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[Back to index of April 2007 articles] BEARINGS: By Martin Smith The thing I loved about the physics lab at school was the drama of demonstration. I really got a charge from re-enacting some of the classic scientific experiments, and it all stemmed from the very first lesson I had as a child. Mr. Ibbotson, remarkable for his bad teeth and worse buzz-cut, started us off by tackling the subject of magnetism. He casually placed a fat bar magnet down on the table, covered it with a big sheet of paper and then sprinkled iron filings all over. As soon as he started banging his fists on the table – to my amazement and delight – the filings sprang into a pattern rather like the curling fronds of a fern. He explained how the magnetic lines of force had revealed themselves by aligning the filings. But he couldn’t have had any idea of the intense mental pleasure he had stirred in me. I was thrilled that invisible energies could be revealed in this way and I have never forgotten the moment. This is the reason I especially cherish a wonderful line from the Easter sermon in John Updike’s novel, A Month of Sundays, where the priest muses about the resurrection, “Still to this day… the rumor lives that something mitigating has occurred, as if just yesterday, to align, like a magnet passing underneath a paper heaped with filings, the shards of our confusions, our covetousness, our trespasses on the confusions of other, our sleepless terror and walking corruption.” What is said here about the resurrection of Christ is very austere and devoid of hollow triumphalism, but it never fails to move me. The only personal access I actually have to the event of Easter is through its power to pull the scattered bits and pieces of my experience into a pattern, giving it a shape and meaning. I am impotent to impose a shape to my life or to decree what its meaning is. I only receive meaning as a gift, and I feel it as a kind of alignment, for which the effect of the magnet on the filings is a vivid image. In the early church, the resurrection was experienced as a constantly renewed infusion of the hope of immortality. In the middle ages, it was experienced as miraculously renewed assurance of reconciliation with God. Our contemporary predicament is less horror at mortality, or fear of estrangement from God, but much more a sense that life might just be treading water on an ocean of blank meaninglessness. Salvation comes as the experience of meaningfulness. Easter day gives us the key not as a formula to believe but an experience to undergo, an experience of being shaken up and then pulled into meaning by the invisible force of the resurrection passing beneath our lives once again. Our lives feel very scattered. We perform our different roles, we experience different diversions and fulfill a variety of tasks. Inside we feel like a jumble of different selves in the same body. Feeling together, integrated, at one and whole within our own skin, seems like a rare experience and hard to come by. Life is getting more complicated by the week. This is what brings us to Holy Week so needy for hope. If it is true that Christ is risen and is united to us, and that we are now part of him, that we are his body parts, then my life receives the meaningfulness that no other source seems able to give. There is a human being, Jesus Christ, who is now completely whole and real in union with God, and it is that wholeness and reality and meaningfulness that is mine for the asking. My story, odd and fragmentary as it is, gains its dignity and force by being understood and felt as part of Christ’s ongoing life in the world. The cold fear of modern existence is summed up in the verdict, “the center cannot hold.” Perhaps human existence has no ultimate story, and there is no key at all to the mystery of why we are here, or indeed why there is anything. With what coolness and focus the good news of the resurrection penetrates to the heart of that fear. Christ himself is that missing center and key, and the gospel makes no less a claim than this: “In him all things hold together.” (Col. 1:17) I, for one, am not moved in the least by the dilute, pared-down Christologies that many are latching on to. But hearing again that, because of the resurrection, all things hold together in him, I am deeply moved. When on Easter day I sense again that my life of strange bits and pieces holds together in him and is suffused with his meaning, then I am really moved, and feel like that boy again who saw the scattered filings spring from confusion into a beautiful form before his eyes. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C. [Back to index of April 2007 articles]
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