Feast of the Exhaltation of the Holy Cross (Yesterday)

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In a perfect work, I would have posted this yesterday on the actual feast, and in truth I haven't posted much on religious content recently. This isn't intentional; rather religion is one of the more difficult things to write about so when things get busy it is the most easily neglected.

But I should write something about the Exhaltation of the Holy Cross, because it represents in many ways what is the most difficult for me about both my Catholic faith and Christianity in general.

My Godfather was raised Jewish and so he has always had difficulty with the notion of the Holy Trinity; to him the idea of a "Godhead" consisting of three persons is almost blasphemous – a trick to work a polythiestic edge into a monotheistic faith. That's an understandable objection from a Jewish perspective.

I, on the other hand, was raised Unitarian Universalist; a faith better defined in terms of its social priorities than its religious dogma. And after having been Catholic for almost four years now, I still have some difficulty with the idea of "exhalting" an object of torture.

Theologically, this doesn't interfere with my acceptance of the Nicene Creed and whatnot; I think I basically understand and accept the notion of sacrifice and redemption. It's the place of the cross in that dialogue that trips me up. That is, the cross seems as if it should be suggestive of evil and murder; the final weapon against God in the gospel narrative, and momentarily effective because it essentially killed God. The counter, the resurrection, was an un-trumpable response to this weapon. That is, one cannot kill God unless God accepts the moment of Death, and doing so within the context of a gift, everything is forgiven and we all go home.

How did the cross (besides being an easily manufactured and striking symbol of a faith) come to be appropriated as an instrument of good, even an object of the holiest distinction?

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Before I continue, I should point out that I think my intuition is wrong here.

There are plenty of matters in which I think the Catholic Church is wrong, both in the priority it gives to its somewhat venial issues with the social world, with the lack of balance and perspective in its own composition, and even sometimes its interpretation of scripture and liturgy. I'm not shy about this.

But I think that the Church is correct to venerate the Cross. There is a scriptural suggestion of this, not only in the way Jesus describes his cross as a necessity, as something he "takes up," but even more broadly in the reversals throughout the gospels: rich for poor, foolish for wise, and so on. There's a sort of symbolic appropriateness to coopting your enemies weapon as your own, something that Paul states outright just a little bit later.

So I accept that the sacred interpretation of the cross is both resonant and true.

It simply runs against the grain of my mind; understanding is an effort.

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This week I made more headway on this issue than I have in years.

At work I've been doing work on Medieval Literature, and one of the pieces I examined is known as The Dream of the Rood where the "rood" is the "cross." It's a archetypical Dream Vision in which the narrator dreams of an encounter with the one true cross. The cross explains, in courtly language, his encounter with Christ; that Christ is a lord in Feudal fashion and the cross is his retainer.

While this creates an automatic distance from a modern reading, several arguments made here were poignant to me.

The first was that the cross represented trees as Christ represented humanity. In other words, if Adam was the human to initiate original sin and Christ the redeemer, a similar relationship can be drawn between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the cross. They're active agent in the sense that they interact with humans and impact the course of events, but they lack the power and autonomy to direct action themselves.

The upshot of this is that tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, inasmuch as it was a creation of God at the beginning, and hence a "good" think interacted with the world in negative ways. The tree was the site of two deceptions (the serpent toward Eve, and Adam and Eve toward God) and the medium against which condemnation was directed. The cross, on the other hand, interacted with the world in positive and negative ways. As an instrument of torture and execution, and murderer of God, most of its career was undeniably negative. But it was the chosen vehicle for the passion and resurrection, and as a result the cross was the medium through which repemption moved.

The second point was that the cross itself, as a creation of God was as subject to Jesus' command as anything else, and by a rough sort of natural law, would naturally have wanted to preserve Christ. This is suggested in Satan's exhortation that Christ fling himself from the temple in Jerusalem to be saved by angels; he would have been saved, according to the text, but such an act of earthly arrogance wasn't part of the plan. Likewise, the inclination of the cross would have been to save Christ, to release him, let him down, or as the Dream poetically suggests, cradle and shield him from his attackers. That the cross did not do so, then, is not an act of cruelty, but an act of obedience and fidelity. It is one entity in the gospel, in fact, that does conform to the principles and arguments that Christ holds forth.

These two observations, and especially the second, are the most compelling arguments I've heard for the Exhaltation of the Cross. This continues to be an important subject to me, since it's very close to the source and argument behind Christian faith. I hope that the future provides similar opportunities to engage the subject.

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