Easter brings together such extremes of emotion, aspiration and human longing. Good Friday carries within it the fundamental contradictions at the heart of all reality - hate and love, violence and peace, cruelty and compassion, betrayal and trust, torture and tenderness, death and life, defeat and triumph. The cry of God-forsakeness, the deliberate resignation of entrusted commitment to the Father, and the quiet surrender of the "it is finished", are only some of the lights and shadows cast by the suffering of God in the suffering of Jesus. Van Gogh's Pieta is an astonishing juxtaposition of light and shadow, blue and yellow, a mother's grief at the broken body that is flesh of her flesh, and that bright yellow sky behind her - dusk or dawn? And the blue of her robe folded in shadow and light brings the eternal and the mortal together, hands outstretched neither grasping nor beseeching, but embracing and and supporting. From his desperate time of illness, this painting emerged as the embodiment of all that van Gogh felt within himself, of desolation, isolation and alienation from the world around him, which could not understand and did not listen.
Rab Butler, the great academic of a past generation, attended the Messiah as it was performed around Easter in Oxford in the 1940's. He was a respectful agnostic and as intellectually innoculated against sentiment and unexamined piety as could ever be met. As the performance moved towards the Isaiah passages about the suffering servant, he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and muttered to his friend, "Damned sad story that". Like the rest of us, he wished it could be otherwise, and hoped that such a story might help make the world otherwise. It's that longing for things to be better, and then to be well, and then for all things to be well, that Kathleen Raine recognised, and refused to countenance as valid good news for struggling human beings. In her series of poems, The Old Story, the third poem articulates both her own longing and the constraints of reality.
Reader I would tell
If I knew
That all shall be well.
All darkness gone,
All lives made whole,
Hearts healed that were broken.
Would tell of joy reborn,
Of wrongs made right,
Of harms forgiven,
But do not know,
how what is done
Can ever not be,
Though love would wish it to.
......
It is that love that wishes, that yearns and works, that suffers and sighs, that gives and struggles, that will not give in - it is that love that was crucified, killed and buried. Which sounds final, and is. Except that after Holy Saturday and the curtains come down, there is God's encore....Because love would wish it so.
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