Dancing
with Skeletons: the Exaltation of the Cross Dancing with
Skeletons: the Exaltation of the Cross Dancing with
Skeletons: the Exaltation of the Cross

Dancing with Skeletons: the Exaltation of the Cross

This Sunday is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.  The cross or (more likely for a Catholic Christian) crucifix is perhaps viewed by many people in our own culture as much as an item of jewellery or fashion accessory as a religious symbol.  In the ancient world it was the symbol of state-sponsored terror!  It was Rome’s way of reminding the whole of the known world, “Cross us, and we will cross you (quite literally!) right back! Mess with us and our system and this is how you will end your days - in the most excruciatingly painful death we can come up with!”  (The word excruciating comes from Ex cruce, “out of the cross,” since the cross was the very definition of pain in antiquity!) I suppose, then, wearing a cross is a bit like someone today wearing an electric chair round their neck on a gold or silver chain!  For Christians, however, the cross is also an eternal reminder that God can take any situation (even the messiest and most complicated) and make something good out of it, if only we will cooperate, learn lessons and hand ourselves over to the rhythms of loving by learning from those mistakes.  Christianity maintains that God has given you and me a job to do involving people to love, and that these are a job and people that nobody else has been entrusted with (such that, if we don’t do it, it won’t get done).  Yes, you and me, with all our mess, entrusted with such a task and such people!

Some of the greatest wisdom in life can be learned from the most humiliating and humbling of experiences.  As C. S. Lewis puts it (quoting John Bunyan) in The Pilgrim’s Regress, “We call it [i.e where they were about to walk] now simply Wisdom’s Valley: but the oldest maps mark it as the Valley of Humiliation.”  In other words, sometimes in life we have to fall flat on our faces in order to learn life’s most important lessons.  Sometimes the worst things we could ever imagine happening to us are, with hindsight, the very things that had to happen to us to improve us, to save us.  Those awful experiences were the best things for us in the long run.  George Bernard Shaw once said, “If there is a skeleton in the closet of your life, learn to dance with it!”  Every human being has done something they aren’t proud of!  It is wise to learn how to let God make something useful out of the awful things of life (awful because of our own choices and stupidity, or because of what other people and/or the contingencies of life do to us).  As many a spiritual writer reminds us, God can turn the eggs that have been scrambled in our life into a healthy, nourishing, life-giving meal!  Remember, in the Christian view of things, God can bring eternal salvation out of his own murder.  The cross that is exalted in the Church on this Sunday’s feast day reveals that God’s heart is, in its very essence, love – God is on our side and God will help us dance with our past!  God doesn't stop loving us, even for one second, whatever our weakness. On the cross God shows that he can bring the greatest good out of the most horrific situation: the worst thing humans can do - the murder of God - is turned by God into the greatest benefit for humans - their eternal salvation.  God says, “Do what you want, and my love will still bring your good out of it!  Do this to me - stick me on a cross - and I still love you!”

Once upon a time a Benedictine friend of mine reminded me that no one is perfect and that this was why Persian carpets are intentionally made with a flaw, a blemish - to the Islamic mindset, Allah alone is perfect. Encouraging me not to be despondent about life and my own imperfections, a former spiritual director, the Dominican Paul Murray, once smiled at me and remarked with great patience, “Paul, nobody does God very well!”  In a similar vein, my Benedictine friend said, “If you hit a bum note in rehearsal, what do you do?  Not go on tour with the band? If you get knocked down sparring in the gym, do we call the fight off?”  Just as great artists often work mistakes into the overall work of art, so does the Supreme Artist, God, with our lives.  Redemption actually means that out of destructive, negative and awful situations, God can bring something new, creative and positive, something greater than had existed before the destruction.  You are a sinner, you’ve hurt someone?  Ok!  So what do we do?  Give up?  Stop being somebody’s friend, or spouse, or partner, or child, or parent, or grandparent?  Obviously in any relationship there are two parties and the offended person may have plenty to say about the future of the relationship but, if there is to be a future, it will be worth reminding ourselves often that Heaven cannot only be for the perfect, otherwise it would be empty except for God!

If there is a skeleton in the closet of our life, let’s ask God to teach us to dance with it.  And if we really believe that we are the first person since Jesus not to have any faults and failings rattling in a cupboard somewhere, perhaps we can simply take pity on the rest of the poor human race this weekend and say a prayer for its more honest members, that they may take the next few steps in the dance towards happiness.