Over the past months I have occasionally pondered the meaning and impact of the Christian symbol of Jesus on the Cross. When I visit a new city, I often happen to visit the main local church, more as a habit and out of artistic interest than for religious reasons. For some time, I have been puzzled by the idea of taking the Cross as a symbol for a whole religious revelation. Compared with the meditating Buddha, the smiling Krishna, or the dancing Shiva, the Cross brings definitely a very different message. It exposes suffering upfront, seemingly suggesting a devaluation of the body in the name of something immaterial. I’ve remained very skeptical about this way of encapsulating the Christian message in such a cruel image, and by proxy skeptical about the message itself.
Now something changed. The end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 have been quite intense for me. Apart from a torn meniscus (again!), I had a short but very moving romantic flirt, which I hoped could have developed into something. It didn’t, and that was fine, eventually. But this new (and last of a series) case of 'torn heart' and shipwreck of my sentimental hopes (after I broke with my partner in July) initiated a whole process, which was probably just waiting to get triggered. The process had a magnitude that went way beyond the meaning, scope, and actual weight of the romantic incident. It entailed something that I never really experienced previously. I was waking up in the morning with a deep sense of sorrow, way deeper than any explicit motivation I could name for it. I did my best to stick to my plans and continue my daily activities, but feeling inside that they did not have much sense—not even dance. I was operating more by inertia than by conviction, contrary to what I usually do. The only thing that seemed to work to face the situation was to revert back to my mettā practice.
I arrived in Freiburg for the third week of my CI teacher training in this state. The first afternoon, walking around in the city center searching for roasted marrons, I causally visited the Münster, which is a beautiful gothic church. I sat there. The mass was starting, and feeling tired and sad, I just remained, a bit hidden in one of the last benches closer to the entrance, watching again the Cross hanging with invisible ropes in the middle of the apse, as if it was flying in the middle of the space. Then, I understood something. Not intellectually, but emotionally. It was a blast.
That symbol appeared to me as the extreme summary of everything that cannot be possibly loved: excruciating torture inflicted to an innocent amidst people who do not even care or understand. Physical, moral, and metaphysical evil all at once. In a sense, the Cross appeared as representing something way deeper than any sorrow might be raised by the thoughts of death, sickness, and separation I usually used to practice mettā, and which in a sense remain natural parts of life. There is nothing the suffering exhibited by the Cross that is really natural. It’s all dispensable suffering, which happens nonetheless—and hence hurts infinitely more.
Then something clicked within me, as if the past years of mettā practice made some kind of sudden upgrade. What if one can not only stay, but even love that extreme and unbearable suffering? What would happen if one could feel love at the sight of what one should not even want to see at all? Is such a love possible?
Pondering this, I felt that the one on the Cross was there to witness the possibility of actually loving even that unbearable suffering and showing that such a kind of love is indeed possible and available. Meanwhile the Mass was unfolding, and I realized that the whole ritual could be seen as a way of encouraging everybody to realize that in fact everybody can be capable of that love, everybody can share in that ability, everybody can share in the nature of Jesus (isn’t that the point of the Eucharist, after all?).
Then, I did feel that love (for lack of better term). And it felt genuine, immediate, authentic, as a jump that does not care for the reasons against, as something that is not provoked, but already available. And I realized that that love was not conditioned by a faith, or by certain beliefs, nor by need or desire. It was unconditioned. And I realized that it was not ‘my’ love, it was not ‘me’ who was producing a feeling of love for something. I rather experienced it as it taking hold upon me, as if it was coming from something at the same time deeper and broader—infinitely deeper and infinitely broader. Intuitively, I realized that this unconditioned love was the nature of what is called ‘God’—the one who nobody ever saw, but was revealed by Jesus, according to the Gospel.
I left the Church someone changed, but I didn’t want to judge what happened. Over the past days, however, this experience sticked with me. Not as a memory, but as something I could actually re-experience and re-enter freshly any moment during daily life, with minimal or no effort. The sadness of the previous days vanished entirely, leaving me rather in a state of astonishment.
After years of agnosticism, after so much Buddhist practice, after detours through Indian bhakti, am I coming back here? This is a coming back indeed. I never received a religious education, I was not even baptized, my parents (especially my father) almost prohibited me from going to church or take part in any religious activity. Yet, I do have two imprints from my early years that have been now powerfully re-activated, even fulfilled I would say. When I was going to primary school, one of my teachers had the habit of letting all kids start the day with a Pater Noster. I was dispended from reciting it (I was not supposed to do it, in fact, as I was the ‘atheist’ in the class), but I’ve learned it anyway, and I was reciting it silently with the other kids. In several moments in my life, I did come back to it again and again, almost automatically, although never superstitiously. When I was around seventeen years old, one day coming back home, I found a Gospel left on a stair on my street, I picked it up, and started reading it voraciously (for the first time). For some months I was strongly under the influence of that reading, to the point of even considering entering seminary instead of university. In my early university years (when I was still in my masters) I even wrote a never published book, which was entitled ‘The Gospel according to Spinoza’ (yep, you know, I was working on the edition of Spinoza’s works) and was actually my way of finding an acceptable interpretation of Christianity by using Spinoza’s lenses. At the time, life made me eventually set this while business aside, although it was more put asleep or to the side, never really forgot.
What happened at the Freiburg Münster, thus, does not look random to me. I have been cultivating mettā for some years now. The limit of that practice, in a sense, was to never test it against real evil. I have been cultivating mettā starting from a meditation on death. But the Cross is not just death, in fact, it’s about unjustly inflicted evil. In principle, mettā should be boundless and capable of embracing everything. But in practice, we always set limits to it. We always establish things that cannot be included in mettā, unlovable states, events, people, from which we are dispensed to love and embrace their unbearable nature. The Cross is a test to displace all these limitations. It also goes beyond the Buddhist metaphysical agnosticism (if not skepticism), by making a substantive statement about the nature of the feeling, which is not just a psychological state of the individual, but rather an individual manifestation of a superior power (in this sense, closer to Spinoza’s own view, per E5p36). This is also crucial because it dispels the idea that ‘I’ can save myself by my own means, which eventually always leads to a deep and subtle form of ‘conceit’ well-known in the Buddhist texts, but also extremely difficult to eradicate.
In the ‘experience of the Cross’ (to give a name to what I happened to experience), there is a very deep sense of surrender, as the sense of love that is activated is not something that ‘I’ can ever produce by myself or by relying on my own forces, but rather something that springs from within and comes from far away. This is closer to the idea of shaktipat in the Tantric tradition (the ‘descent’ of power), but again put to test in front of the hardest image to accept (not the smiling Krishna but the dying Jesus). The teachings of Sri Aurobindo also came back to me in a different light, especially his view in Savitri. Death is nothing but ignorance, and ignorance is nothing but believing to know what we do not know for the sake of not seeing. We die because we want to ignore by pretending to know that certain things are in a certain way (this is acceptable, that is not; this I can love, that is unlovable). The Cross destroys this kind of ignorance: everything is accepted, all limits are dissipated. What I found hardest to understand in Sri Aurobindo’s reflection was his idea of eternal life. But then, looking at the Cross, I’ve seen the difficulty disappearing. Living in ignorance is living as dead, and removing the ignorance is partaking in eternal life—because it is partaking in that unconditioned love, which is life.
Even the idea of the ‘resurrection of the body’ takes a different sense and meaning. The dead body is the body on the cross: blocked, tortured by wrong ideas and views, prevented from moving in the cruelest way. The resurrected body is the body that goes beyond all that. What makes the transition possible is the love that burns the ignorance, removes the limitations, by going through, accepting, embracing, and thus overcoming the deepest pain and sorrow not by negating them, but rather by embracing, understanding, and seeing through them.
This is not something that can be adequately incapsulated in limited imaginative or even rational ideas (to borrow Spinoza’s epistemology), but intuitively makes total sense (even if what I’m writing here maybe does not). All of this just to say that part of the strength of this experience has to do with how it fits, intersects, connects, and sheds a new light on both old and more recent ‘spiritual’ developments I experienced. It also leaves me as if I arrived again at the footstep of another mountain. Perhaps the highest I ever confronted. A part of me has no doubts about where to go and what to do now. Another part of me is scared. At least, I don’t get bored.
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