Easter Day
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 23rd March, 2008
Like Christmas, Easter can bring many memories back for a priest as we remember all the churches we have served and celebrated Holy Week with. This year I have particularly found myself thinking of past people and places in my ministry. The first church I went to as a boy, for instance, where on one Sunday morning the slightly eccentric vicar, after administering communion at the altar, suddenly in full vestments walked down the aisle, out of the door and then we all heard him start up his car and drive off. We sat there a little embarrassed not quite knowing what to do. About five minutes later we heard his car come back, the door slam, he walked up the aisle still in vestments and at the altar said in a loud voice, ”I left the chicken on high – let us pray”. I remember the church I served as a curate, where one day an old man sat at the back of church and I asked if he was ok. “Oh yes”, he said, “very OK” -you see, I am God”. “Right”, I said. “I´ll go and get the vicar”. I told my vicar that God was sitting at the back of the church. “Oh Lord”, he said, “not him again. Keep an eye on him – and for heavens sake look busy!” And then my last church in London where, on hearing that the actor Paul Scofield died 4 days ago, I remembered a memorial service I took at which he read:
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
But what I remember was the way he read the last lines:
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
Schofield read that poem, which we all knew, as if none of us had ever heard it before. We sat there hearing the familiar as if they were totally new, fresh, stirring. I remember thinking how I wish, as a priest, I could do that with the stories entrusted to my telling. How can I, for instance, tell the story of resurrection and you hear it as if never before?
I think that question has been around along time because the gospel writers, and consequent writers, artists, musicians, poets, dancers, have tried to express something of resurrection. But typically it is not the moment of resurrection itself they usually try and depict, but rather the effects of it. It is not the lightbulb, as it were, but everything that is now visible because of the light the bulb is giving out. In the gospel we heard just now, it is still dark and as dawn´s light creeps over the world so we sense some new is being born. The first hearers of the story would have made the connections quickly, here was a man and a woman in a garden: this was a beginning, a genesis.
One way that Eastern Christians have explored resurrection is by icons. Typically most of the icons of resurrection depict Jesus standing on a precarious looking bridge. He stands in the middle, beneath his feet are shattered gates, broken chains and padlocks scattered about, and down in a dark cave you see an ancient Adam and Eve, and Jesus is offering his hands to them and he is lifting them out of the hole they are in, out of their hell. This is resurrection as liberation but also in some icons it looks as if Jesus is not only pulling Adam and Eve up but towards each other. You´ll remember that one of the first things Adam does after the fall is blame Eve and Eve blames the snake. It is as if Jesus liberates them now but also re-introduces them after their blaming match. He dissolves their loneliness by showing us how we are compulsive dividers, compulsive grumblers, and he offers a bridge back to life. Resurrection is here not just a moment of seeing the faithfulness of God´s love that searches us out and won´t give up on us, it is a moment when human beings are reintroduced to each other across the gulfs they have constructed. This is resurrection as defrosting. Now, of course, Adam and Eve stand for wherever in the human story fear and refusal of God began. This is a story about the Adam and Eve in each of us, representing where it was we began to forget God. New life, speaks the icon, is generated by the truth that God never forgot you and now wants you to reconnect again. So, this means if you want to celebrate Easter truly then you might need to go home and phone that person you have grown distant from, you might need to write to the person you had a row with, you may need to say sorry to someone, or tell them you love them, you may need to see where winter has taken over your heart and how you have grown prickly, how unhappiness may be spreading through you. All of us today, and I preach to myself, must be careful that we are not Christian by name and atheist in life. Easter must burst in you. Light must begin to spread – today.
Finally, I said that memories of my past churches have been in mind. Well, in my first church one of my duties was to be the chaplain of a hospice that was in the parish. I spent a lot of time, night and day, there at the age of 24, quickly learning about my limitations. And I came across a charity that I have since been quite involved with, called Music in Hospitals. It is a charity that enables musicians of all types to go into hospices and hospital wards and play live music to the patients – songs from the war in the elderly wards, fun singing in the children´s wards, carols at Christmas, beats and rhythms of all the complete variety of music and song making people alive in places medicine didn´t quite seem to reach. I have two strong memories. First, a young girl in the hospice lying in a coma in the last days and her favourite singer coming in to hold her hand and sing the song she loved most. Her mouth started to sing the words and the smile never left her face. And the other memory, of an elderly lady at the end of her life, a musician, who when asked, wondered if a cello might play near her. A young musician from a music school came and sat next to her bed and played Beethoven sonatas. A musician at the beginning of his life playing to one ending hers, something eternal there between them, bonding them always. For me, that phrase, Music in Hospitals, is a good description of Christ´s resurrection, music playing to us in our incompleteness and hurt, a melody of love reaching our injuries and dependency. Christ stretches out his hands and asks us to join the dance with the eternity of his love. As John Donne prayed, I shall be made thy music.
I would like to end by reading a poem that says this better than me. It is “The Musician” by RS Thomas:
A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.
I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.
So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them God listened.
