'Let Him Easter in us!'

 

 

 

Some thoughts for Holy Week in a time of covid:

 

‘Let Him Easter in Us!’

Easter 2020 will go down in history as the year the churches closed. In the 2,000 years of Christianity there have, of course, been other times when churches were closed in cases of war, famine and civil rebellion. Yet there must be few people living in Western Democratic countries today who have experienced this in their lifetimes. I certainly haven’t.

So how do we react to this? What do we do?

Well I suppose we can go online and watch services and liturgies enacted by solitary clergy in cavernous empty churches. I’m afraid this is a little too voyeuristic for me, and besides, I have a sneaking feeling that this is not where we are being called to now. Rather, in the words of The Wreck of the Deutschland by the great English Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J., I believe we are being called towards the ‘granite of being’. Or, as he addresses it in the opening lines of the poem:

Thou mastering me

                   God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

                   Lord of living and dead;

The poem is about the terrible sea-wreck and death of the passengers of the German steamboat, The Deutschland, off the Kent coast in December 1875. Amongst the passengers were five Franciscan tertiaries, driven from Germany by the Falk laws, all of whom drowned: Mothers Barbara Hultenschmidt, Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura, Brigitta Damhorst and Henrica Fassbaender. One of the them, ‘the tall nun’, was heard to cry before she perished: ‘Mein Gott! Mach es schnell mit uns!’ (Philip Martin 1976). Poignantly, for Hopkins, they were finally laid to rest near his childhood home at St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone. Whilst discussing the incident with his rector Fr Jones at the Jesuit house of St Beuno’s, North Wales, where he was resident at the time, the priest opined that he ‘wished someone would write a poem on the subject’. This was all Hopkins needed to rekindle his writing career and within a few weeks he had produced the great ode of 35 verses.

          The genius of Hopkins’ work, a true Paschal drama, is how he turns this disaster into a witness of Christ’s loving work in the world. This I have recently argued is what we can call the ‘symbolic’ aspect of the Christian message. I am influenced heavily here by the French Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu O.P. who describes the symbolic element of Christian life as revealing: ‘the profound truth that lies hidden within the dense substance of things and is revealed by these means’ (Chenu 1957: 99). The Christian view is thus a way of seeing reality – a symbolic truth especially open to the discerning eyes and ears of poets, artists and creators.

          What then is the symbolic meaning of our present covid crisis? I have tried to explore this in other recent blogs using the symbolism of Blake’s Book of Job, and hopefully I will continue this in the coming weeks. However for today, this special Paschal day when we lay aside our everyday lives and enter for three days into the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ, I return to Hopkins and his exhortation at the end of the Deutschland: ‘Let Him Easter in us.’

For sure the next few weeks will see a great deal of suffering, tragedy and death, it has already begun. But as Christians I believe our role now is to see the ‘symbolic’ hand of God in this suffering as we are led down the Seven Steps into the Underworld of Holy Saturday.

The shorthand for this symbolic form is, of course, ‘the Cross’. The Cross, for the Christian, straddles the two realities of despair and fulfillment. The Christian, as Edith Stein suggested, thus becomes the symbol as they face the Cross in an act of faith, or as Chenu put it:

To join two realities within a single symbol was to put the mind into secret contact with transcendent reality… the result was a double resonance within the single grasp of a ‘dissimilar similitude’ (Chenu 1957: 131, c.f., Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy: 2

Therefore, rather, than sitting at home waiting for the churches to reopen we are called today to find Christ in our hearts, our homes, our families, our everyday lives. ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places’ says Hopkins, and why not in your living room or garden? Also, during this difficult time we are asked, I believe, to find Christ in each other and to pay particular attention to small acts of love and consideration. J.R.R. Tolkein famously said at the completion of his epic Lord of the Rings cycle that the world will be saved by small acts of kindness. Accordingly, during this special Paschal time let us each see 2020 as an invitation to enter the symbolic reality of the moment in small acts of kindness to those around us and in a deepening sense of the presence of Christ in our lives through prayer. Let us take time each day to perform these acts, and especially to contemplate Christ’s message for us through them. The covid crisis will then become an invitation to let Christ 'Easter in us' so that ultimately He becomes for us, as Hopkins concludes his epic poem:

 

'A dayspring to the dimness of us, be

 a crimson-cresseted east...

Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,

Our heart's charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's

Lord.'

 

 

Happy Easter when it comes! Love Peter