April Month of the Resurrection

The flowers are closed in the moonlight of the April garden, but their perfumes fill the night—hyacinths, tulips, and ghostly white and yellow lilies scent the air with a dim, delicious fragrance. They sleep in the fullness of Spring, and the April moon, round and white, displays the masses of their colours in her dazzling beam.

Faint scents of earth come from the field, of the earth harrowed and her hidden secrets revealed. The scent of moss and soil mingles with the scent of the flowers in the garden. The moon rides high, then dips towards the west—she founders in the west like a great ship; the moon founders, and as she sinks, the sun arises on the opposite shore of the sky, and a long golden beam slants into the garden. The flowers wake and open their petals to the sun—the scents of the harrowed earth are lost in the sweetness of the opening flowers.

“The night is come—O night verily blessed!”

The blessed night is an April night, the night of a full moon. Already the scents of Spring are stirring in the fields—fair scents, fugitive scents, scents of budding and growth. Yet to the watcher of the Passion, Spring has not yet fully come. The earth is like a stage set, but with the curtains down. All is in readiness, but the drama has not yet begun. The watcher of the Passion feels that Spring will not have begun till he sings among the perfumes of incense and lilies:—

“Lo, the fair beauty of earth, from the death of winter arising,

Every good gift of the year now with its Master returns.”

But already at those lines he will be looking back—back on a beginning he did not see. The breaking of Easter day was hidden from all but the moon, as none but the moon saw the Son of Man rise from the dead. So on this most blessed night there is no watching but the watching of the moon. The faithful have kept a sorrowful watch in Gethsemane, as a few months ago they kept a joyful watch at Bethlehem, but this night is too blessed, too solemn for human vigil. All we can do is to salute it as it drops over the earth, to greet it as we should greet a joyful daybreak—

“The night is come—O night verily blessed!”

Then we disperse and leave that night to its own mysteries.

The moon is high in the sky, her flooding whiteness of light has wiped out nearly all the stars. On the earth she calls colours into being, strange, ghostly colours. She sails across the heavens like a ship, and to-night she seems to bear with her the wonder of all past lore: she is the ship of the dead to which the Egyptians looked up, she is the goddess who wooed Endymion, she is the Mystery of Mysteries in some far-off Hindu temple. Ship, queen and goddess, mystery of mysteries, she is by virtue of that night when she rode the Paschal heavens and saw what was hidden from all human eyes.

That night was nearing its close, and already the scents of morning were in the air. The flowers and the shrubs in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea breathed into the spring moonlight perfumes like the Song of Solomon. In the clear light of the Paschal moon, that great moon of the feast, their colours were flung into the flooding whiteness, the crimson of the lilies, the flame of the flowering thorn. The garden breathed the breath of spring and the breath of morning, as the moon dipped slowly towards the rim of the earth. She was like the great white lamp of fire that Enoch saw burning in the kingdom of the Son of Man. Already with her whiteness another whiteness was mingling, the whiteness of dawn spreading over the vault of the sky. She lay upon the rim of the earth and her beams flowed straight as a river through the trees of Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. Then the Wonder happened. In the whiteness of her beams stood a Man—very still in Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. He seemed part of the peace and tranquility of the night, and yet in his stillness flowed the festival flood of Spring—budding, joy, warmth, light and life.

For a moment the moon’s rays held him, then a strange kindling flush crept into them, as they mingled with other rays—they warmed, they reddened ... and the sun came over the edge of the world and looked into the face of the moon. Between them stood the Risen Lord of both—and across the world the sun and moon gave each other the first Easter Salutation—

“The Peace of the Lord be always with you!”

“And with thy spirit!”

So even to this time that night is watched by the moon, and we, like the disciples, do not see the Son of Man arise, but know him afterwards in the breaking of bread. In the liturgy of the Mass itself, we do not see the fraction of the Host into the chalice which shows his rising, though our attention is ceremonially called to the solemn moment when the Altar becomes both Bethlehem and Calvary. We know when he takes upon himself the veils of our humiliation, we know when his sacrifice stands lifted to the Father, but of the moment when the Altar is Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, when the broken body and the poured out blood attain the re-union which is their resurrection, we know nothing till we hear the Easter greeting—“The peace of the Lord be always with you.” It is the priest alone who looks over the Altar as on that first night the moon alone looked over the Altar of the world and saw the Sun of Righteousness arise.

“A festival of the returning Spring”—“the god dies to symbolise the apparent death of Nature in Winter, then rises again at the Spring Equinox.” “Tammuz—Gilgamesh—Orpheus—Osiris—Jesus.” Thus the student of comparative religion flings the solemnities of our redemption into the same heap as the nature cults of heathendom. We are inclined to resent this treatment, to deny its justice—but can we? Do we really need to? Why should we be ashamed that in some far back time our father Hammurabi, or our father Tutankhamen, as well as our father Abraham, rejoiced to see our day, and he saw it and was glad?

The devout pagan, whether of the valley of the Euphrates or of the Nile, was wiser than many a learned man to-day who sees in the story of the suffering and triumphant God no more than the story of the withering and flowering field. Those pious heathen of old looked out on the rice fields drowned in the winter floods, they saw the floods recede and a cleansed and refertilised earth emerge from the waters, but their eyes were not so dim as to see only an earthly tragedy and its overthrow—they saw their god suffering in the drowned field, victorious in its resurrection. They could not see the woes of earth apart from the woes of heaven, and as their allegory of food and drink purged itself through the ages into an allegory of sin and redemption, so that under countless rites countless redeemers pointed to the Redeemer of all, that great shape of human thought was made which should be the chalice waiting to receive the wine of divine revelation.

For the great truths of our faith were born in the same manner as all the other wonderful births of earth, all those miraculous virgin births which find their historical ground in the Incarnation ... “by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary”—earth prepared by the Divine Spirit to receive the New Life of heaven. As Christ redeemed human nature, so Christianity redeemed human thought. As for untold thousands of years the physical processes of the earth were preparing him a body for his love, so for thousands of years the mental processes of the human race were preparing him a body for his truth. We have grown accustomed to the idea that Christianity baptised into itself the best of Judaism, but we have yet to accept the undoubted fact that it also baptised into itself the best of paganism. We are like the pious Christianised Jew of the first century who could not understand that the Gospel was also for the Greek. We talk as in reproach of the “Muddy waters of Mithras,” not thinking that by virtue of Cana even these waters can be made wine.... When St. John saw the heavenly Jerusalem he said that “all the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it,” and among those kings ride Mithras, Tammuz, Osiris, Orpheus, Dionysius ... riding to Joseph of Arimathea’s garden, to lay their glory at the Empty Tomb.