Τότε ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ Εἴ τις θέλει ὀπίσω μου ἐλθεῖν, ἀπαρνησάσθω ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀράτω τὸν σταυρὸν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἀκολουθείτω μοι.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone wants to follow me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’”
Matthew 16:24 (my translation)
Nearly fifty years ago I was sitting meditatively in the wood-paneled library of a suburban home housing a makeshift community of charismatic Christians. I was unexpectedly visited with a stunning insight: the power of the cross is not its wood but its function—the cross is a universal spiritual process not a unique historical event.
Here is how I described this moment of startling insight and change in my spiritual memoir, The Light of the Self:
It was in the wood-paneled library of the home housing the Jesus commune where I began to read books by liberal Protestant theologians such as John A. T. Robinson, Harvey Cox, Paul Tillich, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Paul M. Van Buren, and Leslie Weatherhead. From a different perspective than the Christian mystics and Thomas Merton, whom I had also been reading, I derived a similarly liberating insight about religion: it is a contingent, historical phenomenon, and whatever it is that we in English label God is not in itself bound by religion’s often oppressive social and intellectual forms. Jesus was less a savior and heavenly ruler for these liberal Protestants than an example of a life ruled by the spiritual power that breaks down false barriers and creates new communities grounded on freedom and justice.
Inspired by these critical perspectives, I reflected deeply upon the nature of spiritual religion in search of its most basic saving and liberating impulse. One evening as I gazed out the tall windows in the quiet library at the darkening sky, an insight with the force of a revealed truth blazed across my awareness: the personal act of turning away from the disordered self is the function but not the wood of the cross of Christ. In other words, what gives the historical event of the Crucifixion—the wood of the cross—its power is the inner act of turning away from sin and ignorance—the function of the cross. In the language of the theology of that day, this move demythologized the central truth of Christianity.
This inspired thought—a revelation actually—sparked a revolution in my spiritual life. It became clear to me at that moment that spiritual power is always available to us whenever we go against our natural inclination to serve only own self-interests and to live according to whimsical, self-excusing, and ethically impaired standards of behavior. But when we turn toward ultimate reality with devotion and in search of wisdom, we encounter the power of the spiritual cross which underlies the transformative energy of genuine spirituality.
That was the moment that I became a spiritual pluralist.
In that period in my spiritual journey, I had been struggling to reconcile the inclusive mystical Christianity of Thomas Merton and the critical Christianity of liberal Protestant theologians with evangelical Protestantism. And, more challengingly in my Jesus community, with Hinduism. Raised Catholic but now an evangelical convert, I had also been a Hare Krishna devotee for a couple of years before my evangelical conversion. I felt compelled out of devotion to my current evangelical tradition to embrace the doctrine that there is only salvific path, but I was also unable to deny the spiritual power that I had encountered in my other traditions.
The sudden realization that the cross is not a historical reality but the basic principle of the spiritual life allowed me to see that whenever a person practices the asceticism of exchanging self-regard, selfishness, and self-enclosedness for the wider reality of the divine life, they participate in the dynamic of perpetual conversion. This is the cross or crux of the spiritual life wherever and whenever it occurs, and it’s the source of its power to transform mundane existence into transcendent experience in each moment of conscious experience.
Whenever a person is moved to exchange what they have been up until now with a new and more divine version of themselves, they are encountering the spiritual cross. By learning how to change and reform ourselves in order to live more transcendentally, we are walking in the way of the spiritual cross.
As Krishna in the Bhagavad Gītā promises:
मय्येव मन आधत्स्व मयि बुद्धिं निवेशय |
निवसिष्यसि मय्येव अत ऊर्ध्वं न संशय: ||“Fix your mind and intellect in me alone. Then, without doubt, you will always live in me alone” (12.8—my translation).