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.


http://www.edow.org/spirituality/updike.html

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the din undoes us

Our lives are occupied territory...
occupied by a cacophony of voices,
and the din undoes us.
In the daytime we have no time to listen,
        beset as we are by the anxiety and goals
        and assignments and work,
        and in the night the voices are so confusing
        we can hardly sort out what could possibly     
                be your voice
        from the voice of our mothers and our fathers
        and our best friends and our pet projects,
        because they all sound so much like you.

We are people over whom that word shema has
    been written.
We are listeners, but we do not listen well.
So we bid you, by the time the sun goes down today
        or by the time the sun comes up tomorrow,
        by night or by day,
        that you will speak in ways that we can hear
        out beyond ourselves.

It is your speech to us that carries us where we have
    never been,
and it is your speech to us that is our only hope.
So give us ears. Amen.
 

Prayers by Walter Brueggemann,
from the book "Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth"

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