seven stanzas at easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

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.

A friend sent me this a few Easter seasons ago, and I have been saving it until I could make sense of it. When I received it, my mother was dying. It was awful to think she would die just when the world was about to erupt with new life. The humid Louisiana air was brisk every morning, but warm and sauna-like most afternoons, though it could change very quickly and threaten cold, harsh rains. When the weather whiplashes us this way, I am reminded of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (Burial of the Dead):


APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Very close to that time, I attended a Sunday service with my husband of two months, at a small local church that had been recommended to me by a friendly stranger in the DMV. I was suspicious, since I knew the denomination did not allow musical instruments or women's speaking during their services, but my husband reminded me that each denomination has regionally different expressions, and that the a capella singing might be phenomenal. I agreed, and we went. We entered a small church building where only four of the twenty-some pews were occupied. I knew better than to judge a church on the size of its congregation, and proceeded with open mind. A black family filled nearly the whole pew in front of us, by far the best-dressed in the room. The service began, and the singing left much to be desired. Apparently, the song leader was tone deaf, which, added to the lack of instrumentation, did not lead us well through the chosen hymns. It was music that felt like a death, not a coming to life. A boy in the family in front of us looked questioningly at the man I assumed was his father, stifling a grin, while his father did his best to get the twinkle out of his eye and look grave and severe. They seemed to say to each other, shrugging, "These white people just can't sing...oh well." I began to misgive.

During communion (on EASTER SUNDAY, when normal churches hope for and expect an influx of visitors), the crackers and grape juice ran out at the second row. Flustered, the man distributing them disappeared somewhere in the front of the church, leaving us in painful silence. We could hear him clattering around to produce more of the elements. When he emerged, he had forgotten where he'd left off, resuming at our row, leaving the black family in front of us to turn and gesticulate wildly, trying to get his attention. As we started to point him in their direction, the mother cleared her throat, "ExCUSE me!" and the man, realizing what he had done (and how it appeared), turned three shades of red and fluttered back to serve her family communion. I turned to my husband, appalled, and whispered, "I need to leave. I don't know what this is. But it's NOT Easter." He gestured that we should wait until a more opportune time, so we took communion. With no musical interlude to buffer our escape attempt, we found ourselves bracing for the first few logical fallacies of some drivel the preacher apparently intended as an Easter sermon. We left quietly, if conspicuously. The day outside was incongruously bright and beautiful, compared with the silence and cardboard behind us. We didn't know what to do, so we headed to Blockbuster and rented "The Passion of the Christ." That was the most redemptive thing we did that day.

Happily, Easter is usually a much more joyous occasion, and this year the week coincides with my due date, so we may celebrate a new life as well as the Resurrection. I am grateful for John Updike's piercing thoughts on Easter, which remind us that there are so many ways to miss the miracle. I want to be shocked by it, to revel in it, to be left without words and perhaps let go some tears of profound relief. I want to be scared senseless into realizing just how severe, how physically jolting--and how unsafe it is for the status quo of our failed world order--that Christ has risen from the dead.

* In the year nineteen hundred, in the course of purely theoretical (mathematical) investigation, Max Planck made a very remarkable discovery: the law of radiation of bodies as a function of temperature could not be derived solely from the Laws of Maxwellian electrodynamics. To arrive at results consistent with the relevant experiments, radiation of a given frequency f had to be treated as though it consisted of energy atoms (photons) of the individual energy hf, where h is Planck's universal constant. During the years following, it was shown that light was everywhere produced and absorbed in such energy quanta. In particular, Niels Bohr was able to largely understand the structure of the atom, on the assumption that the atoms can only have discrete energy values, and that the discontinuous transitions between them are connected with the emission or absorption of energy quantum. This threw some light on the fact that in their gaseous state elements and their compounds radiate and absorb only light of certain sharply defined frequencies. (Albert Einstein, on Quantum Theory, 1940)

http://www.spaceandmotion.com/quantum-theory-max-planck-quotes.htm

what's in a name?

Reading through Genesis on a quasi-weekly basis with my husband (we fall off the wagon easily, these days, but hope any effort will be taken in earnest by God, who will ultimately draw us more often into the Word that is so familiar from our earlier lives), I am struck by the references to language, specifically the act of naming things and people. It begins with God, of course, naming day and night, but extends quickly to naming Adam, who is given the task of naming Eve and the other creatures of the Garden. It goes beyond this, into each generation of his descendants, and the names they will give their children.

It's a mysterious and weighty thing, the business of naming someone. I can't help noticing that since God gave Adam the task of naming the animals, we have all had some role in the shaping of the world through our use of language. For Adam in the garden it was work, but it was also joyful co-creation. Since the fall, we have the added tasks of co-redemption and co-restoration with God when we name.

As the birth of our first child approaches, we are still wrestling with this responsibility of naming. There are the usual pressures to pick names that are coherent, attractive, not too common but not too strange. All these other considerations notwithstanding, I hope that if we can settle on a name that makes the invitation, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we will have begun the task of raising this child well.

experto crede

Experience.

This leads me to the final leg in my four-legged stool: experience. My life so far can be measured in two segments, before and after I went through Henry Blackaby’s study, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God. Drawing from the examples of Noah, Moses, Mary, and countless others throughout the Bible, the study emphasized not only the uniqueness of each person’s encounter with God, but also the underlying truths that could be trusted whenever God is present. The guiding principles that arrested my attention were that as disciples of Christ, we ought to be taking the time to discern where God was already at work, and joining God there. This seemed a valuable antidote to all our eagerness to do God’s work in our own strength and wisdom. It also reassured me that it was normal to expect interaction with God. It was also the first time I had been asked to reexamine whether I had ever been guilty of presuming to do God’s work without God’s help. It simultaneously whet my appetite, and caused me to relax. In subsequent years, even as I have yearned for God to let me participate in something great in his grand scheme, I have also been able to more calmly recognize the quiet, routine workings of the world God made. Through this less obvious, sustained, prevenient grace, God daily, incrementally draws people into restored relationship with each other and himself, and it is easy to see when you have eyes to see it. The point, Blackaby seemed to suggest, was that it doesn’t matter the scope of the project or one’s involvement in it: the point is to recognize the work of God and participate in it, wherever one is called. In this, he affirmed that any good result of this divine and human co-restoration of the broken world is rightly to God’s credit, not ours.

This did, however, leave me with one empirical problem. If everything good was God’s doing, either by virtue of creating, sustaining, redeeming, or restoring, whose doing was the bad? Similarly, if my Spirit-enlightened reason was responsible for my grasping the good and the true, how could others who did not know God also grasp truth and goodness, sometimes even better than I did? This is where an encounter with the poetry and art of British Romantic William Blake, and his “synthesis of opposing dialectics,” seemed to offer some help. Blake envisioned the world as a kind of yin and yang, where good and evil were inextricably involved with one another for their identity, existence, roles, and actions. In a dynamic, cosmic interplay, good and evil participated in each other, leading Blake to marvel,

Tyger, tyger burning bright
in the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?

...Did He smile his work to see?
Did He who made the Lamb make thee?

In the usual slipperiness between thought and speech, it must be said that one could easily interchange destruction for evil, nurturing for good in the images of the tiger and the lamb, and that destruction is not always evil, or nurturing always good. These things depend on definitions, context, and much more. But the principle remained indelible for me: the world is a mixed bag. Because I live in the world, where good and evil are so intertwined, it follows that sometimes I percieve God in the same way. This is my limitation, that I must always compare the Creator to the created. Precisely where one comparison breaks down, though, it seems another begins, and C.S. Lewis’ beaver puts it nicely in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe when he says of Aslan, the lion, “Safe? Of course he isn’t safe! But he’s good.” This, for me, can only describe the God of the Old Testament, of Revelation...and the God who allowed Hurricane Katrina to happen.

If our experience of God leaves us often with these strange and disconcerting paradoxes, it also assures us that God will defy our every category, that he will burst out in spring when when we expect indefinite winter, that our prodigalism will find its shocking, opposite reaction each time we come home repentant, and that there is a remedy for each yet unfulfilled longing or expectation, if we will recieve it in God’s time. One of the most delightful shatterings of my own preconceptions about God occurred in college, when I was reintroduced to the feminine imagery of God, who defies gender in a way our language cannot. When I lost my mother and grandmother to cancer in close succession, it was helpful that I could already see God mothering me, and that this did not contradict the more familiar role as heavenly Father that I had been raised with.

“Let us make man in our image,” God said in the act of creation, and “Male and female he created them.” I have experienced the powerfully formative roles of gender in family, in friendship, in the academy and in the Army, but never more powerfully than in marriage. It is no coincidence that the very conversation in which I at first objected to dating my best male friend and future husband in college is the very conversation that continues as we explore and adjust our roles in relationship to each other and the rest of the world. If we have a daughter, she will reap the benefits of our very fruitful debate on the subject of what it means to be a “woman who fears the Lord”--in the form of such empowering freedom that I shudder to think how she might eventually break our hearts with it. However, the same would be true of our son, who, in the process of becoming “a man after God’s own heart,” may veer off and become someone who we don’t even recognize. In this, we undertake the same risks as God does--the risks that come with bringing someone into the world who bears the weight of their own choices, and for whom justice, truth, love, and mercy will mean what he/she makes them mean through observation and experience.

My experience of gender is one of the most defining lenses through which I interpret my faith. Resisting the urge to dwell on the repressive, marginalizing experiences of girl and womanhood (on the larger human stage, not necessarily in my own life), I do identify with Madeleine L’Engle’s understanding of “mankind” as referring to all of us. I can be as expansive and generous about this as the other actors in a conversation are willing to admit their need for. If, however, a they cannot acknowledge the historical subjugation of female experience that blatantly prefers “man-kind” where “human-kind” could have been used, or attaches positive connotations to “bachelor” but negative ones to “spinster,” etc., I feel the need to point out this injustice--as a co-restorer with God--of fallen culture and language. It is my rational conviction, looking at the whole trajectory of Scripture and Church tradition, that we were never meant to fall into the confines of these gender-based, linguistic and cultural roles in the first place, and my experience validates this. (This entire post could have read “s/he” every time I refer to God, and I would have done it in good conscience. I made a decision to presume the most generous understanding of God’s self-revelation of our givenness as male and female, both image-bearers of God. Plus, I feel it’s uneccessarily awkward in English, for our lack of a personal, gender-neutral pronoun.) My reasonable response to the reality of gender is that we do not know nearly as much about it as we claim to. We are discovering every day that both men and women can surprise us by (in a Godlike way) defying the categories in which we place them. We also wrestle with the nature and nurture of our seemingly unavoidable differences, celebrating them where we can.

Approaching women in Scripture, I must take each passage in its cultural context, if I am to avoid a crippling interpretation of womanhood that misappropriates particular messages specific to times and places as transcendent or applicable to us all. As a response to church tradition regarding women, I won’t make the ordination of women a stumbling block for other Christians, but I will always prefer to attend churches where women are allowed the full expression of spiritual service and leadership to which they are called. As for experience, I will hold my own with an open hand, recognizing that any understanding of gender this side of heaven is incomplete and therefore still morphing. I will avoid anything that leads me to be dishonest with myself or others about the woman I am becoming before God, even for the sake of community.

Neatly, this discussion of personal experience in faith leads back to the role of reason, since it is only reasonable to critically examine how one’s experiences might color the interpretation of Scripture, buy-in to Church tradition, and future experience.  In this, we are all captive to our bodily lives--we have only our five senses and one brain to integrate them, which, while impressive its its faculties, still limits us to our unique perspective. Perhaps it is part of the divine comedy that we experience this and work it out in the context of our relationships to the world around us. The constant struggle to discern between substance and shadow, truth and error, beauty and gaudiness, is ongoing, and it requires our utmost, individual awareness, attention to the Spirit and reliance on each other. I am reminded of the logic Bassanio unveils to Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as he answers the riddle designed by her dead father to choose her husband. Three caskets of lead, silver, and gold each present a riddle to would-be suitors, but only a man who chooses correctly will find her portrait inside the casket and be allowed to marry her:

So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness of fair ornament?

All the arts and sciences we can devise still echo that groaning of creation described by Paul in his letter to the Romans which, like the pains of childbirth, expresses the hard labor of becoming. We struggle to say what we mean, to create and preserve beauty, to participate in justice and peace--but never perfectly. That Christ shared in this embodied, spiritual existence, providing us with his example of redemption in a broken world, and leaving us the help of his Spirit is the most lovely and hopeful news I can think of.