The World Turned Upside Down

While the world subjugates the goodness of Creation to pain and suffering,
…the cross converts despair into hope.

While the world spins on an axis of pride, retribution, and self-reliance,
…the cross stands on a firm foundation of humility, acceptant peace, and trustful surrender.

While the world continues to be ravaged by violence and storm,
…the cross withstands all bloodshed and torment.

While the world views dying to self as sorrowful self-deprivation and failure,
…the cross reveals its true joyful fulfillment and victory.

While the world lives on false pretense, crowning itself with an unmerited band of gold,
…the cross is sustained by true integrity, undeservedly crowned with a ring of painful wounds.

While the world consumes without ceasing,
…the cross imparts its everlasting blood of redemption and water of life.

While the world continues to breed division,
…the cross invites all to unity.

While the world teaches us to fend for ourselves,
…the cross reminds us we do not suffer alone.

While the world puts wayward man and woman on a pedestal,
…the cross elevates our constant, one true King.

While the world tells us, “you only live once,”
…the cross tells us, “you will live forever.”

While the world exists for the “self,”
…the cross exists for the “other.”

In a world of sterile, senseless hostility,
…the cross is fruitful, transformative love.

It has been said that the cross is symbolic of the world turned upside down. During this season of Lent we are invited to contemplate, accept, and enter into the significance and the power of the cross. Though encountering the cross is difficult and uncomfortable, trust in its fruitful reality brings us the paradoxical ease and comfort that can only be found in bearing the heavy burden of its evident desolation and cruelty.

Another hot and muggy afternoon puts me in my reclining rocking chair. I am kept cool by a series of well-aerated gaps between the chair’s thin, interlocking plastic bands and the fan on full blast. All of a sudden I hear a call from the security guard standing outside my window, winded from his run up the stairs leading to our house. “Doctor, emergency,” he says. Though I hear this phrase many times throughout any given week, his tone is marked by an uncommon sense of concern and urgency. The sense of urgency grows with each word and facial expression I encounter on my way down to the hospital. As I enter the emergency room, a teenage boy lies lifeless on the hospital bed. His stiff extremities and bluish skin are surrogate markers of the absent pulse soon discovered by palpation of his wrist. In the battle against time my hands soon find themselves on top of his chest, each compression into his chest a hopeful attempt to give him another chance at life. Five minutes, multiple pairs of hands, and a vial of epinephrine later, a life-sustaining pulse returns, his eyes are opened, and death seems a more distant reality.

One of the observers of the accident begins to tell us the story. The boy and his friend were riding their bicycles down a very steep hill which ends in a sharp curve. Upon turning the corner on his bicycle with no brakes, the boy violently collided with a set of ion bars. In an instant an unexpected tragedy became the halting reality in front of me amidst an already stifling afternoon.

Shortly after his resuscitation a late afternoon referral to the city of Iquitos is declined by the flight operator as dusk ominously approaches, the water plane’s pilot unable to safely fly in the dark. The boy still has not regained full consciousness and cannot breathe on his own. The remainder of the afternoon and evening finds a group of volunteers and hospital workers taking turns breathing for the boy as we pump oxygen-rich air into his lungs with a bag mask. Over twenty pairs of hands functioning as a human ventilator come together to save one life. Then, the morning’s hopeful sunlight is quickly displaced by a torrential rainfall- the flight evacuation is further delayed by the storm and each passing minute is filled with increasing doubt. The water plane finally departs on its fixed trajectory to Iquitos, all the while containing a life whose worldly fate is all too uncertain. Shortly after his arrival to Iquitos we learn the boy has passed away.

***

The brokenness and despair is palpable that day, a subversive sense of defeat lurking in the shadows with no possible worldly explanation to understand how this child’s life was so quickly and unjustly uprooted. And as the now broken and barren soil is disturbed by the uprooting of this once living and growing tree, the seeds around it are now stirred up. Once dormant, now awakened. Once stifled in packed soil, now set loose with the freedom to flourish. Once trapped in darkness, now invited to bathe in the sunlight. Once content to be contained within themselves, now anxious to sacrifice themselves- to be stripped of the comfort and protection of their shells and to blossom into the flowers they had been destined to be from the very beginning.

In the cross, the world is turned on its head. From the uprooting of a tree emerges a wooden cross, carved away by the brokenness of human hands. I am reminded that in our cross- in our individual and collective pains and sufferings- we find the only possible response to the world’s indiscriminate cruelty. Where the world means evil, only He means good. Only He is capable of bringing about a greater good from the adversity that surrounds us. Only in trustfully surrendering to His permissive will do we have the freedom to truly love. Only in our redemptive suffering do we gaze upon his face with His Mother at the foot of the cross. Only through the cross is found eternal life.

“A seed’s life is inside, yes, but it’s a life that grows by being given away and mixing with the soil around it. It has to crack open, to be destroyed.”

~ Bishop Robert Barron