The Exaltation of the Cross

       September 14 is the Feast of the Exaltation or Triumph of the Cross, truly a counter-cultural feast. Many times we forget what an ignominious symbol of humiliation, suffering and death the cross is—a symbol of a death reserved for criminals in the Roman Empire. This feast celebrates that God sent the Son to endure such a death for the salvation of humanity and that Jesus Christ willingly endured this death. Many spiritual writers have pointed out that God’s love and mercy toward humanity is almost irrational and no one captures that thought better than Catherine of Siena in one of her prayers.

       In certain years on this feast we read Cathrine’s prayer as a non-Scriptural reading at Morning Prayer  and I’m sharing it with you.

O Trinity, eternal Godhead!

We are trees of death and you are the tree of life.

What a wonder, in your light, to see your creature as a tree

  you drew out of yourself in pure innocence.

You planted it and fused it into the humanity you had formed from the earth’s clay.

You made this tree free.

You gave it branches: the soul’s powers of memory, understanding and will.

But this tree broke away from innocence;

 it fell in disobedience and from a tree of life became a tree of death,

 so that it no longer produced any fruits but those  of death.

And you, high eternal Trinity,

   acted as if you were drunk with love, infatuated with your creature.

When you saw that this tree could bear no fruit but the fruit of death

  because it was cut off from you who are life,

You came to its rescue with the same love with which you created it:

You engrafted your divinity into the dead tree of our humanity.

You, sweetness itself, stooped to join yourself with bitterness.

You, splendor, joined yourself with darkness;

You , wisdom, with foolishness;

You, life, with death;

You, the infinite, with us who are finite.

What drove you to this

 to give back life to this creature of yours that had so insulted you?

Only love, as I have said,

And so by this engrafting, death is destroyed.

And was it enough for your charity to have effected such a union with your creature?

You, eternal Word, watered this tree with your blood.

With its warmth this blood makes the tree bear fruit, if we engraft ourselves into you,

  to join and make one with you our heart and affection,

  binding and wrapping the graft with the band of charity and following your teaching.

So through you who are life we will produce the fruit of life.
          Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB for Sr. Mary Catherine Wenstrup, OSB