Some Offerings for Easter Week

Hi, friends!

For the first time, I am using a voice recording on substack. You can listen directly below and then read and look at the images below. The film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew is linked at the bottom of the post.

JUST PRESS THE PLAY BUTTON TO LISTEN:

Ethiopian painting of Christ carrying the cross and the Resurrection of Christ

A Section from "East Coker" in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

The wounded surgeon plies the steel

That questions the distempered part;

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

The sharp compassion of the healer's art

Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease

If we obey the dying nurse

Whose constant care is not to please

But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,

And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital

Endowed by the ruined millionaire,

Wherein, if we do well, we shall

Die of the absolute paternal care

That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,

The fever sings in mental wires.

If to be warmed, then I must freeze

And quake in frigid purgatorial fires

Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

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.

Christ of St John of the Cross painted by Salvador Dali

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER

by John Updike

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.

Christ Crucified painted by Rembrandt

Easter Us

a prayer by Walter Brueggemann

You God who terrified the waters,

who crashed your thunder,

who shook the earth, and

scared the wits out of chaos.

You God who with strong arm saved your people

by miracle and wonder and majestic act.

You are the same God to whom we turn,

we turn in our days of trouble,

and in our weary nights;

we look for steadfast love and are dismayed,

we wait for your promises, but wait in fatigue,

we ponder your forgetfulness and lack of compassion,

and we grow silent.

Our lives, addressed to you,

have this bitter-sweet taste of

loud-clashing miracles and weak-kneed doubt.

So we come in our bewilderment and wonderment,

deeply trusting, almost afraid to trust much,

passionately insisting, too timid to insist much,

fervently hoping, exhausted for hoping too much.

Look upon us in our deep need,

mark the wounds of our brothers and sisters just here,

notice the turmoil in our lives, and the lives of our families,

credit the incongruity of the rich and the poor in our very city,

and the staggering injustices abroad in our land,

tend to the rage out of control, rage justified by displacement,

rage gone crazy by absence, silence, and deprivation,

measure the suffering,

count the sufferers,

number the wounds.

You tamer of chaos and mender of all tears in the canvas of creation,

we ponder your suffering,

your crown of thorns,

your garment taken in lottery,

your mocked life,

and now we throw upon your suffering humiliation,

the suffering of the world.

You defeater of death, whose power could not hold you,

come in your Easter,

come in your sweeping victory,

come in your glorious new life.

Easter us,

salve wounds,

break injustice,

bring peace,

guarantee neighbor,

Easter us in joy and strength.

Be our God, be your true self, lord of life,

massively turn our life toward your life

and away from our anti-neighbor, anti-self deathliness.

Hear our thankful, grateful, unashamed Hallelujah!

Amen.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Blessings this Easter week! Next week, we will watch and discuss Days of Heaven. See you then!

Mary