New and old favorites for Easter

Rejoice, Christ is risen! I hope those of you who celebrate this holiday had a blessed Triduum. My Good Friday was penitential, bit not how I expected. Pouring rain, a delayed field trip, and DC traffic kept me from services downtown. Now I'm glad to be at home with my family, watching Brothers #2 and 3 hone their altar boy skillz.

A friend just introduced me to this poem, and it has immediately become one of my favorites. I love thinking of the Resurrection as a cosmic/nuclear reaction happening inside a tomb, strong enough to imprint Jesus' body as a photo negative on his shroud.

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.

—John Updike, “Seven Stanzas At Easter,” 1964

Speaking of angels in tombs, here's a song that's been an Easter staple in my house since before I could read. It's not really Easter until I've heard a New Jersey Italian lounge singer-turned- Evangelical Christian tell his own version of the Resurrection. We lost the 1983 cassette tape a while ago, but thanks to the internet I can still get my Carman fix.