The Horror and the Glory

“The Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days. 
He spoke this openly.” (Mk 8:31-2)

Today’s gospel is for me a finger pointing to the great feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, this Tuesday.  It is interesting to note that while Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ is to be kept secret, on the other hand, Jesus’ confession of his coming suffering and death is made openly.  The title “Messiah” is ambivalent in its connotations and not something Jesus is willing to embrace unequivocally.  But the identity of Suffering Servant is one he does claim for himself.  Peter’s rebuke and the Lord’s counter-rebuke point to the horror of the cross.  Who saw this coming?  Who wanted a suffering Messiah?  Who will follow him?  If you remember, Fr Isaac asked this pointed question during our retreat: who wants to be saved through the cross, through the way of suffering and death that Christ trod?  And yet our upcoming feast emphasizes the glory of the cross.  We are to lift it high in veneration because by it Christ has redeemed the world.  These words from the current edition of Magnificat summarize well the contrast we are looking at: “Christ’s suffering was hideous, his death dreadful, but by his wounds, we were healed” – his holy and glorious wounds open the way to life.

The horror of the cross.  What is our response to suffering and death in our own lives and in the world today?  I think this may take three shapes (at least):
1)    We don’t look.  We shrink away.  Like Peter we would like to erase suffering and death from our consciousness.  Perhaps we practice a facile spiritualization that means suffering can no longer touch us.  Or perhaps we choose an anesthetized existence, full of happy thoughts, pretty things and nice people, but little reality.
2)    We look and look and look until we are in danger of drowning in the ever-flowing river of human tragedy and distress.  The result is bitterness or despair.  I am reminded of a character in The Secret Life of Bees, who experienced the suffering of the world so intensely, as if her heart were a wailing wall for all humanity, that she finally could not take any more and ended her life.  As T.S. Eliot once put it, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”.
3)    I believe there is a third way, and it is the way the gospel calls us to follow.  We must somehow hold together the darkness and the light which together constitute our temporal reality.  We must look with the eyes of faith for the light shining in the darkness which does not overcome it.  The horror and the glory of the cross interpenetrate.  They do not cancel each other out, because until the last hour, Christ’s suffering continues to be echoed in the lives of human beings.  I think of that cross of broken beams that was found among the ruins at Ground Zero after 9/11.  What did this mean for people?  Why was it such a consolation?  To those who believe it was a sign that here, too, amid these ruined buildings and broken lives, Christ was present.  Even here, redemption was possible.

I would like to offer two literary examples that have come to me while pondering this aspect of the mystery of the cross.  The first is an Old English poem by an anonymous author, called The Dream of the Rood.  The Old English word rood means pole or cross, and the poem tells of a dream about the cross on which Christ died.

“It seemed I saw the Tree itself
Borne on the air, light wound about it,
--a beam of brightest wood, a beacon clad
In overlapping gold, glancing gems
Fair at its foot, and five stones
Set in a crux flashed from the crosstree.”

This Cross is beautiful, bright, golden, and jeweled, truly “not a felon’s gallows” but a “glory-tree”.  But then another aspect comes into view:

“Yet through the masking gold I might perceive
What terrible sufferings were once sustained thereon:
It bled from the right side.
    Ruth in the heart.

Afraid I saw that unstill brightness
Change raiment and color
    --again clad in gold
Or again slicked with sweat,
    Spangled with spilling blood.”

The horror and the glory alternate, first one and then the other coming to view.  This optic does not just apply to the mystery of the cross, but to the mystery of human life: now bloody, now glorious.  We then hear the Tree speak of its experience of being cut down and brought to the site of execution, only to be climbed by mankind’s brave King, embraced by the one who would set mankind free.  The Rood finds itself drawn into Christ’s sacrifice.

“they drove me through with dark nails:
On me are the deep wound manifest,
Wide-mouthed hate-dents….
I was all moist with blood
Sprung from the Man’s side
After He sent forth His soul.”

After the resurrection, the Rood is sought out from its resting place to be adorned for its role in Christ’s victory.
“His friends found me…
It was they who girt me with gold and silver…”

What strikes me here is that the Rood, the Tree participates in the Passion and is glorified by it.  I think this speaks not only of the True Cross, but of our material universe, and in particular, human lives and history.  The nails pierce through us as though his hands and feet.  We too are to be lifted up and glorified.

Now for a very different example.  Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive, Again tells of the residents of a fictional town in Maine.  It is a book of stories about people, about how they shrink from the dark abyss of loneliness and the terror of death, but also search for and sometimes grasp mystery, meaning, beauty, intimacy and hope.  One way this is conveyed is through moments of encounter with the beauty of nature, especially the quality of light at different times of the year.  For the characters, this offers a way through the mystery of suffering, into wonder and hope.  Cindy is facing her own imminent death from cancer.  From her bed she notices once again the quality of light in winter:

“What she would have written about was the light in February.  How it changed the way the world looked.  People complained about February; it was cold and snowy and oftentimes wet and damp, and people were ready for spring.  But for Cindy the light of the month had always been like a secret, and it remained a secret even now.  Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it if you really looked.  You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised.  It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.  As Cindy lay on her bed she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.” P. 123-4
“The sunlight was magnificent, it shone a glorious yellow from the pale blue sky, and through the bare branches of the trees, with the open-throated look that came toward the end of the day’s light…. ‘My God’ she repeated, with awe in her voice.  ‘Just look at that February light.’” P. 138-9
The miracle is repeated in the month of November:
“The sun slanted across them with that horrifying gorgeousness….before them was the November sinking sun against the darkening blue sky.  Along the horizon was a spread of yellow.  And the bare trees stuck their bare dark limbs into the sky.” P. 154, 155

What I appreciate most about Strout’s novel is that she is not out to create an obvious religious allegory, which can feel self-conscious or belabored.  She is simply pointing to moments offered in which the light shines out of darkness and gives hope.  It is the echo in nature of those times when goodness seeps into us through nature, relationships, or a spiritual encounter.  What we do with such experiences is up to us.

As monastics, as contemplatives, we have within our tradition the practice of lectio divina, in which we open ourselves to the Scriptures for insight on God’s action and its meaning in our own lives.  But this practice can go further than the Sacred Word, to embrace all of life, of human experience and history.  At times such as ours, when we are so often faced with the horror of human suffering and death, we need to cultivate this lectio divina of life that allows us to grasp the cruciform nature and salvific meaning of events.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Image: Lindau Gospels, ninth-century jeweled cover.