FROM CRUTCH TO CROSS
I
Corinthians 1:17-18
John
19:13-18
"For
the message of the cross ...is the power of God."
For the past few weeks, at the request of
the Abbot, I have taken the phrase "turning the soul" as the theme
for our Lenten meditations. Lent, I said
at the outset, is about conversion. Turning us around to follow Jesus more
faithfully and in the process being shaped into the person God intends us to be. Then as you turn a bowl on a lathe you soon
come to the heart-wood, that which gives the piece of wood its character and
sustains its life. The heart as metaphor
refers to who we really are, what is central to our lives, that which makes
you, you and me, me. Lent takes us on a
journey both into who we really are,
uncovering the masks behind which we hide, and deeper into the mystery of God
whose broken heart is uncovered on Good Friday.
Lent is the season of breaking hard hearts so that we can learn to love
again, a time to recover the church as the broken hearts club, the AHA
community that stands with God in solidarity with the struggling people of the
earth. And then, last week we considered
how vital it is in woodturning and in life to achieve balance. Lent is a good time to regain balance in our
lives through getting centred in Christ as we contemplate the gospel story
anew.
As we journey with Jesus and the disciples
towards Jerusalem and the cross we are once again helped to find the centre
around which everything else turns -- God's love and grace towards us in Christ
through which we find forgiveness and wholeness again. In this way we might even be turned into something beautiful for God. And it is this sense of being turned into
something beautiful that leads me to share with you a story told by Bill
Everett in our book Sawdust and Soul. I tell it in his own words:
A few years ago Beth Follum
Hoffman participated in a workshop with me and others on “Wood, Rocks, and
Worship” at Andover Newton Theological School. We had asked participants to
bring some wood that was significant to them and that they wanted to work with
in the course of the week. Beth brought a pair of old wooden crutches. She had
been born with one leg shorter than the other and it had only been through
years of painful surgery and therapy that she was now able to walk unassisted
by the crutches, which she had stored some years ago in her attic. The course
requirement led her to take them out, knowing that these maple crutches were
very important but not knowing what she would do with them. In the course of
the workshop she transformed these crutches in a way that transformed her in
the process. Despite her complete lack of experience with woodworking tools,
she discovered that “I had a lot to say to the wood and … the wood also had a
lot to say to me.” She decided, with the support, help, and encouragement of
the other participants, to re-fashion them into a cross, a third life for the
maple tree that would reflect the painful journey she had experienced in her
own life.
As she went back and forth
between her own experience and the actual shape of the wooden pieces, she began
to see a way the crutches might become a cross. In the process she confronted
her own struggle to absorb her traumatic childhood experience and refashion it
so it might provide a language and symbolism for her own emerging ministry amid
the myriad forms of brokenness and healing she was encountering in the lives of
people in her church. At the end emerged a cross that clearly reflected its
earlier form but in a new arrangement that would absorb its old meanings into a
more universal symbol of suffering and new life. She didn’t build a base for
it, but wanted it to hang over the (communion table I had made). It would dance in the air, just as her spirit
was lifting her own body, and with it the spirits of everyone who gathered
around the table on our final day together for communion. It remains one of the
most moving experiences with wood in my own life and in hers...
Beth, Bill goes on to tell us, "is
now a minister in Maine, where the cross hangs in her office as a sign to
everyone of the transformation that is possible in their lives."
Years ago, in the middle of winter with
snow all around us, Isobel and I walked past a church in a small town in
Wisconsin and stopped to read the notice board outside. We were taken by surprised as we read "In this church the hymn 'The old
rugged cross' was composed and first sung." Yes, at the heart of our faith is not a fine
piece of furniture made out of a raw wood, but two pieces of rough, un-planed cedar
(I would think) crudely nailed together on which criminals were crucified. Yet that symbol of punishment and pain speaks
to us of God's saving love, of healing and restoration, of forgiveness and
grace. In a strange way, a symbol of
death has been transformed into an icon of beauty which attracts us and changes
us. The cross has become the sign of God's
power to save and make whole, a means whereby our crutches become transfigured.
When you next visit the sanctuary next
door, look again at the Christ figure which Bill Davis carved from a broken
tree branch here on Volmoed, now hanging behind the altar. There is a photograph of it in Sawdust and Soul and an extract from
Bill's account of what carving it from a broken branch of a camphor tree meant
to him. During Lent we bring the
brokenness of our lives, the pain of the past and present, our failures and our
sins, into the orbit of God's transforming and healing love, that we might be
made whole, balanced, and turned around in our journey into the mystery of
God's love revealed in Christ nailed to the old rugged cross.
John
de Gruchy
Volmoed 12 March 2015
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