Seduced by the Cross
By Kurt Hofer, European Conservative.
Do not hurry by the cross on your way to Easter joy, for we know the risen Lord only through Christ and him crucified.
There comes a time in every Christian’s life when he first realizes that he has never really seen the Cross. He has looked at it, through it, or past it, but never lingered there.
Mine came in the environs of what had heretofore been my refuge—floating in the Pacific, beneath the hollowed skeleton of a decommissioned nuclear power plant, just north of a massive marine base, Camp Pendleton, in San Clemente, California. I caught a wave—something I’d done thousands of times before—but this time I fell off. That was strange, I thought. But then it happened again. And again. My right arm and leg were weak. I paddled into the beach, but the malady followed me to the shore. I fell over and over again; fear slowly usurped the place of confusion in my mind. The waves knocked me down, as if I were an infant who needed to be held up by the arms. Maybe I can sleep it off, I thought. The human capacity for denial knows no limits.
Two days later, after a battery of tests, I was diagnosed with spinal stenosis, for which I would need to be operated on immediately, as well as an ‘incidental’ finding of a lesion in my brain that would also likely need to be surgically removed. At 38, I didn’t feel ‘tested’ by God; I felt robbed by fate.
“You seduced me, Lord, and I let myself be seduced,” says the Prophet Jeremiah (20:7). In another translation, the deceit is perhaps even more visceral: “You duped me, Lord, and I let myself be duped.”
That is how I felt too—duped, seduced—lying on a hospital bed as I awaited surgery, with birthday balloons tied to the arm rails of my bed. Richard Neuhaus’ words in his prose poem of Christian meditation Death on a Friday Afternoon also seemed, even after I made it home safely from the first operation on my spine, like a taunt:
Stay a while. Do not hurry by the cross on your way to Easter joy, for we know the risen Lord only through Christ and him crucified.
As naive as it sounds now, I somehow always thought I would get to set the terms of my ‘staying a while.’ I wasn’t overweight; I exercised regularly. My cross would come to me later, if not at an hour of my choosing.
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