The Crossing

An Ecology of Genuflection

Most of my life I’ve associated making the sign of the cross with a warding off rather than an opening up. Like deflecting a vampire or a speeding ticket. Let it not be so, or please help me.

It seemed to defend or keep at bay rather than enfold and celebrate. It could seem almost neurotic. Whilst I have a radically different relationship to it now, it’s better to be honest about my initial response. It seemed a nervous tic in a grizzly world.

What follows is not an explanation of its historic symbolism – that would be available at the click of a google – these are some personal associations.

In preparing for my upcoming course The Skinboat & The Star, I’ve ended up wending my way to the earliest posts here at Beasts & Vines – a telling of The Voyage of Brendan.

You may remember that St Brendan’s journey to the Hidden Country (what could be America) was no Newtonian straight line, but a circling between three points. One was the whale Jasconius, a second was a tree filled with singing birds and the third an abbey of silent monastics. To get where you longed for required familiarity with a whale-deep consciousness, a bird-like elevation and the broad, warm textures of profound silence. An under-world, an upper-world and a middle-world. I love this. There’s a religious map, right there.

I started to think of how Brendan would cross himself, or Brigid. Brain, shoulders and belly wouldn't be enough. A Crossing (literally a movement between mundane and sacred space) that was big enough for the world’s tears and the earth’s joy. John Moriarty spoke beautifully about this more than once, St Francis lived this, St Kevin took shape so long that a bird nested in his palm. A Crossing doorways into something immense.

I started think about a Crossing that proved an ecology of genuflection.

Ecology (from Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) 'house' and -λογία (-logía) 'study of'). Taking the knee or making the cross draws the whole of God’s house shimmeringly close.

From Skinboat work journal

Maybe we are in crisis, and the more perfunctory Crossing shows us that. It may be revealing to us more than we wish to see. Our imaginative occupancy of the ceremony can get a little thin. Habit is habit. Like taking off our shoes and walking barefoot, I’m in favour of little, physical things that shift our mental cloudiness.

To be fair, I’m not unsympathetic. And we do need a crash helmet half the time. Much of what gets flung at us can seem more spell than prayer, more curse than blessing. Not surprising that the body starts to stiffen and tense; and my Signum Crusis can seem more like a breastplate into battle than a gathering in of the million-precious-things.