Seven Stanzas at Easter

"Tell me yourself, I challenge you-answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature-that little child beating its breast with its fist, for instance-and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."

"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly...

It was a Sunday evening. I sat alone, propped up against the bunks in my room on the sixth floor of Houghton Hall, my college dorm. Outside, the noises of the city and the voices and laughter of young woman, filtered into my silent space, and I encountered the above words from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for the first time. It was one of those moments (and I had several in college) in which everything I had staked my existence was rent from me. I felt as if my heart had been ripped out of me, chewed up, and spit into a thousand pieces upon the floor, and somehow I was to put it all back together. Feeling abandoned and nauseous, I wept.

How can a benevolent, loving God allow suffering? Where is He when His creation seems to reek with misery? Frankly, in my opinion, there is no good answer. But what I have come to accept over the course of the years is that suffering is inevitable; it is part of the very fabric of our lives, and not one of us will escape its claws. But I have also come to believe that we each have a choice: we can either lapse into bitterness because of it and become less than human or we can acknowledge it as a gift which enables us to transcend our selves so that we can become what we were truly meant to be.

Moreover, at the heart of Christianity, is the Incarnation. Though God, Jesus Christ became man and lived in the very flesh in which we live, that flesh which often seems so cumbersome, that flesh which feels pain, bleeds, and dies. And so over the years I have come to recognize and more fully believe that God is still with us. To draw from St. Patrick, He is within us, beneath us, above us, beside us, around us. He is in the heart of all who love us and in the mouth of friend and stranger. He suffers with us and comforts and restores us.

Today is poetry Wednesday. My choice for this week is John Updike's, "Seven Stanzas at Easter."

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-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 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 now 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.