Make no
mistake: if he rose at all It was as
His body;
His body;
If the
cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule
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
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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| Paintings by Rose Datoc Dall |
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