TAKING UP THE CROSS III

This is my apology to Sean. It may not LOOK like an apology at first, but I will get there, in time...

We are living in a strange, new world, an age that began at the latest when John XXIII invited Protestant observers to the Vatican council, in which John Paul II could attend the synagogue in Rome and address the congregation as his "elder brothers in the faith", in which Catholics and Protestants carry a common declaration on faith and works from the cathedral of one denomination to the cathedral of the other in Augsburg, consciously ending a 500-year-old dispute. Protestants have defined themselves for 500 years as NOT Catholic; what do they do now that the Catholics no longer say they are heretics bound for hell in the fast lane? Well, they suddenly discover 1500 years of church tradition that had long lain dormant -- the Puritan founders of my little church would spin in their graves to hear that we celebrate Christmas -- Maundy Thursday might get them up to 45 or 78 rpm...

Sean and I just seem to be at cross porpoises, as Mr. Carroll would say. To me, God as the ground of all reality is the ground of the entire created world, and the church may bear his message, but it seeks also to fence in the truth that will make us free. The church can connect you with the gospel, but the church is not the gospel, unless you understand the church as the invisible unity of ALL believing souls: heretics and orthodox, Pharisees, publicans and sinners, all in one big, and perhaps not terribly happy, family. Anything, but particularly any church, that sets limits to that is not admitting with the sage Franz Rosenzweig that all truth is polyphonous, that only a complete chorus of human voices can dream of approaching the truth that is One and Three.

Now that means that there is an intrinsic truth to the Passover story that transcends Passover, and remember that for thousands of years Jewish children have been told that G-D was not the force that liberated their ancestors, but the force that liberates them themselves. He is present. Because I believe that there is no law to which does G-D not create an exception, I believe that he can liberate people even from Passover and church and himself. Abraham Heschel wrote a beautiful book, The Sabbath, which I recommend to anyone with some interest, some integrity, and a couple of hours of time. In it he makes several telling points, but chief among them is that the G-D of the Jews, who is the G-D of Jesus and all his countless little brothers and sisters [or ought to be], exists not in space but in time — and that is the secret of the Sabbath: that in the tiny little cycle of seven days there is a day set aside to be open to the first seven days of creation and to anticipate the last days, when the community will feast upon Leviathan with the LORD himself.

If Passover means anything, it means that G-D leads us out of bondage, and that bondage may be a church, a philosophy, a marriage, the internet, a life in bars and rest stops — ANYTHING that enslaves us and keeps us from acting in freedom and obedience to G-D- rather than men. So, I told Sean that I thought that for him “taking up the cross” might well mean leaving the church, because leaving the church meant exchanging a life according to someone else’s dogma and definitions for the search of the LIVING G-D. I will not take the time now to go into WHO the Living G-d is now, or where we may find him, or how he is to be recognized; let me just say that he leads us out of slavery into new life, and he probably always asks us to spend forty days, if not always forty years, in the desert before opening up the land of milk and honey to us. I no longer remember where I read it, but I read somewhere that the forty years in the wilderness were what Moses needed to accomplish the death of all those who had grown up in slavery and left Egypt as adults, and to be able to build the new land on a free people “under G-D”.

So far, so good. The Troll is in charge. The Troll has the answers. Then the Troll is suddenly caught with his trousers down as he realizes again, or perhaps even for the first time, though he hopes not, how deeply he will cause other people to suffer by “taking up his cross”. The sorrow he inflicts gets deeper and more hopeless every day. Now, “taking up my cross” means to choose my own suffering freely, which I have done, and I think that I can walk to Golgotha on my own, as long as someone steps in to help — and some have already stepped in to help, have helped me carry the load. That much is my story. But no marriage is the story of one person. The one truly profound problem for me is to understand that my liberation — if that is what it is, and not a will-o’-the-wisp I am following out into the darkness — is a slow, cruel death by scourging and crucifixion of the woman who has given me her all for twenty-six years.

How can I in good conscience take up a cross that may have the bodies of my wife and children nailed to the cross-beam? How can I stand to see the only person I have ever loved enough to say “this one and no other” suffer the agony of being abandoned — and for what? For the possibility that some day, somewhere, there might be someone who loved me as much, who just happened to be a man? Because that is what I am saying. Along with: “You are not enough. Not all you have done put together is enough. You have thrown away the second half of your life. You are to suffer so that I can have what I need, or even just what I want. You are to lose everything, and I am to be free.” That somehow does not sound like the language of the cross. It sounds a lot like the language of Pilate, the language of Dachau, the gulag, and Guantanamo. It sounds like the language of power rather than the language of love. And it tastes like blood. So, Sean, my apology is for trying to tell you what taking up the cross means. It is different for each of us. I will maintain that it is public, political, and penitential, and I would have said that it can never entail the suffering of others. But there is blood on my hands, and it does not yet come from nails, nor is it mine.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The blame is mine, the blame is mine, the blame is utterly mine.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.