I believe in:
the sun’s fire bursting over the dawn horizon;
the first blooming of flowers in the spring;
the rolling of waves and the ebb and flow of tides;
the transformation and conservation of energy,
and that divine spirit does not die.

I believe in:
victory from two nil down in the dying seconds;
falling yet tracking down the field to win;
the party at the end of the examinations,
and the reprise of a musical theme.

I believe in:
daring last minute rescues;
heart transplants and modern miracle cures;
forgiveness and no end of second chances,
and joy filling the cup that sorrow carves.

And I believe in the Parable of the Man, the Cross and the Tomb.

But you say that it really happened,
that, yes, there actually was a “conjuring trick with bones”,
and that there was a dead man god walking,
rolling stones.

Well, I don’t want to be the one to tell you
that it didn’t really happen;
I don’t want to be the one to say
that it’s all in vain.
I still love all manner of comebacks;
get that electricity down my spine
when the underdog triumphs,
and when there’s hope for the downhearted.

And neither you nor I can kill it:
the idea of indestructibility seems indestructible;
the idea of transformation perpetually transforms,
and so the rising again
will rise again.

Like phoenix from flame and ashes;
like Osiris and Heracles of ancient times;
even Gandalf, even Obi-Wan,
of archetype fuelled fiction –
strike them down and they become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

But you need this to be about the hereafter
and I’m much more interested in the Now.

Still I don’t want to be the one to tell you
that it didn’t really happen;
I don’t want to be the one to say
that it’s all in vain,
leaving you with nothing to cling onto,
adrift in an uncertain world.

But if your Jesus is
sanitized,
westernized,
is blond, has blue eyes;
your Jesus never lived
let alone never died, will never rise.

And yet you want his story to be history;
I’d like his story to remain his story.
You want poetry frozen,
metaphor vanquished;
I want it to live and breathe
and fill my being,
helping me to rise and rise yet again,
out of my weakness and brokenness,
to share in something greater than my narrow self.

And it shouldn’t matter who tells you this,
or how,
but if ego never dies,
you’ll never rise;
if you don’t die to self,
you’ll never truly live.

Unless a seed falls to the ground,
there will be no harvest.

But when it does,
the rising again
will rise again
in you.

Copyright A J Phillips 2015

[Published in The Inquirer 12 April 2014 no. 7840]