Eastertide

In our corner of creation...

And so, He is risen.

And we rise, small children and adults, bleary-eyed from the night vigil, the small fry jittery with the aftershocks of sleeplessness and sugar, the adults still running on adrenaline and awe and champagne. He is risen, and death cannot get his clutching fingers into us any longer, and I look at my lined and aging face in the mirror and wrestle to espouse that truth.

He is risen, after a Holy Saturday spent in hospital with my smallest son, his littlest toe swollen to three times its size and turned the colour of a plum. Jack is fine, just special, and I watch the faces that we pass in the hospital corridors, aware of each person whose eye is caught by my boundlessly friendly baby because I see his beaming smile flicker over their features. And I wonder if Mary could mark those who had seen her risen Son just by the light that brimmed in their burning eyes.

He is risen and I read my children a few lines from a poem I’ve found in my sparse few minutes of quiet (by William Dunbar, translated by Adam F. McCune):

Done is a battle on the dragon black,
Our champion Christ confounded all his might,
The gates of hell are broken with a crack,
Raised is the cross, the triumph of the light.

I range a few prints of the ‘harrowing of Hell’ along the windowsill in our kitchen and tell my children, ‘this is your story’. Because it is - fantastic as it sounds - it is. These images of Christ tugging people from their graves, trampling demons with dismissive, almost humorous dispatch (I love Fra Angelico’s Christ who flattens a demon when he knocks down Hell’s door), this is our story. And it is here, in our kitchen, in our hearts, in our little church across the way and the streets down which we walk that the tale of evil’s unravelling takes place.

He is risen and I think of the preciousness of flesh, my child’s flesh, the weight of my baby warm and damp and safe (thank you, Lord Jesus) in my arms. I think of God’s flesh and how it cradles ours so that we cannot be unmade. The flesh of the baby Jesus and the flesh of the grown man splayed on the cross. I’ve been reading Ratzinger’s Spirit of the Liturgy and remember the way he describes ‘the goal of creation’ expressed as the place of ‘the covenant, the love story of God and man’. And I think of God-made-human pinned brutally to earth by the very elements of that creation, pierced by iron, splayed on wood. Grieved, precious flesh that gave itself to death, then makes itself into bread to save and heal the shattered flesh of the beloved. Us, beloved.

He is risen. And my cherry tree shimmers with throngs of blossoms and my garden ripples with waves of bluebells and the light is warm as pond water in summer and a goldfinch lands on the feeder. I hymn my praise, breath by astonished, ordinary breath, and my kitchen is creation made afresh, the place where the covenant of God’s love is made known to… me. The kettle whistles, the birds sing, the baby chuckles, the dishwater lilts, and my laughter is a love psalm of exultant praise.

He is risen.

Alleluia.