Last year, I shared with you John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas of Easter." As many are now reflecting more seriously than ever before upon the reality of death and perhaps their own mortality, it seems appropriate to share it again.
Updike, as I mentioned, was a complex individual, a man of considerable ambiguity, and one who struggled in his faith. This is reflected in his writings. "Earthy" is a word that is often applied to Updike's writing. His novels typically probe theological themes alongside more seamier topics. Updike, nevertheless, especially in his later years, is said to have become more dedicated to the faith. Apparently, he was never able to think his way around the "materiality" and "transcendence" at stake in one of the central claims of the Christian faith, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
While an undergraduate at Harvard University, Updike entered the following poem in a religious arts contest in Massachusetts. It won first prize. With the various attempts within and without the church today to celebrate Easter according to "our own convenience" or "our own sense of beauty," I invite you to reflect on this poem.
Seven Stanzas of Easter
Make no mistake, if He rose at all
it was as His body.
if the cells disillusion 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 befuddled eyes of
the eleven apostles.
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinge, thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that pierced, died, withered, decayed 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 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.
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, for our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
[Written for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church of Marblehead, MA] Taken from John Updike, Seventy Poems, Penguin Books, 1972.
Richard Burnett, Managing Editor, Theology Matters
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