Take Up Your Cross part 2

To pick up your cross and follow Christ means to flow in the love of God which pours out from the Passion. The cross symbolises unbearable pain, the path we walk is a path to Calvary and ultimately leads to a place of death. This is often where people can stop in their journey and understanding of Christ’s meaning, taking pain upon them self deliberately, rather than endure the cross that is, given by living with it, in love. For we must not forget the transformative hope, the transfigurative moment, the all-empowering, embracing arms of love that gather and hold us and lift us into the very real heart of the Trinity; the Heart of Love.

The power and the hope that flow in this heart of mercy change our lives forever more. It is this entering into the truth of the cross and the truth of the love, the mercy, the healing, the redemption of all that is not of God, which ultimately Christ asks us to do, that we may be free to live, to sing, to dance in wonder at the life freely given, for to enter on this path is to enter into the freedom of forgiveness, the blessing of the Father and the empowerment of the Spirit, to live our lives as God fully intended.

 Living in the freedom of the Spirit means that we will find a new way to embrace each moment of chaos and confusion, fear and stuckness, agony even, with a new heart, one that is ever blessed with the truth of the power of God. It means entering into the process of life with the immanence of God, here present, with us, through which all things become possible. It is the way to live within the transcendence of God within each immanent moment.

 It is to free ourselves from the ties that bind us, to our small-minded and often limited view. It is the way to live in light. These contemplations are about the how, how can we do this? How can we live in the truth of the love of God, how can we keep trusting, keep faithful, keep growing through the pain of the world? How can we live in Christ, if not through the power of the Spirit and the love of the Father? For all three are one, as we are also one with the Father and the Son, because Christ has said this is so:

For did he not ask the Father if we may “all be one”, in the same way that he was in the father and the father was in the son, “so that we might also be in them?

 This is such an amazingly inclusive gift of love and oneness that requires the deepest awe. Praise God indeed!