This Good Friday, 29 years from my last, I found myself kissing a 7ft Cross!! Silently, on my knees, lips pressed in fleetingly, while childhood memories of venerating a tiny hand held cross in procession returned to me like a much longed for heirloom. One I didn’t realise was missing until I found it again. I didn’t know back then that my cross was already upon me, nor that my journey was going to be so heavy. That forgotten Cross removed all of the necessary context for my heavy heart, a heart that could find no relief or comfort in the world.
Lyrics I keep my heart in my mouth But sometimes her song breaks out And truth is I want her to cross my lips In conversation with your Kiss At my fingertips But I don't belong so easy And I don't move on so easy But oh You please me So easy
I carried my cross alone for those 28 years, in isolation, regardless of the love that surrounded me. With absolutely no awareness that in making my life up according to my own plans (and I executed on many) I was going deeper and deeper into my own darkness. A darkness devoid of His divinity.
I’ve come to understand since then that our personal darkness provides a mysterious link to the darkness Jesus endured on the cross. Seen this way, our darkness is a gift that brings us closer to God. Mother Teresa puts it this way…
Then when you feel miserable inside, look at the cross and you will know what is happening. Suffering, pain, sorrow, humiliation, feelings of loneliness, are nothing but the kiss of Jesus, a sign that you have come so close that he can kiss you. Do you understand, brothers, sisters, or whoever you may be? Suffering, pain, humiliation — this is the kiss of Jesus.”
I work with people everyday who have suffered greatly and who continue to suffer. The answer to the question around why we suffer can shape and define who we are and how we live. For that reason, in my work, I love to hear people speak personally to what they think suffering is for. Why do we suffer? Why is it so universal?
Christianity holds that we need a Saviour. We are born into suffering that we might return to the one who can relieve it. I balked at that concept for 28 years. I considered it cultish weakness. I determined that I could save myself from anything. I was wrong.
See, it was pointed out to me that Free Will is possibly not what we understand it to be. Our will is not free to choose anything… God, it’s proposed, gave it to us to have the option to freely choose him. Being shown that my free will didn't give me license to do whatever I chose but rather that it was supplied to give me the option to be for God or against him - because that’s what a loving God would do - I was now clear on how to vector my will. My choices were either taking me toward God or away from him.
I had no real place to go with my pain, despite having all kinds of places to go in the eyes of the world.
When my Dad died I realised the fear that had haunted me my whole life was still controlling me. I felt like no one could “handle” me. Every time I’d told my truth or been most authentically myself, especially with men, I was discarded. I was terrified I was unlovable as I was. My Dad and my brother are my two most painful examples of that cross.
On the day he died the only place that could handle me, the only place I belonged was at mass. I didn’t realise that at the time but that’s where I went and it suddenly revealed to me where I needed to be indefinitely.
The Faith shows me that through accepting that I need a Saviour my struggles are now rightly ordered as both a call and response with God. I can finally have someone to take all of my anguish and torments to. Sadly I needed to be on my knees to come to Jesus, not everyone has that story, but I was incredibly defiant and rebellious and wasn’t coming back to him without total surrender to his way.
Not so easy
I wrote So Easy on Good Friday, which perhaps seems paradoxical given it’s the most torturously dark day in the Christian calendar! I had very little time to record something and honestly I had no idea what was coming out of my mouth or why. Often I am thinking of something or someone else entirely.
It’s only now that I am here reflecting on the message of the song that I have been given some very potent insights…
The Magnificat - the greatest song ever written?
When I sat down to write this substack I sent a little prayer up requesting guidance and inspiration. I followed the voice that told me to look out a book I hadn’t leafed through in months. I found it under my bed and sat with it closed between my palms until I felt called to open it. And this is what it said when I did;
“Explain it who will! Without Mary, man has no hope…”
“Huh?!” was my response followed by swiftly re-closing the book for a second try but you guessed it. I opened at the exact same page again.
This time I decided to slow down, listen and vowed to read on. And there, at the end of the paragraph the lines I didn’t know I was there for, appeared. It read;
“The Christian woman, closest to the cross on Good Friday”
I felt like God was speaking directly to me in those words, it shocked and honestly scared me a little. Of all the books, and amidst all those pages how on earth did I land there? What was he saying to me?
After those question arose in me I felt guided to go back to my lyrics.
And truth is I want her to cross my lips In conversation with your Kiss
Without even realising what I had been singing about he showed me what he’d written and sung through me! Was it Mary I wanted to Cross my lips in conversation with the kiss of Jesus? Why had I chosen those words? The answers were all coming together in one eerily prophetic religious experience for me…
Mary
At my fingertips
One thing stayed with me in those orphaned years, Mary. I gave my children rosary beads at a young age simply to pass on my love of them. I taught them The Hail Mary despite feeling I was no longer affiliated with the Catholic Church. I always had a fascination and love of rosary beads. I’d marvel at their refracted light and deep hues every Sunday in the little chapel shop, so eager to hold their cooling weight in my small hands. Little did I know my connection to God and to Jesus had gone nowhere, it was always right there at my fingertips, through the rosary.
Curiously in this past year I have learned that Mary is the one who guides us back to God, who remains with us when we are far from him, who helps us come to him, especially when we don’t feel any kind of special relationship to Jesus.
Now I could see why I opened at that particular page and received that specific message.
We who are returning to lives of Faith know something we didn’t before. And It comes from a very special kind of experience.
My childhood formation in the Catholic Church was the experience of Religious Authority - I was not well Catechised, meaning I did not experience the fullness of the Faith through my education of it. My experience was a formulaic pathway.
I have come back to the Faith not through the experience of Religious authority but within the Authority of Religious Experience.
I simply cannot argue with the religious experiences I have anymore. I could however argue, and I did, with religious authority.
Religious experiences are deeply personal and uniquely specific to our own set of sorrows and struggles. They bring us closer to the Divine, they provide a sense of encounter with a greater power and bring us into life-changing and transformative truth.
The authority of religious experience also has the power to bring us back into the fold of Religious Authority without the want or need to rebel or feel a life of suppression or denial is what’s required of the Faith. I left as a rebellious child and I came back desiring to be an obedient child. The framework of Religious Authority has come as a profound blessing after so many years making up my own rules.
I believe we all have innately religious natures, regardless of whether we have a specific religion or Faith. We all worship something. We all innately understand the concept of devotion. We all have the capacity to sense the supernatural in the natural. Nature has within it natural laws that must be obeyed. Our spiritual natures are made of and require the same.
I see now that Mary was the one whom I could comfortably connect with in those lost years. I could cry out to and entrust my struggles to her - this was especially true when I became a mother myself and realised how ill-equipped I was for the vocation. It was Mary I could speak to. I couldn’t identify with Jesus or God, though I always believed in them.
Back to the book that was in my hands, now captivated, I read on;
“If woman wants to be a revolutionist, then the Woman is her guide, for she sang the most revolutionary song ever written - The Magnificat, the burden of which was the abolition of principalities and powers and the exaltation of the humble. She breaks the shell of woman’s isolation from the world and puts woman back into the wide ocean of humanity.” Fulton Sheen The World’s First Love
I circled back on my lyrics:
But sometimes her song breaks out And truth is I want her to cross my lips In conversation with your Kiss
By this point I literally had to stop and consciously breathe. Was he pointing me to Mary? I felt quite fearful and shaken. Not the kind of fear that makes me afraid of Him but a kind of trembling in reverence that floods me with overwhelming love and devotion. That is what I mean by the authority of a religious experience. It’s hard to prove or explain but i’m reminded of a quote I love by Stuart Chase;
“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”
With utter conviction I know He was telling me, in no uncertain terms that he could hear my heart song and see my work and was showing me HE was the Way. It brought me to exquisite and holy tears.
The Kiss - the icon of intimacy
In conversation with your Kiss“Suffering has to come because if you look at the cross, he has got his head bending down — he wants to kiss you — and he has both hands open wide — he wants to embrace you. He has his heart opened wide to receive you.” Mother Teresa
Ours is an intimate God. One who came to Earth to experience human suffering and show us how to bear up in it, to lead us through it. His heart is frequently depicted in flames, he literally burns with desire for each of us. As a people who bear his image and likeness… can the same not be said of us? My heart has always burned with an insatiable desire for love!! He knows us. We would be hard pressed to find anything more intimate than a kiss… we want to kiss everything we love. A lover’s lips, that old photograph, the head of a newborn, the cross… and he wants to supply endless kisses to the ones he loves too.
The Cross
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 25 For whoever would save his life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? Matthew 16:24-26
It is with relief that I finally realise my cross is my blessing. I often tell my clients that whatever benevolent force created us was exceptionally kind to give us only one big challenge to face for our entire lives. Look for yours… it has been with you your whole life and I believe it will continue to be. It’s that one thing that no matter how hard you try you can’t shake it… you always come back to it, it always comes back to you, that’s your Cross. All of the other challenges in your life will relate or correspond to that One. Your Cross can define how you will respond to life’s sorrowful and glorious mysteries… and the rosary can prepare you for a life in more intimate union with Jesus and God.
On the same paragraph it closed with these words;
We need women who will leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross.
There his teaching for my day was complete.
Easter
Tomorrow I celebrate Easter Sunday. The culmination of my lenten journey. 40 days of “denying myself, taking up my cross and following him”. I have never felt more spiritually clean. Nor has my heart ever felt this light with the burden of living - his promise fulfilled. It feels So Easy to do the not so easy things in my life now. God requires silence to speak in our hearts - he won’t compete with the noise we’ve filled our lives with. This lent I have immersed myself in 40 days of noise free living… My noise detox was limited to deepening my faith via Spotify podcasts and my soul has been rewarded with a peacefulness that I wouldn’t trade for anything the world has to offer.
“Your life has taught me that unless there is a Cross there will never be an empty tomb; unless there is a crown of thorns there will never be a halo of light; and unless there is a scourged body there will never be a glorified body.” Fulton Sheen
Last year, at Easter time, I came home. Not just through Death but in the empty tomb of Resurrection. I came back to life. After many long, lonely and fruitless years trying to belong in the world I realised I never would. I let my old self, my old life, die. As some in these circles say… I exchanged the tomb for the womb!! My cross has always been that I don’t belong. I carry that with more ease now in the comfort that as a daughter of God I belong, but to him only, not to the world.
But I don't belong so easy And I don't move on so easy But oh You please me So easy
Resources
If you are curious about the rosary I highly recommend The Rosary In A Year Podcast. I am currently working through the short daily practices that bring so much centring and peace at the end of my day. If you wish to know more about my personal journey with the rosary and with the cross, i’d love to answer your questions. Please feel free to comment below.
Always trust your creative nudges, I thought I was just messing about with a song idea to play with a new tuning on my guitar (thanks Lynsay!), turns out God had other plans!
** The book. The Rosary. The pocket shrine. The guitar. And the crochet “sacred heart” envelop my daughter Robin made for my Bible.
From my Cross to yours, and until the next Love song, Clare x