From Volume 3, Number 4, Spring 1997

Lingering at the Cross

As this issue is being mailed out we are well into the 50 days of Easter. During these Great Fifty Days the Church dispenses with fasting and the penitential disciplines; indeed at various times in  the past Christians have been forbidden to fast, even to kneel during this period. However, regardless of when this issue is being mailed, this article is being written in Holy Week and it is a kind of Holy Week  reflection on Celtic Christianity that I have to offer.

While attending a spiritual retreat in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains my wife and I decided to visit a very different kind of church on Palm Sunday. The congregation was mixed in race and age  (more so that most churches we've been in) but it was nonetheless predominately white and young. As we sat waiting for the service to begin several people greeted us warmly. One young couple (we later found out they  were small group leaders in this church) stopped to chat, asked us if there was anything we wanted prayer for, then proceeded to join us and pray together for God's purpose and blessing in our lives even as the  congregation was slowly filtering into the chairs and pews. Coming from a mainline liturgical church we found this rather refreshing.

However, this was a very non-liturgical church — 40 minutes of contemporary praise music + 40 minutes of very powerful preaching + prayer ministry ad lib — and we found ourselves missing both the  liturgy of Palm Sunday and the emphasis on the Passion of Christ. The pastor of the church we visited began the service with a prayer thanking God for the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, for Jesus' death on the  cross, and for the Resurrection. The reference to the cross was just that, along with thanks that Jesus did not remain there. From there the church began its period of praise, but I was left feeling something  important had been glossed over.
The Cross is a problem for modern Christians. The agony and torture, the cry of dereliction, "eli, eli, lama sabacthani," all due to our sin is more than we want to  face. Yet if this renewed interest Celtic Christianity is to be more than one more way to feel good about ourselves, it is important for us to swim against the tide, to linger at the Cross even in the midst of  Easter.

The Cross takes its hope from Easter, but Easter takes its meaning from the Cross. As was once said, "Good Friday without Easter is but another tragic death. Easter without Good Friday is but  another spectacular miracle story." Together, they are the turning point of human history. The necessity of Jesus' death on the Cross speaks to us about the drastic nature of our condition. By that guide the  Incarnation itself was not a mid-course correction, a divine attempt to get us back on course. Rather the Incarnation is the end of something failed and the beginning of something radically new. The Scriptures speak  continually in images of death: "Whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever would lose his life will save it," is spoken by Jesus nine times in the Gospels. Paul speaks of us in Baptism as people  who, being buried in a death like his will be raised in a resurrection like his.

How does this lingering at the Cross square with the spirituality of Celtic Christianity? That spirituality speaks to us of the goodness of creation and the living image of God in humankind. It is an  earth-affirming spirituality that seems to have little in common with the description of a creation finally destroyed in wrath and fire found in the Apocalypse of John. Are the neo-pagans right to reject  Christianity outright? Yet these same neo-pagans rejoice in Celtic spirituality, in many of the same qualities that drive the renewal of Celtic Christianity. And if the world view of the Bible is antithetical to the  world view of the earth-affirming Celts, why did the Celtic peoples run to embrace the Christian faith?

Spending those ten days in spiritual retreat gave me some hint of resolution to this apparent contradiction. One of the primary theses of the retreat was that the Bible tells us that humankind was  created for a different world than the one we have. Being created in the image of a triune God, we were created for perfect relationship, an eternal dance of love, respect and affirmation. The fall into sin did  nothing to erase the yearning deep within every human soul for the world we were created to live in. But the difference between the life we yearn for at our deepest level and the life we actually live creates in us  a constant pain of loss and disappointment. In that condition the drive of the human heart is to suppress, to numb, to control that pain no matter what the cost. And in that condition, control becomes the operative  word. We strive to control the pain of life by controlling ourselves, controlling others, controlling our poor earth.

This demand to control was not a characteristic of Celtic spirituality, pre-Christian and Christian. Something in those Celtic cultures did not fear the pain of yearning. According to a Christian  therapist, Dr. Larry Crabb, to accept the pain of a world that cannot meet our deepest desire leads to confusion. That confusion comes from our inability to make sense of our experience and can lead us to faith  (total reliance) on God our creator — that somehow this God in whose image we are made has something better for us. Our constant disappointment with life can then bring us to hope — hope in a life, a world where  these disappointed desires are finally met. Finally, to recognize and admit our sin in attempting to control our reality, to let go of our attempts to rule our world can set us free to live lives that are  God-centered, other-centered, lives that are natural for creatures created to be in relationship.

When I consider the movement from confusion to faith, from disappointment to hope, from repentance to love, I begin to see the motivating force that makes the Celtic saints so attractive to me. When  those movements are active in my life perhaps I can enjoy this earth and the peoples and patterns of this earth as good without having to make them my ultimate good. Perhaps as I linger at the Cross, linger long  beyond comfort, I will be freed to enjoy and bless this life even as I freely yearn for the new heavens and the new earth in which we will find our deepest yearning fulfilled at last. Perhaps then I can celebrate  without any dilution the joy of Easter.