Seven Stanzas at Easter–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.
April 8, 2007 at 6:32 am
Ah, this is so lovely! The beauty and grandeur of the universe as it actually is does completely crush the way we try to make it fit neatly into our conventional thoughts.
April 8, 2007 at 7:11 am
Thank you, Kristine. Thank you for all the poetry, all week. Thank you for finishing with the Seven Stanzas. They have have become an Easter standard in my family, and have meant more to me than any other poetry ever.
April 8, 2007 at 9:27 am
Thank you!
April 8, 2007 at 9:38 am
Thanks for this. Made my Easter. I’m printing off some copies to give to friends at church.
April 8, 2007 at 9:41 am
And so remarkably… mormon.
April 8, 2007 at 10:41 am
Wonderful.
April 8, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Thanks, Kristine, for all of your Easter posts. I’ve really enjoyed them, and this one is particularly appropriate, I think.
April 8, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Um, that is to say, of course, your Holy Week posts. Sorry–I’m a little slow to shed my Mormon vernacular.
April 8, 2007 at 3:13 pm
No need to shed the Mormon vernacular, Eve–it’s all about the same thing :)
April 8, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Wow. Thank you so much for this. This will be filed away in my scriptures to be read again and again.
April 8, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Wow, that is beautiful. Thanks for your Holy Week posts.
When I was in seminary (early morning, rural Oregon), my seminary teacher had us celebrate Holy Week by reading what Jesus did on each day, etc. She was a very enthusiastic and emotional person, which high school students don’t necessarily appreciate, but for this it worked well. I don’t remember many of the particulars of our Holy Week in seminary, but it sticks out in my memory as being especially beautiful and meaningful. It was probably the best thing I did in seminary and I remember it every year.
April 8, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Oh no! I just read the comments and realized the one I made first got caught by the Spam-monster (yeah–banned on my own blog!)
Anyway, it was thanking Ann for reminding me of the Updike poem–I don’t think I would have thought to put it up without her nudge, so the thanks rightly belong to her!!
April 9, 2007 at 10:26 am
Who is John Updike?
This poem is fantastic.
Going beyond #5, I can worship with these words.
thanks
April 9, 2007 at 12:39 pm
“John Hoyer Updike (born March 18, 1932) is an American writer . . . most famous works are his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike.” (Wikipedia)
Yes, the author of the poem is one and the same. He wrote Seven Stanzas in 1960 as an entry to a Religious Arts Festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church in Marblehead, MA. His Seven Stanzas at Easter won $100 for “Best of Show.”
April 9, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Awesome. John Updike is awesome. You are awesome. Easter is (in the true sense of the word) awesome.