100 Days

Today I happend to see the press conference from the White House about the swine flu.
It is so absolutely refreshing to hear people from the administration who speak clearly, use the English language well, seem to know what they are talking about, and are honest about the situations and complexities the face (as far as one can tell: I realise that not everyone is honest all the time, and government officials in general should not be considered honest until proven so. Don't send any responses along that line. I know what you are going to say and in general I agree with u. ;-).
That for me is one of the biggest positives of the last 100 days.
I am loving it.

Literally risen

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.

Seven stanzas at Easter
John Updike