Cross



"I place on the altar of dawn the quiet loyalty of breath..." ~John O'Donahue

I invite you to see the Cross as creation's radiant blossom, in all its multiplicity and paradox, opening its petals from a singular uncreated center. What beauty, what loss, what fullness, what emptiness, the Cross contains!

Its horizontal beams are the past and future. Its vertical beams are consciousness and matter. In our world of opposites, liberation only comes through the Cross, which is the experience and transcendence of polarity. When our conflicted mind of opposites is crucified, we pass through the center, into eternity. But this is not something we do after death: it is this very moment of complete acceptance.

The center of the Cross is the matrix that embraces, and by embracing transcends, every pair of opposites: pain and beauty, sorrow and joy, body and soul, thorn and rose. From the center of the Cross, I see that past and future were only thoughts, spirit and matter were but wave and particle of the same Radiance.

Eternity is the death of thought. This death empowers awareness to see the miracle of the commonplace. To rise to the miracle of the ordinary is resurrection.

"This day, you shall be with me in paradise," Jesus says to the thief on the Cross beside him. Yes, the past is forgiven this instant. This very breath dissolves the entire history of the world, and all its sins.

Like a fleeing dream, past and future are dispelled in the clarity of Easter morning, which is any morning you breathe through the heart...

The weight of the body dissolves in the light of its infinitesimal photons, each created and destroyed in an instant. So the resurrection is not separate from the crucifixion.

The difference between heaven and hell is like the edge of a dragonfly's wing, transparent in a sunbeam. Heaven is wonder, hell is doubt.

What use is doubt? What energy or advantage does it gain? What are we really doubting, if not our own mind? Good then, doubt the mind. Crucify the mind. Awaken to the beauty of the morning, any morning. Learn eternity from the thrush's song...

Pass through the center of the Cross, into the heart of now. Choose wonder. This very morning we are together in paradise. The world is changed in the twinkling of an eye.

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