Mocking with Metaphor

Last Friday night as I was driving along, someone decided that he needed to slam into my car and then speed away. Totally senseless. Not even a good story. There wasn’t ice or snow. It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It wasn’t a badly lit street. He drove away, and I was left with a totaled vehicle.  No reason.

Of course, that’s senselessness on a very minor scale. Awakening yesterday morning to another bombing in yet another city just reiterated the senseless all around. How long, oh Lord, indeed.

During Lent, I’ve used this space for a prayer and a poem–and another poem seems in order to finish Lent. For me, what combats the senseless is trying to understand what is real, what is solid, what is dependable. Not much is. But I’ve always loved John Updike’s poem for its absolute insistence on the reality of the Christ’s work at Easter, for its echo of the Creed’s assertion that the “resurrection of the body” is a non-negotiable. Whatever else happens, for good or for ill, nothing really matters if Easter didn’t. Really.

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-mâché,
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.