Re: Easter homily #4

I had been thinking of posting Updike's Seven Stanzas -- and now you did it!
Thanks! Our pastor read this to us several Easter's ago, and it made quite an
impression on me. I can't help but respond to the first lines though, that it
is a poor reflection on our grasp of "metaphor" that we have come to
use/recognize it only as a bludgeon of falsehood & so a mockery against God.

--merv

Quoting Ted Davis <tdavis@messiah.edu>:

> The final homily I will offer comes from John Updike's "Seven Stanzas at
> Easter" (1964).
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
Received on Thu Apr 13 15:39:00 2006