I found this distasteful when I first encountered it - it felt pagan somehow. And too public, a performance of piety. Today, at my church, which isn't perhaps quite comfortable with it, most members of the congregation didn't go up. I did. (I took the picture later, of course.)
Before we came to this part of the liturgy, we'd heard the Passion story (John's today), ending with the laying of Jesus' body in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus - not His apostles, who had fled in fear, not to mention the throngs who celebrated his arrival in Jerusalem with palms. Even the Marys were gone. I got to thinking about His aloneness, the busy hubbub of the crucifixion followed by a desolate stillness, in the distance the low buzz of life going on. My mind did a cinematic zoom out, the cross(es) barely visible on a hilltop which became just one of many hills as it receded into the distance, the business of life going on in the unseen valleys under a thickly clouded sky. What abandonment.
Then came the time to go up to the wooden cross. I knelt and placed my hand on it, just above the stone, and fancied I felt something - the busy work of cells, the consortia of consortia of life forms Lynn Margulis described to us. Wood. And suddenly the abandonment didn't seem so great at all. He wasn't alone. The wood, with all the worlds within it, pressed against His body, holding. And he felt that love, that presence.
Elizabeth Johnson has suggested that the whole history of life is included in the human form taken in the Incarnation, not some abstracted fantasy of human-rather-than-nature. I took that to be referring to animals, but the family of life is much bigger than that. Margulis' revelation of the drone of bacteria, in and around and beyond every form of life we encounter, has made that kinship palpable in a new way. I've had a thing for trees for a long time. But only today did I think of the wood of the cross - the cross not as a metaphorical tree, but an actual tree, with all its constituent communities - as kin.
The wood courses with our better nature, faithful when we humans (as the Reproaches so poignantly remind us) so abjectly fail.
