The Triumph of the Cross

The heart needs the peace that Jesus Christ has won for us. Without this peace, we slowly die poisoned with all kinds of anxiety and resentment. Our innermost being suffers disturbances because we have lost an orientation point for all that is good, true and noble. Without the right standard, the constant nudging of our overly technologized culture pushes us into toxic ideological stands that blind us. We may gain a sense of belonging and purpose with this blindness, but this is only to the benefit of unnamed bureacrates and hidden engineers pulling the strings. Indeed, without an objective point of reference, we are easily manipulated into gazing upon the world through pre-packaged digitized narratives that only make us more resentful and anxious, but never access the only peace that can save us.

Without God, without the vision that only He can make possible, Saint John says the world can only excite lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Our pre-packaged narratives cannot see God because they cannot see beyond the material, beyond the facts, beyond the process.. The material is the plane of measureable, visible things. Facts are those things men have done, and it is the repeatability of a fact that gives it scientific value. Process is how facts are produed. Narratives that appeal the imagination are construed from these building blocks to help us feel that we live in a world of predictable results. It is only the level of narrative that the engineers and those they serve want us to live,

To live and move and have our being in the merely material is a life constantly nudged to commercial existence. Yet, such narratives do not beyond the banal. Materialist narratives filter out what really matters because these stories never rise above what is measured, what is fit into a dialectic, what can be produced. Pre-occupation with the mere surface of reality only knows what is useful and never what does not admit of being used. The gravitation force of such superficiality pulls toward the convenient, the comfortable and the merely familiar, even to the point of boorishness, or else, callous pride. Yet to rise to the plane of a meaningful existence, a life truly worth living, one must climb and be lifted up to a purpose and mission not limited the merely convenient, comfortable or familiar.

Even in the darkness of sin, a shadows of the divine still shine the cosmos. Reality in relation to God has an immeasurable depth and height, breadth and width - dimensions grasped not with the mind so much as with the core of one's very being. A relational God helps us see that even the material is meant for relations, that everything is ordered to what only the heart can know. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry meant as much when he said one sees rightly only with the heart.

The Crucified God challenges us to take off the blinders of political causes and the pleasure we find in the self-righteous indignation they solicit. He who reveals the face of the Father dares us to open our eyes to what is spiritual until an astonished silence seizes us, Just as there is a felt solidarity when spouses gaze into each other's eyes, a moving stillness when a mother first sees her newborn, an aching silence when a dying friend offers a final glance, contemplation of the Cross can circumscribe our frail existence with eternal truth. Those who dare to open themselves to these deeper truths soon discover how little we measure and how much we are measured by what is really real. If we fall short of what we desire when see Him, what we desire remains as good and beautiful as ever. Here, the most honest among us long to be delivered from all that holds us back from that for which we were made.

For those souls who dare to hope in the face of materialism, who dare to yearn that what cannot be measured be the measure of man, the Father is acting in great power. If shadows of divine light still linger on a humanity subject to death, He gives a new Light that no darkness, not even dark dialectics, can overcome. This living Light grants that even deeper gaze known to faith, and those who take the risk of belief in this Light, who live by this Light in relation to God and to one another, such souls find understanding even when fallen in a pit of doubt. They find ground to stand on and this even when everything is shaken under their feet. This is because they have found the One who dwells among us, the Word who implicates Himself in our plight.

While many celebrate those who wrestle with God, there is also a God who wrestles against death and the powers of darkness. He battles against meaninglessness. He fights despair. This God is gazed upon only under cruciform shadow, and his wordless cry is his last word to a world that rejects Him. Yet no rejection or humiliation can sway His purpose, for who can stand against Him? He attacks the kingdom of hell and He has shattered its gates. His enemies flee before Him while this Victor leads a host of captives to freedom and taken captive sin and death. And those who march under His banner join their hearts to His in triumph, Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi: quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.