Cross purpose

Coventry Cross
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As you go down the stairs to the café at Coventry Cathedral, you pass the burned cross which was made of two pieces of wood found in the rubble of the bombed out original building. They were found lying together in the position of a cross. The stone mason, Jock Forbes, who was working on the new building, tied them in that position and there they stand behind a glass panel engraved with the words ‘Father forgive’.

If you are a first time visitor to the cathedral, you might not expect to come across a burned cross on the wall as you hurry downstairs for a cup of coffee. You are surprised by it, as if you were being accosted by a stranger. You are unsettled by the encounter even though it proves, after all, not to be violent or in any way threatening, although you find that the disparate thoughts which are swirling around in your head as you hurry down the stairs, are suddenly interrupted, as if they were being held to account, in a way which is profoundly disturbing.

It is as if this fleeting and seemingly inconsequential moment encompasses the whole of history of which you are an integral part. It questions it. The charred cross is a reminder of the horrors of war and of the violence wrought on the earth by every generation, and you are a part of that too. The moment of ‘encounter’ allows you to see this and to know it at the deepest level of your hidden inner self, as you read the words ‘Father forgive’ etched into the glass in front of the cross. Seen against the charred cross, the delicately wrought words disturb and shock.

There is another cross in Coventry Cathedral, a replica of one made of nails, nails which were also found in the ruins of the old building. The original nail cross was given to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin as a sign of repentance for the Allied bombing. There have been, and will continue to be, many crosses. But the words ‘Father forgive’ will always remain the same, wherever they are placed and whenever they are said or thought.

Perhaps they will remain because they are not our words. Most of us, if we are honest about it, are not capable of speaking these words for more than a split second before falling back into a place of unforgiveness, hence the continuation of violence at all levels and in every context of human existence. Violence is the only language we really know and feel confident speaking. It is the language of unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness takes many forms. It is not just a perpetuation of hatred. It is more a matter of not being able to let go of fear, something to which we seem to be perversely, if unconsciously,  addicted. So someone else needs to say the words with us and for us, and keep saying them, until we learn not to be afraid of forgiveness and of what it entails. This is the purpose of the cross. It is also what makes an encounter with it both disturbing and life changing.  

Last week I wrote about the politics of hope and one commentator remarked, rightly, that hope, in politics, can be construed in many different ways, depending on individual or collective interests. I think the hope which comes with the forgiveness of the cross takes us beyond these narrow limitations. I also think that faith is sometimes revealed in the way hope is worked out and that, in this respect, it is acceptable for faith to remain undeclared or hidden.

Faith is not invariably a matter of openly declaring oneself to be of any one religion, because true religion does not need to declare itself at all. So it is not for anyone to judge whether another person has faith, or to judge others on the basis of a priori definitions about any one set of religious beliefs. Faith is about faithfulness to ideals, as well as to beliefs, as my commentator pointed out in relation to Jeremy Corbyn’s long years of faithfulness to his vision for a better society. It is also about trusting in a love that has been encountered from outside the limited boundaries of purely human forgiveness.