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