Today we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

On a grand scale, it honors the beginning of the veneration of the cross. St. Helena, mother of Roman Emperor Constantine, was given the key to the treasury to search for relics and places of Jesus’s life.

In the 4th century, her travels took her to Jerusalem where, during her son’s excavation of a tomb, three crosses were discovered – one of which was believed to be the cross that Christ died upon. The cross quickly became an object of veneration for the Church and Jesus’s followers.

On a personal scale, today we remember in prayer how Jesus overcame death by putting his life on the cross for us. It is a feast day but not a solemnity. We will continue as usual today, completing our works throughout the monastery but – as always – doing so with reflection and prayer on the one who gave us life and remembered us in death.

“How splendid the cross of Christ! It brings life, not death; light, not darkness; Paradise, not its loss. It is the wood on which the Lord, like a great warrior, was wounded in hands and feet and side, but healed thereby our wounds. A tree has destroyed us, a tree now brought us life.” (Theodore of Studios).

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