Crosses on Billboards

Posted on July 17, 2004 in Myths & Mysticism Travels - So Cal

Twice, as we came back from Palm Springs earlier this evening, the image of a cross smote my eyes. The first of these icons — white against a blue background — stood on the highway just before it rejoined Interstate 10. As if to make a statement against the reality of the dinosaurs stalking the freeway at Cabezon, this billboard had the object of torture spreading its arms wide. “Jesus loves you this much.”

I must say that it caught my attention and nailed its message to my forehead. The second stood a mile or two past Beaumont on the Moreno Valley Freeway. This one — black on a white(?) background dissolved into a dozen or so black birds which I think were meant to be peace doves but more resembled swallows like the ones we’d seen swooping about Hidden Lake on our hike this afternoon. If they were swallows, they hardly stand as a Christian symbol: Isis took the form of a swallow as she circled Osiris’s tomb, for one thing, and among the Celts, a fairy in the form of a swallow seduced Cuchalain into the Otherworld.

But then, isn’t that apt? Modern Christianity attempts to win converts not by forthrightly standing for the principles of Christ but by seduction. The religion that the churches which put up these signs probably does not teach life as Christ taught it. Instead, the men on the pulpits of those churches are much like the hypocrites who pray loudly about their love of God and go on supporting the Bush Administration, which is the most unChristian organization at work on the planet today.

The tragedy is that by instilling misunderstanding or distrust of this symbol, these simonists dissolve the words of the Great Teacher into so many flying embers, as black and as empty as the advertising icons that I saw coming home tonight.