,,The cross is the essence of the mission of Christ, of the Messiah on this earth.
The cross for the Christian (and I must not miss the opportunity to repeat, every human being is a Christian) is the symbol of the interference of Heaven with earth, of spirit with matter.
Avoiding the sign of the cross, Protestants lose sight of the fact that it does not only evoke a dreadful instrument of torture (and it is no accident that the torment consists of nailing the creature's verticality, in punishing Man through his very specific, ridiculed position – vertical, yet without freedom, vertical, yet with limbs in ptosis, vertical, yet exposed to shame), but also the conscious repetition of our integration into ultimate meanings.
More than any other symbol, the Cross is the perfect and complete imago mundi. A simple, integral imago mundi, which says everything."
-Fr. Nicolae Steinhardt
