In memory of the great author, who died today, here are his Seven Stanzas at Easter, written in 1960:
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.
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5 responses to “John Updike (1932-2009)”
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What a freakin awesome poem.
“Let us not mock God with metaphor…
making of the event a parable…
The stone is rolled back…
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.”
Translation for me (at the risk of making less of the poetry):
“Death is really real. We see it. We feel it. It’s not art or language or imagination. It is just death, unavoidable and universal. God, let resurrection be just as real. Or else all is vanity.”
That poem is just beautiful. Francis Schaeffer used to say that unless we believed that, were we at the cross, we could feel its grain and splinters, we would have entirely missed the point of our savior’s bodily death. Lest we awake missing the point in that “unthinkable hour” this poem reminds of of our frailty and Christ’s power over every physical particle, even his own person to whom he gave life!
dz:
this is rock solid. amazing. and really challenging.
-c.
Here is a quote from a Lutheran minister in his Rabbit Run
“Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful…. When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that…. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”
It will be interesting to see if any talk of his faith will come up in the inevitable deluge of published eulogies.
Thank God for Mockingbird!