Monstrous, Marvelous
Easter hope for this mother
It is Holy Saturday evening. The other adults and older kids are at an Easter Vigil service. The baby is alternately flailing against and flat upon my chest. The house is finally quiet.
My eyelids are sandy with fatigue. I’ve begun thinking of what I could possibly do tomorrow morning, early, before the breakfast and the later dawn service, instead of tonight. This has happened for weeks, and putting off the to-do’s is both necessary and viscerally crushing. My body twinges occasionally with small aches, another marker of tiredness.
I am drafting my third post idea of the week, after the one I’d wanted to do—after not finishing, yet again, one I’ve been thinking on for two months—got long and rambly and broke into two. Then I just didn’t have the time to flesh it out, between spending time with visiting family, savoring late night talks, celebrating a sweet seven-year-old’s birthday, coordinating and practicing music with young people and the choir, and trying to enjoy spring break with the kids at home, while also sitting, like I am now, in a quiet penitential moment during Holy Week.
So I am letting go, as the baby grasps and pulls my hair in his efforts to cram his fat fist into his drooly mouth (twelve weeks old now, and maybe another first toother at three months, like his oldest brother). This Easter is the lactating-mother-on-the-couch version of mile seventeen of a marathon, where the runner puts one foot in front of the other out of habit, moving forward because it’s the only way to go.
I’d like to be more consciously focused and present, more intentional, during this season. I also know, regardless of my physical capacity or mental acuity, that my God carried His frail flesh to the cross for me. His body shook with weakness and pain, His soul crushed and absolutely alone. His is the only kind of help, the breathing, bodily kind, the eternal soul bound up the finite kind, that I need, right now and for the rest of my mortal days.
My God, now made mine through His incarnate work1, reverses all of the death and decay of our world to give us, to give me, His hands. His cool or sweaty, callused or soft, hairy or not, but definitely, for-sure wounded hands. The rest does not matter, because this is all that matters: His hands are real, they are the same hands He used to break bread and touch the sick 2,000 years ago, only now they will never be still and lifeless or imprisoned in a tomb again. And ultimately, neither will mine. These exhausted bones will not always be so. It is monstrous and marvelous.2
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 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.
So much of this post was inspired by Pr. Will Weedon’s commentary on the Easter hymn, “O Sons and Daughters of the King.” You can listen to him discuss it in an Encore episode from April 12, 2023 on Issues, Etc., here.
With gratitude to John Updike and his poem from 1960.