I know it’s strange.
I am not pious nor especially religious; I am not a Christian. I am a follower, not a worshipper, of Jesus Christ, which is part of the reason.
The cross (actually two crosses, one is an ancient replica of a small Roman Cross) reminds me to think about the needy and the vulnerable. I wear that every day also.
Christ’s most extraordinary impulse was to help the poor and support the weak. This idea changed the world and our very understanding of humanity.
For me, the cross stands for that – the homeless, the needy aged, the refugee children, the hungry. In this, the wealthiest country in the world, helping the needy is out of fashion.
(My cross – I have more than one. The beads are part of a necklace Maria made me out of some dogbane she pulled out of the woods. I wear that every day also.)
We have more than one pandemic raging through the country; one of the most virulent viruses is hatred and contempt for those who are weaker and needier than we are.
Were he alive, Christ would be horrified, and many congressmen and women (and Mr. Trump) would be running for their lives, just like Senator Hawley did on January 6.
They might not be so lucky. They are the true heretics.
The cross reminds me never to hate those less fortunate than I am. It seems to have a lot of feeling; I wear it daily. My grandmother would not understand this were she alive, and neither would my Jewish parents.
Maria knows I am odd and accepts me the way I am (mostly.)
(Sunday is always a spiritual day for me, a day of contemplation and faith.)
I don’t quite understand this cross stuff myself all the time, but I know I need to feel it. I feel naked without it.
I am not religious, yet I have much faith and seek a spiritual life. We can make our religion when we need to mix and match and take what we like from one and something else from the other.
I don’t need to be slavishly blind to one and dismissive of the others. Almost all religions have something to offer.
In a way, that’s what spirituality is all about for me. The cross brings me comfort and hope.
I also wear a cross to remind me to follow the precepts that Jesus taught. I wear a miraculous medal with it as a symbol for strong women. I wear them together on a chain that I never take off.
Thank you for sharing your spirituality. I was raised Catholic by an atheist mother and a devout Catholic father. I left the Catholic Church in the mid 1980’s when my local Catholic Church has posters of dead fetuses in the church during mass and my 8 year old son was with me. Although he never asked about the posters, I knew that no one should put that kind of material in front of an 8 year old child and that the church’s gesture was purely political. The fact that I had an atheist mother helped me make the transition. I had begun meditating, Hindu style, long before I left the Catholic Church. My hippie young brother had already been trained as an initiator for the Maharishi. So, when I was in grad school in my late 30’s and became a follower of Paramahansa Yogananda, I retained the good parts of Catholicism. My mother’s atheism allowed me to appreciate the parts of Catholicism like serving the poor, their form of serving being in solitude, vegetarianism by some Catholic groups, the blessed feeling inside a Catholic Church [it feels like the ancient old growth redwood forests where I live in Humboldt County], the intellectual approaches in Catholic Universities [ I earned my EdD from University of San Francisco], and so on. At age 79, I am untroubled by my spirituality and have respect for all paths thanks to my parents’ spiritual differences in our home. When my mother was dying, I made certain, when she entered Hospice, that her atheism being respected.