i've written about this in prior years, but each year after easter i feel a particular pull to make sure that we don't too hastily "move on," and forget about the "he is risen!" joy we've just experienced. easter isn't a day; it is a way of life. and so, i thought today, in an effort to keep the newness and the miracle of the resurrection fresh in our minds, i would share this poem by john updike. i had never read this before until a colleague shared it with me last week, and i was deeply moved by it. i hope you find it compelling as well, and that you allow resurrection and the hope it gives us to continue to shape you in the journey ahead.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not
reverse, the molecules
reknit,
the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring
recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the
mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven
apostles;
it was as His flesh:
ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that--pierced--died, withered,
paused, and then
regathered
out of enduring Might
new strength to
enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping,
transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a
sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier
ages:
let us walk through the
door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a
story,
but the vast rock of materiality
that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for
each of us
the wide light of
day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta,
vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in
real linen
spun on a definite
loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own
sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable
hour, we are
embarrassed by the
miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
-by john updike
from "telephone poles and other poems"
1963
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