The cross is the symbol for all who follow Christ. It depcits the convergence of all creative dyads. It represents the single point where all complementary creative partners, such as matter and energy, male and female, time and space, love and truth, come together in dynamic union. The cross represents the meeting ground of Creator and creation. It symbolizes the surface of the earth interfacing with the sun through biological activity. In the most immediate and human sense, the cross is where Christ meets your particular environment.
"If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me."
Luke 9:23If anyone shall follow Christ in His creative purposes, if any shall follow the energy that is available within the range of His creative intentions, he must deny what he has thought himself to be, pick up a new identity in Christ's nature and fullow the currents of Christ's love. Just as the acorn must stop thinking of itself in the unbroken terms of a seed, specific and clear-cut, and open itself to the death of a bursting asunder in revelation of inner potential, so the individual who would follow Christ must die to all past self-identities. He or she must release all the old assumptions, addictions, and demands, the good as well as the ill, and take up the cross of relationship in the presence and nature of Christ.
In the personal sense, the cross symbolizes everything withwhich we are involved: our habits, thoughts, friends, hopes and fears. If we would follow Christ, we must lift up the cross of our time/space situation and allow ourselves and all things around us to become suspended in on-going creative action. We must lay down our fictitious lives as isolated individuals to discover our true lives in spirit.
If it appears that there is a sacrifice involved, it is only apparent. Carrying one's cross, moving with one's life purpose, truly being oneself is a joyous experience. The notion that it is some great ordeal is incorrect. Jesus could hardly have stated it more plainly, "the yoke is easy and the burden light." Carrying one's cross is fulfillment. It is what life is all about.
When you get right down to it, we do not have much choice as to whether or not we are going to take up the cross of our time/space situation. When we chose to incarnate, we chose to do precisely that. Our only choice at this late date is as to HOW we take up our cross. Will we take it up in the victorious nature of Christ? Or will we take it up as miserble little unfortunates, at the mercy of every passing environmental whim? In the first instance we are lifted up with Christ into the service of universal intelligence. In the second, we are crucified.
Jesus moved THROUGH the experience of the crucifixion INTO the experience of resurrection. He showed the way for each individual to do the same. We are invited to willingly accept our crucifixion in the fallen state and them to continue on undaunted into the experience of our own resurrection, never stopping or admitting defeat until we join once gain with our Creator in consciousness.
THE CROSS NEEDS TO BE SEEN AS A LIVING PROCESS, FLOWING FROM ILLUSION INTO REALITY, FROM APPARENT DEATH INTO LIFE ETERNAL
The cross is a powerful symbol for Christ, indeed for all the Christian world, not because of the crucifixion in and of itself, but because of the resurrection that drew the crucifixion (and all that it represented) up into life eternal. If we are to leave the impotent Christianity of dogma and step into the transformative Christianity of the living Christ, we need to understand the crufixion as a process flowing into the resurrection.
We cannot isolate the crucifixion as a snapshot of reality focusing on Christ's death apart from the resurrection and understand the significance of the cross. The significance of the crucifixion is not DEATH ON THE CROSS but LIFE ON THE CROSS. "....I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. " John 10:10 It is Christ's life that we are invited to share at the intersecting cross of our particular juncture of time and space. It is not a death, which did not prove sustainable, that is to occupy our primary attention. It is a living experience.
Christ's greatest offering to the human race, indeed to all tiime and history, is His Life. He, Himself, demonstrated the Way, the Truth and the Life. The true cross is not a symbol of death. It is a living symbol of our awakening from the death-like slumber of historical ignorance into the conscious presence of God.
The cross that we bear is the cross of union, representing the intersection of a Creator's unity and a creation's diversity. We stand with Christ at the balance point between time and eternity, between light and substance. We represent the truth of Christ in a specific field of creative interaction. We share Christ's light. We are facets of a single universal intelligence, lights unto the world."
by Ken Carey from Terra Christa
No comments:
Post a Comment