Thursday, January 29, 2009

John Updike, RIP or "I'm Just Sayin'"

John Updike could be profane. But, he could also be profound. And, he had a lifelong intrigue with orthodox Christianity. I don't presume to judge him. I only hope he really knew what he described in these words:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as 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.

12 comments:

  1. Beautiful!

    "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."

    Do you sometimes feel that in our "thinking" church, we fall into the bad habit of overtheologizing (I made that word up) things that are very simple? Just curious.

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  2. Yep. not everything needs to be explained.

    Do you analyze a diamond, or do you gaze on its beauty and significance as a mark of an intended's love?

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  3. Exactly. Just making sure I'm not alone...

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  4. "Do you analyze a diamond, or do you gaze on its beauty and significance as a mark of an intended's love?"

    isn't that a perspectival question. I do agree with you, however if I am a jewler, I am going to thoroughly examine the diamond so I make sure that what I have is the real thing.

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  5. But you know me, so you know I am well aware of how over analytical we can be unecessarily ;-)

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  6. So are you a cartesian, williams? You have to judge the Scripture to judge them authentic?

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  7. i'm not even sure what that means, pierce...you would do that

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  8. WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
    When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
    When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
    When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
    How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
    Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
    In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
    Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

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  9. *sigh* I LOVE Walt Whitman. Maybe it is because I love poetry so much that both of these poems express what I often feel. I love to worship with fellow believers in my church. But so often, for me, the knowledge that my Savior is real comes when I am reading His Word myself or when I drive through our neighborhood in spring when all the pear trees are blossoming. I'm not pagan about the trees. But I certainly realize that only He could have made them so beautiful...

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  10. Ken I bet you love Walt Whitman, he is your kinda guy...

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  11. Had to take it there, didn't you Brad?

    You couldn't just let it be sublime.

    Besides, the point of this post is resurrection in all its beautiful and hard physicality.

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  12. I have no problem with that...

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