The Empty Tomb: Moving Toward an Easter Poem

I am not, strictly speaking, an atheist.

Nor is it entirely without reservations that I engage in a believer's practice.

I love story and ritual.  For this reason the liturgical traditions of Catholicism are beautiful to me, and valuable.  For this reason I will cherish its presence in my life and the life of my family.  We are nourished and connected by its ancient rhythms and sense of the sacred among us.

But I also consider it a wonder and a responsibility that we have developed the ability to think critically, explore different ideas, interpret and appreciate the world around us.  We humans are thinkers as well as feelers and do-ers. We have a duty to learn what we can, nurture and maintain a capacity for curiosity and wonder, and remain engaged in unswervingly rigorous analysis of what we observe and think we know.

My problem with the attitudes of august atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and McEwan is that they share with certain fundamentalist Christians the propensity toward annoying condescension.  You can almost hear this subtext:  "It's a shame those poor people aren't like us, isn't it?"  I have a problem with people who think to themselves, "He's a believer?!  But he seems so intelligent!" There's nothing more arrogant than absolute certainty, nothing more inferior than feeling superior.  On both sides there are a number of arguments that strike me as a little hollow.  No one, to my mind, has really earned the right to feel he or she is closest to the truth.

I once described myself as "A theist who's skeptical about the miraculous; an atheist who prays; a believing nonbeliever who talks to saints."  I'm sure this is a description that would drive a lot of people crazy.  Does it suggest a mind and heart too wishy-washy, or just open to real possibility? I'm not even sure it matters.  

If that description's bothersome, wait till you read what's next:  a few elements of my Christian credo.

I think Christ is gone.  The texts say so too:  "He is not here; he is risen."  Aslan has left Narnia. It's up to us now.  The world is our job; we have no one but ourselves to blame for its flaws, and it's what we have to work with.  Period.

I also think Christ is here.  Calvary is walked every day.  Faces crowned with suffering weep and bleed, hearts break, people are nailed against their will to terror beyond imagining.  Christ is here, living among us.  Christ is here, reaching toward the wounded, working to help.

That about sums up my "belief."  Christ absent and present, wounded and healing, God dead and living. The contradictions don't frighten me, and the fluid definitions keep me growing and honest, and, I hope, humble.  We need mystery; it keeps us going.

***

I wrote the poem below over a decade ago. It still expresses my understanding of the mystery of resurrection, not necessarily as an event or supernatural occurrence (though the poem can certainly be read that way), but as a process open to all who are open to it.  I think it explains my "faith" better than these other ramblings ever could.


The Labor

In Nazareth my father taught me how
to measure wood and sand it till it shone.
From him I learned to work with all my might;
to play with all my heart’s delight; to teach –
he was so good at that; to laugh with joy;
and best of all, to love and help my ima.
The gifts she gave were priceless pearls: a jar
of water in the shop; some honey cakes
(the special kind); a story by the hearth
at night; a vision of the evening sky.
The laying-on of hands began with her;
she taught me how to heal. When I was small
she washed my wounds and scrapes and held me till
my tears were gone. And when I was a man,
my calluses as hard as nails -
when Nazareth became Jerusalem -

an eon since I'd shed those tears - I knew
I'd have to learn again the things I thought
I'd come to know.  And in the end it was
not I who touched the ailing and the dying;
they touched me, and all the wounded world
reached toward me and filled my outstretched arms
until I was a mother holding all
that life inside – a vessel, but a child
as well, enclosed inside unfathomable
darkness, darker than the deepest earth,
no mother near nor father listening close.
My healing hands were pinned against my will,
or should I say connected at long last
unto my will, my dearest wish: a laying-
on of hands that could deliver all
my children safe and sound. And there I was
to meet them as they came, emerging from
the empty darkness leaving all their shrouds
behind. And lo, they were like little children
dancing in the morning sun and laying
on each other’s cheeks their healthy, hearty, happy hands.