Parish of St. Ignatius of Loyola; Chestnut Hill, MA
14 September 2014, 5:30 p.m. mass
Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Numbers 21:4b-9; Psalm 78:1bc-2, 34-35, 36-37, 38; Philippians 2:6-11; John 3:13-17
The New England poet Mary Oliver celebrated her birthday this past Wednesday,
and if she were here, I would say three things to her:
“Happy belated birthday, Mary,”
“Please let me hang out with you,” and
“Keep writing!”
Keep writing poems like “The Uses of Sorrow,”
which, in its entirety, goes like this:
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
I like the poem any day because, well, it is short, and thus, easy to memorize.
One never knows when something like that will come in handy.
But I especially like the poem today as the church turns her attention to the cross because,
on the one hand, the cross is a box full of darkness.
Yet the name of today’s feast – the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, or,
as it used to be called, the Triumph of the Cross –
tells us that that box of darkness, too, was and is a gift.
Now, if it took Mary Oliver years to understand
how her poem’s box full of darkness was a gift,
it will likely take us a lifetime of reflection and wonder
to grasp with our hearts how the cross of Jesus Christ
is a site of triumph, an occasion for exaltation.
Indeed, I hope such reflection and wonder takes us a lifetime.
I hope that when this feast occurs annually, even when it is not on a Sunday,
we come back to the darkness that is gift,
for when we do, when we spend a lifetime beholding the cross,
we prepare ourselves not for the afterlife,
but for this life, here and now.
How do we begin, or, if we have already begun, how do we continue beholding the cross?
I think it starts with acknowledging that the giant wooden crucifix behind me
is not the only cross in this church right now.
There is a good chance that there is a person sitting near you who has cancer.
When we exchange the sign of peace, you will likely shake the hand
of someone who has been stung by the pain of divorce –
pain, perhaps, that the church exacerbated,
rather than soothed.
You will share the one bread and the one cup with many
who are mourning the death of a friend or a family member.
Entering into the darkness and the gift of the cross in this way, through one another,
is not pivoting away from the feast we remember today.
We have never called this day the feast of the Exaltation of the Crucifixion of Jesus.
In fact, if we ignore the crosses of the people around us,
if we dismiss too quickly the crosses of our own lives,
I think we will have missed an opportunity to stare down suffering.
And if we miss that,
we miss the chance to become more like Christ.
If this is correct, if it is a fruitful, not a futile exercise
to look at the boxes full of darkness around me,
hoping to understand that they too are gift,
then perhaps we should widen our gaze beyond these pews,
beyond our friends and family members.
Tragically, it seems that now, maybe more than ever, we have far too many crosses,
far too much darkness, before us.
Take your pick:
Overseas, there is ISIS, Jim Foley, Steven Sotloff, and now, David Haines;
Israel and Gaza;
Ukraine and Russia.
Here at home, we have Ferguson, Missouri;
Ray and Janay Rice;
and thousands of other victimized spouses and significant others
whose abuse was not picked up by an elevator video camera.
I will stop there, trusting that we all see at least some of the crosses in the world at large,
that we recognize that there are crosses in these very pews,
and, thus, that the cross that stands behind me, to which our eyes are drawn,
is more than a rendering of an historical event;
it is also a symbol of a current reality.
How can all of this be gift?
How can these crosses give rise to exaltation?
Inevitably, any answer that anyone gives to these questions will, at best, be partial,
but today’s feast reminds us that we can say something about suffering.
We believe that at least one cross led to new life, to transformed life,
not just for the Risen One, but for the women and men who were his friends,
people who hid behind locked doors,
people who saw only boxes of darkness,
until one day, the darkness opened up into a gift.
We are sitting in the midst of people right here,
who have had the courage and the grace to wrestle some sort of victory –
small, medium, large victories – out of the clutches of suffering.
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And regardless of what any newspaper puts on its cover, each of us knows that,
just as there are crosses of suffering and death all around us,
so too are there empty tombs urging us to herald a different kind of news,
the Good News.
When we spend a lifetime gazing upon the cross,
we prepare ourselves not for the afterlife,
but for this life, here and now.
We prepare ourselves to be not just women and men, girls and boys,
but to become brothers and sisters to one another.
That, perhaps, is what makes the box of darkness in Mary Oliver’s poem a gift:
when we open it, a friend, a brother, a sister, someone we love,
is sitting there beside us.
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