The negation of negation (the cross)

Taken at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and Retreat House in Inverness, CA by yours truly.

We live in a secularized world where the human experience has been locked inside a thick steel wall of materialism and rationalism.

We’ve muzzled the mysterious and tied the transcendent up in the corner while amplifying the stuffness of life.

What we have now is the clock, the screen, our brains, and a million metrics to ‘optimize’ our lives.

Ours is a synthetic world that has been constructed over the centuries since the eve of medieval times and the movement from modernism to our current technological age.

But then, there are the glimpses...

Yes, in our locked-down secularized world, we get glimpses of the transcendent.
It might not be until that first child is born
when you look into your child’s eyes, it dawns on you…
God is looking back at you.

Huh?! What do you do with THAT?! It can’t be!

Our culture sounds the alarm, “NOPE. KEEP MOVING. NOTHING TO SEE HERE. YOUR CHILD IS THE PRODUCT OF SCIENCE AND IS ULTIMATELY A HAPPY ACCIDENT. MOVE ALONG, HUMAN.”

But it can’t be. It’s more than that. Things get stranger and stranger the more you live into your newfound identity of mother/fatherhood…

You realize that the negation that resounded so loudly from the secular frame of our culture has been negated in your lived experience. Who you were before that baby was born is no longer. Your past self is utterly unrecognizable. You have died and have been made new.

The child in the manger is curled up into your chest at 3 am as you bounce on your yoga ball for the third time tonight trying to calm her tears and get her back to sleep.

This is the power of the cross.
It is the negation of negation.

On the cross, we were like, “Nope, nothing to see here, people. Keep it moving. Caesar is God. This idiot is dead. Pay up.”

And after His heartbeat stopped
and the earth quaked
and the veil was torn…

For three nights
in the darkness of the tomb
negation was being negated.

In the fertile ground of nothingness
God created new life.

This is the pattern…

God is a God of double negatives.

Our secular world is a world of negation. But we cannot keep the corpse in the tomb.

God will always negate our negation.

Amen.

As Ever,
Jonas