The Easter Rising

Christ will be the green leaves

I have barely a month to go before I am due to submit the manuscript of my Book of Wild Saints to my publishers. This, plus the fact that I am still recovering from the severe burnout that hit me over the winter, means I am publishing little original writing here at the moment. This will change when summer comes; in the meantime, I greatly appreciate the support of all of my readers.

Today - Easter Sunday for us Orthodox folk - I am republishing this piece I wrote last year. New subscribers may not have seen it; and perhaps some of you old timers might appreciate it again.

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?

I wondered this, and I concluded that I had misdirected my worship. I had worshipped the trees rather than their creator. I think that this was a category error; still, I missed the feeling it gave me. I missed the sense that the trees were my sisters and the birds my brothers. Those who have never felt this may call it ‘pagan’, as if that meant anything, but they would be wrong. It is not ‘pagan’ to feel, as Adam did, as Eve did, that this place was created to be our home. That we were intended to be at one with it before we broke away and began instead to worship ourselves.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims the work of his hands. Daily they speak, they never become silent.

Something has happened to me this Easter, though; that old feeling has come back. Now I walk through my growing forest and I feel again that green force that I once felt, and I am overjoyed because I missed it. Is it different now? Yes, and no. I feel the land breathe within me and to me, I see that everything here has its own life, I feel the inscape of it all, but now I feel something beyond it too; something that made it, that sings it every hour, though for this force there is no time.

In his hand are all the corners of the earth.

I give thanks for this now, in sun and in rain. It is such a joy to have it back; to have it gifted to me again.

Maybe there were some things I had to learn before I could be trusted again with all of it. I don’t know. Nobody knows, really.

The force: the force that stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind - this force, we Christians believe, is the force that created all things. It is God Himself, it is Christ. This force, we are taught, this force that drives life through all things, itself took human shape once; itself came down to us. This force experienced all of our joys and limitations, all of our potential for evil and stupidity. The force that created us inhabited us, and now all is changed.

This is the force that rises today. Christ is the force that drives life. He is the force that rekindled it when death had claimed it.

It’s hard to grasp this notion sometimes: that the creative force that sung the entire universe into existence walked among us, died and rose again, and in that rising inverted everything: power, love, death. But this is the story. Humans are made from soil and the breath of God. A human is humus, and the same breath we are born from is the wind under the wings of the rook as it glides over my garden.

Life has never been other than a mystery. But we know this. We are taught it, and we feel it if we stand still in sun under trees.

Let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them; let all the trees of the forest sing for joy.

We were made to be gardeners, but where are we now? Building wolves from scratch, flying plastic pop stars into space, mining the hills and the oceans to feed the addicts we have made of our children. There is poison in the waters of the springs on the mountain. We kill whatever does not make us rich and satisfied and comfortable, we mewl for more and spit and strike at those who point to the fouling of our own nests.

Who knows what grows in the hedgerows now? Who knows where the hedgerows have gone?

But everybody knows what the American President said yesterday. Boo to him! Hurray for him!

Everything is wasted now. All the time, all the soil. Don’t look at it. Don’t look at the empty estuaries and the scars where the forests used to be.

Maybe if you don’t look at it, it won’t be real.

The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt.

I feel now like a man who lost a jewel in the grass, but who has unexpectedly, years later, found it again. The jewel is not the same, though. The weather has done something to it. It was buried, and now it has been claimed again from the dark soil. When I hold it up to the light, it shines differently. The colours are other, somehow.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Humans are idiots who ruin everything; but also, we are all we have. And look at what we can do when the force sings within us. When we stop trying to pin and label it, and start singing with it instead. When we stand quietly in a young wood. When the machines we have confused with reality are switched off and left behind. When the peace of the Spirit inhabits our hearts and is poured out again as some great, uncontrollable love.

Today, anything is possible.

There has been death, and there always will be. But there is life too; there is something eternal now. There is a promise. Because of the rising.

We can go home, if we want to.

There is a path laid down.

We can step out into the fields under the sun, we can feel the insects entangled in our hair. We can feel the force of Christ singing in everything He made.

It is still possible to listen; and then, on our knees, to give thanks.

We are not here for long, and yet none of it will ever end.

The great mystery is to be experienced, not explained.

I think you know what I mean. I think we all know it.

Today is the day we can choose to remember.

Yet sometimes when the sun shines through a gap,
These men know God the Father in a tree.
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap,
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.

If you appreciated this piece of writing, please consider a subscription or a one-off donation. It will allow me to keep offering these words for free, and will help those unable to pay. Thank you!

---

The poetry extracts which top and tail this piece of writing are from ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,’ by Dylan Thomas, and ‘The Great Hunger,’ by Patrick Kavanagh.