Death could not hold Him

One day the grave could conceal Him no longer;
One day the stone rolled away from the door.
Then He arose over death He had conquered;
Now He's ascended, my Lord evermore.
Death could not hold Him; the grave could not keep Him
From rising again.

 

 Living, He loved me; dying, He saved me;

Buried, He carried my sins far away.

Rising, He justified freely forever;

One day He's coming -- O glorious day!

***
He is risen!  Happy Easter everyone!

"Glorious Day" - J. Wilbur Chapman, John Mark Hall, Michael Bleecker

"I can only hope"

Yesterday I read this Mary Karr poem on Mama:Monk and it spoke to me so much, I thought I'd share it here on this Holy Saturday.

Christ’s Passion

Sure we’re trained to his suffering, sure

the nine-inch nails, and so forth.

And the cross raised up invoked

the body’s weight so each wound tore,

and from his abdomen a length of gut

dangled down, longing towards earth.

He was a god, after all.

An eternal light swarmed in his rib cage

no less strong than the weaving nebulae that haul

this dirt-speck planet through its course.

Surely his flesh mattered less somehow, less

than yours to you. He hung against steel rods

with his whole being, and though the pain

was very pure, he only cried out once.

All that was writ down. But what if his flesh

felt more than ours, knew each breath

was a gift, and thus saw

beyond each instant into all others.

So a morsel of bread conjured up

the undulating field of wheat from whence it came,

and the farmer’s back muscles

growing specific under this shirt

and the sad, resigned pace of the mule

whose opinion no one sought.

Think of all we don’t see

in an instant. Cage that in one skull.

If Christ saw in each

pair of terrified eyes he met

every creature’s gauzy soul

then he must have looked down from that bare hill

and watched the tapestry teem

till that poor carcass he borrowed

wept tears of real blood before they

unhooked it and oiled it and bound it

round with linen and hid it under a stone,

to rise again or not, I can only hope.

-Mary Karr Viper Rum, Penguin, 1994

At the cross

At the cross I bow my knee,

Where Your blood was shed for me:

There's no greater love than this.

Reuben Morgan, Darlene Zschech 

cold f-x ... ewww

Jonathan is home from school for the third consecutive day with a cold.  He missed church Sunday, too.  His nose is so green and crusty that ... well, let's just say at the moment he has a face only a mother, and possibly Shrek, could love.

It reminds me of that heart-warming poem we used to say at school,

When you're dancing with your honey

And your nose is kinda runny

Some people think it's funny

but it'snot!

After four days at home, this is about as profound as you're going to get from me today.

Monday morsel: "turning points"

Lately many of my favourite blogs have been posting a weekly quote.  Just in the last few days I've read quotes from Shakespeare at Tim's blog, from Jane Austen at Classical Quest, and from George Eliot at Scribblepreach.  So, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that, I thought I would join this tradition and post a quote every Monday from something I've been reading.  (And unless I can come up with a better "m" word, I'll call it "Monday morsel."  Suggestions welcome!!  Hmm ... message ... missive ... malpractice ... meringue...)



Perhaps it's the Downton Abbey craze that has made me want to look more into the relationship between servants and masters in literature.  Whatever the reason, I recently took Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day off my bookshelf to re-read it.  This is one of my favourite novels.  Yes, it was made into an excellent movie with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  But the book is more than excellent -- I think it's perfect.  Ishiguro slowly and deliberately reveals the inner life of Stevens the butler so that we see beneath his image of himself as a small but dignified participant in important world affairs.  It's almost painfully ironic to watch Stevens looking back in bewilderment at the events of his life:


"But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently?  One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way.  In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points,' one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect.  Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had.  Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding.  There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable."