A protest came from the part of me wanting to protect the comforting illusion that everybody and everything was smiling and content. This woman was disrupting things. Beneath the fine hotel exterior — the image of happy families having happy holidays — lurked human anguish. Broken connections. Failure of relationship. It brought to mind a line from a Beatles song; the first time I heard it I didn’t appreciate it, but its poignancy has emerged over the years: “All the lonely people — where do they all come from?” One might continue, “All the anguished people — where do they all belong?” 

There’s no getting around, over or under it: they are many; they are us. We all have in us a deep hunger for relationship, for communion. Sometimes we find it; often it breaks; always it’s limited by our own weakness, and ultimately by our mortality.

This truth is reflected visually in our church buildings. You can’t get into a church without bumping into the cross, some way or other. Some churches have only one. Some have them all over the place (a friend, visiting one church, counted more than 300). Either way, you can’t get over, under or around the cross. It’s made of sin, weakness, failure, and it’s everywhere. The odd thing about the church is not that it recognizes this reality, but that it proclaims it. On Sept. 14, we celebrate the feast of the Triumph of the Cross. Not the Shame of the Cross, nor the Deletion of the Cross, but its Triumph. What could this mean? It urges us to look and see that the cross is among us, but forever changed. It has become the meeting place between God and humanity, between love and sin. Its triumph is the victory of life over death, even in the moment of death’s apparent defeat of God Himself, when triumph seemed to belong to evil. Love crucified is love triumphant, love stronger than sin, not through human effort but by God’s self-gift in Christ.

That day, by the elevator, the weeping woman carried her cross past me and I didn’t reach out to help carry it. Could I have offered a hand, a word, perhaps a pair of sunglasses? Would it have changed something? I don’t know if I could have relieved her suffering a little; I would at least have spared myself the pain of knowing I didn’t try. 

Later that day, I had another chance meeting, this time with two elderly couples. The husband in one couple, and the wife in the other, were brother and sister, born and raised on the Saskatchewan prairies; their lives spanned horse-and-buggy days to the Internet era. Theirs weren’t easy lives, but they had grown into generous, warm adults. Both told their family story: their father’s sudden death leaving his pregnant wife with seven children and a family farm to care for. That tragedy and grief were as present to Eric and Lila as though it had just happened (Lila was the babe in the womb when the father she never met was taken from her). Their cross was made of broken relationship, this time not by human agency but through the ultimate enemy, death. Their suffering was never removed, over six decades. Rather it remained, becoming infused by other forces: fidelity, commitment, love, self-sacrifice. Both siblings told me how courageous their mother was, how close-knit their family became. Both witnessed a triumph big enough to carry and transform the pain that never left them.

The feast of the Triumph of the Cross tells us divine love has penetrated our suffering, despite our inability to accept that gift; has transformed pain and death itself; has changed the cross, the tree of death, into the tree of life. This power is so big that we can experience it here and now, even amidst anguish — as I experienced it through Eric and Lila — as they experienced it in their history, which carries hidden within it the truth of Christ’s triumph by way of the cross. As I pray the weeping woman might experience it, despite my failure to act. To receive this power here, where sin and anguish still flourish, is to begin to receive the gift of our cross exalted by God’s love.