Fashion of the CROSS

Piper PERABO

Why the cross? you ask. What is the potency of the cross, and why is it worn with devotion and how does it give attention to the details of one's mortality? From torture to death to salvation is the red of the cross, the blood of the Lamb. Redemption comes from the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, who died on the cross of his own volition. This is how the story of the Cross is told from the pulpit, has been told from ancient Rome to the missionaries cutting a swath across the Americas. This accumulation of power(s) is how the Cross became a symbol of holy war. These powers are intertwined with the notion that the gospel has to be told everywhere out of concern and fear of souls going to hell forever, and Nature not being turned into property by the indigenous peoples of the world!

For the duration of their tenure as a world power Rome dotted their country sides with men hanging from crudely erected crosses. Those men had committed an assorted of crimes, challenged any number of culturally held mores, and lost their lives, and value to a worldview that valued and assessed life that today feeds the concepts of life, liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness in today's American value system. And now strangely, the perception of life from an apex predator, a sexual vulture's appetite for death and dying, and an altered sense of self based upon enslavement created energies that sought input from the Most High when economically feasible, and from God salvation from the Cross of Jesus! We believe in the Cross for reasons that steer us away from the natural flow of the life-death-resurrection Jesus came from!

It is an incredible leap of faith that there are no repercussions if the symbols of death are converted into the hope of salvation. That leap has shaped us all. I ask, should that spirit of thought be held at arm's length because it is the devil? Why wear the cross? Why do you wear it if you do not know the trail it took to become a holy symbol? - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8.17.2014