equal armed cross | betsybeadhead

I love this shape. It is the cross, the intersection of heaven and earth, but empty. It is filled with the wearer.

I love that it is a quatrefoil. It reminds me of a four leaf clover. It looks medieval, yet the place I bought it from calls it “Moroccan.” It isn’t just one thing, and that kind of thing makes me really happy.

It reminds me of the bead that launched my love of beads way back when I worked in Washington D.C.

I loved that bead so much that I got a tattoo of it. In fact, it was my first tattoo.

I’ve since added to it, as you can see. But it is the center of the design.

This tattoo reminds me that God is always with me. It got it after the first time I was in the hospital for my bipolar disorder. They take away all of your “stuff” when you are in a mental hospital. That is the one place where you need something solid to hold on to. Me? I chose to have a reminder of God’s love with me. I figured they couldn’t take this from me.

But this symbol – this empty cross, I like even more. It is the same shape as that bead of course, but it means more because it is less. By having the center of it empty, it shows the wearer through it. It reminds me that I carry God with me, and so does everyone else.

I made this version of the empty cross necklace with green, orange, and purple. I’m not sure why these colors keep standing out for me. I like them, sure. They seem a little more vibrant than I normally work with though.

I’m a little limited on these crosses – the batch I have only comes in green, and it is a bright green at that. No hiding it! But in a way I like that too. Green is a color of growth, and this vibrant green is a good reminder to be alive in my faith.

I love equal armed crosses. They look like plus signs, rather than crucifixes. Sometimes they are known as Greek Crosses, but I’ve also seen the design in Tibetan double dorjes. There is something powerful about this image. I understand it as (from North to South) meaning “Heaven” and (from West to East) meaning “Earth”. Thus, when the two are joined, it means Heaven meeting Earth. It means God is with us, here, now. It means that God isn’t “up there” but “right here”.

I like this symbol far more than the image of a cross with a naked dead body on it. There is something really gory about using a dead guy as a symbol of faith. I get the whole “Jesus died for our sins” concept, but I’d rather think of Jesus being proof that God is real, that He cares about us, and that He wants us to live and love in this way – to serve all people in the same way that Jesus did.

I’m really wrestling with the idea of “Jesus died for our sins”. I’m not really a fan of it. We are human. We are faulty. We make mistakes. That is part of the package. The more I focus on the fact that I can’t be perfect, the further I get from where I need to be. I understand the Jewish concept of atonement – that you’d make some mistake and you’d have to pay for it by some innocent animal being sacrificed for you. So the idea of Jesus is the same. He’s the firstborn, unblemished male – just like what is prescribed for atonement. He was sacrificed – he took on the sins of the world.

Great. Now I have that to feel guilty for. My sins caused this totally innocent guy to get crucified. Crucifixion is a horrible way to go. Long, slow – you suffocate to death.

I feel guilty eating animals. I don’t see why they have to die so I can live. So why would I get some amount of peace from this perfectly innocent person being put to death so I can have eternal life?

This makes no sense.

I’d rather focus on what Jesus did. He stood up to the religious authorities of the day. He broke rules that stood in the way of what really needed to happen. He healed people on the Sabbath. He healed people who were “unclean”. He touched people who were considered outcasts. He hung out with the forgotten, the ignored, the “least of these.” He taught that God is real, not some story in a picture book.

He took away the authority and power from the educated authorities and gave it away to the street people. His disciples weren’t educated or special. He found them doing their jobs and asked them to follow him. They dropped everything they had and started to help him out. I know I don’t have that kind of discipline. Most of us don’t.

Here’s another reason I like equal armed crosses. Because they aren’t crucifixes, they aren’t immediately associated with Christians. I’m a little wary of that association. There are plenty of people who say they are Christian and they use it as an excuse to attack gays, women, immigrants – well, everyone who isn’t married, white, and American.

Jesus wasn’t American, and he wasn’t white. And he never married. Jesus tells us a lot about love and not judging, yet too many “Christians” forget this and focus on the words of Paul rather than Jesus. Anybody who quotes Paul to me as justification for their reason to exclude people just doesn’t get it. And I’m sorry for them.

Perhaps I should say I am a follower of “the Way” – the old term that the early Jesus followers used. Or that I’m all about the Tao of Jesus. That has a certain ring to it.

I’d rather have no church buildings and no ministers. We are told to build up our treasures in Heaven – yet we spend all this money on stained glass windows and altars and vestments. Meanwhile people are still homeless and starving. We are told to not call anyone Rabbi or teacher – because we have just one Father in heaven. Yet we do these things. How have we gotten so far away from the Source?

Something has to change.

I know I’m not alone in thinking this. It is like we have become addicted to the IDEA of Jesus. And we’ve put so much on him and around him that we’ve forgotten how simple it is to just let him work through us and in us and on us, to use us to heal the wounds.

I don’t feel guilty really for Jesus dying for me, I feel guilty that he died and it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. People are still people, and still faulty. People are still using religion as an excuse to attack and kill other people.

Sure, there are some that get it. There are some that work in food banks. There are some that volunteer at shelters.

But remember the song “They will know we are Christians by our love”? Sadly, this isn’t true. It is hard to tell people you are Christian. They clam up. They get self-conscious. They stop being themselves. They think you are going to judge them – and with good reason.

We have to change this. We have to be the change in the world. We have to stop talking about Jesus and start BEING Jesus.

Sure, I don’t have all the answers. Sure, I’ve mentioned this before. But I think about it every morning when I go to put on a necklace that I want to be a good example of love, and that I don’t feel comfortable wearing a cross to do it. And something feels wrong about that. It isn’t the world’s fault. It is the Church’s fault. We are only as strong as our weakest link – and that is the WBC, that is Swaggart, Roberts, Osteen, etc. That is all the “ministers” who use Jesus as a moneymaker. That is all the megachurches that are so big they could house half a city’s amount of homeless, but don’t. That is us.

We have met the enemy, and he is us.