SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

 

John Updike wrote the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century.  If you believe, or want to, it is worth rereading.  

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER (1960)

S1                                   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.

If I'm not in a hurry, I find God in nature every time I walk outdoors.  But loving God's creation isn't a belief.  A belief is knowing that the tomb was really empty and that the man Jesus showed his pierced palms to Thomas.  Updike's "if" in line 1 is not hedging his bets, and we don't need to hedge ours.  

S2                                       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. 

His flesh rose and ours will too.  That's the promise of Easter.  We won't turn into Monarchs floating among the Lantana.  Our very bodies will walk (or stand or sit or lie) with the risen Lord.  

S3                                 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. 

 More anatomy.  As His heart re-beat, so will ours.

S4                               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 Resurrection is not a parable.  Not a puzzling little narrative where one thing might stand for something else.  It is simply, literally, true. It needs no interpretation. Jesus rose from the dead.  That's why he is the Christ.  Take a breath.  Open the door to the room of faith and walk in.

S5                            The stone is rolled back, not paper-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. 

It's all literal.  The wounds, the death, the grave, the stone.  And next comes the angel, literal too, wearing a garment that somebody wove!  No one imagined the angel.  We don't need our imaginations here. 

S6                                And if we 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.

S7                           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.  

I remember (always) when our son died.  Instead of harming my faith, his death made it more logical.  We wouldn't be created in all our complexity to end on the 9th Floor of Duke Medical Center.  Now that would be ridiculous, not eternal life.

Let's have a wonderful death and resurrection.  Happy Easter!  

                                                    Nina Naomi