As Holy Week approaches, the symbol of the Cross take its proper center stage.
And it is in the cross that we see the perfect metaphor of God's order for humanity.
"The cross is saying that there is a cruciform pattern to reality-
that Reality is not meaningless and absurd."
We can see how God created the heavens and earth by separating the void and creating order in creation. We can see His ordered patterns in nature everywhere. We come to know His order for humans through marriage, parenting and right relationships with others.
And we all search for a coherent order, meaning and purpose in life.
"But neither is reality perfectly consistent. Reality, rather, is filled with contradictions, what Bonaventure (1221-1274) and others called "the coincidence of opposites."
While we see God's beauty, goodness and order, we also experience suffering; there is the palpable reality of evil, pain, tragedy and sin.
Bonaventure found a sacred geometry in the symbol of the cross: "For the center is lost in a circle, and it cannot be found except by two lines crossing each other at a right angle."
In other words, some kind of suffering is the only way to reconcile differences.
"Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths.
The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a "mixed" world that was both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole.
He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly disfigured—all the primary opposites.
Jesus "recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth" (Ephesians 1:10).
Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of suffering and not to demand perfection of creation.
He taught, in effect, that it is the "only" way to be saved.
We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize.
The people who hold the contradictions—and resolve them in themselves—are the saviors of the world. They are agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness. These are the people, as Ken Wilber says, who "transcend and include."
The insistence on the perfect is often the enemy of the practical and helpful good.
Perfectionism becomes angry righteousness, or what we call "zealotry" in individuals, destroying both the zealot and the cause. In society, it creates "isms" or ideologies that brook no compromise or ability to negotiate.
We must try to be peace and do justice, but don't expect to find your definition of perfection in yourself or in the world. You normally do not love truth at this point; you love winning.
Perfectionism contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism.
Jesus was a realist; he was patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed.
Following him is not a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, and to love the way that God loves.
Jesus did not come to found a separate or new religion as much as he came to present a universal message of vulnerability and unity that is necessary for all human souls, and the earth's survival.
Vulnerability and unity do not compete with one another" -
they intersect in the sacred geometry of the Cross!
Excerpted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs
Prayer: Jesus, your vulnerability and unity with the Father shows us the way, the truth and the light. You experience every pain that we do, every joy that we do, every good event and every evil event. We hold the shape of the cross you bore in order to hold the contradictions of good and evil in the world- not by trying to find perfection in ourselves or in the world, but only in YOU... to receive more of your love, more of your grace, more of your justice, more of your peace for the sake of the world you so love. Amen
Lyn Woodruff, River Prayer Reflections and Prayer & Presence Team.
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