Consider the Cross

Consider the Cross.

Two straight lines intersecting each other, which may not necessarily be of equal lengths, but on which you can spend equally substantial time to ponder.

First is the vertical line. Place your right hand opposite your heart and from there starting from your heart, raise your hand to your head gently. From your heart up to your head, and to God, it is as if you tell Him, “God, take all my heart, my will, my intellect, take all of them I raise them all up to you.

You can please utter “Ika na ang bahala” (You are the one in charge); or you say—“Ika man nanggad ang Bathala” (You are, indeed, the Supreme Being). You sound very much like the Jesuit patron Ignatius when you do.

Guiding your hand from your heart to your head to Him, let them all go. As renewal groups always [ex]claim—let go and let God. The vertical gesture says someone is your God. From where you are standing, seated or lounging, you need to reach for Someone higher than you, upwards. You alone cannot do anything. Without God, with no sense of Divine Providence, what can you achieve? Certainly, Someone else Is higher than you are. Certainly He Knows better, and He can do better than you. American recluse poet Emily Dickinson would even write—“He’s Somebody. Who are you?”

Then, the horizontal line. Place your hand gently from the left shoulder and to your heart again then to the right. The horizontal gesture says that others are like you. It also says you need to reach out to others because grounded on earth, it is in your nature to move leftwards, rightwards, horizontally.

From your left side to your right side, that is how you are advised to relate to life. You are directed to go sideward to see the meaning of life further in other human beings like you. Grounded on earth like you, other people are also waiting for companionship. Yes, an anecdote even said that millions of people are waiting to be spoken to; people moving left and right like you might also need to puzzle out the same mystery you have been confused with for years.

Yes. Take the chance. Best reach out to them. With some of them, you can clarify your too many questions. With others, you need not ask too many. And with a fewer special ones, questions, not answers are the least things that would bother you.

What a sensible way to make sense of monotony! If all symbols fail to justify things about which you ask too many questions, what blessing it is to look at the Cross and realize its essence. What a sensible way to explain why you make the sign every time you pass Church or other sacred spots.

Contemplating the Cross this way calls to mind Christ’s laymanizing of Moses’s Ten Commandments—two laws on life only: Love God with all your heart, with all your might. That’s the vertical line, that’s your vertical life. Love your neighbour as yourself. That’s the horizontal line, that’s your horizontal life.

Consider the Cross.