The evenings are drawing in but right now it’s so hot you’d think it was mid-summer. The mood is drawing in too. There is a sense of impending stricture about life, the almost certain knowledge that full-blown lockdown is perhaps only days away. There is uncertainty. And yet there is sunshine, proclaiming, for the last time, perhaps, an eternal summer, that false certainty we experience on a warm day in mid-September, that somehow summer will never end.
There is also a hint of past summers in the air, faint memories of childhood revived by the smell of cut grass, the last cut of the year, or sudden changes in temperature – shorts and T-shirt one minute, woolly jumpers the next. And these memories trigger other associations. You recall a conversation overheard on just such a day, in which you understood certain things about where love should be, but is not. The kind of conversation and memory that takes you forward into life as you would soon learn it will have to be lived. It will have to be lived with integrity, the kind of integrity that refuses to deny the truth of your memories.
Lived realities have more to do with memory and association than they do with what may be going on right now. This is a fact that is often hard to come to terms with. Now is now, and then was then, you tell yourself. You may think that the feelings you experience right now, in regard to the things you may remember from past Septembers, are manageable. In fact you may feel that they do not belong here, with the early autumn sunshine, and with your now happy life, but shut away somewhere in a box labelled ‘issues resolved’.
You will remember the morning you looked down at the house and made a silent promise to yourself, that this would never happen to your children. But it happened in a quite unexpected way, as a result of your trying too hard to get it right. The sins of the fathers and mothers are often re-visited on their grandchildren in quite the opposite way that their children experienced them. Where love was lacking we now over love in triple helpings, just to be sure.
Today is Holy Cross Day. Some will be finding it strange, even disturbing to be reminded of the Cross on a beautiful day in mid-September, and out of season too, when we should be thinking of harvest, and even Advent. Why the Cross now?
I think it’s very helpful that we are given a stark reminder of this emblem of all that stands for pain and suffering when we are trying to make the best of this fine weather, without allowing ‘issues’ from the past to emerge from their dark hiding places and spoil it all. It’s helpful because it assures us of the truthfulness of our painful memories, that they were not imagined, as some may have wanted us to believe. It validates them. It also tells us that these memories and associations are precious in the eyes of God.
This is all very well, you may say, if you are someone who prays and believes in God. I did neither of these things on the day I looked down at the house, at least not with any great conviction. But I’ve since learned that prayer and the Cross itself don’t work in linear time and they don’t depend on my faith, or the lack of it, at any given point in my life, because life, prayer and the Cross are all of a piece.
The effect of prayer, and the way it draws directly on the energy, or grace, of the Cross is outside time as we understand it. It also does not depend on the faith, or spiritual giftedness of the individual at any given moment or in any particular circumstance. There will have been others praying and looking to the Cross when I was looking down on that house. So what I was then did not compromise any prayer that may have been going on in places and through people unknown to me at the time.
Where someone is praying, no matter when, or for whom, the energy they draw on is the same energy that emanates from that unflinching Cross. It heals our individual lives, and the life of the world, and propels us all forward in a Godward direction, in the direction of divine love. To the extent that we resist the call, or pull, to prayer and to the Cross itself, that energy is proportionally diminished. This is, I believe, true across time and on into eternity, which is why we ask good people who have died to carry on praying for us. It is also why we pray for those who cannot or will not pray, whether they are alive or dead, and despite the memories or associations we may still harbour in regard to them.