Happy Easter

It has been a while since I posted anything here but I haven't given up. Last weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Greenville, South Carolina to speak at a friend's church on Reconciliation. Jack and Jane Peyrouse and their children, Jane, Jay and Marcia have been friends since my days as the Associate Rector at Holy Trinity in Fayetteville, NC. Jane died two years ago - way too soon for those of us who loved her. Jack moves along busily, involved in so many things at his church and in the theater community in Greenville as well as the lives of his children and grandchildren. A wonderful treat while in Greenville was to see Jack co-starring in a production of "Love Letters." The play by A. R. Gurney chronicles the letters written by two people from second grade to late adulthood. It was wonderful to see Jack perform again. The play is interesting and thought provoking both for the story it tells and the story left untold. Gurney left openings for us to add our personal interpretation of the story and perhaps to weave our own stories into the love letters!

A glorious and blessed Easter awaits us tomorrow. I welcome the good news of the resurrection into the darkness of our current world. I ponder the causes of so much illness and death in this small community of New Harmony. I wonder if the depression in our economy, the losses which people have experienced, have pushed some beyond their capacity to hope. It is the dilemma of our age which causes us to place our hope in "things." When the "things of life" begin to fall out from under us there must be something greater to hold on to. What could be greater than the knowledge that God has come to us in his Son Jesus and that he takes away death's sting. This is good news - great news indeed.

Seven Stanzas of Easter

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-mâché,

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

Have a blessed and joy-filled Easter!