The cross is how to work for the answer without becoming part of the problem. The cross is about how to stand against hate without becoming hate yourself. How can you stand against hate without letting it frame the question? How do we oppose the evil, the hurts, the betrayals, the abandonment, the rejections, and the disappointments in our lives, the people who let us down, the people who turn against us, and the people who tell lies about us? How do we stand against that in a way that we do not become a mirror image of the same thing? In the end, this is the essential spiritual question.

The cross is a geometric image that you can hold onto and draw life from, a visual metaphor for the paradoxical nature or cruciform pattern of reality. Reality is filled with contradictions. Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests and half-truths that all of life is. The people who live and hold the contradictions, in fact, are the saviors of the world! These are the people who are the agents of all true transformation, reconciliation and newness.