LEVEL CROSSING?

 

I awoke with the peculiar sentence in my head, “There are trains everywhere – and they all go to the Cross”. Something to ponder, I thought as I dressed. It reminded me that indeed all our ways go to the Cross, and that the implications of that are rich enough to fill centuries of theology. Here are a few of the ones that came into my mind that morning.

1.        The Cross is our Cross. It is the death we cannot avoid, toward which we are headed, that may meet us on a highway or in a hospital room, but meet us it will.

2.        As such, it is our Cross in the sense that we can elect, at least in principle, how to meet it and undergo it. It may be with courage; that is admirable, but a purely pagan virtue. It may be with surrender to God’s Will: that is probably the best way. It may be in sacrifice, for another; before that is up to us, it depends on circumstances.

3.        The Cross is the symbol of our guilt: it is where we, as humanity, crucified the Son of God. It is unavoidable: all trains go there, whether we like it or not.

4.        The Cross is the symbol of our forgiveness: He died there to accomplish that. Is that, too, unavoidable? We can avoid it only by refusing it, which is the only absolute sin.

5.        The Cross, because it is our Cross and His Cross, is the meeting-place where we come together with Him, where our paths cross. Taking the train thither before we have to – in prayer, in meditation, in sacrifice -- is one of the finest ways to be united to Him.

6.        The Cross is a crossroads, a place of choice, a place of crisis in the original sense of the word. When we go to it, we cannot avoid difficult thoughts, and often hard options. Because it is real, it disallows or at least questions our comfortable fantasies.

7.        The Cross is peopled or not, a crucifix or empty, the Cross of Good Friday or the Cross of the Resurrection. Most Catholics are used to the former, most Protestants to the latter. The richest thought is that it is both, and so focuses both meditations.

8.        The Cross is both horizontal and vertical: as the Germans say, both waagerecht and senkrecht: both weighing-scale straight and plumbline-straight. As such it both weighs our soul and plumbs it: a magnificent image.