Good Friday: The Cross of Christ, sacrifice, and the key to wholeness

A single word shapes Good Friday; a single word describes the Cross of Christ.

Sacrifice.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Cross of Christ is about sacrifice.  But it’s not about appeasing an angry deity.  When the Cross of Christ is turned into that, it’s a deformity, a travesty, and is terribly misleading.  No, the Cross of Christ is not about appeasing; it’s about revealing . . . revealing something we all know.  We all know that love is free, but it’s never cheap.  Love always costs something; love might cost us everything. To participate in the healing of the planet, to live in relationships that are honest and that help us grow into wholeness, to work alongside others for justice and transformation, we have to make sacrifices.  Love costs us.  Rumi once said, “Gamble everything for love”; it’s always worth it.  

As part of my Good Friday meditations, I was thinking about the Cross of Christ this afternoon.  I noticed the Ethiopian cross in my office.  As I looked at it, I noticed it looked more like a key than a cross.

Then I realized that the Cross of Christ is just that—a key.  It’s the key to living well, loving without reserve, thriving because we dare to love in the face of hatred; love in the midst of suffering; love when others give up; love when people build walls; love, even when our love is refused or ridiculed or trampled on; love, even when it seems foolish.  

The Cross of Christ is the key to life because it points to love, and the sacrifices love requires to open the doors of our hearts.  

The Cross of Christ is the key to the wholeness, the unity, the wellbeing which is what God is up to in Christ.  The Cross connects what we separate at our peril, the opposites that foster division, brokenness, alienation, and injury.  The Cross, as a symbol, joins heaven and earth, divinity and humanity, spirit and matter, North and South, East and West, top and bottom, right and left.  

The Cross of Christ shows us the key to wholeness, harmony, wellbeing.

That key is love.

And love, though free, is never cheap.

On courage to enter the soul's depths: No. 9 in Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

Most of us avoid the descent into our inner lives because we fear we'll meet more darkness there than light.  And often we do.  It's easier to stay outside, on the surface of things, and ignore the depths.  Some of us have no guide for the inner journey toward healing and wholeness.  

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the modern world's most insightful, spiritually-grounded, and beloved poets.  I love the way he bridges the two worlds, inner and outer, sacred and secular, and always invites me into the depth of soul I need in order to come more fully alive.   

He gives me courage to enter the labyrinth of the soul.  

His poetic vision is a helpful partner to anyone who wants to integrate their lives more fully.

Here's a sonnet that invites us into the courage it takes to enter our inner lives and face the pain and suffering we'd rather avoid.  

It's a poetic exploration of the themes Dr. Donald Kalsched, the eminent psychoanalyst, explores in his work on trauma, how suffering blocks our life energy, and what it takes for the soul to emerge into the fullness of life.  

Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows have a wonderful translation of this sonnet, as does Robert Bly, and Robert Hunter.  I've lived with Rilke for awhile and with the ways this poem guides not only my own inner journey but also my healing work with others.  And so, I've rendered it myself.  It's impossible to take a poem over from the German into English without allowing the language to dance in new ways.  This rendering is true to the spiritual vision of the great poet, attempts to offer some sense of the lyricism of the German, while drawing it through my own soul's experience and into our new setting.   

Sonnets to Orpheus, No 9

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated/rendered by Chris Neufeld-Erdman

Only you, who dare to lift the lyre

inside the inner labyrinth and maze,

will find the pathway back into the light

of endless gratefulness and praise.

Only you, who on death's bitter flowers

have slept and fed,

will sing a living song

to what was given up for dead.

What shimmers on the pane between the worlds

will quickly slip away;

internalize what you behold.

When born of these two realms

our words and ways

become more valuable than gold.

This Ash Wednesday, consider all that God can do with dust

Image by Kyle Ellefson

On this Ash Wednesday, this remarkable blessing from Jan Richardson.  About it, she says: 

"Ashes, dust, dirt: the stuff we walk upon, that we sweep away, that we work to get rid of, now comes to remind us who we are, where we are from, where we are bound.

"How terrible. And how marvelous, that God should feel so tender toward the dust as to create us from it, and return us to it, breathing through us all the while. Even after releasing us from the blessed dust at the last, God continues to breathe us toward whatever it is we are becoming.

"Ash Wednesday hits close to home once again. My husband’s ashes remain in the keeping of my brother, waiting in a beautiful wooden box that Scott has built for them. This spring we will bury the ashes on the family farm where Gary and I were married not so long ago. And we will breathe, and we will bless the earth from which we have come, and we will give thanks for the astonishing gift that passed too briefly among us but whose love, tenacious as ever, goes with us still."

Read it and embrace your earthen self.

A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days

you felt like dust,

like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

Did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made,

and the stars that blaze

in our bones,

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge

we bear.

–Jan Richardson