Maturity lies in accepting the truth - and then making the most of every moment of sensation so that our response is as deep and wholehearted as may be. 'This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well which thou must leave ere long', as Shakespeare has it at the end of one of his most memorable sonnets (no.73).
Yet here comes the Easter gospel, apparently determined to upset this stoical maturity and to promise us just that eternal life we are urged to leave behind as a childish fantasy. Death will be 'overcome', 'swallowed up in victory'. (I Cor 15.54) Is the Christian gospel just a version of that popular but problematic passage sometimes read at funerals, beginning 'Death is nothing at all' and talking of it as just 'slipping into the next room'?
That's not quite the tone of what St Paul or any of the other New Testament writers is saying - nor of some of the ancient hymns and prayers of the Church in this season ...
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Easter for grownups ...
... courtesy of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury: here's his sermon for Easter Day. On facing the inevitability of death:
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2 comments:
Sorry. I couldn't resist a quote from The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/daddy_put_in_bye_bye_box
After weeks of being sleepy all the time and never finishing his din-din at night, area daddy Howard Lewis was put in a bye-bye box early Monday morning so that he could go on a vacation with the birds and clouds in the sky.
"I love my daddy. He's the best," said Ryan Lewis, 5, after watching the box get dropped inside a cool underground fort full of dirt and sand.
BTW - Taking what things seriously?
Yeah, that Onion article is pretty brutal. I prefer their one-line (or even three word) items --- on the less-is-more theory --- but there is a certain purity to articles like this which stick a knife in, twist it, and then twist it again, and again, and ...
BTW - Taking what things seriously?
Well, my first post tried to answer that at one level; the blog's subtitle / topic-list tries to answer it at another. Beyond this, I guess I want to claim that it's intentionally ambiguous.
And if one's going to take things-in-general seriously (too seriously?), the least one can do is have a sense of humour about the fact.
So are you back from your blogging hiatus for good?
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