We’re Living It, Whether We Know It Or Not

The farther we get from Easter Day, the less likely we are to hear words from Scripture as being messages about resurrection. Why is that?

The main reason, I think, is that most of us think that the resurrection was something that happened once upon a time to Jesus. A fair number of folk take it to be the happy ending to an otherwise tragic story about the suffering and death of a righteous man, indeed a man who was not only human but divine.  As such, it doesn’t occur to us that resurrection of the body has anything to do with us, certainly not here and now. We have successfully swapped the notion of resurrection for the belief in immortality of the soul. The two are not necessarily incompatible, but immortality leaves some important issues aside.

I invite you to consider some of those issues [this morning]. They are raised in one, two, or all three of the scriptures. So let’s take them one at a time.

The river near Philippi, supposed place of
Lydia's baptism, the first in Europe    

The story from the Book of Acts is the lovely account of a Sabbath morning when a delightful woman by the name of Lydia became a Christian convert. Luke tells us in one of the passages in which he recounts his accompanying Paul that they headed outside of  Philippi to the river that they supposed was a gathering place for prayer. Sure enough some women were there including a businesswoman, Lydia. Incidentally, she was apparently very prosperous as she dealt in purple cloth, a precious commodity. Luke tells us that Lydia was a believer in God.  How she had come to be one we don’t know. After hearing Paul’s message about Jesus she and her household were baptized, the river no doubt being convenient for that. We don’t have to speculate much about what Paul said that morning. His was always the message of the transformation brought about through relationship with Christ Jesus. He couldn’t have proclaimed the gospel without mentioning the death and resurrection of Christ. And no doubt he unpacked his understanding of baptism that a few years later he would write in his elegant letter to the Romans:

           

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.[1]

St. Lydia of Philippi

In effect, Paul gave to Lydia and the others a framework for their lives if he discussed resurrection in this way.  He might have said as I often do, “When you forget everything else about baptism, remember that it is “down under and back up again.” Baptism, as graphically demonstrated by immersion in water, is a ritual enacting the death-and-resurrection principle.  Indeed it is a way of identifying with what we call “the Paschal (Easter) mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.” But it spills over into all of life. It was already present in Lydia’s experience as she went through the inevitable ups and downs in her business. Take apart any moment or extended moment in her life, such as dealing with one of the problems of a member of her household, and she could see in that slice of life the dynamic of death and resurrection. Something begins in the ideal state of perfect equilibrium, at least theoretically. Then something goes wrong and we descend into the quagmire of problems, perhaps confusion, even despair, or, on the simplest level, the ideal is exposed to be imperfect. It deteriorates, as does everything in life. We reach bottom. Metaphorically speaking, our notion of the ideal is dead. Then arrives the moment of truth and we see, if but dimly, how there is literally no way forward but up. Hope comes alive. And we take its wings and begin the ascent out of the depths. 

That is a bit dramatic a description of ordinary moments, but maybe you see the point. That is quite literally the way life is. All of life, not just human life, and certainly not just conscious life, and most definitely not just Christian life is a matter of what some have called “traveling the U: down, down, down until we reach the bottom, and then back up again.”[2] Death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the universe. 

So what does baptism do to merit our calling it the means by which we experience true resurrection? Baptism brings us into a community whose very life is conscious, intentional fellowship with the Risen Lord. Living with him is not fundamentally anticipating a future in another world but living in eternity. All the scriptures point to the unity of creation with the Creator. The entire Bible can be summed up in the words, “They shall be my people and I shall be their God, and I myself will be with them.” And that is the core message of the gospel lesson from John 14. Dwelling in this community of the baptized is the explicit context in which the incarnation of God extends from Jesus to everyone through nothing else but love. “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.”[3]

All of this is quite simple and straightforward, or so it would seem until we get to the existential reality that we are faced with every day. That reality is our being situated in what John’s gospel calls “the world” and what Paul rather confusingly calls “the flesh.” They both mean the day-to-day cauldron of human activity largely driven by anything but love. It is the world where even the most well-intentioned systems get twisted from their best potential and turn into engines that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. It is the world where gratuitous violence destroys life and is even praised. It is the world where money rules and where greed is a breeding ground for corruption that now has extended to the point where the entire ecosystem is but a few years away from being thoroughly wrecked so that our own species and a number of others will not survive. Add to that the willful ignorance that denies the enormity, the evil of it all.  

At precisely that moment—the Now of this very day—comes the hope revealed in that beautiful but dreadfully misused Book of Revelation. Its message is nothing less than resurrection on a cosmic scale. If we surrender the temptation to read Revelation as a book essentially about the damnation of all but an in-group of like-minded conservative Christians, it is about the body of God, another name for which is the universe. You’ve heard from ours and many other traditions that the temple of God is the body. So it is. That body of yours is like every other material thing in the universe. The energy to which it is convertible is the Love that powers all things in the cosmos, and one of the thousand names of that Love is “the Lord God the Almighty.” And the one through whom we know that Love and its origin best is Jesus, who is called “the Lamb.” When we who share his life and live it in our own bodies catch on that what he is by nature we become by grace, then we begin to be what C. S. Lewis referred to as “Little Christs.” We usher in the age when “the nations will walk by the light [of God’s glory]. It is totally incompatible with such Love that we would ever settle for a life of lies and falsehoods, whether on a personal or corporate, national or global scale.  Why?  Because the deepest truth of the universe is indeed Truth. And it is made concrete and present when we attune ourselves to the Divine and live for no motive other than to be like God, not by how knowledgeable or sophisticated we can be, but by how loving we can be. That’s what it is to be “written in the Lamb’s book of life.”[4]

Revelation moves towards its end with an image of the last things that marvelously mirror the first things that ever were and presage the first things in a transformed world.  Far from being a corrupt and perverse world hell-bent on destroying itself by the hand of one species that’s out of control, the world empowered by resurrection and saturated with love is a world nourished by water from the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing right out of the heart of God and the Lamb down

through the middle of civilization. Instead of a population on the defensive, fearing even children fleeing from oppression, poverty, and violence, its cities will be abundantly fruitful and its people known as healers for people of all nations and tribes and languages. The dwelling of God and of the Lamb will be in pitched in the heart of everyone, and we will worship him.  We will see his face in the face of every creature. His identity will be visible on ours and their foreheads.  There will be no more night.  We will not need any light—of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be our light, and everyone who manifests the life of God will reign forever and ever.[5]

What a surpassingly powerful vision! And yet we will never get there by doubling down and working harder at it making come to pass. Paradoxically it is by letting go and letting God, as the old slogan has it, that the heavenly city is born and the heavenly community realized. Our old ways, including all the old stories we tell about ourselves including the story of how terribly sinful we are, must die. Only in traveling the way of death do we ever reach the point where there is no way to go but back up again, rising full of the power and peace of the resurrected and ascended Christ.

Edward Knippers, The Ascension of Christ, 2014

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C in the Revised Common Lectionary, based on Acts 16:9-15; Revelation to John 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14:23-29

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2019

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[1] Romans 6:3-11.  This an all other biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford,  1991).

[2] Peter Senge et al, Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

[3] John 14:23.

[4] Revelation 21: 10, 22-27.

[5] Revelation 22:1-5.

Life Against Death

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

“What do you think really happened to Jesus in his tomb?  I mean (I know you don’t know but guess)what do you think?”

“Oh I don’t know,” he said.

I growled.  “That’s your first response.  What’s your second?”

So Joe and I sat across from the desk we share and got into a discussion about resurrection as I was beginning to compose my Easter sermon.  I had no idea back then in 2012 that it was going to change me.  For one thing, it was nothing new, my asking this question. I’d been posing it for no fewer than forty years, intrigued since at least seminary with the notion of what it means to live the resurrection.

In the course of our conversation I pulled off the shelf a book I’d had since 1970, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death.  Brown was a literary Freudian.  The final chapter in that book is entitled “The Resurrection of the Body.”  Here is a snippet of Brown’s argument that I shared:

The time has come to ask Christian theologians…what they mean by the resurrection of the body and by eternal life.  Is this a promise of immortality of life after death? In other words, is the psychological premise of [Christianity] the impossibility of reconciling life and death either in “this” world or the “next,” so that flight from death—with all its morbid consequences—is our eternal fate in “this world” and “the next”?  For…that perfect body, promised by Christian[s]… is a body reconciled with death.

In the last analysis [Christianity] must either accept death as part of life or abandon the body.[1]

So we talked on, Joe and I, about the acceptance of mortality, and about how Jesus embraced the body and the body’s inevitable fate, death.  We chewed on the notion of how resurrection is impossible outside the body, and thus of how the body is central to any discussion of resurrection, while it can easily be tossed aside if immortality of the soul, for example, supplants it.  That happened when Christianity exchanged its twin foundational doctrines of incarnation and resurrection for a pervasive suspicion of the human body and a campaign to classify anything material as inferior to anything “spiritual.”

I grabbed another book, one that I love.  It’s C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in his Chronicles of Narnia.  I flipped to that passage where Aslan, the great lion, willingly goes to the Great Stone Table to let himself be sacrificed in place of pitiful Edmund, who’s run afoul of the White Witch.  It’s much too long a passage to read to you, or even to sum up.  Suffice it to say that the little Pevensy girls stand in the shadows watching a jeering, mocking, cursing crowd of fiends and brutes cruelly shave, muzzle, and finally bind the great cat to his death on the cold stone slab. 

Lucy and Susan manage in the darkness to remove the muzzle from the dead lion, and sob and cry until at last they notice that little mice have appeared. The mice, perhaps hundreds, have come in the darkness just before the sun has risen and are gnawing through the ropes binding Aslan’s corpse.

A great crack then breaks the stone table in two from top to bottom.  The frightened girls, who could not bear to look any longer at the horrible scene, turn and, seeing no Aslan, imagine that something awful has happened to his body.  One asks a question and they hear a voice behind them.  “Yes!”  There shining in the sunrise is Aslan himself. No, not a ghost, but fully alive, even with his mane grown back.  He tells the girls to catch him if they can, and the three run, romp, laugh, and play until girls and lion lie panting in the sun, not the least tired or hungry or thirsty. [2]

I was in tears.  I put the book down.  “Joe,” I said in awhile, “I want to live like that.  I want the rest of my life to be nothing but resurrection.  I want to taste it, feel it, love it until—until I die.”

            I

We are at the beginning of Holy Week when we get to follow that dolorous way of the cross, watching another rabble mock and scourge and spit upon and string up the Son of Man.  So we’re not quite ready entirely to ponder the resurrection just yet, are we? Instead, let's look at two stories. One is a vision, Ezekiel’s celebrated vision of the valley of dry bones. 

"Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost..."

A voice says that they are the whole house of Israel, as good as dead, dismembered, bleached dry, useless.  But the vision of new life unwinds. Bones rattle together.  Muscle and sinew and skin cover them.  Then the ruah, the wind, the spirit enters them and becomes their breath.  It is a redoing of creation.  The spirit that moved over the face of the deep when there was nothing but a watery darkness now moves into the slain and brings them to life.  What does it mean? 

Then another story, even weirder than the vision because it purports to be factual.  Jesus gets word that Lazarus, a man whom he loves, is ill.  Instead of rushing straightway to Bethany, Jesus delays.  By the time he arrives, Lazarus has died and has been buried for four days.  Jesus is deeply moved, weeps even.  They take him to the tomb.  He prays.  He calls.  “Lazarus, come out!”  And the man whom he loves comes out not as a corpse, but alive, still wrapped in the grave-bonds.  “Unbind him,” commands Jesus. “Let him go.”  What does it mean?

Ezekiel tells us the meaning of his vision.  What happened in the valley of dry bones is what Yahweh will do to Israel.  They say that they are no better than bones, their hope clean gone, their future cut off completely.  Yahweh will breathe the Spirit into them, bring them home to their own soil.  And they will know who has recreated them.

And the meaning of the raising of Lazarus?  In John’s narrative it is the last straw for the authorities, the overwhelming impetus for putting Jesus to death.  In a larger sense, one cannot read the story without hearing overtones of the story which is yet to come, a story of a tomb sealed with the customary stone, a dead man inside covered in grave-clothes down to a napkin over his head, a voice shaking the world like thunder coming from heaven. 

Henry Ossawa Tanner, "Resurrection of Lazarus," 1896

What does it mean?  You get to figure it out.  But I think I can give you a hint.  There is only one thing deeper than death, and that is the power of pure love.  To put it in C. S. Lewis’s metaphor, it is the Deep Magic. Magic deeper than death decreed before the world began that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and death would start reversing itself.  As Jesus says before his own death, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

            II

So all of these stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the “Valley of Dry Bones,” the “Raising of Lazarus” are like so many sparks emanating from a single bonfire burning at the heart of human experience.  They all get at the truth differently, but the truth they get at is a truth about embracing mortality.  It is the  Truth himself who oddly says, “If you care about saving your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it.”   Every instinct in us wants to save our lives, beginning with our bodies and spreading out to everything material that props them up.  We love our things, our systems, our habits, our idols, our money, our pedigrees, all that stuff.  And, ironically, not always but often, much of that stuff comes between ourselves and our plain old bodies, our natural naked vulnerability.  We have a hard time even believing that we would ever be safe, let alone whole, if we once stopped worrying about it all.  We’ll make a thousand excuses to hold on to what we’ve got.  We’ll do our best to fend off change, mistaking change as life-threatening.  And the irony is that death is defanged the moment we begin to embrace the inevitability of death.  That’s not the moment when we know we are on our way out of this life, but the moment when we can behold our own bodies and love them the way God loves them.  St. Bernard of Clairvaux once said that the highest form of love was not the love of God for God’s sake, but the love of self for God’s sake.

That’s where new life is born.  And it does not stop where it starts. When we begin to love our bodies, our senses, without which the knowledge of God is impossible, we begin loving the things and people around us as we love ourselves.  Start practicing that kind of love and you’ll find that it’s a lot more fun than arguing, fussing, and fighting.  Begin loving profligately rather than measuring love out cautiously and you’ll find yourself laughing more than controlling.  Gradually shed your fixations and get playful and you’ll see how right Jesus was when he said that unless you become as a little child, you’ll just miss the boat to the kingdom.

III

Here’s the secret, and it is a pretty well kept one.  There is a difference between making a pact with death and embracing death.  On the one hand, making a pact with death is to resign oneself to the ways of death, most of which are pretty good at masking as life-sustaining, like that list of things we desperately want to cling to.  On the other hand, embracing death is facing into the wind, stepping out into space trusting that there’s a Love strong enough to hold us close and never let us go. 

You can’t be the Body of Christ without embracing death.  You can’t be the Body of Christ and opt out of facing the cross.  And that means more than persevering through suffering, though that might be in the cards.  It means affirming the physical, your own bodily life.  It means you let go of the fantasy that life is in the past.

What this troubled world needs is a community that doesn’t just recite a creed about the resurrection, but one willing to risk living the resurrection.  Show them by your life how to have a little more, or a lot more, Eros, and less strife. Form or reform communities where dreamers, mystics, poets, singers, artists, political idealists, social workers, healers, psychoanalysts, theologians, philosophers, writers say no to dead polemics and yes to reimagining a world living with its bodily senses wide open.[3]  Teach others how to live soulful lives the way you tend to your garden and the way you prepare and serve fabulous meals.  Look for opportunities to love and serve those hard to serve and harder to love.  And, in Norman Brown’s words, a little consciousness might help: “a little more self-knowledge, humility, humanity, and Eros.”[4]

And every time you stand on a gray day before some apparently dead end, listen carefully for a Voice that will shake your life like thunder.  It’s the old incantation fixed from all eternity by him whose Body is one with yours:  “I am resurrection.” 

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2017

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[1] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death:  The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History  (Middletown, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1959), pp. 308-9. Alterations mine.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, vol. 2 in The Chronicles of Narnia (New York:  HarperCollins (Harper Trophy), 1950, 1978), pp. 150-164.

[3] Brown, p. 322.

[4] Ibid.

All That Way

Christmas, 2015

T

he voice of the wise man speaking in T. S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” says,

…set down

This set down

This:  were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?...

            Christmas is about the hardest time of year to preach the gospel.  You’d think it would be about the easiest.  But nearly everyone comes to church pretty much knowing a story.  Each of us imagines that the story that we know is indeed the Christmas story.  And why not?  There it is, all over the place:  on greeting cards and magazine covers; in commercials and on television; in carols blaring at us in shopping malls and in lovely concert settings with choruses singing “O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.” To be sure, all of those things have something perhaps to do with the gospel, even in a clumsy way.  But the core of Christmas is well buried beneath the presents under the tree.  Eliot, wise man that he was, knew the mysterious question that lies in the manger all wrapped up in its own swaddling clothes:  birth or death?  Which is it that we celebrate?

            About the last thing on anyone’s Christmas wish list is to come to a Christmas Eve midnight mass to hear a sermon about death.  I once got myself roundly chastised by an appalled parishioner, a mother of young adult daughters, one of whom came to church on Christmas and of all things found herself in tears at a true story I told about a Santa Claus in a children’s cancer ward who stayed with a little boy during his last hours, fulfilling the kid’s wishes while inadvertently incarnating the very Presence of Jesus, which is what I thought Christmas might be about.  Christmas, she scolded, was not the time for social action sermons, least of all those that make us cry.  This is the season of joy, or unbridled merriment, of jingling bells and spicy smells and poinsettias all in a row.  And I don’t want to spoil that for you, I really don’t.  But this might be my last crack at actually saying something truthful about Christmas before I leave parish ministry after 44 years, and I hope you’ll cut me a little homiletical slack to depart ever so slightly from the conventional romantic, if not jolly, script.

            The minute Jesus was conceived, he became subject to everything that any human being has both to enjoy and to contend with simply by being a body in this world.  I have no way of knowing what Mary thought about her little infant.  I imagine she was, like most young mothers of firstborn children, maybe nervous about nursing, concerned that there be enough dry swaddling clothes, perhaps wondering about the economics of a third stomach to feed in the months and years to come.  I suspect she was not as prone as some modern parents might be to look on this tiny being, squalling in the manger, all red from the birth canal, and to compliment herself on having such a fine baby, who just might one day become President.  Living as she did in an age where children rarely survived the first few years of life, it might have passed her mind that this baby was indeed mortal, and subject to death.  She might even have prayed that he be spared early death.  There was no getting around it:  to be born was to die.  And that still is the case.  Being divine, if that is what you want to call it, was no insurance whatsoever that your mortal body was anything but mortal. 

Somebody was to jeer at him a few decades later, jeer at him pinned to his rude cross:  “If you are the Messiah, come down from the cross.”  Skip out on death.  Prove that gods and saviors don’t have to die.  And he wouldn’t of course.  He couldn’t.  He had made a pact by that time that mortal he was and mortal he would be, and thus would have to do what mortals least want to but must do eventually:  face mortality.  Die.   That is the lynchpin of this whole project of incarnation.  It is about nothing less than embracing mortality.  One of the oldest Christian hymns we have goes like this: 

            though he was in the form of God,

            he did not regard equality with God

            as something to be grasped,

but emptied himself,

            taking the form of a slave,

            being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form,

            he humbled himself

            and became obedient to the point of death—

            even death on a cross.[1]

Ironically the Church has a piece of good news here, but in my experience we rarely hear it and even more rarely believe it.  The good news is that it is a fine thing to be mortal.  It is a very wonderful thing to be a body.  Millions, billions of years have gone into the evolving human frame; and for all their aches and pains and vicissitudes, these bodies are not junk to be jettisoned on the last day, but temples of the Spirit that indwelt Jesus, warehouses of creativity, bearers of the resurrection life, the flesh that is transformed by the divine life who gives himself to us to be quite literally ingested as bread and wine.  And we get to enjoy many of the fruits and sweets of bodily life not exactly without charge, but generally without having to pay anything like what our senses, for example, are truly worth.  The kicker is that none of this means what it could mean until we fully embrace it.  And fully to embrace bodily life means that you have to get over being afraid of dying. 

            Now you think, I’m sure, that I am talking about fear of physical death.  To some extent I am.  But that is only a secondary fear, subordinate to other, more formidable, fears.  Humans are hard-wired for connection, and the truth is that nothing scares us quite so much as the prospect of being disconnected or unconnected from others, especially those on whom we are physically or emotionally dependent in some way.  And so we invest huge amounts of energy in trying to be lovable, trying to be accepted, trying to be approved, even when some of our behavior sabotages us.  We carry around loads of shame—shame that turns into cold fear that we’ll somehow be at the end of our tether some day and no one will notice or care.  Beside that, death is hardly anything to fear at all.  The dying that we most have to do is letting go—getting out of the way.  Or, to put it in the vocabulary that Jesus himself used, we can choose “to become as little children,” honest, direct, simple, playful, receptive, trusting.  That kind of outlook does not happen automatically.  Even little children sometimes have to learn to let go.  Much more so do adolescents who generally play to audiences that they hope will accept and not ostracize them.  Even more so do adults who continue to believe that our true measure is what we earn, accomplish, do, rather than how vulnerable—open—we are willing to be. 

            It is exactly at this point where Eliot’s mage’s question is most poignant—and helpful.  “Were we led all that way for birth or death?”  He goes on to say that he had seen birth and death and had thought they were very different.  This birth, though, the birth of Christ, was hard and bitter agony for him and his companions, like Death, their death.  So they returned, those wise men did, to their old kingdoms.  But no longer could they go about life quite so easily as they once had.  And that is the heart of why the Birth of Christ feels so much like Death to anyone who gets it.  All the old stuff that used to mean so much just doesn’t work so well any more.  The old dispensation, the old literalism, the old cop-outs, the refusals to give oneself over to loving passionately beginning with one’s body itself, the self-protection programs designed to make us look good under scrutiny:  all those things are like so many little household gods that are supposed to work like charms—crystals and talismans, and also orthodox ideas and sacred formulas—none of it matters once you’ve actually laid eyes on Being itself lying in a manger ready to become food at any instant.  Somewhat like the raised Lazarus in Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, once you have been dead and raised by Christ, living in the old world with those who don’t get it pushes one into feeling, well, dead to all that is untrue, and alive to all that is true.  And the worst part about it is there is no way to explain it to those who insist on a rational, predictable formula that will work for everyone the same way.  Norman O. Brown wrote in Love’s Body that incarnation is a good bit like reincarnation.[2]  It is not just Christ who is born.  It is we who are born all over again once his life touches ours.  And it is that being born all over again that feels so much like Death, because that is exactly what it is.

            If any of this frustrates the hell out of you, well, just say goodbye to the hell and let it go. There is simply no way to work this stuff out in your head so that you can come to a place of believing it and then get about the business of living it out.  It doesn’t work that way, because, you may have noticed, life itself does not work that way.  You enter life the way Jesus did, kicking, puking, muling, screaming.  Much later you start figuring out what your life is all about.  Same thing is true for the New Life that you and Eliot’s Wise Man begin when you encounter Christ’s New Birth.  You are changed.  All you can do is laisser les bons temps rouler, as they say in New Orleans.  “Let the good times roll.” 

Live!  James Broughton, poet of Big Joy, who, in my opinion grasped the dazzling beauty of the incarnation and was overjoyed with it as much as any priest or prophet, wrote in his poem, “Song of the Godbody,”

I engender all the women of men

I engender the men of all women

I love you in every man’s body

I live you in every man’s lover

Trust that I know my own business

Cherish your fact and your fettle

Respect your perpetual motion

Relish your frisky divinity

You are my ripening godling

You are my fidgety angel

You are my immortal shenanigan

You are my eroding monument

I am ever your lifelong bodyguard

I am always your marathon dancer

Let your feet itch with my glory

Dance all the way to your death[3]

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2015

           

           

           

           

           

           

           

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[1] Philippians 2:6-8.

[2] Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1966), pp. 201-202.

[3] “Song of the Godbody,” in “Mysteries of the Godbody,” Ecstasies:  Poems 1975-1983 (Mill Valley, CA:  Syzygy Press, 1983),  pp. 58-59.