RITE AND REASON:The central truth of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, is frequently the most difficult for many Christians to accept
IN A RECENT series of lectures at Newcastle University, the American poet Jane Hirshfield outlined three elements of good poetry – “generative energies” as she termed them – “hiddenness”, “uncertainty” and “surprise”.
It should come as no surprise that much of what Hirshfield has to say about poetry, from Homer to Heaney, may be turned unaffectedly towards the Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A problem, however, for the believing Christian of the 21st century is that the blandness and opacity of so much religious worship and spirituality today have all but emptied those extraordinary stories of their capacity to confront us with the mystery of a divine hiddenness, with the nervous uncertainty of the disciples gathered in the upper room, or even with the surprise, agitation and raw fear of the first witnesses of the resurrection.
We have perhaps to go back to some first principles.
There can be no spirituality of discernment or of depth which cannot not face up to the intrinsic hiddenness that is part of the mystery of human existence and of the reality of God. The New Testament gospels, in particular the parables of Jesus, point us continually to God’s truth as far more than neatly packaged truisms.
The parables glow with enigma and subtlety rather than platitude or banality and, equally, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was not a staged performance for the excited applause of multitudes. It is understated, inconspicuous and unobtrusive. It is mysterious.
However, it was not a poet but a scientist, Albert Einstein, who reminds us that the most beautiful thing we can ever experience is that which is mysterious.
Has humankind lost the capacity to live with uncertainty?
St Paul might well be content that we must continue in this life to see puzzling reflections in a mirror, but succeeding generations of Christians have found such advice beyond their ability.We crave absolutes.
Hirshfield suggests however that living with uncertainty can be thought of “as standing out in the rain so long that, soaked through, one grows once again warm, drenched to the point that there is no reason left to seek shelter”.
This may take courage. It will certainly take true faith, but no greater faith than the faith of those who first witnessed the event of Easter.
With the finest of poetry we are surprised and transformed, not once but persistently. There remains always the shock of the first encounter. Just as we may experience again and again that sharp intake of breath when encountering the sheer beauty of a building, of a scene or of another human being, so we must be ready for constant and repeated astonishment and transformation as we read, pray and think through the account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But being repeatedly changed by the Easter event, we are also impelled to action, to the action of treating the world as new, as a place for unjaundiced hope and for unrelenting love.
Is the Easter story though more poetry than truth?
It was not beautiful poetry alone that drove 11 extremely demoralised and frightened men and a handful of less faithless and less fearful women to challenge and threaten the world with the truth that Christ had risen.
There is supreme and definitive truth in the midst of the hiddenness, the uncertainty and the surprise. Indeed it is another American writer, John Updike who died in January, who warns us against reducing the Easter event to metaphor, thus obviating the Gospel imperative to take dynamic action into the world:
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.
(from Seven Stanzas at Easter)
Richard Clarke is Church of Ireland bishop of Meath and Kildare