Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike
(yes, that John Updike) (really)


Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell's dissolution did not reverse,
          the molecule 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 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.

Did Not See This Coming. . .

I almost hate to break into Holy Week with something so mundane as my sporting interests, but. . .

My Spartans are back in the Final Four, for the seventh time in Coach Izzo's 20-year tenure.  This has got to be the most improbable of all his Final Fours, or any of the others in the history of my alma mater (both of 'em).  We graduated a decorated group of players from last year's team, and this had all the earmarks of a rebuilding season.  We just didn't have the kind of players that make deep tournament runs (I mean, heck, we lost to Texas Southern in December - at home!).  Even as late as February, there were serious questions as to whether our string of consecutive NCAA tournament appearances (this is our 18th) would be coming to an end this year.  But things came together in the waning weeks of the season, and we made a solid showing in the conference tournament.

We got a 7th seed in the NCAAs, which seemed a tad low, by the time we got there (but only a tad; I thought we deserved a 6th seed, or maybe a 5th).  We duly won our first round game, and then threw a complete defensive blanket over Virginia, a highly-ranked team who won the regular-season championship of the vaunted ACC.  In the next two rounds, we came from behind in both games to pull out gritty, hard-fought victories.

And now we are in the Final Four.  Again.  We play Duke this Saturday, and we don't exactly have a long track record of success against them (Coach Izzo's teams have beaten Duke exactly once in nine tries); and they hung a ten-point loss on us back in November, just to reinforce the point.  But, you know, that was then, and this is now.  And even if we should somehow beat the Dookies, Kentucky is looming, and the conventional wisdom says that nobody can beat Kentucky this year.  But, you know, once you get to the rarefied air of the Final Four, you never know what might happen.  And no matter what happens, it's been a heckuva ride already.  So, we shall see what we shall see. . .

GO GREEN!

And, just for fun, there's this. . .

Lest There Be Any Illusions. . .

This is what the Mediterranean Sea looked like in the aftermath of the 21 Coptic Martyrs.

"With their minds fixed on Christ, they despised the tortures of this world and purchased eternal life at the cost of one hour". . . (from The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 2nd century AD)

"Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.  Rather, fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell."  (The Gospel According to St. Matthew; chapter 10, verse 28)

Or, as Tertullian might have said, way back in the 3rd century - seed for the gospel, right there. . .

And I am still a Nazarene. . .

As the Ruin Falls

This poem by CS Lewis has long been one of my favorites.  It is a very 'Lenten' poem, and I offer it to you all, apropos of the season. . .

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As the Ruin Falls by CS Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love - a scholar's parrot may talk Greek -
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack,
I see the chasm.  And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man.  And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls.  The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.

Taking It to the Most Basic Level. . .

"How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me."
      ~ Malcolm Muggerridge

Me too, man. . . me too. . .

And then there's this. . .

The Wisdom of Einstein. . .

I really don't intend to turn this into a Xavierian clearing-house of humorous pictures and sayings, but this stuff is too good to pass up. . .

(Hat tip to The TOF Spot)

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Often, when I leave a comment on another blog that I particularly like, I'll just save it, and turn it into its own post at a later date.  This seems to happen particularly often with comments I leave at Suldog's place; his mind and mine seem to resonate in some very, um, fertile ways.  Just recently, I left some particularly, shall we say colorful comments to a post of his, which I probably won't be posting here; a man's got his standards (and his wife reads this sometimes).  So, if you really wanna read 'em, you can find 'em here (scroll down to read the comments) (or, you know, read Suldog's post, and then, there you'll be). . .  You can thank me later.

A Belated Happy Presidents Day to You All. . .

When I was a kid, we didn't have Presidents Day; we had separate observances for Lincoln's (Feb12) and Washington's (Feb22) birthdays.  It seemed like a bit of a ripoff (and honestly, kinda disrespectful) when they folded them together into a single holiday, lumping the two great men together with Chester A. Arthur and Warren G. Harding (among, you know, others). . .

Anyway, I know that Presidents Day was last week, but I just found this:

(Hat tip to The TOF Spot)

It Be Like That, Sometimes. . .

Wishing a spiritually prosperous Lent to all my friends. . .

Something Borrowed. . .

In honor of Valentine's Day, I'm borrowing this from something my friend Skip posted a few weeks ago; it's Number 8 on a list of Nine Important Facts to Remember as You Get Older, and it's just way too good for me to pass up. . .

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Life is sexually transmitted.

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Yup, that fits with our experience, fersure. . .

But seriously. . . way more there than meets the eye, and on so many levels. . .

Or at least, so it seems to me. . .

Thanks, Skip

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In other news, Jenn and I are spending the weekend in a city an hour-and-a-half away from Our Town, helping to put on a marriage retreat.  Which seems suitably apropos of St. Valentine's feast day, in its own way. . .

Tales From The Blizzard of '78 (Michigan version)

Given the recent winter weather, both here in OurTown, and (more prominently in the news) elsewhere, it seems a fitting moment to recall some winter-weather stories.  My friend Suldog has, on a couple of occasions,including just recently, posted about a massive snowstorm that whacked the New England area in February of 1978.

Well, we had a Blizzard of '78 here in Michigan, too, but ours was a week or two earlier, in mid/late January.  We got 18 inches of snow, and it pretty much shut down the southern half of the State of Michigan for a couple days.  The following October, the local birthrate was 30% higher than normal ('cuz, you know, you can only play so many games of Monopoly, right?).  And so, I offer you a few stories from the Blizzard of '78, mainly kluged together from comments I've left on other people's blogs (mainly Suldog's). . .

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The massive snowfall forced my mega-university to close for only the second time in its history. And one should never underestimate the capacity of college students, whose classes have been cancelled, for some monumental feats of stupidity.

A group of guys on the top floor of our four-story dorm decided (with plenty of, uh, ‘lubrication’, you can be sure) that it would be really cool to jump out of their windows into the 8-10-foot-high snow drifts that had piled up against the wall. So, for an hour or so, guys were lining up to jump out of 4th-floor windows into the huge snow drift. They would let out a yell while they fell, and then they’d land with a muffled ‘WHUMP’ as they belly-flopped into the snow. And, wondrously to behold (heck, maybe miraculously; that whole bit about how God protects drunks and fools, and all that), the snow absorbed the energy of their fall quite nicely. The drift extended all along the outside wall of the dorm, so, as the drift got beaten down in one location, the jumpers just moved progressively down to the other rooms on the 4th floor. After a while, the supply of willing jumpers began to dwindle, and they started to grab guys out of the shower, to throw them, wet and naked, into the snow drift below. It was the very picture of drunken college hijinks.

Until one of the jumpers inadvertently discovered the bike rack concealed beneath the snow drift, which left him with a few broken bones. After that, the mood was kinda killed. . .

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Being college students with a couple of serendipitously unscheduled days off, my roommate and I decided to go off in search of suitable convivial beverages (and in sufficient quantities). . .

We first headed to the small 7-11-type store across from our dorm, but there was a line out the door, snaking back-and-forth across the parking lot, then through all the aisles in the store, back to the beer fridge, and up to the registers.  The store was rationing beer to one 6-pack per customer, so everyone could get some, and even at that, it was likely that they would be sold out before we made our way back to the fridge.

So we decided to start hoofing it thru the 18-inch deep snow (drifted considerably deeper in spots, you can be sure), toward the larger town to the west of the college town (known to all my blog-friends as OurTown; the college town, being to the east of the larger town to the west, is East OurTown), having nothing particularly better to do for the next couple hours, anyway (walking into a raging blizzard, through thigh-deep snow with no particular plan beyond knowing we wanted to procure beer; good thinking, right?)

About 3/4 of a mile from our dorm, a stone's throw past the freeway underpass that loosely marks the boundary between OurTown and East OurTown, we found another, even smaller, hole-in-the-wall party store that managed to open that day, so we went in and asked the clerk how much beer he'd let us buy. Well, he was far enough from campus that he felt no need to ration his beer sales, and he told us he'd sell us whatever we could pay for. So we pooled our pocket cash, and managed to scrape together enough to buy two cases, and we started hoofing it back to the dorm, only now we each had a case of beer to lug thru the snowdrifts (a thumbnail calculation reveals that we were each carrying about 18 pounds of beer alone, saying nothing of the weight of the cans or the packaging; so it was a not-inconsiderable load, even if we weren't trudging through waist-deep snow) (But, you know, the beer must get through!). After a while, a guy with a 4-wheel-drive Jeep came along, and seeing how we were struggling through the snow with our barley-malt burden, graciously offered to drive us back to the dorm, if each of us gave him one can of beer.  Hmmmmm (rubbing our snow-encrusted chins as we weighed his offer). . . OK!

So, that night, we were the hosts of the floor blizzard party, since between us, we had almost eight times as much beer as anyone else. . .