The Easter Rising

Christ will be the green leaves

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

What is this force, this force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that through my bones drives a weariness more often now, that through the rocks drives the water? Is it time, merely? Encroaching death? But then, what force spawned life so that death could end it, what force calls the flowers from the warming Earth each spring?

Everything rises today.

Life as you grow older feels like a series of questions without answers, and you know there can never be answers this side of the tomb. Existence is an apophatic theology. It becomes the question you never thought to ask as a child, because as a child everything is alive, everything immediate, everything now, nothing lasting.

What is this place, and who am I?

The wintry fever approaches steadily, and you will never have an answer, not really.

Nobody has seen the Father but the Son.

Today is Easter Sunday, the day of the Great Rising. What is the story that Christians are telling about today? That a man rose from a grave? Yes, of course - but more than that, much more than that. Other people have risen from graves, at least if you want to believe the Christians - and not just the Christians. People restored to life: it’s hardly common, but neither is it unique, it seems.

No, it is not simply the rising, it is who - or what - is risen.

The April weather in the Irish west was astonishing this year, for a while. Two whole weeks of unseasonal heat brought the land out from the finalities of winter. True, the frost still came at night, but by the afternoon I was digging the garden with my top off. Everything on our land awoke. Our field, in which we planted 800 trees nearly a decade ago and which is now becoming a forest, hums with insects heading for the poplar blossom and the whitethorn. The pond is full of frogspawn and the soil is warming. Crocus and cowslip defeat the couch grass in their quest for the light. Sparrows gather moss and straw, the hazel poles are budding. We have set up a beehive in a grove by the hedgerow, and now we wait in the hope that some worker will seek it out and beckon the swarm to follow.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.

As the land has sung itself back into life, it is as if I have awakened too from some numbness that overcame me. It was not simply the numbness of winter. For a while, I have felt closed off from my land; somehow an alien as I walked through it. Maybe I was reading too much theology. I always knew that the Holy Spirit sung itself through bud and blossom, but knowledge is not experience. Back in the day, when I was a pagan and a pantheist, I felt the force of nature as an overwhelming power within me. Then I became a Christian, and something retreated.

What was it?