Timelessness

The resurrection is upon us. Reflection has led us to old, perpendicular boards where the essence of a power we seek in ourselves and in everything and everyone around us lies in wait for whatever worshipful moment becomes ours. I am an Easter rebel.

I don’t give up things for Lent. I choose to be told what I can do, not what I can’t do, believing that if I fill my moments with all that is possible, there won’t be many linear segments of time in which I will focus on the can’t.

Poets are obsessed with time. T.S. Eliot comes to mind, but really all poets, unlike novelists and those who write nonfiction are constantly within and without the craft of their work attempting to suspend it. A poem only works if it exists in timelessness. I might give up time for Lent within the context of a work of poetry. A poem that fits upon the page is a revelation because it is an entire world scrawled into being, a heterocosm that makes its own rules, then breaks them.
Take the famous “Red Wheel Barrow” poem by William Carlos Williams. Read it and invariably it means something. With a few simple words carved into the niche of universal symbolism, we are drawn to the vignette and we don’t care when that is. The poem happens for us as we read it and it happens all over again for the next person to encounter its simple genius.


So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white
chickens.
No internal punctuation, the poem only works because of the order Williams followed in the placement of his words on the page. Time stops. Fascinating to me is the realization that the chickens just have to be white and there has to be water in the poem–ablution.
The resurrection is where time stops, where the sequential doom of all civilizations comes to an abrupt halt. The resurrection is the point at which I look in the bathroom mirror, turn the lights on bright and see my sin. The resurrection is the point at which I close my eyes and place my pointy finger on a page of the Bible and the words ring out with life-sustaining relevance.The resurrection is the resounding message which I can’t work hard enough to believe. I can’t click off to-do’s on my Lenten sight-seeing tour. I can’t buy enough souvenirs, eat enough crackers or drink enough grape juice to deserve.
I must carefully open the pages and tread within the border of the poem that is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and simply take it all in. So much and beyond so much….everything depends upon that.