own self-righteousness.

Jesus’ response to our inner conflict is to take us down the road of each choice, consumption and transformation, showing us their ends and then leaving it up to us to make a decision.  We are repeatedly hit with an either/or choice – the illusory and temporal which offers us a façade of reality and which is passing away OR the real and eternal which is breaking in and which is our real identity and eternal home.  Either/or is happening with the Good Samaritan are the priest and Levite passing by, the son who returns and celebrates is brother to the one who stays outside, one crucified thief asks Jesus to remember him, the other is mocks Jesus.  The question is “which fire do you want?”  Human life is the confrontation with this radical decision which we avoid at our peril.

This all brings us into the world of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.  It illustrates the spiritual crisis of “yes” or “no”.  The rich man is an image of blindness, one whose comforts have dulled him to his deep desire, his humanity.  His soul is revealed in his treatment of the other - rather than being seen, welcomed, and fed (and table fellowship for Luke is the manifestation of new life), Lazarus is invisible, ignored, and waiting for crumbs.  Jesus is painting a picture for the religious leaders in his audience and for us of what happens when we say “no” to the other – we not only leave them to suffer but are choosing to harden our own souls as well.  Compassion received and compassion given reflect Jesus, reflect the kingdom among us.  This is why the parable extends beyond this life – to illustrate that our willingness to see, to care, defines the destiny of our very soul.  Breaking bread with the outsider is allowing my soul to be broken open and receptive to grace.  My own inclusion is ratified in my inclusion of my brother or sister.  I pass through the gate of protection and into the vulnerability of my humanity.  Dare I see, really see the person at my gate when I am conditioned to believe that not seeing that person is acceptable?  And in seeing the one in need, the one I can so easily ignore and right off as worthless, do I treat him or her as a precious and valuable child of God?

So there is both a social and spiritual dimension to the parable.  They are interconnected.  Compassion and generosity blesses both of us just as blindness and greed harms us both.  For Jesus, this is the spiritual revolution because if I allow myself to get stuck in a moral vision in which only some have worth, I am in danger of rejecting the kingdom which declares that all have worth.

We all have blind spots.  We all see ourselves and others selectively and partially.  We are all the rich man to some degree, which is why the intention in prayer and community to get an honest look inside my heart is so important.  My inner rich man takes the form of pointing out the blindness I recognize in other people and judging them accordingly.  My gate is that I want to hear voices that affirm what I believe and resist those that criticize what I believe.  I want to be in the “in” group, I want clean and easy answers to what is going on in the world, who is to blame for its problems, and assurance that the right people will fix things in the right way.  The problems of the world are those other people and the solutions are big and far away from my small life, so I build gates of rationalization, defensiveness, and blame.

What does it mean to be given sight and then move toward the person at my gate?  We must be aware of the danger of abstracted compassion and theoretical mercy. The call is to the particular and the tangible.  It is good to support causes and efforts that address the systemic injustices of our wider country and world, but that support is never a substitute for attending to the person at my gate.

The parable comes back to the person at my gate.  I notice in conversations around the monastery and in parishes a quickness to bewail and lament the positions and behavior of those we deem unenlightened.  The implication is that of course we would never believe or do anything so hateful as that.  When these realities arise in conversation and move you deeply, perhaps God is awakening your conscience to go and work for justice and reconciliation where it is lacking.  But maybe this kind of conversation is the snare of armchair compassion and passive mercy.  What if rather than talking about people we don’t know and don’t like, taking the focus conveniently off our responsibility, we shifted the conversation to the question of the person at the gate?  What is given me to do, to give, to care for those in need?  How can I dismantle my gate and instead build a bridge of understanding across a divide to those I label outsiders?  The great chasm of the parable is a cautionary tale – it need not be if we learn from the rich man how to recognize the hell of blindness for what it is and wake up and engage.  The problems of poverty and injustice are real and bigger than me, but my relatively small act is still important and valuable socially and spiritually.  Reconciliation, respect and caring are not popular and may never be at the big cultural level.  But at the level of my life I can begin with the person next to me.  The one I label outsider is a gift who shows me what is in my soul and where I am going if I am willing to look.          

May God give us the grace to see and the desire to act. Amen.                            
 

Proper 20 C - Sep 18, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC 

Proper 20 Year C- Sunday, September 18, 2016

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
1 Timothy 2:1-7
Luke 16:1-13

The shrewd manager

 Today’s collect contrasts being “anxious about earthly things” with “loving things heavenly.” It would be simple to imagine that “loving things heavenly” means some kind of ethereal, spiritual experience. However, the stories Jesus has been telling in Luke’s long narrative of the journey to Jerusalem are earthy, everyday stories that connect to human lives. It’s one of the central ironies of the Christian life that in order to “love things heavenly,” we must turn toward the dust of which we are made, and from there try to envision and build the reign of God. What better way to make the point than with a parable, that grassroots lesson connecting the ordinariness of life with the extraordinary nature of God? None of the parables have baffled interpreters quite like the story of the Dishonest Steward, or perhaps better called the Shrewd Manager.

The story in Luke that comes immediately before today’s story is that of the prodigal son, with the older brother, and the forgiving father. Today’s story may well highlight the same situation: someone in trouble stumbles into grace practically by accident. In the story of the prodigal, the younger son makes very selfish choices that offend nearly everyone, and only comes to his senses when he realizes something must change so that he can survive. Continuing to act in his own self-interest, he returns home, with his speech prepared, only to discover that grace and forgiveness have been waiting for him the whole time, and we have a sense that he may finally get what it means to be loved.

In today’s story, the dishonest manager is in an equally bad situation, and for the same selfish reason. Both son and manager squander the goods of a father and an employer. There was no concern for how their actions would affect others, just for their own gain. When the manager’s employer figures out what he’s done, he continues to act in his own self-interest by cutting deals with his employer’s debtors. His survival depends on them owing him something, because he is sure that manual labor and begging are not options for him. What’s so disturbing to us is that it works! It works even better than he had planned; not only do the people who owe money to his boss get a better deal, the manager himself has regained some status with his employer because of his shrewdness. It’s his shrewdness, not his dishonesty that is commended. He understood how to use what was entrusted to him. In order to be where he wanted to be in the future, how he handled the present counted.

This is crazy, upside-down grace. We who hear this story want him to pay for his dishonesty. What Jesus seems to be highlighting, is not a moral example, but the ridiculous nature of God’s grace, and our call to live in it. Jesus commends the shrewd manager as an example, not for his dishonest dealings, but for his clever solution. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He says that if this manager – who is “of this world,” meaning someone whose values are entirely self-oriented – has managed to find his way into a better situation, how much more might his followers do, with the grace of God behind them?

People today are no less lost than they were in the time of Jeremiah,  Jesus, or Luke and many times their quandary is precisely the same. Self-interest blinds people to the harm done to themselves and others. Greed flourishes because insecurity reigns. Fear drives people into rigid defensive postures. No one recognizes their role in turning away from God toward their primary concerns that have replaced God. Being prophetic is more than a matter of speaking truth to power. It is also a matter of speaking truth to suffering, to weakness, to laziness, and to failure to take responsibility.

In the Book of Proverbs, we read: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18).  This is the crisis Jesus, Luke, and Jeremiah address in our readings. The chosen people and the children of light, have lost the vision of God. This parable is a call to reclaim who we are and to renew our vision today for the kingdom of God beyond and among us. What Jesus thinks his followers are capable of is what he himself has been busy doing: healing, reconciling, truth-telling, and proclaiming the kingdom. We must be as clever as the manager in today’s gospel, with a different goal: not serving our self-interest, but the best interests of the world that God loves. When we lose sight of the goal, the vision, when we have no idea where we are going, the riches we possess have no larger value than our need for them. In monastic life it is especially easy to lose the vision, the goal, and to slide into complacency.

Today’ gospel is a reminder, for those inside and outside of monasteries, that when we get anxious about and obsessed with money, status, power, and control, we end up using our best skills for ourselves alone. It’s also a reminder that in spite of ourselves, we are bathed in grace and forgiveness. We are called to be shrewd about recognizing grace and forgiveness and sharing it. We are called to love things heavenly, by loving God’s whole creation.

Forgiveness – which is an act, not a feeling – has positive consequences for everyone. We can get hung up on the undeniable fact that the person in the story, or in our lives, is acting dishonestly or manipulatively. We’d like to distance ourselves. But Jesus chooses his story carefully, and this one sticks in the memory precisely because it’s outside the boundaries of any conventional morality tale.

Forgiveness and its consequences are central to the Gospel. No matter who does the forgiving, it’s going to create ever-widening circles of positive consequences. This cycle is initiated by God’s grace toward us. It precedes our entire existence, and if we choose to be kingdom-builders, we begin by accepting God’s grace, and extending forgiveness to others. There is really no other way to transform our limited sense of justice into the expansive sense of God’s justice and mercy. Forgiveness is the engine that drives our journey toward the kingdom, and we who receive it are called to share it freely.

+Amen.

Holy Cross Day - Sep 14, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright

Holy Cross Day, Wednesday - September 14, 2016

Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:31-36a

The finding of the cross - from the icon cross in our church, by John Walsted

When I was in college I worshiped at an Episcopal parish named The Chapel of the Cross.  The original congregation, started in 1842 without a church building, had been named The Church of the Atonement.  An actual church building would not come until 1848, and when Bishop Ives of North Carolina arrived to consecrate the space, because of its small size he called it a “chapel” and declared “We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  And so the congregation was renamed, and the new church became The Chapel of the Holy Cross, later shortened to its present form.
 
“We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  Today we celebrate Holy Cross Day, or “The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”  A feast day named for the deed, not the doctrine.  What this day actually commemorates is the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the year 335.  Tradition has it that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the sites of both the Crucifixion (Calvary or Golgotha) and the Burial of Jesus, the tomb.  And it was at the site of Calvary that the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena unearthed the remains of three crosses.  To discover which, if any of the three, was the True Cross of Jesus, she touched wood from each of them to a diseased woman.  And, of course, when this woman was touched with the wood of the True Cross she was instantly healed.

And so the wood of this Cross was broken up, divided, and spread around the world as relics.  And it’s said that if all of these various fragments of holy wood were gathered together to reconstitute the one True Cross we would find that not only was the Cross of Christ outrageously massive, but also made from the wood of about 15 different kinds of tree.  Such are the miracles and the mysteries of our Lord.
 
“We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  We have built a lot of bad doctrine, bad theology, around the Cross.  I imagine that most of you have struggled at some point in your journey of faith with just why this death on a cross occurred, and whether or not it had to happen this way.  Of course, there are the straightforward, historical reasons—Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire and to the Temple hierarchy.  They saw him as a revolutionary and a blasphemer, and so he was executed.

We could ask Why? and simply stop there.  These are good enough and true answers.  We could stop at the deed and forget the doctrine (and in some ways we might have been better for it!).  But as Christians, we are not let off the hook so easily.  We’re forced to ask the question, “Where is God in this Cross?”

One route that some of our theologians have taken is to think of Jesus’ Cross as a transaction, a payment to placate God’s wrath against us, so that we end up with God the Son dying to save us from God the Father — which sets up a pretty schizophrenic dualism within the life of God.  And it places violence, blood lust, and, as Dom Crossan so eloquently put it, “cosmic child abuse,” right at the heart of God.  This is one route our theologians have taken.

Another route is found in one of my favorite books, the 1933 novel "Peter Abelard" written by Helen Waddell.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your list.  There’s a scene in the novel where Abelard and his friend Thibault find a rabbit dying in a hunting trap.  As Abelard carefully removes the rabbit from the trap and holds it, it dies in his arms.  Heartbroken, he asks Thibault if he thinks there’s even a God at all.  How could God allow the suffering of this little innocent one?

“I know,” Thibault says, “Only, I think God is in it too.” […] “All this,” he stroked the limp body, “is because of us.  But all the time God suffers.  More than we do.” […] “Thibault, do you mean Calvary?”  Thibault shook his head.  “That was only a piece of it—the piece that we saw—in time.  Like that.”  He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle.  “That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree.  But you only see it where it is cut across.  That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God we saw.  And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, forgiving sins and healing people.  We think God is like that forever, because it happened once, with Christ.  But not the pain.  Not the agony at the last.  We think that stopped.”

“Then, Thibault,” he said slowly, “you think that all this,” he looked down at the quiet little body in his arms, “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?”

“God’s cross,” said Thibault.  “And it goes on.”

This is another way of writing our doctrine of the Cross.  Not as a transaction or a payment, but as a sacrament.  As an outward sign of the way God is with-us-in-all-things, down to the depths and the dregs of life.  The etymology of our English word atonement, our word for the doctrine, is literally at-one-ment.  And our beloved 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich writes of this at-one-ment, following a vision she was given of the Cross: 

“Here [in the Cross] I saw a great one-ing between Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.  And all creatures that might suffer pain, suffered with Him… The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another person… In the sight of God all humans are oned, and one person is all people and all people are one person.”

Christ then becomes that One Person in whom we are all held, and in him, all of us oned to God.  Christ on the Cross shows us that God is at-one with the suffering of the whole universe—at-one with my dad dying on a roadside, at-one with the rabbit caught in a trap, at-one with our bodies as they wind down and wear out, at-one with us in everything.  That is the doctrine to which the deed points.

Today, Holy Cross Day, is also the titular feast day of the Order of the Holy Cross.  And every day as I walk through the main door of the monastery here, I see those words above the entrance, “Crux est Mundi Medicina”—“The Cross is the World’s Medicine.”  How is the Cross medicine?  There’s a line from the Sufi poet Rumi that says, “The wound is where the light enters.”  Can we see the Cross as our collective wound through which the light can enter?

The Cross is not only a comfort given to those of us in pain — it’s also the reproach we need, the shock we need, to wake us up — it’s the sign of our own violence, domination, and misuse of power. Huston Smith puts it this way: “Every time we abuse the poor, every time we pollute our God-given planet, indeed, every time we act selfishly, God dies naked on the cross of our ego.”  And so the Cross as our collective wound is also our medicine, our salvation, our opportunity to wake up.  That, also, is the doctrine to which the deed points.
 
There is a Wisdom document that has been important in my own spiritual life, and I’m certain in the life of many of you.  And I want to take our final word on the Cross from this text.  The Master writes:

“The cross is not the symbol of an event which has its place in the distant past, while only the memory of that event belongs to the present.  Rather, it is the witness of a fact of the eternal order—the self-oblation of the incarnate Son to his eternal Father, as full of love and power today as […] on Mount Calvary. […] The whole love of the passion burns in every Eucharist, and we, [Christ’s] servants, are to be kindled with that love…”

These are words from the Rule of James Otis Sargent Huntington, founder of the Order of the Holy Cross.  The Cross is our comfort, the Cross is our medicine, but finally the Cross is the truest symbol of that Love beating at the Heart of the Universe.  A Cross present in every act of self-giving—a fact of the eternal order.  This is what we celebrate today.  This is the doctrine, the Love, to which the deed points.

And if the pieces of this True Cross were to be gathered together, it would be as immense as the universe.

Amen.