Cross-energy: Living with Death

A few days following the death of Frank Sinatra, a full-page ad appeared on the back of the first section of the New York Times newspaper. It featured a vintage (1960s) Cadillac, a large spacious car, facing the viewer head-on, with blue headlights. The caption read: "Francis E. Sinatra, 1915 -1998: It was a Great Ride."

Yes, the Sinatra years offered a great ride, Cadillac-style, for millions of his fans. This ad evoked memories memories that one could enhance by putting down the paper, walking over to the CD player, putting on a Sinatra disk or cassette, and recapturing that voice again. This would intensify the memory. But there are even better ways of capturing past events, and making them come alive again. We Christians have our faith and baptism to bring alive in ourselves the events of Jesus Christ himself, especially his last moments on the Cross. We affirm that this capacity links our lives with his, and our sufferings with his. Part of this is memory, of course, supported by the text of scripture and the living memory or tradition of the church. But it is a memory that gains a special intensity from our faith and baptism which, in a remarkable way, updates and makes present such events in the life of Christ as his sufferings and death on the Cross.

This is a special kind of memory, then, which some describe as a "dangerous" memory, because it refuses to lay in the past, but insists on emerging into the present, in all of its original force and power. This should be "good news" to us believers, that is, the heart of the gospel message.

It is precisely believers who are suffering today who have a special advantage in seizing the opportunity this entails an opportunity that over the years we have expressed in such ways as: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit" (Jn. 12.24). Or, in other times and places this message came across as: "The blood of Christians is the seed" (Tertullian, Apology, 50.13).

These sayings, of course, are repetitions of the familiar message about life proceeding from the sufferings and death of Christ on his Cross-and from the sufferings of all those whose faith and baptism unites them to these events in the life of Christ -- for such linkage Christians certainly affirm. There is a fertilization process at work here-the working out of life from death. The cross is an apt symbol of fertilization, imbedded as it was in the earth of Calvary. Fertilization is, initially, a kind of death-like event, an entombment that eventually brings forth new life. The resurrection, of course, is the explicit expression of this life, but even apart from this overpowering event, there is something about the cross itself that suggests more than mere suffering and death. It symbolizes the first, silent phase of the death-life process getting underway.

This mutual interplay of death and life underlies the Christian sensitivity to the forces that are at play at the two extreme points of earthly existence: birth and death. We sense a dynamic play between our beginning and end that restrains our interference in either, by interrupting the one or hastening the other. We say "restrains" realizing, of course, that some interventions at either point may enhance the quality of each, and help us better accommodate ourselves to the energy at play in the sufferings and death of Christ on the Cross-energy to which our faith and baptism link us in the midst of such struggles.

We attempt to bring this truth home to roost within our own life experience against opposing positions, one of which might be a pervading sense of the insignificance of what we are about and a corresponding hesitancy to ascribe too much importance to who we are or what we are doing. Should this be the case, it might help to reflect on this Sufi story that captures what the cross and suffering are all about in our lives, whether we are Christian or not:

A stream was working itself across the country, experiencing little difficulty. It ran around the rocks and through the mountains. Then it arrived at a desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared. After many attempts it appeared that there was no way it could continue the journey. Then a voice came in the wind, "If you stay the way you are, you cannot cross the sands. To go further, you will have to lose yourself." "But if I lose myself," the stream cried, "I will never know what I'm supposed to be." "Oh, on the contrary," said the voice, "if you lose yourself, you will become more than you ever dreamed you could be." So the stream surrendered to the drying sun. And the clouds into which it was formed were carried by the raging wind for many miles. Once it crossed the desert, the stream poured down from the skies, fresh and clean, and full of the energy that comes from storms.

These are all commentaries both on the revelation of God in the scriptures, addressing believers to the same effect, and on the ordinary human experiences of many who have gone before us. The cross and suffering constitute a remarkable ensemble for those endowed with faith and baptism. They even speak to those lacking these gifts, such as the thief and the Roman centurion on Calvary. Like the vintage Cadillac in the New York Times, they offer us a great ride over the road of life.