ON HOLY CROSS DAY

Public domain.

I have a story for today. It is, you might say, a Holy Cross Day story. Perhaps the only Holy Cross Day story I'll ever be able to tell.

I’ll confess that, as much as I love theology and thinking theologically, feast days dedicated to abstract ideas have never been my favorite. I struggle, as I like to imagine many people do, with what to do with a day that is not commemorating an event, but a concept. Holy Cross Day was, for a long time, no exception. I especially struggled with how a day dedicated to a barbaric instrument of torture and death was a day of feasting and celebration in the church. Thanks to a story that happened a few years ago involving my son, Elias, I no longer question the joy and the genuine human comfort of the cross, and of Holy Cross Day.

But before I tell you this Holy Cross Day story of mine, there are some facts that you have to know. As I said, the story involves my son, who was three years old at the time. Elias, like me, is autistic, though we wouldn’t know this for sure until a couple of years later. A great many people still have a notion that autism means a deficit in or lack of empathy. This is not and has never been true in the slightest. It was the prevailing understanding for a time only because most of the people describing autism were coming at such a description based on their own understanding and expectations about how people ought to behave. It’s taken years for science to come around to the idea that this autism meaning a lack of empathy isn’t true, but all it really would have taken would have been science getting to know Elias. He’s always been keenly, even exceptionally aware of the inner states of other people. Sometimes I think this is a big part of what comes across to neurotypicals as difficulty relating to the world; he’s so overwhelmed by the ways other people are affected or could be affected by things that he becomes paralyzed. He wants so badly to help and isn’t always sure how.

You should also know, relatedly, that Elias is full of feelings. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and he always has. He feels everything, and he feels everything deeply. This is true of nearly all his emotions. His joy and laughter are absolutely infectious. And when he is scared or worried or overwhelmed, it sort of takes him over and crowds out his ability to focus on virtually anything else. When he was very young, this meant offering him as many reassurances as we thought might be needed. In times of acute worry, I would often hold him on my lap or in my arms and recite something akin to a mantra — a perpetual promise to him: “I got you. I got you.” I’ve said it countless times, and I hope to say it countless more. “I got you.”

And you should know that Elias has had strabismus, a condition which essentially causes his eyes to cross. If untreated, strabismus can lead to a lazy eye and/or the loss of binocular vision. Essentially, the brain decides to stop seeing through the non-dominant eye. In order to avoid these long-term complications, there is a type of eye surgery that can be done to help correct it. It has a success rate of only about 60–80%, but carries fairly minimal risks. So it is possible to have multiple operations, with the odds of success about the same each time. For most people with strabismus, the condition can be fully corrected with surgery, though due to the success rate it frequently requires multiple surgeries.

Which brings us up to speed for our story which took place on Holy Cross Day, 2018. On that day, Elias and I woke up early. We had spent the night at a hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, having driven there the night before from our home in Jefferson City. It was just me and him; his mother and baby brother stayed back in Jefferson City. While I was a little nervous about taking Elias to an operation alone, it seemed much preferable to us all being there, and having to try to entertain his not-yet-two-year-old brother for hours in a hospital waiting room.

So on Holy Cross Day, we woke up and drove from our hotel to St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Elias couldn’t eat or drink anything after midnight, and so in solidarity I refrained from eating breakfast. With both of us prone to getting hangry, we were both probably very tired and even more cranky that morning. I have to say that this is entirely speculation, on my part. I remember very little of the morning. In fact, the only part I remember was the worry. Its presence was for me a tangible weight in the hotel room when we woke up, and it only seemed to grow as we made the short trip to the hospital.

At the hospital, the time to get him prepped and ready for surgery seemed to flash by. You think, ahead of time, that it will take a while to get things moving. And of course it must — nothing ever really moves quickly in health care — but then the moment for the surgery is there in the blink of an eye, and there he goes down the hallway: my child, my baby, and I can’t go with him. There are few feelings of powerlessness, of helplessness, as overwhelming as that moment. All I could do was wait. And hope. And pray. And pace. And so that is what I did.

I am a church nerd through and through, so I knew even then that I was there, waiting helplessly, on Holy Cross Day. I found myself thinking about the meaning of the feast, about the fact that it is even a feast at all. A feast, of all things, celebrating an instrument of torture. A day honoring the device that we used to try and kill God. And I thought about the question that Jesus asks Peter in the passage from John’s Gospel that we read on that feast day: “Who do you say that I am?” I had my own answer, I thought. 

But then there they are once again, telling me that Elias is in the recovery room, that I can go and see him. And they warn me again how bad his eye will look, how it’s likely to be not just bloodshot but full of blood, an obvious wound. They remind me that it’s normal, that it’s nothing to worry about. And then there he is, wearing sunglasses a few sizes too large. They make him look more relaxed than either of us could possibly feel in that moment. He is clearly still recovering, still hazy, still loopy from the anesthesia, still unsure of what exactly has happened to him. 

I feel terrible. Guilty. I hadn’t adequately prepared him, I’m sure. I know he must be in significant discomfort or even pain, and just how deeply pain affects him. And I know that it is likely that much more and greater pain lies between him and recovery. I am worried about having to give him eye drops to prevent infection, knowing how much he hates having anything put in his eyes. I am worried, even then, about the possibility of having to do all this over again, of all this effort being wasted, if this surgery is not successful. But mostly I am just full to the brim with unspecified, undirected worry. Worry without an outlet, without a purpose. “Will this all even be okay?” I want to shout at the sky.

But I am not left to worry for long. Amid the anxious silence, I feel his tiny hand reach out and grasp mine — gently, hesitatingly. And I hear him, in his bravest possible voice, say the thing that breaks me: “I got you. I got you.”

I do not weep silently, or gently. I weep uncontrollably and all-consumingly. I weep throat-closing and face-filling tears. I weep so deeply that I think I might comprehend infinity. I still weep sometimes, to this day, just thinking about it. I am doing so now, in retelling it. To think that my son, in pain and misery beyond anything that he had experienced, saw my worry, and thought to comfort me. 

Those words of solace and solidarity break me, and they make me whole. As grateful as I was for them in the moment, I’m even more grateful for them now, every year when Holy Cross Day comes around. Every year, when we contemplate and celebrate that instrument of pain which becomes the instrument of our salvation. I had never in my life had as tangible a reminder of why we celebrate the cross than that moment. It seems unlikely I ever will again. But in that moment, in that one glorious moment, I saw the cross and the face of Christ as truly as I ever have. Felt the comfort that emanates from the cross in the slight pressure of a tiny hand, grasping mine. Every year on Holy Cross Day, I feel the comfort of that tiny hand, hear the embrace of those whispered words, again and again.

Because they were the cross. They were the heart-rending joy and the reassurance that Holy Cross Day is meant to evoke. The moment of the cross is God, in Christ, every bit as bad off as we have ever been, and worse. The cross is God in the depths, in the worst of it, in the midst of suffering and pain and dying and death. The cross is Christ burning, yet not consumed, except with worry, with concern, with love for others. It is Christ in agony saying, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” The cross is God, nailed to a tree, with arms spread wide enough to embrace all of human experience, all of humankind. The cross is God telling us, once and for all, “I got you. I got you.”