Resurrection and Wrestling

Happy Easter, everyone. Although the following song is actually probably more fitting for Palm Sunday, I am posting it today. This is a song of human betrayal and weakness, the faithfulness of God, and God's pursuit of humans ("Got me in a sleeperhold"). Anyone who knows more about wrestling than I do (which is most everyone) and wants to elaborate on the use of the metaphor, have at it!

Please go to this page and click on the last song, "Sleeperhold," by Dolorean.
Here are the beautiful lyrics to read along--I have put a few of my favorite lines in bold:

"Sleeperhold" by Dolorean
I was there I heard the crackling of the palms
He came upstairs and had the curtains drawn
This is my body
Keep your stomachs full
This is my blood
Let's get drunk on soul

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go
Blessed are those who have no clothes
For sunlight is their fashion
And blessed is he who sleeps on the streets
But his roof is sheltering sky
And blessed be the broken one
For whom grace daily unfolds

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go

I was dropped down on a dirt brown field
I watched the sun rise over me
I wanted the heavens to open like a saloon door
But all I heard was a cock crow
What have I done? I cried inside
And my spine turned ice cold

Got me in a sleeperhold
And you won't let me go

I'm tapping out
I'm tapping out
I'm tapping out
Cause it's all too beautiful

I'm blacking out
I'm blacking out
I'm blacking out
But I don't want to go
I'm blacking out
But I don't want to go

**Thanks to Jeremy Huggins to introducing me to this song a few years ago.

Interpretations of the Mystery AND Physicality of Easter: Updike and Holbein

My good friend Bill Rice is visiting this weekend for Easter break. His girlfriend, Anna, sent him the following Easter poem by John Updike. We were stunned. Amazed. Came close to tears on the reading of it. Updike is a man very concerned with the physical world--we can see this in his fiction which is often both sacred and profane. In this poem, he reminds us of the real life physicality that is also part of the Mystery of Easter. After reading this, Bill said that the poem reminded him of Hans Holbein the Younger's painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. I don't know what to really say about the terrifying beauty of this poem and this painting. But great comfort and beauty is mixed in with the ugliness, terror, pain.

SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER
by John Updike

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.

A Good Song is Hard to Find: Sufjan, Flannery, and the Violence of Being Human

Hi folks. Sorry for the looong absence from this blog--cross country move and new job will do that to you. I am planning on postin more soon, but for now, here is an article about Sufjan Stevens that I have just written for Catpult Magazine. Hope you enjoy it. By the way, if you aren't familiar with Catapult, make sure to check it out! Great magazine/online discussion. I am gearing up for Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music , so will hopefully be blogging about that soon.