2023 Eastertide
Dear Family and friends and occasional readers of this blog,
Easter comes again, spring, returning green. Yet even the name “easter” recalls the one Christian attitude the Puritans most hated (and still do)—that Christianity invented nothing new. Even while we hold that Jesus, as the risen Christ, is the “way, the truth, and the life,” we have also always known that Jesus taught nothing new. Even his adversaries did not exclaim in horror, “No this is something no one ever thought before.” Instead, they objected to his teaching in his own name, beginning “but I tell you.” The great truths of our faith, of any faith, are those the hearts of men and women everywhere have known—in all “climes and times” as we used to say.
So whatever gives you hope and joy at the season, that is your “easter,” your renewal. If nothing does, then I’ll pray that it will; if it does, I’ll pray that it grows in every dimension, until joy and wonder are constant signs of the power, presence, and love of God.
May you be especially blessed this season and know that Nancy and I send you heart-felt greetings.
Nancy and Chuck
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
**
For some reflection on the season, I’d like to start with two more poems, each by a fine writer who saw deeply into himself and into the world about him.
John Updike, “Seven Stanzas as Easter” (1960)
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.
John Gneisenau Neihardt “Easter”
Once more the northbound Wonder
Brings back the goose and crane,
Prophetic Sons of Thunder,
Apostles of the Rain.
In many a battling river
The broken gorges boom;
Behold, the Mighty Giver
Emerges from the tomb!
Now robins chant the story
Of how the wintry sward
Is litten with the glory
Of the Angel of the Lord.
His countenance is lightning
And still His robe is snow,
As when the dawn was brightening
Two thousand years ago.
O who can be a stranger
To what has come to pass?
The Pity of the Manger
Is mighty in the grass!
Undaunted by Decembers,
The sap is faithful yet.
The giving Earth remembers,
And only men forget.
In November 2002, Joe Green sent me two Neihardt poems, the one here and the other called ‘April Theology’. In the latter the poet protests “What! House me my God? … Roof me in…Wall in from the green and the wonder of growing?”
Joe noted that Neihardt had read the latter at a convent and it was “. . . well into his reading,” Joe noted, “when it occurred to him that ‘April Theology’ might not be appropriate for his audience. But when he inquired of the Mother Superior if the poem had offended her, her face glowed and she answered, “Oh my, no.”
Neihardt had told Stan Smith that he was once walking in the woods and thought of words spoken by Jesus. “In a moment of sudden realization,” Stan conveyed to Joe, “Neihardt shouted these words aloud: My God! He meant it!” And Neihardt told Smith, “I doubt that anyone holds Jesus in greater esteem and reverence than I do.”
The 1960’s, however, were times of hot debate over the ‘physicality’ of the Resurrection. I remember to this day a debate held at NU (now called the University of Nebraska at Lincoln). Charles Patterson, the Philosophy of Religion professor who chaired my MA thesis on Kant and Kierkegaard (a work that has blessedly gone unread ever after) had invited to campus Dr. William Pollard, an Episcopal priest and a physicist who was head of the Oak Ridge Atomic Testing Institute in Tennessee.
It was the philosopher that believed the resurrection was not to be taken literally, the physicist who believed it was. During the questions that followed, I asked if it were not true that the Hebrew and Christian scriptures suggest there are two “books” of God, one being nature and its appreciation, the other being scripture itself, the message of Revelation, both to be read by the beholder.
To paraphrase what I was asking, isn’t it both/and rather than either/or? Both Updike and Neihardt? Both the poetry of Revelation and the nature of the created world? Both the angels and the head of the pin? Doesn’t the divine always come to us mediated in a setting Sun and in a rising Son? Divinity can neither be housed in four walls or in all of creation by themselves, and it is the same Divinity that humans find in both places.
With many thanks to both Joe and Stan for their friendship and Charlie Patterson and William Pollard for their example—that “communities of knowing” should be in dialogue with one another, lest the full majesty of the Divine be lost and God be caught merely in a box or a tree, my box and my tree—and, thereby of course, not yours. And by the way, neither poem, read carefully, is quite what it seems at first!
**
From Ramadan’s start (March 22), through Christian’s Holy Week and Jewish Passover and Chinese tomb-sweeping day, through Easter East and West and the Islamic Laylat al Qadr and Jewish Yom Hashoah, a season of glimpses of holiness and revelations of glory!
**
Just a bit of family news: our favorite oldest grandson Rowan has now taken on a new job in maintenance at one of Google’s new Omaha “farms;” or you might meet him if you order an Uber in Omaha. Our favorite next-to-oldest grandson will be confirmed two weeks following Easter at St. Mark’s on the Campus, with the statue to his great-grandfather in the courtyard. We are just a couple of months away from Harland and Noelle going on the Diocese’s Civil Rights Pilgrimage. Further north in Milwaukee, our favorite younger grandchildren continue to delight. Will is becoming better and better acquainted with his clarinet and opting to see baseball from behind the catcher; Greta is learning light and sound in the Milwaukee Youth Theater; Huck continues to be the outgoing and witty companion, but he’s being chased hard by Lou, the youngest. Nancy is wrapping up a year of tutoring for our Literacy Council and serving on the Kearney Action Network steering committee, and Chuck continues to write, teach, and, as editor of Kearney Creates, to serve as Secretary of the Kearney Cultural Partners. We plan a trip westward to see old friends this year and have great hopes of Spain in 2024, as well as anticipating the planning of a reunion in 2024 of the old student gang at St. Mark’s on the Campus from the ‘60’s.
**
Although I hate to sully three fine poems by professional writers, I’ll end with a short poem of my own—one I’m fond of and have included before
Our Only Easter Present Was from a Jew
The two women telling me they had never heard of prayers
Being offered on Holy Saturday
Are both nice people, here to prepare the altar for Easter.
Today, they seem to favor scooting past the chapel for their exit
In preference to joining in the prayers they’ve never heard of
At the noonday offering that takes place every year.
Another, who worshiped more this Holy Week
Than in all the many months just passed together,
Seems most to lament the lack of silence, the absence of black,
That same draping we abandoned
Over thirty years ago, and that silence least likely found
Where organist and singers, readers and children prepare for Easter.
Perhaps I near the time I will not hear so much
Of what it is that people forget they ever knew. As we dwindle,
Perhaps no one at all will be aware of it much longer.
At breakfast where early Saturday morning usually finds me with friends,
Myrna Rosenberg came over with a box of chocolates.
Happy Easter, she says. Happy Passover I reply as she and Sid leave,
Heading home to prepare their Seder miles from the nearest Temple.
April 7, 2012
Grand Island, Nebraska
Kearney, Nebraska
Easter 2023
Next blog: May 2023, quite likely the mid-March through May Memorial Day “In Memoriam” but maybe a little commentary on the humor our legislature has (unwittingly?) provided this session.
Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus 1601
capeek 