'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.'
