Bright wings
Wednesday March 30, 2005
Darkest before dawn
My mother had a saying for every situation. Sometimes, when I felt that life had dealt me a lousy hand, she’d say, “It’s always darkest just before the dawn.”
We all know that.
It’s common wisdom in Alcoholics Anonymous and other similar organizations—addicts have to hit rock bottom before they can start recovering.
We plant seeds in our fields and gardens. If those seeds remain dry kernels, nothing will grow. They have to die, as seeds, before they can send up sprouts.
And every Easter, Christians around the world affirm that Jesus had to die, really and truly die on the cross, before he could be resurrected.
My scientific mind keeps asking for a rational explanation of the Resurrection – something that will make sense of the image imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, of Mary Magdalene’s encounter in the garden, and of Paul’s seizure on the road to Damascus.
Some people don’t need rational explanations. The biblical witness is enough evidence for them.
It’s not enough for me. I want to have it corroborated.
Emotional evidence
But I also realize that I will never get that kind of evidence. Because whatever happened that Easter morning, resurrections are not primarily physical events. They’re emotional.
The people who experienced that Resurrection clearly weren’t expecting what they got. Mary didn’t recognize the man she loved deeply, passionately. The disciples didn’t know what to make of a being who could pass through doors, who could materialize on a road and disappear in the middle of a meal.
Even Doubting Thomas suspended his disbelief without actually needing to touch a wounded body.
Resurrection defy empirical experience. They’re best explained not by facts, but by poetry.
Back in the 1800s, a monk named Gerard Manly Hopkins committed to paper some glorious lines. In a world “bleared, smeared with toil,” he wrote, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out,” he visualized, “like shining from shook foil.”
Despite the smoky pall spread by England’s coal-burning industries, Hopkins imagined the sun coming up:
morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
because the Holy Ghost over the bent
world broods, with warm breast and with, ah! bright wings.
Scientifically, Kipling makes no sense. Mandalay is in Burma. It looks west, not east. Across the bay is India, not China. China, in fact, is several countries away, on the far side of a range of mountains twice the height of the Canadian Rockies.
But Kipling never let a minor detail of geography interfere with a good metaphor. He knew that only after a really dark night can dawn come bursting up like thunder. And only after the dark night of the soul can new life emerge with “ah! bright wings.”
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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