Shape and Substance

Easter morning, before dawn

John 20:1-18

When Night Is Over

An Easter Meditation

How do you know when the night is over and dawn is coming?

John begins his story of the resurrection with these words: “On the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came, early, while it was still dark….”

The Magdalene comes in darkness, in the liminal moments between night and morning, between the old and the new, between Sabbath and the first day of the week. She approaches the tomb. She must choose her moment wisely, lest she violate Sabbath law by embalming the body too early, before the Sabbath is over. I wonder: does she breathe a small, silent prayer for sunrise, for the clarity of legal daylight?

How do you know when the night is over and the new day is dawning?

There is an old Jewish legend about a rabbi who asked his students this question: How do you know when the night of the Sabbath is over and the first day of the week has begun?

It is when you can distinguish between your house and the house of your neighbor, said one student.

No, said another, It is when you can distinguish in the field between a cow and a horse.

Not so, said a third. It is when you can distinguish between the colors of the flowers in the garden.

No, said the rabbi, you are all wrong. All your answers divide the one into the many. But the Holy One, blessed be he, is one, and out of the many makes one. When you can look into the face of the stranger and know that one to be your brother or your sister, when you look into the face of the enemy and see the face of the Holy One, then you will know that the night is over and the new day has begun.

John says that the day of resurrection begins in darkness. Night has fallen on the cross, now relieved of its mournful burden, and gloom has shrouded the whole of the day after—the second day, the day of death and darkness. And now, the Magdalene comes to the tomb to clean and spice the body, preparing the dead for death’s long dark journey. The sun has not risen, the day has not begun. There is no dawn in the east, no ray of light coursing like a mythic chariot across the sky. No trumpets sound, no timpani crash, no choirs sing hallelujahs. There is only darkness… and emptiness.

When she comes to the tomb, the Magdalene sees the stone rolled away, the tomb empty. John says, “She ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.’” Darkness, and emptiness.

Isaac Luria, the great 16^th c. Jewish mystic, taught that creation begins in darkness and emptiness, with an act of divine self-evacuation. Before the beginning, there is only God, and God is Light Without End. But for anything that is not God to be, the Light must make a darkness. God must first make a space into which the not-God can come into being, a place for all that is created and material and enfleshed. And so, Luria taught, the first act of creation is not the divine breath exhaling the first command, Let there be light. It is rather God inhaling, gathering the divine light into God’s self, contracting, as it were, to make an empty place—a place of darkness—where God is not and all else can be. Tzimtzum, Luria called it, a Hebrew word that means “contraction,” a word that evokes a woman in labor, clenched muscles and sweat on the brow and wrenching pain in the belly—the prelude to birth. Tzimtzum isthe mother’s indrawn breath, held tight behind gritted teeth, as she pushes new life into the world. The first act of creation, said Luria, is not when God exhales the first command for light and land and love, but when God inhales into darkness and makes an empty place, where God gives birth to all that life comes to be. Tzimtzum is the womb of creation.

The Magdalene comes to the tomb, thinking it is the place of death and dying, the ending place, from which there is no new beginning. She comes to pay homage to the victory of death, the dark victory death always wins. She expects to find a place full of death.

But she finds instead the empty place, the place of nothing, the place where there is no longer death but where there is not yet life. It is the liminal space that is no longer darkness and not yet dawn, no longer despair and not yet hope.  The empty tomb is where all that was has died and all that will be is has yet to come to birth. It is the habitation of the Possible. The empty tomb is the empty womb, where God contracts, and a new creation holds its breath, waiting for a world to be born.

She sees, but the Magdalene does not understand. Neither does Simon Peter understand, nor the unnamed beloved. They see the grave clothes, the head wrappings—they even “believe,” as John says—but they do not understand the meaning of this moment. I suppose the same is true for us, standing here in this liminal darkness, having wept the bitter tears of death only to see the place of death emptied of its power. We see. We believe, in whatever ways we can. But believing does not always make room for understanding.

The Magdalene does not understand, maybe does not even believe, but she stays, standing there in the doorway of emptiness, weeping, peering into the darkness of a now-dead past, unable to conceive of the future about to be born. And then, says John, she sees…

…The gardener, or the one who, in the dim light of the not-yet-dawn seems to be the gardener. He is a stranger. She sees him and begs his help, one stranger reaching out to another in the dark night of the soul, yearning for connection, for relationship, for hope. And out of the darkness he speaks to her, exhaling her name: Mary. Hearing the sound of her name, breathed in love, the sound that has made her hold her breath from dusty days on Galilean roads to the death-scarred agony of the place of the skull… hearing that sound she understands: God has exhaled. God has given birth to a new creation. “Rabbouni!” she cries, and the stranger is stranger no more. She looks into his face and sees there the very face of God. Night is over, and dawn has come.

Here is a poem by Mary Karr, entitled “Descending Theology: The Resurrection”:

From the far star points of his pinned extremities, 
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink— 
till the hung flesh was empty. 
Lonely in that void even for pain, 
he missed his splintered feet, 
the human stare buried in his face. 
He ached for two hands made of meat 
he could reach to the end of. 
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist 
of his heart began to bang 
on the stiff chest’s door, and breath spilled 
back into that battered shape. Now 

it’s your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water 
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

—Mary Karr, Sinners Welcome, Harper Collins, 2006.

It’s your limbs he comes to fill. It’s your birth swept out of the dark womb of death and awash in the shattering amniotic fluid of new life. It’s your life he comes to fill, delivered new-born and squalling into a brand-new world. It’s your baptism, remembered, well-watered, renewed, “rivering every way.” This is the birthday of the new creation. Christ is risen, and we will see his face in the gardeners of the morning. God has exhaled. The night is over. Look, the dawn is coming.

20 April 2025

t’s Holy Saturday, the Day Between, the day after the worst has happened and the day before it is possible to expect the best. It is a day we Prostestants don’t know what to do with, and so we mostly ignore it.

That’s a mistake, I think. There is much this day of darkness and hopelessness, of loss and dead ends would teach us—about the limits on human pride and arrogance, the failure of human self-aggrandizement, and the fact that hopelessness may well be the purest form of hope.

Here is a poem, written a few years ago, that I used in my Paschal Vigil collection, The Hole in the Heart of God (Resource Publications, 2020). It is my humble suggestion that death may well have something to teach us who cling so fiercely to life.

The Second Day

Do not yet roll the stone away
nor hurry toward tomorrow’s dawn;
let us dwell in death today.

Other voices have their say
outside this sabbatic tomb.
Do not yet roll the stone away

nor come to gloat, embalm, or pray,
lament, or raise the victor’s song—
no, let us dwell in death today.

Build no castles made of clay,
draw up no plans for sacred rooms.
Do not yet roll the stone away

and prematurely birth the day
when knowledge preens and error looms.
Let us dwell in death today:

the Possible in its unknown way 
will use the dark to make us strong.
Do not yet roll the stone away,
but let us dwell in death today. 

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. Here is a hymn I wrote for Advent/Holy Week/ Triduum that seeks to see the entire sweep of the gospel narrative under the rubric of silence. The tune is NOËL NOUVELET, a French melody familiar to most of us either the Christmas Carol, “SIng We Now of Christmas” or as an Easter hymn, “Now the Green Blade Rises.” I would recommend using a slower tempo than either of those settings if you choose to sing the hymn below.

You can see the entire text without the framing technical material if you click the priner icon in the upper right corner. You have my permission to print and use this hymn if you so desire.

All the best,

Paul

Rapture

… 	Rapture joins the world
and irony divides, and unaware of either
the osprey desperately undresses every bone
and then unbuttons both the eyes.
—Jennifer Grotz, “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon”

I don’t believe in the Rapture, but if I did,
(What does it mean to “believe?”) I would require
a Raptor of sufficient size, with fire
behind its eyes and talons furled and hid

biding its time in some aerie high above
the stürm und drang of my petty part
(because such fortunes do not touch its heart
nor curry sympathies that smell like love)

until with pinions spread and hackles splayed
it falls upon me, merciless, with pure
intent to kill and eat and to all else inured,
until with bones denuded, flesh a-flayed

I am at last consumed, transmogrified,
and nothing left that I might call my own
and given to the raptor’s brood to feed
a future’s hunger yet unsatisfied
but fledging, soon to fly from home,
an accidental grace, a holy need.

—Paul Hooker, 2024 (unpublished)

            Whether or not poet Jennifer Grotz intended to inspire such imagery (I suspect not), her poem “Landscape with Osprey and Salmon” landed on my eyes at a moment when I was (and am) struggling with the remnants of my religious life. I am not and have never been a fundamentalist or evangelical Christian; my bent is toward the progressive side of theology. But even that has worn threadbare in recent years, a beloved garment donned too many times without regard to the ultimate intolerance of its seams or the wear patterns in the crotch. Her image of the osprey—a raptor par excellence—“desperately” tearing apart its piscine victim seemed perfectly situated to invite exploration of another view of the metaphysical. It is not, I would caution, intended as a final or conclusive statement, but rather an angle of vision, a clearing seen between the trees while passing above or through them.

            I live in a culture on the verge of drowning in evangelical foolishness, propped up (for the moment) on the waterwings of overinflated individualism. Its adherents think that at the appointed moment some divine avian will swoop down and catch them up, delivering them to heavenly bliss in a realm far above the quotidian struggles they are certain are hampering their joy. I think they have the imagery wrong. I imagine a rapture considerably less comfortable and comforting.

            Mark Jarman, in his poem “Soften the Blow, Imagined God, and Give,” writes: “Still I believe a part of me is bent/to make your grace look like an accident…” What, exactly, is an “accidental grace?” I find myself increasingly inclined to think that everything I might call a “grace” from a “God” who overarches my existence with some benign omniscience is in fact an accident born of the conjugal gathering of place and time and perspective. If I understand Jarman, he is trying to see deeper into the apparently random pattern of “punishment” and “pressure” (his words) in his life, which “might be meant/ to kill me in the end or help me live.”

I wonder if I am coming at it from the opposite direction. I have heard all my life the Pauline predestinarian refrain that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), a dictum that sees grace as anything but accidental. And yet I am increasingly suspicious that we assign far too much benevolent succor to the heart of the Holy. What if the Rapture (to the extent that such a metaphor can be trusted) is not nearly so much about deliverance as dissolution? What if the good toward which all things supposedly work is not a good for us or me or you but some larger aim under which all other more proximate goods are subsumed and in which they are finally consumed? What if the need served by some purported eschatological denouement is not any need of ours, but a need felt deep within the Holy itself? What, to be less prolix, if it is finally not about us at all?

            A word about the prosody of this poem. Those who know the structure of the sonnet will immediately recognize that this is a stanza too long to fit the standard Italian sonnet form, and that the rhyme scheme departs from the norm. The sonnet, for centuries a fixed form in either English (Shakespearean) or Italian (Petrarchan) modes, is lately coming in for some renovation. Rhyme schemes are being abandoned, rhythmic patterns overloaded. My reconstruction here is a bit more modest. I’m not so much redrawing the blueprint as expanding the house, converting the back porch into a third bedroom by adding a stanza to the octave so that it is no longer truly an octave but a 12-line statement of the theme before turning in the verso to a different way of reading the moment. I do this for the same reason anyone adds on the back of a house: to create new rooms where thoughts only yet aborning might have a place to play.

Maybe it's the sour mood I'm this inauguration day. Maybe it's the nagging presence of the black dog. Maybe it's the cold and cabin fever. But here's a poem I've been pecking at for a while.


A Poor Place for Gods

‘Soon,’ said the crackling voice of the flame, coming from behind him, ‘they will fall. Soon they will fall and the star people will meet the earth people. There will be heroes among them, and men who will slay monsters and bring knowledge, but none of them will be gods. This is a poor place for gods.’
Neil Gaiman,  American Gods, 2001.

This is a poor place for gods.
You wouldn’t know it from the way we pray 
and swear 
and warble praise choruses ad nauseam 
to Something we have never seen or heard 
or known
save in the chancels of our imaginations.
Take a peek at the treasures we lay up 
for ourselves:
small deities pressed in the family Bible
alongside the azalea plucked from the 13th hole
at Augusta National,
demigods riding dolphins in the surf 
as we watch from our beachfront condos,
centaurs chatting 
over stale-brewed coffee, long gone cold,
at last week’s Life Group Meeting.

This is a poor place for gods. 
Americans don’t believe in gods 
(unless they come down to us on golden escalators).
We believe in
in fanciful yesterdays and fantastical tomorrows 
(though not in workaday todays).
In border security and security systems. 
In LifeLibertyandthePursuitofHappiness
(though not if Happiness runs too fast). 
In video porn. The NFL. And QAnon. 
In Somebody Else’s Fault.

This is a poor place for gods.
Gods demand sacrifice and obedience,
two skills 
we never managed to acquire
except on battlefields and in delivery rooms,
and then 
only in service of the proximate.
Never the Ultimate. We dare not contemplate 
the Ultimate.
That would mean there is a limit
to what we can manufacture, take by conquest, 
or simply buy 
even if the dollar is losing ground to the yen. 
Americans are our own Divinities.

This is a poor place for Gods.
Still there is, famously, a bustle in the hedgerow
a stirring wind, 
a shaft of sunlight, a never-ebbing tide,
the faintest rumble from just over the hill.
One would think 
that Something is afoot here. Still,
there must be (mustn’t there?) a meteorological explanation
for the meteor
slashing the night sky like a saber 
crashing headlong into the whimpering world
and exploding,
eviscerating our exceptionalism
and making way for another Way of Life.

We worry about sea level rise. But really,
weren’t we promised fire not flood next time? 

[I hesitate to cite Gaiman, given the recent allegations of sexual assaults against multiple women (see Lila Shapiro, “There Is No Safe Word,” in New York Magazine, January 2025). That said, Gaiman’s alleged reprehensible behavior seems to me to illumine the ironic truth lurking in his phrase: “none of them”—and none of us—“will be gods.”]

20 C+M+B 25

The Magi Recall The Star
Matthew 2

Epiphanies always have consequences.
Apocalypses always require assembly.

A star. A distant pin-prick—maybe
	light from an ancient orb gone supernova?—
portends the end of something, and the birth
	of something new. But what? Or who?
Why should this punctuation in the dark
	become the instigation for the journey?

The journey. Set your foot to paths uncharted
	impelled to some uncertain destination,
ask inconvenient questions of those whose power
	disinclines them to acknowledge answers,
barter time from old, bloodthirsty fools
	who sit on queasy thrones and dread the star. 

The star. It moves, yet night to night the same 
	point of light in the aching windswept darkness,
the cold black emptiness of space.
	Like you, it makes its own strange journey,
setting sail to catch the breath of God.
	It finds its destination in those eyes.

Those eyes. The child sees you, and calls your name—
	a name you had forgot, or did not know
you knew, a name whose riches, undeserved,
	will cost you everything you have, and more.
He looks at you, and in his eyes you see
	the rising and the setting of your hopes.

Your hopes. Leave them behind, these selves you carry 
	the journey long, like treasures of the heart;
return, then, empty-handed, knowing nothing
	but the light behind the dark eyes of the child.
Be haunted by that light. It does not fade
	even as the star returns to darkness. 

Darkness falls. You are night-blind, and groping. 
Go home a different way, if home at all. 

+

	Encounters with the Holy change everything. They reverse the polarities of existence. They cost you everything, and even everything is not enough. They drain you of yourself and replace you with another Self you did not ask for and do not understand. They require you to die in order to live. “Yet not I who live,” writes Paul, who met the Holy on the Damascus Road, “but Christ who lives in me.” 
	Jesus, says Mark, met a demon-possessed man near Gerasa in the Transjordan. When Jesus exorcised them, the demons “begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country.” Why do demons want to stay home? Do they crave domesticity, fear the uncertainty of wandering and wildness?  Are the comforts of home antithetical to the coming of the Holy? And is that why those possessed by the Holy so often find themselves pilgrims and wanderers? From Cain to Abraham to the magi to Jesus to the desert fathers, they fling themselves out into ferocious landscapes to seek the Holy in places where life and death are inconsequential matters. Does the Holy drain away who you are so Something or Someone else can fill you instead, possess and mold you, make of you something you never intended to be? Does “home” cease to be home anymore, so that going home is but another journey into a far country? 1


1 This poem of mine, along with the accompanying commentary printed here, first appeared in Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Fall 2022. I subsequently included it, in edited form, in my volume, The Longing: Poems (Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024).