SORROW FIRST, THEN JOY……GREAT JOY!
Yes, I have formed my opinion on why a Crucifix large or small needs to be front and center in every Catholic Church. This is my passion. This is what we the people need. And I will yell it out for all to hear. Not with any other motive except to help others find a deeper Catholic faith. Because this is the best way to bring others to what we have been gifted in Christ Jesus. We are Catholic Christians. We preach Christ Crucified. We have a Cancer, and this is our darkness, our sin. We have the Confessionals; we have our very own beautiful hospital. The joy of being healed starts with the Crucified Christ.
“Try looking at pain as something that transforms. Once you learn to hold opposites together, you can find happiness.” Richard Rohr, O.F.M.
32 years later, with so many struggles in between my new Catholic faith brought me back to that room when I was eight years old where my mother laid. She was gone. We won’t find a place, home or church here on earth that will protect us from sin. This room through the years has clearly shown me this. Church is not a place to condemn others or ourselves because of our sin, rather a battlefield with the great physician at its very core. Forgiveness at its very core.
Like the room with the soft yellow light where I stood with my father and his father, I have found peace in a place where there seldom is any. But from my mother’s room and yours there is a hall that leads to the center of all homes, to the center of our very own souls. In this room there is the cross, there is our Savior upon it…you want to grab everyone you have ever known, ever loved and even hated…you want to pull everyone that you have ever hurt and been hurt by to the very foot of this cross and take a good long hard, honest look at what our savior Jesus has done, is doing for each one of us. To be pulled into death on a cross, to move beyond our cross upon are saviors back through its dark passions of a self-centered self into our Shepard’s arms… into our Fathers love forever. The cross stands in heaven and earth as the great divide… on the dark side a crucified savior with a beam of soft yellow light piercing the void, forming a narrow path, a beacon of hope for the lost, for us. On the back side is the light of God illuminating heaven while exposing the pit of death in which we are delivered from. This is our door home. We should not take the backside, the resurrection and place it in front to ease our pain. This door in our Churches must remain as is. I know it seems harsh. It’s not. Its tough love.
