The Clamour and the Crucifix

Sometimes, it all gets a bit much.

Trying to maintain your Christian Faith in a world which wants you to alter those beliefs sounds very straightforward when you say it out loud. It's when the fall-out hits you: today's Western World may not seek to stone you, throw you to the lions or crucify you literally. No. Today's tactic is to destroy your faith through "science", social pressure, complex legal arguments, and more and more trivialities-dressed-as-important so that your mind is torn hither and yon seeking for the way to honour God - the God Who is with us, for us and fiercely on our side; distraction, distraction, distraction. It is all noise.

We can see just how much the world hates Christianity: it is called the Cross and, today, we behold our sovereign saviour, our Lord and God Incarnate, stripped, nailed, reviled and mocked on the cross. You can hear the noise around Him as He hangs there. All He can hear are the taunts of people who are anti-understanding, seeking to drown out His message with their list of obligations. This is how Our Blessed Lord is no-platformed - pinned to a cross and drowned out.

It is only those who stare at the cross in tears and silence that hear the one thing that the Devil was trying to stop us from hearing.

"Tetelestai!"

It's this that the Devil doesn't want us to hear because it is the truth: he has been conquered and his eternal fate known in Time. It doesn't matter what you hear around you. The truth is the truth. The cross is the cross. And God is God. No matter how this world tries to drown out what you know to be true in your heart, it cannot. It might as well try to convince you that two and two are five. You may not know why two and two have to be four, but you do know that it is four despite even courts ruling that the sum should be otherwise.

The only approach to this clamour is silence.

In silence, we hear the little voice of God who seeks out only those who want to hear Him. The world may hear tetelestai and drown out, distort and confuse its meaning with words, psychobabble and redaction. But we hear it, and we hear it in context: Christ has done it; He has perfected His salvation; He has poured Eternal Truth into the world through the opening of His hands and His side.

All we have to do is sit at the foot of the cross, look up, listen and be loved.