a funny thing happened on the way to decorum

Thompson is another poet about whom I heard through the Image Journal. You can read an editorial about him here. Before I get to his poem, though, a thought for the day.

Today during the ‘Last hour by the cross’ at Christ Church, I kept returning to the question “how can we live our faith bodily?” How can we live the cross bodily? Any of you reading from a Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or even just a high Anglican background will be shaking your heads at how long it took me to figure out the most obvious, basic way: to make the sign of the cross. In this action, we physically do what wordsmiths call ‘verbing a noun.’ We cross (noun > verb) ourselves. It’s utterly of-the-body, and in one sense is the precursor to all cross-shaped living which can flow out of it.

Recently, in a discussion about faith and science, a uni mate and I shared an eye-roll at those who will point out “evidence of Christianity” every time a cross-like shape is found in science, be it at the molecular level it in the shape of a protein, or in the division of cells, or the symmetry of galactic bodies. Let’s be frank: that sort of shape-happy ‘proofing’ is superstition. It does not prove beyond a doubt that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life.

Neither does making the sign of the cross prove someone to be Christian. But is it one way to start doing this bodily faith thing? I certainly find it less than comfortable! What if people see me and think I’m trying to be holier-than-thou? What if I’m doing it wrong? Will I be judged for saying In the name of our loving Parent, or Creator, or Mother, instead of Father from time to time? What if this is just another way of putting up an in-group/out-group boundary instead of creating unity among people of faith?

All those uncomfortable anxieties aside: something about this is also deeply comfortable in the sense that I feel I am giving a natural, physical assent to something: not a certain doctrine of the atonement, not the patriarchy of the church, not the superiority of uber-liturgical traditions…none of that. I am giving a natural, physical assent to Yeshua, a carpenter from Nazareth, God in the fullness of history bringing wholeness back to humanity. I am subverting the symbol a Roman instrument of torture and claiming it for the other side.  I am observing Good Friday as Dunstan Thompson observes it in his poem ‘On a Crucifix:’

      See

Here at last

       is

     Love