“The Cross, the shape of Christ’s dying, his agony and our reproach; the utter fallibility of everything in this world which one day must perish, even the sacred things we most cherish. But it is too, the shape or our hope, recalling the place where God redeemed the death of his son, and forgave us for it and lifted us with him to a wholly new kind of life which can never be taken away.

The Cross is a new plan of existence that cuts across our little tracks, one that is beyond death itself, yet entered through it. It is beyond pain, and yet discovered in pain; beyond all defeat and betrayal, yet meeting us precisely there. This is the Cross of Christ in the midst of which we meet, which he holds out to us, at that busy intersection where his life and ours are intertwined, where sometimes we see his body hanging and sometimes see only the bare wood because he is no longer there, he is risen.”

The Very Rev’d Francis B. Sayer, sometime Dean of the Cathedral of St. Peter & St. Paul, Washington, D.C. From his book To Stand in the Cross, Seabury Press, 1978.