Peace with Culture Part 1: Holy Cross Day · MONASTICA: Essene-Rose Lineage

Peace with Culture Part 1: Holy Cross Day

As I work regularly with the Sevenfold Peace Path, I have found it very healing, reconciling with my families religious lineage of Christianity.

Fortunately, growing up, I did not experience any form of fundamentalism.

And yet, I always desired a place to belong.

With my mystic lens, I always found it hard to be contained within a dogmatic system. At the same time, I longed for something that offered deeper roots, spiritual guidance, culture, and tradition than I was finding in spiritually fluid communities.

I began to contemplate how I might restore some traditions that have been woven throughout my ancestral line.

This line does not run straight. It weaves through the Judeo-Christian line as well into the earth-based practices of Germanic Druids or the Scottish Celts.

I’m curious to know if any of you have found a similar call?

One towards a reclamation of ancestral lineage?

There’s a lot of work here to restore peace in this area. Blessings to all on the path. May it bring an abundance of LIFE.

From this personal exploration, this writing was inspired for HOLY CROSS DAY, September 14th:

For centuries we have been taught to look upon it as the instrument of our salvation. That humanity’s sin created a debt which could only be satisfied through blood, and that God offered the Son as the sacrifice necessary to reconcile creation to its Creator.

But what if we looked again?

What if the Cross does not reveal a God who required death, but a God whose Life could not finally be overcome by death?

I find myself returning to a simple question, would the Source of Life require death in order to give Life?

Would an all-loving, all-powerful God need the killing of the beloved Son before mercy could be extended to creation?

Or might the Cross be telling us something very different?

Perhaps God did not demand the Cross, perhaps we created it through empires, fear, violence, domination and religious certainty.

The Cross was a Roman instrument of torture and execution long before Christians placed it upon our altars or wore them around their necks.

Jesus entered that system of violence without becoming violent himself.

He did not meet hatred with hatred.

He did not answer domination with domination.

He did not summon another empire to overthrow Rome.

He forgave.

He surrendered himself into the Mystery.

When humanity answered Love with death, God answered death with Life.

This changes the way I view the Cross.

I do not need to imagine a Father demanding the blood of the Son.

I hold instead the revelation of a Love so radically nonviolent that even while being crucified, Christ refuses to participate in the consciousness that crucifies.

After the crucifixion, came the resurrection and is perhaps where the Christian story had always been trying to lead us.

Not toward death, but toward Life.

Before there was Golgotha, there was Eden.

Before there was a Cross, there was a Tree of Life.

Before there was sin, there was blessing.

Before separation, communion.

Before the tomb, God breathed Life into creation and called it good.

Life is the original orientation.

While this may seem obvious to some, I believe the continual state of violence and separation from God in our world mirrors our orientation towards death.

Christ does not introduce Life into a universe founded upon death. Christ reveals the Life that was there from the beginning.

“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” (John 1:4, NIV)

This is why I find myself increasingly drawn toward the earliest Jewish-Christian streams surrounding the Jesus movement—the Nazarenes and Ebionites—the peace-centered ethos associated with the Essenes.

Their surviving voices may be fragmented and debated, yet among the fragments attributed to the Gospel of the Ebionites survives an extraordinary saying of Jesus:

“I have come to abolish sacrifices.” (Gospel of the Ebionites, fragment 6/Epiphanius, Panarion 30.16.5.)

What might Christianity look like if we allowed those words to stand beside the Cross?

If Christ came to bring sacrifice to an end, perhaps the Cross should not become the ultimate validation of sacrifice.

Perhaps it exposes it.

Perhaps the event at Calvary reveals the terrible culmination of humanity’s ancient belief that peace can be accomplished through violence.

That purity enters the church through exclusion.

That world order comes through domination.

And that the only way to reconciliation with God and our original design is through blood.

The Resurrection overturns this logic.

God does not answer killing with another killing.

God answers with Life.

This does not mean that death has no place within the sacred mystery.

Creation teaches us otherwise.

Leaves fall as seeds disappear beneath the earth. Bodies too return to soil. Our positionalites and identities dissolve through our healing just as Love allows seasons to end.

We surrender again and again what we cannot carry into the next threshold.

Death and rebirth belong to the great rhythm of creation.

Death having a place within the cycle of Life is very different from declaring death the requirement of God.

Death may be a threshold, but it needs not be God’s demand.

This is one of the deepest mysteries Christ came to embody: we do not conquer death through another death, we become so deeply rooted in Divine Life that even death cannot sever us from Love.

This is the illumination of Christ.

The cross isn’t a glorification of suffering, but the revelation of what Love becomes in the midst of suffering.

It’s not the sanctification of violence because violence was inflicted upon Jesus, but the revelation of a Love that refuses to become violent in return.

Nor is it about a God that was persuaded toward mercy through blood, but a God whose mercy was there from the beginning—revealed in Christ through healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, and ultimately resurrection.

To follow Christ, then, is to enter this same Living Way.

We allow the consciousness he embodied—peace without passivity, mercy without judgment, forgiveness without denial, and radical love without domination—to take root within us.

Perhaps this is what it means for Christ to become illumined within the human person.

The Cross reminds us that we not only believe in the resurrection of Christ, but that the pattern of resurrection begins to become visible through the way we live.

The Cross becomes a mirror…

Bringing awareness to:

The violence still lives in us.

The ways we create and participate in scapegoating.

How we condemn.

How we dominate Creation.

What we are willing to sacrifice in order to preserve our certainty, our institutions, our identities and our power?

From the revelations in the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Christ revealed the distortion of power within us, that cultivate the very violence humanity has created.

When we begin to orient ourselves towards Life we:

Forgive.

Love.

Do not retaliate.

Abide in God.

This brings us to renewal.

Perhaps the deepest symbol of Christianity is therefore not death upon a cross, but Life re-emerging. Again and again.

The Cross is real.

The suffering is real.

Death is real.

But none of them is ultimate.

Life is.

On the Holy Cross Day, I honor the Cross because humanity brought its violence to Christ, and Christ showed us another Way.

A Way of peace.

A Way of mercy.

A Way of forgiveness.

A Way that refuses to reproduce violence even when violence is directed toward us.

Beyond the Cross stands the empty tomb—the eternal proclamation that violence cannot create the Kingdom of Heaven. Death cannot extinguish Divine Life, nor the Christ in us.

Perhaps salvation has always been less about being rescued from an angry God and more about being liberated from everything within us that has forgotten how to live.

The invitation of Christ remains—

Come out of the tomb.

Return to the Garden.

Become Life.

And carry that Light into the world.

Part 2 continued…

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Peace with Culture Part 1: Holy Cross Day