Embodied Easter Empathy
Dear readers,
I have not had time this week to write a normal newsletter—but I want to briefly share two things with you:
Two favorite Easter poems (that many of you already know)
An invitation to an all-day book launch event on Tuesday, April 19th
Today is Good Friday. As TS Eliot reminds us:
“The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”
We would like to think that we are healthy, whole, “sound, substantial.” But the only hope of healing the brokenness we try so hard to deny is the “dripping blood” and bloody flesh.”
Perhaps this graphic language makes us uncomfortable. It should. The sharp violence of Christ’s sacrifice is the only remedy for the dull violence of our hearts. Naturalist Christian novelist John Updike’s poem “Seven Stanzas on Easter” reminds us of the lived-in cost of Christ’s time on earth. The poem is about the extreme empathy of embodiment in a frail human body, a body with smells and cells and perpetual movement toward death.
“Seven Stanzas at Easter” by 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.
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As many times as I have read it, this poem leaves me stunned. I hope that you find it both disturbing and comforting on this Good Friday.
Before I sign off, I want to invite you all to an all-day book launch event on Facebook Live this Tuesday, April 19th. You can find the invitation HERE (and you can watch even if you are not a member of Facebook). From 10 am ET to 8:30 pm ET, I will be talking with various artists, writers, pastors, friends about the importance of empathy. Check out the lineup below.
Join us!
May God bless you this Easter weekend.
Thanks for reading.
Mary