Christ crucified

Oddly, I had originally wanted to write this week’s reflection on something else, when the phrase that titles the final product began to steal into my mind some days prior… but I was pretty torn. Then, today, the Epistle read at Mass began with the very phrase.

Well played, beloved Lord… well played. I pray I manage to make good on what you’ve offered me.

The Garden of Gethsemane

My American grandparents displayed religious artwork; the one I remember best was a depiction of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. If I recall correctly, it depicts Jesus kneeling at a rock, a light shining from heaven onto His serene face, eyes raised in prayer, a chalice hovering before Him.

Now that I think of it, I’m not so sure it was the Garden of Gethsemane. Maybe it was just Jesus in prayer. Or, maybe I’m confusing it with another image I’ve seen. Decades do that to your memory.

Anyway, I liked the depiction. It spoke to me.

Glow-in-the-dark Jesus

Fortunately for our present purposes, my recollection of the Catholic artwork in my Italian grandparents’ house is much more vivid, and not just because certain refined tastes disdain it as kitsch. One such candidate would have to be the glow-in-the-dark crucifix that hung inside the main door. Laugh all you want, but when a dark nightmare woke a younger me and I had to walk across the apartment to use the restroom, in pitch black darkness, that glowing crucifix said something, and it wasn’t something bad.

And, yeah, I’ve had some pretty dark nightmares in my life. For some of them I wasn’t even asleep.

That’s what impresses me about the crucifixion, about Christianity: God isn’t indifferent enough to say, “All’s well,” nor is He the sort of cheap virtue-signaler content to say, “Thoughts and prayers! All will work out in the end; it’s My plan; be patient and, once you die, you’ll get to be with Me in Heaven.”

No, God entered our life and shared it. As the Gospel of John puts it (1⋅14), …or, as John later puts it in his first letter (1⋅1-2), “What we looked upon and touched with our own hands.”

And put to death.

It’s kind of sobering: God Himself comes to us, in the divine Person of His Son, veiled in human flesh… and we put Him to death.

So, yeah, that kitschy, glow-in-the-dark crucifix said something to me, as I walked down the dark hallways.

Abbi pietà — Take pity

The room I slept in at that time — different from the room I slept in earlier — also featured a Pietà. It wasn’t the comparatively serene Pietà of Michelangelo; this one was a southern Italian special, painted in bright, saturated colors. Livid bruises, red blood; the artist accounted for all of it, near as I could tell: even His knees were opened, with white tendons (?) circumscribed by red blood — from falling under the weight of the cross, I reckon?

The divine corpse lay in Mary’s lap, her arms stretched out in what struck me as incomprehending anguish, tears streaming from her eyes: “Why?”

The word pietà is the Italians’ translation of the Latin misericordia, itself a translation of the Greek Κύριε, ἐλέησον. In English we translate it as, “Lord, have mercy,” but the Italian sounds more tender to me: Signore, pietà! “Lord, take pity!” It sounds less like a defeated warrior pleading for his life than a deathly ill man with no money, begging a Doctor to heal him.

Given where the original Greek appears in the Gospels, this latter sense of the word seems more accurate — though I know little Greek, certainly not enough to speak with authority. The Greek certainly includes the senses of both “mercy” and “pity”; it just seems to me that the second sense captures the spirit more accurately than the former.

The Sacred Heart

Nonna likewise kept a holy card of the Sacred Heart at her bedside. I didn’t quite realize what it was when I first saw it, but the crown of thorns around Jesus’ exposed heart, a flame burning brightly above it, while Jesus pointed at it, again made the impression. I must have been quite young when I first saw it, as the only thought I recall expresses sincere shock:

Indeed, Beloved Lord, how Your heart must burn painfully… with love for us!

The crucifix, the pietà, the Sacred Heart… these all laid the seeds for how I came to see the Christian religion as the story of the greatest unrequited love of all time: God’s love for His people, made most manifest when He Himself hung from a cross and pleaded,

The Sign of the Cross

I’m not sure how I didn’t pick up the Sign of the Cross before I dove headlong into the Southern Baptist Church at age 10 or 12 (something like that), after which I certainly didn’t make it until I started making it privately sometime before becoming Catholic. I admired it from afar, so to speak; again, it spoke to me at a certain visceral level. Just as non-verbal gestures in a marriage — in any relationship, really — can say much, much more than words ever can, the Sign of the Cross says something more than merely recollecting one’s baptism.

Christ crucified

As a child I read somewhere that when the first Catholic missionaries came to either Genghis or Kublai Khan, he was impressed that they identified themselves with the cross: “Your God has taken an instrument of torture, and made it a symbol of love.”

The Sign of the Cross reminds us of God’s love for us. It illustrates the link between the crucifixion and baptism, as we are baptized “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” That’s one of my favorite aspects of Catholicism: “We preach Christ crucified.” There’s no reluctance to show a suffering Christ on the cross, just as there is no reluctance to show Him in glory, hands still bearing the stigmata. There’s no hesitation to embrace the mystery that God, that reality without which all other realities would ever have come to exist, sent His own divine Word, His only-begotten Son, into our lives, to the deepest level of misery, to allow us to touch Him, hold Him, beat Him, slay Him, just so that He could say, in the ultimate non-verbal gesture,

A stumbling block to those who think that following God’s will guarantees happiness in this life, that following God implies material success, that we should only ever depict God in glory.

Foolishness to those who assert that there is more than one foundational reality, or that we make our own reality, or that the reality which enables the existence of creatures who love cannot Itself love us in the truest, most humble way possible.