Fr Henry Charles

“Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east…as his reign rolls.”
The Wreck of the Deutschland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

“Let him easter in us....” Hopkins’ resurrection prayer captures the sense of transformation, re-dedication and re-centering that Christians experience when they enter fully into the Easter mysteries. To be sure, at this time renewal is all around us. In the northern hemisphere, the earth is in full bloom.

From magnolia to cherry blossom, from crocus to daffodil, nature is a riot of life. “I see his face in every flower,” wrote Joseph Mary Plunkett.

In every poui, too, pink and yellow. To Christians, the earth itself is God’s Easter blessing and more. It is a sacrament pointing to our new creation in Christ.

But can we really speak of new creation? Pope Benedict XVI commented in his Easter message on the continuing slaughter in Iraq. In that war we keep hearing only of military deaths, Americans or members of the allied forces.

Only these appear to be counted and made to seem significant. But how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have perished since Saddam was dethroned? There’s also the genocide in Darfur, that seems to have no end. A new creation? 

Such language often seems callous and unreal. But Easter is not an automatic event, something born in us without pain. Easter comes only when Christ triumphs over death in us. “Let him easter in us…” We have to accept the totality of the cost.

Lent has always seemed to me unnaturally long. It has only gotten shorter because, I imagine, I have gotten older. Nowadays, it just flies. Lent is a time when we learn Luther’s lesson: we cannot by ourselves throw off the weight of the past. It’s too much. Reptiles may shed their skins, but not we.

The past — our past, the past of our choices, the past our sufferings inflicted on us, the past of our frustrated and unrealised desires, the past of our achievements overly esteemed and our injuries unforgiven — the past is the burden we always become to ourselves.

In the Easter mystery, Christ is the one who lifts the weight of the past from us. This stone is rolled away, that we may come forth – again – in freedom for a different future. Christ is the “crimson-cresseted east” who rises in our lives.

In this time of the year, the earth is renewed, but in Christ we are transformed. It is not the same old life that wells up in us. We are God’s new creation, remade by Christ from within. The life we must now lead is therefore totally new, radically different from the life we have lived before.

“Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,” St Paul writes, “compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience, forbearing with one another...forgiving each other.... And above all these, put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony....”

How radically different this creation is from the old, ruled by neglect, omission, sin and self-rule. But it is so, not because we have made it or willed it, but because Christ lives in us. As we live and breathe, he has become, in Hopkins’ difficult words, “our hearts’ charity hearth’s fire…”

For Hopkins, priest as well as poet, it was not enough at Easter that each of us be renewed individually or that the Church alone be sanctified. He was a patriot to his core.

The light of glory had to penetrate the land and the people he loved. “Oh, onward English souls,” he exclaimed; he relished the light of Christ brightening “rare-dear Britain.”

Easter transformation is thus not reserved for the baptismal bath or the sanctuary. It is also meant for the world to which we too belong, for “rare-dear” Trinidad and Tobago, our own “magical space,” as I heard David Rudder recently describe it. At a time when so much death surrounds us, the light of Easter is needed to penetrate our country and our culture.

Hopkins, the man, knew all about this. He was plagued by frailty and weakness, not just physical but psychological. At times he would plummet into an abyss of darkness, what he called “cliffs of fall.” The steep dropping-off places of the soul seemed worse than any physical distress. This was the crucible of his own hope, his “eastering”.

The term itself is drawn from the nautical world. It means steering a craft toward the east, into the light. Lent may be viewed like that, a progressive heading toward the light, trying to rid ourselves of the darkness, the doubts and burdens of living. By rising with Christ, and letting him easter in us, we turn our lives to the east, where God’s light always goes before us.

When Hopkins wrote his poem, he was dealing with a disaster that completely baffled him. He dedicated his poem to the memory of five Franciscan nuns drowned between midnight and morning of December 8, 1875, when the German ship Deutschland went down. Before such occurrences, as before much else, Hopkins knew that God was beyond our grasp.

Even so, he prays that Christ will easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us. This is exactly the hope of Easter.