One Friday morning, it was my turn to open and prepare the church at MSSP oratory in B’Kara for the Psalter prayers. The church was still empty. In the quiet, a faint recording of the brothers and sisters of the Monastic Community of Bose reciting the psalms played softly in the background. Incense burned gently in the thurible before the ambo.

Seated behind the crucified Christ, suspended above the altar, I began to pray.

A single shaft of light fell across His wounded body, quietly illuminating His agony. The air was thick with incense, its fragrance wrapping the chapel in a gentle sense of reverence and mystery.

As I prayed, it struck me how often my own life lingers in that same place, behind the Cross, fixed on suffering, walking closely with an agonising Christ. It is a familiar path: to dwell on pain, to remain at Calvary.

Then my gaze shifted.

My eyes fell upon the Anastasis, the icon of the risen Christ, softly lit in the shadow cast by the Cross. And there, something caught my attention: behind the risen Jesus, the shadow of the Cross was falling across the icon itself.

In that moment, a quiet realisation surfaced, the Cross, though still real, had become a shadow. Perhaps my gaze was never meant to remain fixed on suffering alone, but to be drawn forward, toward the Risen One.

I was reminded of the Lenten reflections of Fr Ivan Scicluna OFM Cap, who spoke about Paul’s thorn, not as something taken away, but something lived with, transformed by grace. And I recognised, in my own small ways, those quiet limitations that come and go, the weight of the body, the tiredness that follows, and how easily I ask for them to disappear.

But perhaps I am not called to remain there.

Perhaps I am called to carry them differently… to let them become part of the path.

Between these two, the suffering Christ and the risen Christ, there stood a small golden cross fixed to the wall, set with a single stone. One of twelve, marking the consecration of the church.

And I found myself thinking: this too is me.

Through baptism, I have been set apart, claimed. Like that small cross, I am called not only to bear the Cross, but to reflect it: transformed, radiant, no longer merely an instrument of shame.

For there is no resurrection without the Cross.

And yet, the Cross on its own remains a scandal, as Saint Paul reminds us, a stumbling block, a sign of contradiction. Only in the light of the Resurrection does it become glory.

That morning, something became clearer within me:
I must pass through the Cross, but I am not meant to remain there.

The Cross may cast a shadow
but it does not have the final word.

My gaze must learn to rest on the Risen Christ,
and in Him, discover that even the Cross can shine like gold.