Sunday 14 September 2025
Our Lady Immaculate
Much was made today of the Exaltation of the Cross falling on a Sunday.
I’ve not yet come to fully understand the cross. Not in the way the church teaches. In much the same way that I’m still coming to understand the importance of Mary.
But what I did understand was something from the homily and what it means to carry our cross. Quoting an archbishop, whose name I didn’t catch, Canon P said “I usually find the prospect of carrying someone else’s cross much easier than carrying my own.”
That sounds very familiar. It’s much easier to think you can solve the problems of someone else, feeling virtuous in the process, than fixing those things in your own life that need attention.
But I wonder how many of the troubles of the world, the unsettling and incivility of society, which this week were gruesomely demonstrated by the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk, come about from our insistence that the world’s problems should be solved — to our strict specifications — with no attention paid to our own faults.
I know I have my crosses to bear. A list of faults that challenge me every day.
But what would the result be if everyone set about fixing their problems, before turning to tell others how to fix theirs. My hunch is there’d be a lot fewer online shouting matches, far fewer righteous protestors in the street, a reduction of poisonous headlines. Because the reality is we’d spend our entire lives trying and failing to fix our own faults, carrying our cross.
We might also gain some perspective on the world, and the lives of other people. One that was far deeper and richer. We might all understand a little about our neighbours and those people with whom we disagree. Young and old might get a better grasp of what each other’s life was like.
There was a lovely peace to be had in church this morning. I looked up at the stations of the cross in the quiet before the service began. They seemed to carry extra meaning.