“This is the Wood of the Cross”

O Lover,

As I recall, I first participated in the veneration of the wood of the cross in the 1991 Tríduum liturgy as I was nearing the culmination of my own RCIA journey. A novice not having experienced this rite before, I recall resisting in the pew and then only conflictedly bowing to kiss the wood. Such an unprotestant thing to do! While the Catholic multi-dimensional hermeneutic and the tradition’s mysticism edge would modulate this discomfort over the intervening decades, the kissing of the cross, not entirely unlike most atonement theories, would remain relatively unimportant to me.

That shifted last weekend during the Good Friday liturgy. Thrice the cross was incrementally exposed with the words “this is the wood of the cross,” we the kneeling faithful responding in each case with “come let us adore” and then silence. And in that sequence You were seemingly opening up something within me, O Lover. I saw that more than an instrument of torture or the furniture of a scapegoating sacrificial theory, the wooden cross was emblematic of the very core of the Euangélion (“Good News”): Your Love-fueled and irrevocable Self-binding to the beloved creation. Not only in the Eucharist or the cross was finítum cápax infiníti (“the finite capable of receiving the infinite”) operative, but the Incarnation, Your Solidarity Project (Eph 1:9-10), was Your definitive statement regarding Your relationship with all having being, an expansive embrace altering everything including death itself. In the words of the Exsultet, the Tríduum is “when heaven is wedded to earth,” when even “the happy fault” is drawn into the vortex of Your relentlessly healing Love. In the Christ You have manifested Your Self-ligature to the finitisphere, and for the duration. The wood of the cross is shown to be emblematic of the entire world characterized by Angela of Foligno (c.1248-1209) as “pregnant” with You. 

The wood the cross—ugly, excruciating, agent of death—is thus revealed as transept, nexus, locus of the marriage of Lover and beloved, formlessness and form, Spirit and materiality, the Infinite and the finite. While not to be casually employed regarding this or that, “adoration,” a very strong word, is an appropriate response to You in Your Solidarity Masterstroke. In Your ubiquitously sacramental cosmos surely the wood of the cross cannot be dismissed as an exception! 

“Come let us adore!”