Twice a year our Church decorates the Holy Cross with flowers and calls us to venerate it by making profound bows before it and kissing it. The first time is on the feast of the Veneration of the Holy Cross (September 14th) and the second is on the Third Weekend of the Great Fast. This practice is a part of our Byzantine liturgical tradition. There is no universal practice on how this is done or what types of flowers are used. The practice is to present the cross in such a fashion that people gain a deep insight into the fact that the Cross of Christ was and still is truly life-giving. That is the   essence of this very beautiful custom.

As we know, the Cross, during the era of the Roman Empire, was the ultimate sign of humiliation, cruelty and death. Christ’s crucifixion, voluntarily embraced for our salvation, transformed that horrible sign of death into a beautiful sign of life. Christ’s free embrace of death on the Cross revealed to us the true nature of human life. It was His   voluntary embrace of His crucifixion that revealed several things, namely that (1) human suffering, which is a part of earthly life, can be transformed, if accepted in the right way, into a true opportunity for spiritual growth; and (2) human life is immortal, death being only a means of making a transition to a new way of living. One of the main revelations that God made through the Person of Jesus, the Christ, was that we are immortal. He revealed this by going through human death Himself and then rising from the dead. There could have been no better way to reveal this truth to us than by His crucifixion.

This is one of the reasons why our Church never separates the Crucifixion from the Resurrection. Think about the prayer we sing today before the Cross: We bow to the Cross, the instrument of His death, and, praise His resurrection. As we do this, we are called to reflect upon this revealed truth and to embrace it with deep faith.

So the symbolism that our Church uses to convey this truth is to intertwine the Cross, the symbol of death, with one of the ultimate symbols of life, flowers. When you think about it, what better symbolism could there ever be to convey this truth. Flowers convey the beauty of life even in the midst of suffering and death. Flowers bring a sweet aroma to death and, at the same time, signal the potential of rebirth. Think about the life-cycle of many types of flowers. They grow, bloom and die only to grow and bloom again. Our Church has chosen to use symbols which can allow us to experience in a real way the meaning of life