When I was in high school I drove past a guy with a ten-foot wooden cross hooked over his shoulder. He was tramping north along the dreary county highway, or “Old 8” as everyone called it, the two lanes of chipped blacktop now surpassed by a six-lane concrete corridor of controlled-egress expressway a quarter mile to the east, easing the jaunt between Akron and Cleveland.
His only compromise with the Via Dolorosa was a small wheel bolted to the bottom of the longest shaft. This allowed him some roll where the tail end would have dragged, scourged relentlessly by road grit.
The local news picked up on his story, and it turned out that he was making a cross-country pilgrimage of conviction, having taken scripture at face value when Christ commanded: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”
So he did as he believed he was told. He hammered out a scrap-wood cross and went in search of salvation.
While it might be easy to dismiss such a guy as an eccentric, his quest wasn’t much different from many feats we laud. Some are nearly identical in form, like through-hiking the Appalachian Trail or ultra-marathoning. And then there are those less vigorous endeavors that still require the same tenacity, such as finishing a late-life PhD., or spending every weekend restoring grandpa’s Chevy.
The practical value of such pursuits is negligible. In pure economic terms they are a drain on resources, requiring more in inputs than can be expected in outputs. Modern tilting at windmills. But again: What’s the difference, really, between carrying a crucifix through Ohio and a backpack up the Rockies? Both look rad on Instagram. Life is life. You do you.
I try to remind myself of this when my utilitarian hang-ups kick in, but that’s tricky when you were reared with Protestant shame-static clogging your brain.
Since the time when I first saw that pilgrim, and for about as long as I can remember, echoes of “take up your cross!” have dogged me, nipped at me. Lashed by other scriptures about the moth-and-rust-which-doth-corrupt, or folk-spun pieties about “giving all to The One who gave all for you,” I’d lie awake in my priapic bed, the sleep-chasing injunctions spinning through my head. My self-serving acts were weighed nightly and found wanting.
What I really wanted, then as now, was to lose myself in poetic vibration, to blast off into the Roman-candle night spewing sparks of imagination, littering the dust-up world with the flash-pan ephemera of my pop-gun mind. But these were useless things, or so I believed.
Thirty-odd years later, I’m essentially still the same. Though the flesh may wither and creak, the spirit’s unchanged. I still hear that voice in my head — if anything I hear it more clearly now than before — and it makes that same scary demand: “Pick up your cross!”
But it’s no longer a scold, no longer a wrathful nag demanding penance and cowering deference to religious obligations. Sometimes, when I find myself alight in clear-mind meditation, I gather the temerity to respond. “What then, is my cross?” I ask. The answer that rings back is always this: “Do your life. Sing your songs. And most of all, write what must be written. This is what you were put here to do. This is your call.”
When I get to that point again, when I can hear the true voice behind the mind-mud of duty, I sigh. I exhale with great relief. It feels good to be on the same page with the Great Almighty. But when I ponder what it really means — the great mountain of work before me, the discipline and focus and courage and no-saying to well-meaning friends and family — I’m scared all over again.
This is real work, a Sisyphean challenge. Fret-hand callouses and smooth-sung notes atrophy with the briefest neglect. Words don’t flow from fingertips without a daily return to the high-minded place where sonic syllables resonate with diamond imagery.
Bearing this cross might even kill me, bleed me out, ’cause that’s what crosses do. Wasn’t that the point of the crucifixion? Torturous sacrifice so that others’ souls may live? Martyrdom awaits – one day of the body, but now of the base brain that claws and shrieks for sensuous distraction and the numbing comforts of supposed right living. Yes, it’s a hard path I’ve got before me. But it’s the one my soul’s always wanted, and I really have no choice in the matter.
When I think back on that guy trudging up Old 8, I wonder if he was actually doing the easy thing, if schlepping a fabricated burden was a simpler solution to his problems than that other thing: confronting his demons, making amends, facing familial obligations, or punching in at a soul-crushing job. I don’t know his story. Maybe the quest was a cop-out. Maybe it was beautiful. This is just speculation. But what I do know is this: That what may seem a ridiculous life to one, might well be the path to enlightenment for another.
C’mon, cross. Let’s get walking.
Thanks, Grant. You remind me also of Jesus’ promise that we will do greater things than he.
My sense is that a great deal of this – such as your example of keeping family obligations – will not be heroic in the world’s eyes. But it is more than he did in his earthly ministry.
Or imagine someone with a chronic illness (or someone who cares for such a person). They bear their crosses longer than he. “The three sad days are quickly sped,” says the hymn. Some endure decades more.
Of course I know that his suffering isn’t just a physical thing – there’s all the humiliation and injustice of the Creator at the mercy (actually the lack thereof) of the creation. Unless Jesus is who the church says he is, his physical sufferings are eclipsed by any number of folks we know.
I think that our cross beams intersect where the joy you so well describe – knowing the work that God assigns us – meets the sufferings of carrying it out. And we can appear ridiculous staggering around d with all that.
God bless you!