the time of alleluias and holy fools

It is Easter, the time of alleluia.

Source: Uploaded by user via Betty on Pinterest

The time where I and some others gather and sing songs about resurrection, early in the morning on the first day of the week. It’s the time of holy foolishness, when we sing the praises of a man who we say is God, who was dead and alive again.

It has been too long, friends, since I’ve written here. But believe it or not, I will be back again tomorrow, back with more words celebrating the holy foolishness.

Today I am full. Full of songs, full of the Easter feast and sweets and lingering around the table with friends. So I will leave the words to John Updike today.

I’ll say just this, with all the holy fools: Alleluia. Christ is risen indeed.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

           John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissoltion 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.