I hit home runs without stepping up to the plate, and I bake delectable desserts with the intensity of my gaze. England’s top rugby teams scout me for my sense of smell and rugged handsomeness, David Tennant styles his hair to imitate mine, and Harry Potter is a loose biography of my life so far.
I have been in a morgue.
I am both an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Schrödinger’s Cat is actually dead, thanks to me.
I consume slightly more water per week than the average human.
I have traveled the world, supped with kings, pirated cargo ships, faxed documents, discovered elements, and dressed myself in the morning. I built Rome in a day. I was the last person to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the first to eat Wonder Bread.
"Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance."
The fat cat on the mat may seem to dream of nice mice that suffice for him, or cream; but he free, maybe, walks in thought unbowed, proud, where loud roared and fought his kin, lean and slim, or deep in den in the East feasted on beasts and tender men. The giant lion with iron claw in paw, and huge ruthless tooth in gory jaw; the pard dark-starred, fleet upon feet, that oft soft from aloft leaps upon his meat where woods loom in gloom — far now they be, fierce and free, and tamed is he; but fat cat on the mat kept as a pet he does not forget.
