Carrying the Cross

Taken from: http://peterrollins.net/blog/?p=31

Just thought I would offer a small excerpt from my forthcoming book The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief (release date 19th June - but this seems to change on a daily basis). This quote is from chapter one and encompasses the primary question that I address within the book,

There are countless people who betray Christianity, individuals who turn their backs on its message because they no longer believe in it or because it asks too much of them. But there are a few who betray Christianity, not because they no longer believe in it, but because they believe in it so deeply, because they understand that unless the seed of our Christianity falls to the ground and dies it will remain a single seed, but if it is allowed to die it will produce many seeds.

With this in mind we may wonder whether the deepest cost entailed in embracing the radical message of Christ—that we lay down our life and pick up our cross and follow him—may not simply be the call to sacrifice our own life (something we are asked to do before we pick up the cross), but the call to sacrifice what we love more than our life.

The cost of Christianity, for so many, is thought to lie in the demand that we die to ourselves for the sake of our Christianity. The cross we are called to carry is thus one upon which we are to be put to death. But what if this cross we bear had another meaning? What if the cross that we are called to carry is not for us at all but rather, like the cross that Simon of Cyrene labored beneath, is really for another—a cross for us to crucify what we love? Is it possible that the cross we labor beneath must be used to crucify our Christianity? How many of us can truly understand this question? How many of us can really know what it is like to destroy what we love for the sake of what we love—to be the most faithful of betrayers? Yet perhaps it is precisely this that we are being called to: engaging in that most difficult task of putting our religion to death so that a religion without religion can spring forth.