Dry Cross
More than once have I heard a verbal bomb-throwing match between Catholics and protestants over which kind of cross should hang on the wall: a crucifix or a simple cross, and the insane caterwauling of two opposing sides now presenting myopic reasoning for going totally one way or totally the other ensues. What the Catholic side might miss in their argument, other than the pointlessness of trying to win an augment against an utterly convinced iconoclast, is that there is a tradition of both images present in our tradition. Neither are protestant, both belong to the truly vast array of symbology of the Catholic Church.
Over the bed in every cell of a traditional Carmelite convent is what Saint John of the Cross called a “dry cross” one that is barren and without the corpus of the crucified Christ. This cross, which is often also present in the refectory, fits the general austerity of the monastery perfectly and communicates, wordlessly, a number of ideas. Sometimes, despite lacking the corpus, will have the nails still in place - three of them, each representing the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, vows made eventually by every monastic member of the Order. It is these things which fix us to the cross - that barren cross that hangs in our cells is our cross, one that we must bear with the help an inspiration of Christ who said “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, once also called Roodmas, on September 14th marks the beginning of what was once a much more universal monastic practice of fasting from the feast of the Holy Cross until Easter of the next year. The Carmelites still hold to this fast as it is written in the Rule of Saint Albert.
Every day, the cross serves as a reminder both of that generous gift of salvation won by the blood of Christ on the cross, but also our own cross, our own individual responsibility, something not unique to the Carmelites, but characteristic of the spirituality of the order as our eremitical character finds us alone with and before the living God. Father Anastasius of the Holy Rosary, O.C.D. meditates on the physical center of the Carmelite Rule: “Each one shall remain in his cell or near it, meditating day and night on the Law of the Lord, and watching in prayer,”
In the first place, it deals with a personal obligation of the religious; his vocation is such that it does not admit substitutes of any kind; and the common life itself does not lessen the responsibility of the individual who, because he is a person, can be elevated to God only by meditation and prayer.
We are called as Carmelites and as Catholics to bear patiently the burdens of others, but our responsibility is ours - we cannot trade our cross, neither can or should we seek to diminish it, but to embrace it, cooperate with it, and say with the choir of the saints: Ave crux, spes unica.
