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 thing painted in the faded credulity
of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,
not 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 make it less monstrous,
for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

– John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.

The geniuses at Salon have brilliantly taken transcripts from Fox New douchebag, Glenn Beck and put them, verbatim, in verse. The result a somewhat more fantastic than can be described in prose:

FORGOTTEN MAN

At first, the idea of the Forgotten Man was
The little orphan that was in the middle here and
Everybody forgot that, and government and
The businessman was happy and
Playing the role of government is Jesus because
I think that’s who we have as president now, and so …
What would happen is this guy would be happy and
This guy would be happy, but the little orphan
Was left out, but now the Forgotten Man; help me out on this;
Now the Forgotten Man, Jesus, decides that he
Is going to help out the little orphan person; so …

You, no longer wearing the top hat and no longer happy,
And of course, the little orphan boy now has a crack pipe and
Octomom is back here with her tentacles; OK,
There’s Octomom; Jesus decides to take the money from you
Now, and then he gives it to Octomom.

Tons more here, here, and here. I’ve also included a couple other favorites after the jump.

IMAGINE

Let’s say you are in Saudi Arabia
Where nobody’s ever heard of the Trinity.
You’re a Catholic. Nobody’s ever heard of
The Trinity. What, the Trinity?

What, it’s three in one,
They’re everywhere and nowhere.
Jesus is on the cross
But he’s really God.

So God has died but
Yet he didn’t die
And how does this –
Imagine you’ve never heard this before.

So you’ve never heard
Any kind of explanation.
So it works.
You know what I mean?

THE BORDER

You stand up for the border,
You’re a racist.
Are you really a racist?
I’m not a racist.

TIME TO BELIEVE

It’s time to stop playing
Games in this country.
It is time to actually believe
In something. I do.
I know you do as well.
Believe in something.
Even if it’s wrong.

I’m sure that some have noticed the dearth of posts over the last few days. Well, part of the reason for the current lacuna is that I have been in the process of moving back to Portland from Eugene, Oregon where I have spent the last two months. I was spending some time working out of the offices of Wipf and Stock Publishers, though from now on I will be working off-site, and in fact for the next two months I will be working from my own home. So far so good.

There are a lot of exciting projects happening at Wipf and Stock with which I’m excited to be affiliated. Right now I’m spending the bulk of my time on a forthcoming book by John Milbank, entitled The Future of Love: Theological Interventions. It is a collection of some of Milbank’s most important essays, both early and recent, dealing especially with the issues of theology and politics, religious pluralism, and Milbank’s overall theological agenda. It promises to be an important volume to anyone interested in Milbank’s theology.

Also, incidentally, we have also just finished up another book by Milbank entitled The Legend of Death which is Milbank’s collected poems. It promises to be a good read for anyone theologically-minded who also has an interest in poetry. It should be available in a matter of days or weeks and most. Here is one of the many notable poems (page 10):

Early Autumn Vagrant

A day brushed with lemon.

Luminous wafts
of light lapping frequently
like inverted shadows
beneath a dull-cast heaven.

All ignored by the brimming
schemes of afternoon pastures

for their harvest of sun-tide,
with wave after wave of
wind at last blindly illuming

the bench of the end of everything:
all cast-up, awaiting unknown salvage.

It has all been perfect,
but has left me languished,

my world swept away from me
and myself along with it.
My bodily eyes, self-bereft,
watch my soul depart on its last
and surest voyaging,

while I read on eagerly
in the book about love
as the dusk sweeps out
the open clearness.

In his book, A Theology of Compassion, Oliver Davies suggests that theology has a fundamentally poetic character.  The act of theology is an act of imaginative poiesis, of making language strange.  Poetry, he says leads us to the threshold of theology, but not beyond precisely because of theology’s commitment to historicity.  While poems in some sense remain tied to the empirical reality of the world, they basically function as a semiotic system, as a textual world of their own.  What is fundamental to poetry’s reality is its status as distinctly other than the physical world that we inhabit.  Theology however, makes distinctly historical claims in its own narration of the world.  Theology does not merely encode an alternative semiotic world to question, interrogate, or illumine the empirical world of sense perception. 

Rather theology seeks to interrupt the real world with the Real World revealed in Jesus’ history.  It is this Reality that theology proclaims to be actualized in the history of Jesus.  As such, theology’s poeticity does not consist of it suspension of of the historical; rather its historicity is the very condition of theology’s particular poetic character.  It is in the Reality of Christ’s history to which theology witnesses that the poetic dimensions of human imagination find their telos and fullness.  “The radical dialectical antitheses of Christian faith, of incarnation and Trinity, personally made manifest to us in the hypostatic union, are the consummation, overflow, and ‘passion’ of human existence itself, accomplished in every form of human feeling, thinking, and speaking.”

In keeping up with the current trends, I now have a tumblr.com blog, where I can do the lazy kind of posting (just links, quotes, and pics).  Hopefully some of you will visit it sometime.  The title for it is taken from the captivating poem by W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming: 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

If you have ever owned
a tortoise, you already know
how difficult paper training can be
for some pets.

Even if you get so far
as to instill in your tortoise
the the value of achieving the paper 
there remains one obstacle -
your tortoise’s intrinsic sloth.

Even a well-intentioned tortoise
may find himself, in his journeys
to be painfully far from the mark.

Failing, your tortoise may shy away
for weeks within his shell,
utterly ashamed, or looking up with tiny,
wet eyes might offer an honest shrug.
Forgive him.

–Scott Cairns, “Slow Learner” in Compass of Affection: New and Selected Poems (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 5.