O Crux, ave, spes unica

The Solemnity of the Holy Cross: September 14

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. (Galatians 6:14)

“You’ll find me at the foot of the cross,” Uncle Harry used to say. Year after year he would say it, as I grew from infancy into childhood (“Knucklehead,” he named me in those days because I always had my "head in the clouds" and didn't pay attention to things as I should), then into a geeky (and even more impractical) teenager, and an adult. But I never knew what he meant, not until he died and was buried. Sure enough, there at the cemetery, his grave (and later on that of his wife, my Aunt Geneva) was at the foot of a large cross, outlined in a boxwood hedge on a hillside (this was West Virginia, after all), and visible for a mile or more. Right there at the foot of that cross they were buried, and there they remain until the end of days.

Mind you, Uncle Harry was not a church-goer. Far from it. He was a profane man, who poked fun at his wife’s devotion and prayers. He had served in the War, then worked in a lumbering operation until he could work no more. Hard work, among the sort of people Mrs. Clinton considers “deplorable.” That is what she would have thought of Harry and Geneva, and my parents, and for that matter, me.

But he purchased a burial plot at the foot of the cross.

And he gave me the little New Testament that he carried over in France and Germany with an inscription “to my favorite nephew” and an admonition to “read this book.”

It is hard to wrap one’s head around the Solemnity of the Holy Cross. I know, because I have spent all morning trying to figure out how to explain it to the youth choir in their rehearsal this afternoon. What it boils down to is this: how can I “glory in the cross,” as St. Paul writes in Galatians? How can I glory in the agony and death of my Savior, whom I love?

We have the same quandary on Good Friday, when many congregations around the world engage in the Veneration of the Cross. As the Prayerbook says,

If desired, a wooden cross may now be brought into the church and placed in the sight of the people. Appropriate devotions may follow. (BCP p. 281)

Some people come forward and kneel before the cross. Some kiss it.

In our place, we sing the spiritual:

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

That is, in truth, about the only way one can venerate the Cross -- on that day, on this, or on any day: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble.” No words. Not even music, though it comes closer.

Uncle Harry loved to listen to the old Gospel songs. One of his favorites was an LP recording of Tennessee Ernie Ford, and on that record was “The Old Rugged Cross.”

So I’ll cherish the old rugged Cross,
Till my trophies at last I lay down;
I will cling to the old rugged Cross,
and exchange it someday for a crown.

That is what this Solemnity of the Holy Cross is about. Do we think of the Cross once we are outside of Holy Week? What place does it have in our daily life? Do we “cling to the old rugged Cross?” St. Paul is right: it is the only way to be “crucified to the world, and the world to me.” It is only the Cross that can show up all the deceits of “the world, the flesh, and the devil” for what they are, and deliver us from their power.

When I survey the wondrous cross
where the young Prince of Glory died,
my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride.
(Isaac Watts)

At Matins this morning, I sang another hymn, this one from the early days of the Church. It is more elegant, but at its core it is saying the same thing as the Tennessee Ernie Ford song:

O tree of beauty, tree most fair,
ordained those holy limbs to bear;
gone is thy shame, each crimson’d bough
proclaims the King of glory now.

O cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
to save us sinners from our sin,
God’s righteousness for all to win.
[from “The royal banners forward go,” by Venantius Fortunatus (540?-600?)]

Fortunatus wrote this, it is thought, when a fragment of the True Cross was brought to Poitiers in the year 569, and that is another tie to this Day, September 14, when St. Helena dedicated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site where she had found that “tree of beauty, tree most fair” among the piles of rubbish.

The stanza “O cross, our one reliance, hail” is better in Latin, especially the first line:

O Crux, ave, spes unica;
Hoc Passionis tempore,
Auge piis justitiam,
Reis que dona veniam.