Mankind, in a frenzy of strange fears, spends its time and money to escape the cross and all it stands for.
September is the month of many feast days: Our Lady’s birthday, the Exaltation of the Cross, the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and others.
Yet mind and heart seem to be attracted to the cross. Perhaps because nature all around bedecks itself at this time of year in a blaze of glory and colors, maybe to make a fitting background of shades of gold and yellow for the great feast of the Exaltation of the Cross…the sign of our salvation.
Who these days exalts the cross in their soul, heart, mind, and life?
Mankind, in a frenzy of strange fears, spends its time and money to escape the cross and all it stands for. Far from exalting it, they want to abolish it, forget it, erase it from their lives.
Catholic mediocrity, content with the minimum or with individual sentimental piety in which the word “I” is so predominant, is mediocre and individual precisely because souls, walking slowly the ways of spiritual life, inevitably approach Golgotha. Once they begin to see the Cross, fears enter in.
The stark nakedness of the Holy Wood is a fearsome sight, and the fears it begets turn many away from a full, joyous Christian life, throwing them back into that spiritual mediocrity in which one can hide oneself from the cross.
Yet the Lord does not permit this hiding to be of long duration. Never was there a century like ours in which the cross has blazed so clearly or so high above the earth.
Strange this paradox, this eternal sign of contradiction! The salvation of the human race today and tomorrow, depends on accepting the exaltation of the Cross of Christ.
Modern rejection brings it into the midst of the people with its full weight.
Acceptance would make it yield its sweet secret of lightness, love, and holy joy.
Strange and perverse generation! Madly we seek to escape its holy weight. By doing so, we lie prostrate under all its pain.
For behold our fears, the ever-increasing darkness around us, the ever-closer stench of the breath of the Beast as we try to throw off the weight of the Holy Wood, given to us for our salvation.
Oh Holy Wood! Whisper to us the secret hidden in you. Tell us of the Love that died in your embrace. Tell us of the freedom and peace that you hold out to those who love you. Show us how to exalt you within our fearful hearts, how to shape our loves in your cruciformity!
You are the weapon that will save us from the Beast, who, like a roaring lion, seeks whom he may devour.
Oh Holy Cross! Speak to us of him who loved us so much as to die on your reluctant breast. Speak so that we may learn to love in return, and, ceasing to be mediocre, become holocausts of love, lifted up on you!
September, the month of many feasts, of nature singing her song of love in all the notes of a symphony of yellow and gold. A bride bedecked for her Beloved!
Let us, bedecking our souls in courage and love, exalt the Cross of Christ in our daily life.
Then, and only then, will we know its sweet secret, its feathery weight, its everlasting joys.
-A 1956 editorial by Catherine Doherty
The Crucifixion carving by Patti Birdsong
