A Fight For The Future

It is a battle for the soul of the 

Church--Evangelical Catholicism

or old-school Catholicism

I have always liked going to morning Mass.  For years went to a local monastery for Mass most of the time, but since I recently moved, have been going to the local parish.  Not bad—not great (I still miss the friars) but not bad.  Homily this morning was somewhat pertinent to what I have been writing in recent entries.

The priest reminded us that the Samaritans were outcasts, “unclean” in Jewish eyes.  As left-behind descendants of the ancient Israelites (the ten northern tribes whom the Assyrians had led into exile in 722 BC (more or less, exact year uncertain), the Samaritans worshiped Yahweh and had the Five Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), albeit in their own language and with considerable variation from the Hebrew Text.  Because they worshiped God at their own temple on Mount Gerizim and not in the Jerusalem Temple, and because they followed religious law that differed from the Jewish standards, they were considered particularly unclean.  The devout Jews of Jesus day were convinced that while the Greeks and Romans were unclean and thus unworthy of God’s attention, the Samaritans should have known better and thus their sins were particularly foul.  But the Samaritan in today’s gospel received the same mercy as his Jewish colleagues and, moreover, was all the more appreciative of it because he had been an outcast, not only as a leper (as were the 9 Jewish lepers with whom he met Jesus) but as one who had always been told that, as a Samaritan, he stood outside the mercy of God.  Jesus’ dealings with the Samaritans—whether in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Woman at the Well, or today’s exercise of mercy towards a leper—were a red-flag to the pious Jews.  In the same way, Pope Francis’ agenda of reaching out to those whom pious Catholics consider to be “sinners” or in need of “repentance” and “conversion” before they are welcomed back into the community of the faithful is offensive to today’s scribes and Pharisees.  We are stewards of the Divine Mercy, not protectors of it; we are meant to had it out generously and freely as there is a (literally) inexhaustible supply of God’s Mercy.  It should be squandered on sinners; it was meant to be squandered on sinners.  But only those who have received the Mercy, like the Samaritan in today’s gospel, can appreciate it sufficiently to revel in its excess without worrying that it might someday be exhausted.  Those who would be stingy in spending it will never themselves be given its abundance because they don’t know what it is for. 

I have done a number of posts on “Evangelical Catholicism” based on my reflections on George Weigel’s book by the same name. Weigel defines Evangelical Catholicism as

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.  

I am not happy with how Weigel unfolds this ideal in his book with concrete proposals for how the Church might act in regards to its mission in the contemporary world, but I think his definition of Evangelical Catholicism is exactly on target.  As he defines the specifics of what he means by the above vision of the Church, Weigel attempts to somewhat squeeze the broad foot of Christ’s Risen Body into the somewhat narrow shoe of Pope Benedict XVI, whereas Pope Francis seems content to let Christ enjoy the freedom of being barefoot. 

Looking at Weigel’s definition of Evangelical Catholicism we get the following elements.

1.   We are all called to meet the Risen Christ and make friends with him in the Scriptures

2.   We are all called to meet the Risen Christ and make friends with him in the Sacraments

3.   We are all called to meet the Risen Christ and make friends with him in Prayer

4.   We are all called to become evangelists, going out into the world to make disciples of all peoples, teaching them what Christ has taught us, and baptizing them in the Name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. (The Great Commission.) 

5.   We are called to give witness to the truth of our Catholic faith by the way our friendship with Christ leads us to express our human decency and our fundamental ties (solidarity) with all others. 

Looking at the fifth principle (spelled it correctly this time, Anonymous of 11/10, thank you for making me more carefully aware of my propensity to choose the wrong spelling of that word) let me draw your attention to the fact that Weigel mentions human decency and solidarity as essential elements of how we relate to others.  I think this is the problem with those of the “Burke School” of Divine Mercy (as differentiated from the “Pope Francis School” of Divine Mercy.  With solidarity—the key concept of Pope John Paul II—we understand that we are all in the boat together and that the salvation of the one depends on the salvation of each of the others.  With solidarity there is no “them” and “us,” there is only a we.  We do not judge, as Pope Francis has declined to judge, precisely because we know that we are in the same boat as the most miserable of sinners.   

In light of that, let me say that I don’t judge Cardinal Burke.  O, I might make fun of him and his propensity to dress up like the Empress Maria Teresa (always one of my favorite people in history, and, like the Cardinal, a devout Catholic), but I have no doubt that he is sincere in his faith.  The problem is the construct of that faith. I understand him because I once saw things very much as he did.  I had very clear concepts of moral right and moral wrong and expected people—including myself—to conform to those constructs.  I am approximately of the same age as the Cardinal, but I have been fortunate, however, through the years to come to know people in ways that Cardinal Burke and others seem not to have.  I have come to realize that while there are clear boundaries of right and wrong in the world of abstractions, in the reality of people’s lives there are immense complexities that cast shadow and/or light on our moral structures.  I have met people who have made difficult—very difficult—decisions in their lives and not always the right ones.  I have met people who have made wrong decisions—sometimes seriously wrong decisions—and yet remained essentially good people.  I have seen that certain decisions—objectively wrong—have not deprived individuals from great graces in their prayer (sanctifying grace) or in their actions (actual grace).  In my career as an educator, I have been to 12 step meetings for people with addictions to drugs, with addiction to alcohol, with addictions to sexual behaviors—and I have heard some of the greatest stories of God’s grace and favor that have ever been told.  I have met divorced and remarried; I have met active homosexuals; I have met unmarried couples whose capacity to empty themselves for others in profound acts of charity motivated by their faith in Christ and their love of God and nourished by their participation in the sacramental life of the Church and their confidence in the gospel has stunned me into understanding that I simply cannot judge the state of another’s soul no matter the external circumstances of their lives.  I am deeply sorry that Cardinal Burke and those who have rallied to his side in opposing the hopes of Pope Francis for a more welcoming Church have not had this same grace.  It is sad that Raymond Burke sought office in the Church and it is the failure of the Church that she (the Church) rewarded his quest for power.  Perhaps had he stayed a country priest, faithful to the confessional and the hungers of his flock, he might see things somewhat differently. 

The story is that Francis too, when Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina, was known to be hardassed and rigid in his administration of the rules of the Society over the priests and brothers entrusted to his care.  The plight of those same priests during the Argentine “Dirty War” seems to have been the shock that Bergoglio needed to view the challenges of life from a different perspective.  Two of the Jesuits under his care were arrested by the Argentine military and were tortured, but many of the Jesuits were in great danger because of their identification with the poorest and most abused in Argentine Society.  Bergoglio became involved with the underground, helping several flee the country and giving up his own passport to one journalist to use to escape.    It seems that the “Dirty War” was the agent of Bergoglio’s radicalization. 

It is difficult for those who have not experienced the sort of personal conversion that Jorge Bergoglio underwent to understand the direction he has taken since becoming Pope last year.  We can only pray for the grace for our hearts to be opened and to see the world with the compassion that fills the Sacred Heart of Jesus rather than the judgment of the scribes and the Pharisees.  Scribes and Pharisees, and even rogue Cardinals, can be as good people as martyred nuns and tortured priests or even as maligned and misunderstood Popes, it is all a matter of allowing God to replace the stony heart with one of flesh.  

True and False Religion

Model of the Second Temple, Israel Museum,

Jerusalem

I was struck reading Morning Prayer today by the words of Azariah in the Canticle from the Book of Daniel. 

For we are reduced, O Lord, beyond any other nation,
brought low everywhere in the world this day
because of our sins.

We have in our day no prince, prophet, or leader,
no holocaust, sacrifice, oblation, or incense,
no place to offer first fruits, to find favor with you.

But with contrite heart and humble spirit
let us be received;
as though it were holocausts of rams and bullocks,
or thousands of fat lambs,
so let our sacrifice be in your presence today
as we follow you unreservedly;
for those who trust in you cannot be put to shame.

And now we follow you with our whole heart,
we fear you and we pray to you.

The context is, of course, the time of the Babylonian Exile.  In the all-but- abandoned City of Jerusalem, the Temple of the Lord sat in ruins.  There was no sacrifice, no evening offering of incense.  Indeed the Cult had come to a halt—how was God to be served when no sacrifices could be offered?  And the lament of Azariah over this tragedy led to the great breakthrough in our Jewish/Christian tradition.  “Let us be received with contrite heart and humbled spirit”—this is the true sacrifice.  What use does God have for bulls and goats—and should he want them, the hills are covered with them and they are his for the taking (cf psalm 50: 8-13). The time of the Exile was a “Dark Night of the Soul” for Israel where they were taught by God what he truly wants: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; setting free the oppressed, breaking off every yoke.  (Isaiah 58:6) 
I bring this up because of an article I read yesterday about aggressive plans being made by certain factions tied to the Netanyahu Government to seize the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in order to build a “Third Temple. (The first was the Temple of Solomon; the Second Temple was the Temple that stood in Jesus’ day.)  There is a strong desire in certain factions of moderate Orthodox Judaism to rebuild the Temple and restore the Cult.  The Ultra-Orthodox say that the Temple cannot be rebuilt and the sacrifices reinstituted until the Messiah comes and sorts things out. The Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism do not seem to have much interest in restoring the sacrificial rituals.   But that is not what I am writing about—nor, for that matter, is the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoring of the Cult.  Though I do want to bring up the issue, before I move on to my main point, of how can people be anxious to restore Cultic Worship when, at the same time, they see themselves as having a right to seize farms and groves and houses from the Palestinian people who have lived on this land since the time before Joshua brought the Children of Israel into the Land of Canaan approximately thirteen centuries before Christ? Though, again this being a history blog, it would be more accurate to speak of a series of migrations from the fifteenth through the twelfth centuries Before the Common Era (1499-1100 BC) than a single “Exodus.”  What is the point of building a Temple or sacrificing bulls and goats if one does not honor the commandments of God?  That was the message of the prophets as distinguished from the priests who supported the Cult qua Cult.  Jesus, of course—at least from the Christian understanding—reinforced this prophetic tradition that what God wants is mercy, not sacrifice (cf Matthew 9:13). 
Now let’s bring this over to issues that face us as Catholics today.  We too have people for whom everything is the Cult and for whom the greater commands mean little or even nothing.  They worry about issues such as using glass chalices or home-made breads for the Eucharist but want illegal immigrants rounded up and “shipped home.”  They want to deny those whom they deem unworthy Holy Communion but they support economic policies that leave the poor without access to health care or a chance for higher education.  They want to bend the knee to receive Christ in Eucharist while kneeling but they don’t bend their hearts to Christ in the least of his brothers and sisters. The women veil their heads but their hearts remain hardened and stiff.  The men put pro-life bumper stickers defending the unborn alongside NRA stickers and don’t see the contradiction.  The children are shielded not only from sex-education but from meeting their peers who are Black or Hispanic or Asian.  They want Mass in a language few if any understand because, “God-forbid we understand the Word of the Lord: we may have to change our attitudes.”   It is all magical mystical mumbo-jumbo that gives them a sense of otherworldliness when what Christ calls us to is change—deep, personal, change-of-heart change—in this world and in this life.  One might belong to the True Church but still have false religion. 

All Are Welcome: A Prayer For The Church

I mentioned in my last posting about people being made welcome around our Father’s Table—that is that all should be made welcome in the assembly of the Church.  A friend of mine who is a professional Church musician told me that Marty Haugen wrote the hymn All Are Welcome tongue in cheek because in most Catholic and Lutheran (Haugen’s music is widely sung in Catholic Churches but he himself is a Lutheran) congregations, all are not welcome, or at least are not made to feel welcome.  I find this sad, tragic really and cannot but wonder how Christ who sat at table with sinners and ate with them would feel about the scribes and the Pharisees winning out in so many of today’s parishes.
A priest friend of mine recently gave a retreat in which a woman came to him for “advice” because her children were “persecuting her” by not allowing her to see her grandchildren because she was “just trying to teach them their Catholic faith.” 
Given that all five of her children had “banned” Grandma, the priest was suspicious that the situation might be more complex.  When the woman told him that three of the children were practicing Catholics he was even more puzzled about the problem.  What was Granny trying to teach them?   “They need to know that same-sex marriage is evil in the sight of God,” she told him.   Now I am not sure that four and seven year olds do need to know that.  And it certainly isn’t the first point of catechesis, as my priest friend said.  But when he told the woman that there were other points of the faith that she perhaps should concentrate on, the woman just launched into a diatribe so vicious and filled with rancor that the priest told me “I seriously had to ask myself whether I could give her Holy Communion in the state she was in.  There obviously is more to her story than she was telling me, or perhaps that she would even own.  What had motivated her to come to see me?  I had said nothing about same-sex marriage, but I had said in one of my retreat talks that ‘everyone today knows what the Catholic Church is against; few know what it is for.’  She hit the nail right on the head and knew exactly what I meant by that remark. And she thinks that is just fine.”
I don’t expect the Church to soon change its teaching on same-sex marriage any more than I expect changes on the ordination of women or contraception.  Frankly, as I stated in my last entry, I don’t think a change in the doctrines themselves is the most urgent item on the agenda.  What is urgent is a change of style on how the teachings are presented and how people are treated in the Church.   A week or two ago I had posted that the Church is not about moral perfection but about the forgiveness of sins.  That drew two or three responses from the Pharisee wing assuring me that no, the Church is about moral perfection.  Anyone who knows the history of the Church knows that the Church, or at least its pastors and spokespersons, is in no position to make demands of moral perfection on anyone.  And the Gospel is clear that the only ones who have a right to come to the table are the sinners—“the healthy do not need a physician, the sick do; the Son of Man has come not for the righteous but for sinners.”  We must avoid the temptation to stand up in front of the world and pray “I thank you Lord that I am not like the rest of people: gay or contracepting or having aborted—or even like that agnostic over there.  I demonstrate at the abortuary twice a week, I vote Republican…” Better to look deep into our hearts, acknowledge our own failures—past and present—and greet our fellow sinners with open arms and a smile.  “This man, I tell you goes home justified; the former does not.”

p.s.  apologies to all those who vote Republican in good faith and with a sincere conscience, just using it as an example of those who who feel they have the moral right (or obligation) to keep Obama-voters from Holy Communion.          

Rethinking God IV

Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son: 

A Meditation on the Nature

of God  

We have been talking about “rethinking God” since I made the original post saying that Senatorial candidate Richard Mourdock’s comment that God wills pregnancies,  even those that are the result of a rape, made me stop and reflect on things that I have always just taken for granted about God.  And as I have reflected on what I actually do believe I find that it is quite different than things that I once believed even though I was never conscious of my understandings of God having evolved.  I did several postings on the shifts of God as seen in the perspective of the Hebrew Scriptures or what we Christians often call “The Old Testament.”  Now we need to move on to the “New Testament” or the Christian scriptures.  And again, I am writing not as a scripture expert—which I am not, nor as a theologian—again which I am not, but as a historian looking at the development of thought.

 Perhaps the greatest shift in our “rethinking God” comes with Jesus himself.  Jesus dramatically redefines God.  While the Hebrew Scriptures refer to God as “Father” in terms of God’s relationship to the entire people of Israel and specifically of the Davidic Kings, Jesus applies the familiar form of this word—Abba, equivalent to our “Dad” or even “Daddy” not only to himself but to each of us.  There is no parallel to this familiarity in any of the Jewish writings that go before Jesus.  In fact, while the scriptures use the term “Father” for God being the “Father” of Israel, or the “Father” of the King (see Psalms 2:7; 89:27; 110: 2-3;) there is no sense of the personal Father-child relationship between the individual Jew and God.  Jesus in his time in the desert following his baptism and in the frequent nights he spent in solitary prayer (Mark 1: 35; Luke 4:32) seems to have realized a very unique and personal relationship with God and one which he did not choose to keep to himself but into which he invited his disciples to enter when they prayed (Matthew 6: 9-13; Luke 11: 2-4).  This familiarity with God was very off-putting to the religious people of his day who considered it blasphemy that Jesus proclaims this parent-child relationship (Matthew 27:43; John 19:7). 

While we Christians take this familiarity with God as, well, familiar, for Jews and for Muslims God remains totally other—Transcendent—and this Christian concept is something with which they are not only uncomfortable but even think to be highly presumptive, a violation of Lèse Majesté.  For many Christians too the idea of God as “Abba” or even Father is no more than formulaic—they shy away from the implications that God is this loving and forgiving parent to whom they return to find not only forgiveness but an unconditional accepting love.  God remains for them primarily the judge who will mete out according to the measure of our merits rather than the measure of his love.  Like the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32) they cannot move beyond the idea of “deserving” to understand the fundamental idea of Grace—the totally gratuitous love which God offers not according to our virtue but according to our need.  
Reading some of the blogs such as the infamous Les Femmes: Women of Truth out of Woodstock VA or The Thinking Catholic Blog or listening to Michael Voris’ Vortex one can see just how fiercely the compassionate Father revealed by Jesus is rejected in favor of the idea of God as put forward by the Scribes of Jesus’ day who were so threatened by Christ’s revelation concerning a God whose fatherly heart desires without condition His children’s return to him.  To a great extent the divisions in the Church today are rooted in these two diverse theologies—one emphasizing the need for propitiation, the other focusing on the idea that “it is mercy I desire, not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13). 
This problem is not confined to a few lunatic bloggers but is part of the wedge between the Catholic faithful and those “shepherds”—whether priests or bishops (or, I suppose, deacons) whose pathology manifests a compulsive need for control over the lives of the faithful and a fear of a Catholic laity whose intellectual and spiritual maturity empowers them to make moral choices for themselves.  A god who requires propitiation gives an unhealthy power to a clergy whose role it is to offer sacrifice and insert themselves between God and God’s people as the necessary conduit of grace from God to His people.  This is a role of great power and thus—like all great power—subject to great abuse.  We saw this in the episodes earlier this year in which Father Marcel Guarnizo took it upon himself and on  his own authority to deny a woman Holy Communion because he unilaterally judged her to be in the state of grave sin. (See posts for Feb 28, March 1, 2, 12, 16, 17, 27, 29, April 25, 27, 29, 30, all 2012. ) He had to “protect” God (Christ, present in the Eucharist) from contamination by one whom he judged to be a sinner.  Those who are anxious to have others denied Holy Communion or other access to means of grace reflect this idea of a god who conditions his acceptance on “merit.”  How far this is from the example of Jesus and his confrontation with the Woman at the Well (John 4: 1-42)!  On the other hand, those who accept the idea of God as “Abba” as revealed by Jesus see the need for conversion  but realize that conversion comes as a result of God’s love, not as its condition.  From these two different understandings of God proceed widely diverse understandings of the Mass and Sacraments, the role of the clergy, Christian morality, Christian political and economic theories, and other issues that are linking the Church to our society’s culture wars.  The division has become acrimonious and is creating a wide gulf that is not only disturbing parish communities but undermining authority in the Church and threatening the unity of the Church.  The subject needs to be studied carefully and a strategy for healing needs to be implemented before the gulf grows wider.  A strategy for healing does not mean submission to the neurosis that has precipitated the crisis but the selection of shepherds who have wisdom and compassion necessary for truly pastoral leadership.     

Ecclesia semper reformans, semper reformanda: The Church, always reforming--always in need of reform

Yesterday a woman at church said to me “I am so at the end of my rope with the Church—this sex abuse issue, the coverup.  I resent the fact that a criminal can be a priest, but a woman can’t be.”  I had never heard it put quite that way.   We are in the midst of a mess in the Church these days.  The sex abuse and the cover-up are part of it—a huge part of it.  We are seeing hypocrisy when the “The Church” is taking such a harsh line not only on the political hot-potato of “gay marriage” but of appropriate pastoral care of gay people.  Indeed it seems that “The Church” has defined for itself the most rigid of codes of sexual morals when it is clear that many of bishops and clergy who make up “The Church” are living a double standard, sitting in the chair of Moses, as it were, but not practicing the morals they preach.  In the last few entries to this blog we have seen this is nothing new.  The blog has looked at gay popes and cardinals and bishops and we have looked at bishops and cardinals and popes with multiple illegitimate children.  We have seen prelates who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth for themselves and been interested in their own aggrandizement rather than the pastoral good of the souls entrusted to them.  We have seen abuses of power and resorting to violence to achieve one’s ambitions in the Church.   

Somewhat coincidentally I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities or, more precisely, listening to it on an audio book.  I last read it as a sophomore in High School but it has always remained among my favorite books.  Last evening, on my way home from church, I had been listening to the scene where Monsieur the Marquis’s carriage runs over and kills the child of Gaspard.  One could not help but be appalled at the Marquis’s apathetic contempt for the ordinary citizen.  Here is a man who lives in a universe where he thinks the “vulgar masses” were created solely to provide him with his indolent lifestyle.  And you know, I hate to say it, but in so many ways I see “The Church” reflected there.  In many ways it was the Church of the Renaissance and the ancien regime that Dickens was writing of—quite explicitly.  He does not leave that to your imagination when he speaks of the French ecclesiastics.    “The Church” was complicit in the evil that left so many people in dire poverty and squalor in those centuries when some think the Church was so glorious.  Those Basilicas and palaces of Renaissance Rome were built on the backs of the poor.  Not only Italy, but all Europe was being drained dry by the Medici, Della Rovere, Piccolomini, Borgia, Farnese, et al popes and their sycophant cardinals  and bishops and pezzi grossi prelates who were building their palaces and screwing their pages and poisoning their enemies while God’s poor starved.  I am not being anti-Catholic in saying any of this.  I am just reporting the facts.  And when I say that today we have prelates in Rome and prelates here parading around in silk gowns with trains longer than Kate Middleton’s upcoming dress and pontificating about sincere people who are trying to figure out how to balance their need for giving and receiving love, their same-sex attraction, and their devotion to Christ I am not sure how much has changed.  And when I hear sermons that tell me the priest is from cloud la-la land and has no idea how parents of families with four and five kids are trying to make ends meet without the mother having to work outside the home, or hear priests say that they have a life of sacrifice when a maid plops their three course dinner down before them on a table set with linen, china, and crystal I think that there is a need for change in “The Church.”  When I hear priests disparage women or hear of a Bishop who has instructed his pastors that when he visits, no woman is to be invited to dinner I cannot but think of Monsieur the Marquis and his contempt for the people who carried him with all his comfort on their backs and with the sweat of their brows.

But that is not the whole story, nor even half of it.

Also last evening I was at Tenebrae.  The Cathedral was packed.  The Liturgy was moving.  As I listened to the ancient readings and saw how the scriptures were arranged in the various antiphons and responsaries to tell the ancient story of our fall and our redemption—our fall in the disobedience of one man and our redemption in the obedience of another—I was moved to think of those countless thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of monks and nuns who through the centuries created this prayer, wove these texts together out of their meditations.   In the ever-darkening shadows of the Cathedral as the service progressed, I was reminded of faithful pastors, the holy priests, the humble men and women who, while the false shepherds were making a mockery of the Cross, were on their knees, lost in the mystery of God’s love made manifest in a naked and bloodied thorn-crowned man from Galilee whose faithful obedience set right all the sin in human history.  I looked around me at the Cathedral.  Connecticut Avenue lawyers in their three piece suits.  Mothers with strollers.  A smattering of the DC street people.  Some same-sex partners from the Dupont Circle area.  Senior citizens who live in the neighborhood.  Yuppies and DINKs (Double Income No Kids).  African Americans. Asian Americans.  White bread.  Hispanics.  That’s what it means to be Catholic.  Y’all come.  Everybody’s welcome.  And this is what The Church is.  The hierarchy is not the Church. The Pope is not the Church.  Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” is not the Church (despite what he pretends).   The Church is the whole kit and kaboodle.    We all belong. Even those popes with kids and those popes with pages, even the Borgias with their special mushroom casseroles and Sixtus IV with his pretty-boy Cardinals.  Saints and sinners, wheat and tares, Christ died for all and if you or I are one of the lucky ones who remember that it is about Christ dying for us—and for all—and not about capes and swords and tall bejeweled mitres, just be thankful that your eyes have been opened and pray for those who are still so blinded by the glory of “The Church”  that they can’t see the true glory, the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.