Holy Saturday

An Excerpt from The GOD Emerging: "A Call for Resurrection"

Having burried God’s old body in the womb of Earth, the poet summons the artists to take back the City from the Salesman and its Beast…

                    ...And then, with heave and hurt
and fire, I raise my head again and shout:
 
“Now onward! To the City!” 

                                                      as, with eyes
seared red, and cracking voice, and trembling frame
unstrung by loss, I thrust my wretched fist
into the sky.

                             …But they just look at me,
confused. And so I shout again. “Come on!
We have a God now for our cause!”

				                                     “But he
is… dead?” says one; another: “Dead—and buried!”

To which I wipe my brow of tears and sweat,
and with the maddened sense demanded now
by this, our age—(or else, the age to come)—
I sneer back from my scaffold balcony 
a tear-stained insolence in helpless hope
and call down, “Dead? The God is dead?—is dead?
Well…what is that to us? Goddamn you all,
you are no ARTISTS! Weathermen, more like— 
Accountants! Scales-and-beams! An artist looks
on graves and sees a tiller’s plot! sees seeds
in all the coffins, sleeping soft and dark 
till harvest-time! What, is your canvas flat?
Then it too must be dead to more dimensions!
Crack brush! cast—hurtle ink into the fire!
for making planes a portal into depth
seems far beyond you! 

                                               “So… the God is dead…
and so is false… and so is worthless, yes?
For such an end unravels all that was,
as Gods who die must never then have lived?
And yet… we’ve known his power! Life or lifeless,
true, false, Something or nothingness: …a sense
that carved the world! His shrines and temples, hymns
and rousing anthems broke our souls in two,
and out of them drew up an ecstasy 
so worthy of a God! His tapestries 
and frescoes, vaults and architraves and beams
and colonnades and porticos called out
our better sense, and made transcendence seem
as immanent as bread. …Sun set upon
the frost, and with its colors overproved 
the theologian’s gloss—all Logic’s proofs
and certainties we long to chain Him with.
Is that dead too? that soul that lives in veins
and goosebumps after head’s soul has expired?
If so: by suicide! If skin, hair, heart
rejoiced regardless of a spirit realm,
and if in thunderheads we saw some throne
and some Elysium—amen! amen
I say to you! Hail, Dome! Hail, Pantheon!
Hail, Oratorio! and hallelujah
to the round glass which plays the halo to
sweet Chartres! Notre Dame! Amen, I say,
to holy Parthenon, and pagan priests
who wooed us with their mumbled prayers. For these
savage the question—true or false, alive
or dead—as nothing makes the world to weep,
and nothing plays the Light, and nothing stirs
creation, in-breaks inspiration, spreads
its majesty upon a feckless world
where nothing moves us, nothing strikes. But all
cry out to nothing, ‘Be our God, and we’ll
be worth you!’ So is Beauty born—and, God!
to be so empty… yet fill up the world!
It maddens definition of our ‘nothing.’
It gives the lie to Truth—makes Paradox
more worthy of our aim and spirit-worship!

 …You know it, too… 

                                         So come: let us not talk
of death. God is not dead… but only sleeping—
sleeping within our hands, which always are
and always have been strong — with Resurrection!”

	So I proclaim, and might have said it then
myself had not another cried: “…He’s mad!—”
“—He is a poet…” offers up a third,
(but leaves ambiguous if that corrects
or just corroborates). Some nod, and some
stand quizzically… and so the painter asks:
“Well, poet… what then should we do?” To which
I turn, and place my hand upon the grave
of God—then… lift my eyes up to the sculpture’s…

 “…Create,” I say, and shrug my shoulders, sighing.
“Create. Invent. Imagine—as we do.
Would you shun Gods of clay and straw
as ‘made,’ and seek a substance higher? Where?
Where would you find it? …Spurn the deities 
we fashion from the earth—scorn sticks and stones
and curse the tailored effigies—expunge
divinities we’d conjure out of loam,
and what is left? …Poor exorcists… How soon
believers in the immaterial
turn atheist! For souls lie in our bones!
and, severed from embodiment, the Ghost
decays—the Temple of the God’s the brain,
and there’s material. There’s loam. There’s clay.
From dust we came, and from it form our lords!—
is that to counterfeit?”

                     			    They look at me,
perplexed… yet in their staying still fuel hopes
I’m having some effect, some force, some sway… 
and so I argue on:

                                     “…Or say we know
the ‘Numinous’—the ‘Word,’ the ‘Logos’… Say
we’ve touched the Real, and spoken to Transcendence—
Are not all scriptures of the Immanent? 
All revelation, in the tongues of men?
Or did you think that the Eternal Power,
spanning the Cosmos like a canopy,
and Ancient Master of this Universe
of galaxies—spoke Latin? Hebrew? Greek?
Spoke Arabic, or English? Would you have
so small a God? to think Him shaped a man
at all? to beard Him out, and leg Him? call
Omniscience ‘king,’ or ‘father’—‘him’ at all?
and think these humblest metaphors spoke more
than connotation? Hah! No, every name
of the Ineffable’s translation: sounds
we mouth to fret the air and signify
profundity. For what is ‘God’ but this:
…the greatest entity a soul can ponder…?
What, if he’s not the summit-thought? the height
and maxima of Good and Beauty? sums
of all superlatives? What? if not that?
The soul stirs in the breast, and wind caresses;
but… how could we express it? How, against
the rapture of the world, and the wild flush
and the dark joy—(existence, overflowing…)—
how, to the vale, can we make known the peak
but in crude noise, transliterating? …How?
How speak? but that we violence language! freeze
fire! bend an alphabet of common words
so out of shape they imitate the odd,
the sacred: making half-known mystery?
Are not all Gods then …poetry? And art,
religions? Idols by our hands, and clay
and straw—and pigment, canvas, symphony?
which try, and try, but only ever hint
at what we cannot say—warping perception
past clay …towards infinity? which stun
the brooding brain with pretty puzzles, till
it sees: reflections of the Greatest Thing
that can but ripple in confusion. There’s
perfection: in the broken glass of Song!
gesturing toward the Best in good, and Truth
in fraud: sweet idols for imagining
the imageless! So, clay and straw will do
as Eucharist, as relic, icon, cross…
All beauty is a specimen of God.
So prays our art…

                                           "And so: create!
Let poets say again, ‘Let there be gods!’
and let them see that they are beautiful!
Let us have myths again, and Jupiters, 
and yes… Jehovahs too…” 
                                                   I raise my hands,
still caked with earth, “God is not dead,” I say,
“Divinity is clay in hand, and we…
are potters of the heart.”

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From The GOD Emerging, a metamodern epic by Brendan Graham Dempsey