Over the last few weeks, I have attended several organ recitals, part of a Lenten noontime series. It was nice to hear organ music again (it's been quite some time since I have attended church services or organ recitals, in part because of the pandemic) but what I found myself focusing on was crosses and crucifixes.
In one of the churches, an enormous hollow cross filled with sand sat (horizontally) at the church's crossing. There were kneelers around it, and candles to place in the sand, evidently so the faithful could use it as a focus of prayer (whether during Lenten church services or in private, I don't know). It reminded me that at a Maundy Thursday service a few years ago, a rough wooden cross was set up in front of the altar, and people (except me) lined up to genuflect to the cross or actually kiss it. And then in a different church the other day, there was an enormous crucifix over the altar. It was white (marble or painted wood?) and the body of Jesus was white, but that didn't whitewash the excruciating violence of the image. Having grown up in this religion, I know that his hands and feet were pierced by nails, and that death was painful. In your mind's eye you cannot help but see the blood dripping from the wounds. In fact, one of the Bach pieces played in the recital translated into English as, "My heart is bathed in blood". Ugh, really?
When you move away from a religious construct, I guess it takes years, maybe decades, to fully process certain things, and what was coming up for me was the oddness -- even unhealthiness -- of this veneration of the cross itself and the violence that took place on it. Once again, old hymns come to me. Number 66 in the 1940 Hymnal ("Sing my tongue, the glorious battle") calls the cross a "noble tree", refers to the "sweetest wood, and sweetest iron"...and then goes on in the next verse to nearly equate the cross to a mother's tender bosom! Now, these words are attributed to a 6th century writer. The sensibilities here are hardly modern; I sort of "get" the desire to honor the setting of Jesus's last hours. But ultimately, I still don't understand. The cross was an instrument of torture and death. What is glorious about that? How did all this, literally or figuratively, become the crux of the Christian message? Some of the most stunningly beautiful music of all time is intricately tied to acts of traumatizing atrocity (sort of a heart-wrenching polyphony); it is becoming harder and harder for me to listen to it, much less to sing it.
