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Sunday – Easter
After my eldest son died, one of my colleagues—a national authority on colonial Puritan poetry—quietly assured me that love was more powerful than death. Although poets have been telling me this all my life, it resonated particularly powerfully at that moment. The two poems I have chosen for today’s Easter post make this their focus.
First, there’s Scott Cairns’s “The Death of Death,” the title of which reminds one of John Donne’s defiant declaration, “Death, thou shalt die!” Cairns uses fertility image to accentuate his point:
The Death of Death
By Scott Cairns
Put fear aside.
Now that He has entered
into death on our behalf,
all who live
no longer die
as men once died.
That ephemeral occasion
has met its utter end.
As seeds cast to the earth, we
will not perish, but like those seeds
shall rise again—the shroud
of death itself having been
burst to tatters
by love’s immensity.
Powerful though we know love to be, however, thinking of it as triumphant still requires us to engage in an act of the imagination that takes us beyond what Brazilian philosopher and poet Rubem Alves calls “the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress.”
“Reality is is more complex than realism wants us to believe,” Alves writes, adding, “the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual.”
Alves has one sentiment that shows up also in Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” Berry writes,
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
For his part Rebem writes,
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them
will never eat them.
Think of this as radical hope and the foundation of faith:
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
Here’s the poem:
What is Hope?
By Rubem Alves
What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real than it looks.
It is a hunch
that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.
It is a suspicion
that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible
are not determined by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection….
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope
produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering
creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness….
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them
will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act
be dissolved in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love
is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies
the seed of their highest hope.
