Easter Sunday comes, but we are all still in Good Friday or Holy Saturday—and, by the look of things, will be for quite sometime. Friday and Saturday of Holy Week (which is a mapping of the main movements in this journey of our lives) remind us of the reality of pain, suffering, death, and grief. Saturday symbolizes those long periods of our lives when we grope through the shadows searching for direction, a new beginning, anything to give us hope. Saturday characterizes our lives when we can’t see into the future.
At best, the COVID19 crisis has us in Saturday. More likely, we’re still in Friday—the day of death, grief, and loss.
Into our experience of all this, Easter comes.
We face Easter differently this year. Less naive. More realistic about the other two days that, for most of society, Christianity included, are too often overlooked. We like to go straight to Easter, so enamored are we by the light, the joy, and sense of excitement.
This sermon is sober. But it’s not sedate. In it, there’s a real sense of the Force of life that not only changes us, but “threatens” (in all the right ways, IMO) to change everything. COVID19 will change us. And there’s something else at work in the dark of this season, in this Friday/Saturday of our existence. Sunday is pulling us into a future that could make us a more benevolent presence on this planet.
Below, I explore the nature of Easter, the nature of the cosmic Christ, and the nature of our humanity—not dogmatically, but poetically and socially. History shows us that when crisis hits, it’s the poets and other artists who see the way forward before the politicians do.
1.
“While it was still dark, just before dawn,” the Bible tells us, “one of Jesus’ friends came to the tomb.” She came that first Easter morning to grieve. She came feeling loss and despair. She came, overwhelmed by the strife and change that haunted her after the violence of Jesus’ death.
We too come to Easter while it’s still dark. We too know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by change and strife, fear and worry for what we have lost and what we may yet lose.
Yet, there’s a mystery, says Saint Paul, long hidden from human eyes, revealed through the Resurrection; it changes everything about the way we live our lives, who we can become, and what we can make of the future.
2.
In the mid-1880s, the poet-priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins was living in Dublin, Ireland. One of the leading Victorian poets, Hopkins was a daring poetic innovator, manipulating rhyme and rhythm in unconventional ways. But by 1888, he was overwhelmed by strife and change; he became acutely depressed. From inside his desperation, he wrote what he called his “Terrible Sonnets,” exploring the despair and suffering he felt. Then, in July 1888 he wrote a poem that is regarded as one of his greatest achievements, and one of the greatest poems in English literature. He titled the poem with an awkward but revealing phrase: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”
“Nature is a Heraclitean Fire,” says Hopkins. Here he’s referring to the early Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, 500 BCE, who taught that strife and change are part and parcel of nature. Unavoidable, but necessary.
Hopkins recognized the truth of Heraclitus’ philosophy. It’s what stirred him to write his “Terrible Sonnets”—he had to try to make sense of the depression that was, in part, a response to strife and change, grief and loss.
We too could say we recognize this truth—that life is a “Heraclitean Fire”—that strife and change, grief and loss are unavoidable. And we also know that without strife and change, life would not only be dull, it would not be. Strife and change may often be unwelcome, but they are necessary agents in the unfolding of our lives and the evolution of the universe.
The awkward title of his poem tells us something more. It tells us that in this midst of the strife and change, Hopkins’ encounter with his own “Heraclitean Fire,” he also experienced “the comfort of the resurrection” of Christ.
“Comfort,” and I’d add, challenge, is what Easter is all about.
3.
The poem begins with sprung rhythm and vivid imagery and poetically made-up words, all describing both an inner and outer world in crisis:
Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: . . . .
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fueled, | nature’s bonfire burns on. . . .
So the poet gives us a sense of the inner turmoil that burns because the world’s on fire.
We too know something about this. Our world is on fire, and we feel ourselves floundering.
But then the poem turns and the poet hollers through the noise and pain, defying the trouble that assails him:
Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s grasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. |
Easter throws Hopkins, and us, a lifeline across our “floundering deck” . . . “a beacon,” and more, “an eternal beam.”
What is this “beacon?” What is “the eternal beam” Easter throws across the “floundering deck” of our lives?
4.
Hopkins answers with an allusion to the New Testament and Saint Paul’s own vision of what Easter means, not just for Christians but for everyone, everywhere:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am . . . .
The resurrection means that Christ is what we are; we are what Christ is. “Christ, in us,” says Saint Paul, “the hope of glory.”
What, then, is Christ?
Christ is the glory of Life, the divine energy of creation. Christ is God’s anointing of the humus of our otherwise inert bodies with the irrepressible, indomitable, creative life-force of the cosmos.
. . . . and, then, says Hopkins,
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, . . . .
this bag of bones and blood, that can sometimes fall into depression at the state of the world, is so much more:
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, . . . .
“Matchwood,” as if our bodies could quickly disappear at the mere stroke of a match:
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
A symbol of absolute preciousness. Something formed under extreme pressure, in the dark, and expertly cut to shine and shimmer with the splendor of God.
This vision of the absolute preciousness of our lives, the divine glory that shimmers in each of us and, in fact, in all things, is the “beacon,” the “eternal beam” cast across the “floundering deck” of our lives on this Easter Sunday two thousand and twenty.
5.
COVID19 has made many of us more conscious of the fragility and dignity of life—not only ours, but everyone’s. It has made many of us more aware of how interconnected we all are by Life itself. This pandemic is a “Heraclitean Fire,” and right alongside that fire is the “comfort,” and challenge, “of the Resurrection.”
Christ, the Life-force of God, in us and in all things.
The Novel Corona Virus is forcing us to ask new questions. How do we keep from dying? How do we keep others from dying? How do we keep our economies from dying? Is this this how things end or is this how something new begins?
The Resurrection, this vision of what Christ means for us and all things— no matter what strife and change may assail us, we are anointed with the mystery and majesty of Life itself; we are, therefore, imbued with the glory of God. This truth could change everything.
For “In a flash, at a trumpet crash” we could see with new eyes that nothing is separate from Christ, that Christ is in us and we are in Christ and that we are therefore, all of us, part of the great web of life—not better than, not greater than, but one with, one part among the parts that work together for the wellbeing of all things.
Awakened to this vision, we could ask even better questions, novel questions inspired more by the Resurrection than by the Novel Virus.
We could ask, in this moment of Fire, not only how do we keep people from dying, but how do we foster the best possible life for everyone and everything?
We could ask, in this moment of clarity, not only how do we keep our economies from dying, but how do we create policies and programs, structures and institutions that are agents of life and flourishing?
We could ask, at this time of re-evaluation, how do we rebirth democracies where hierarchies are minimized, where participation is maximized, where the rich aren’t more valuable than the poor, where the privileged get good medical care but the masses don’t?
We could ask, at this time of re-assessment, how do we sustain a sense of solidarity as global citizens and leave behind old tribalisms that we must outgrow so we can create a civilization where one nation doesn’t put itself at the top of the food chain, where one gender or race or identity group doesn’t consider itself superior to others, and where humans aren’t more valuable than plants and rivers and sunsets?
This pandemic doesn’t need to be a sign of how things end. It could create a shared vision for a new and benevolent way of life for this planet.
This Easter could contribute to that new beginning.
For Easter wants us to know that “This Jack, joke, poor potsherd” of our wounded and wary humanity, this “patch, matchwood, immortal diamond Is immortal diamond.”
Easter reveals to us the divinization of all things.
And when we see all things as precious—all things as radiant with the divine, all things, therefore, as holy—everything changes.