Today is the Feast of The Elevation of the Venerable and Life-Giving Cross. I found a wonderful quote on Fr Ted Bobosh’s blog that I thought was worth sharing:

“Only the cross can meet the suspicion of escapism: God gives hope not by promising to pull us into a different world but by offering us a fresh beginning in this world, by himself coming to a place of the very sort we are tempted to escape, a place where suffering, opposition, and senseless conspire to make life appear utterly futile and unbearable.  Only the cross can meet the suspicion of optimism in human nature: God gives us hope by meeting us not at the lofty summits of human achievement but at the point where all purely human hopes have shrunk and collapsed; it is here that exhausted human hope can be remade out of inexhaustible possibilities of God’s love.  Only the cross can meet the suspicion of violent domination: God gives us hope not by defeating the powers of darkness with some equivalent act of violence from above but by submitting to them and bearing their force from below, not by an imperial force that crushes from on high but by a love that absorbs evil in the depths.  This is the way of Golgatha, God’s wisdom (1 Cor. 1:18-25).”   (Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth)