Crucified For Being You

Crucified For Being You Cartoon by nakedpastor David Hayward

Rosenstock-Huessy, in I Am An Impure Thinker, claimed that the cross is not just a Christian symbol but universally human.

The universal human experience is that we are torn in four directions: by the past and the future, and by the inside and the outside.

He called it "the cross of Reality".

I agree.

This is where our suffering takes place: exactly where we are... torn between these tensions.

So...

Why struggle for not being yourself?
Why suffer for not being authentically you?
Why be crucified as someone else?

If I'm going to struggle in this life, as we all do...
if I'm going to take up my cross, as you must yours,
then I'm going to engage it as me and not as the expectations of others.

Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

I say the same about our deaths: "Take up your own cross; everyone else's is already taken."