St. George’s church and churchyard, morning, 10 April 2015
Even though it was early, and will be even earlier next year, Easter Day was at least bright and sunny this year. It was almost a reprieve from the endless winter that was 2015 and, well, this current cold front which has come through this week and which is still hanging on, in the form of cold and fog, as I sit and write this morning. Early Easter’s aren’t particularly welcome for kids and families — bundling up in thermal fleece for an egg hunt is never fun, and everyone wants a nice family picture outside. Nor are early Easter’s lovely for altar guilds and flower guilds. Just last night, in fact, the head of our altar guild told me that next year we’ll have to forego some of the prettier, flowering plants we normally get since it’ll be a late-March celebration. Bummer.
And yet there’s also something about an early Easter that, I think, tells the Christian story more profoundly than a Sunday in later April when everything is blooming and in full color. Just this morning, driving back to the rectory from an early morning call, I noticed it, you know, in the way that fog kind of sets everything in highlight or contrast.
Outside, even now, there are these shoots of green, shots of color, somewhat daring, somewhat risky. Patches of green grass set against, pretty much, a brown-ish field. Daffodils and jonquils, of course, are the heartier (gardeners would say) or riskier (I might add) perennials, shooting out before it’s safe, before it’s warm, before it’s right and ready. But all around it’s still brown and gray, cold and chilly. Warmth is coming, for sure, even later today. Spring is already here and, we trust, having been given a pretty good Easter-day foretaste, it won’t disappoint. But, still, it’s gray, brown, chilly.
A page from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ journal, 30 June 1864
I was recalling one of my favorites, the great Catholic, indeed Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to whom I turned upon returning to the office because he says these things so much better than I could or anyone has, for that matter. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he begins the poem of the same phrase. “Charged,” he says; charged! For this reason, then, because the world is literally charged with God’s grandeur “…nature is never spent,” Hopkins affirms; “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” But that freshness, that dearest freshness is underneath, not immediately or always perceptible. Not to the naked eye nor, for that matter, to the trained eye. Not only is it “down” there, it’s “deep down.” Deep down, for we still live in a world that is, at times, shrouded as in a cloud, a fog, a kind of darkness. Easter isn’t a declaration so much as it is a revelation. It isn’t an awareness so much as it is an invitation.
Easter is its own kind of beginning, but it’s also its own kind of end. It’s the central truth of Christianity, resurrection, and yet that’s the most remarkable thing about it – and one, I’m afraid, which too many Christians, themselves, overlook and get patently wrong: that the foundational tenet of our life in God has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with what we know or believe or feel or can see, readily and straightaway with our eyes, no matter how trained or gifted or skilled we may be in searching. Our life in God, made new in Christ, has everything to do with what we hope in, what we place our faith in, what we cannot see but still trust, nevertheless. Just like we trust that warmer days and more colorful landscapes are coming, even though we cannot see them and even though it feels, on mornings such as this, that this year’s eternal winter isn’t going away.
What Easter brings to an end is a religion based on creedal comfort and doctrinal assurance. Easter ends dogmatic certainty. Easter ends the reign of belief statements, memorizing things in order to get right with God, doing certain things to ensure your place in heaven. Easter ends all of that. Because we’re talking, now, about the beginning of faith. And one cannot enter into faith, a real and living faith in God through Christ, until one has put to end the desire to know, to believe, to understand. As we’ll meet this Sunday in Thomas – unfortunately, throughout history, called ‘the Doubter’ — one of the biggest things standing in the way of true, living faith in God through Christ is a fruitless obsession with belief. What Thomas learned, leading him to echo the greatest affirmation of faith in all of scripture, is what we must also learn, day after day after day: that faith and doubt are not at all set against each other, but what is at tension with faith, ironically, is a constant obsession with belief, for faith’s opposite is nothing more than certainty. I’ll say it again: the opposite of faith is certainty.
For only when you perceive without seeing, when you hope without knowing, when you trust without proof is faith begun, much like on a chilly April morning, even just a few days after we’ve proclaimed the truest thing, and yet the hardest thing, we know to say: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
GOD’S GRANDEUR
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
| THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. | |
| It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; | |
| It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil | |
| Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? | |
| Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; | 5 |
| And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; | |
| And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil | |
| Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. | |
| And for all this, nature is never spent; | |
| There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; | 10 |
| And though the last lights off the black West went | |
| Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— | |
| Because the Holy Ghost over the bent | |
| World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. |
