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Welcome to
Ben Rhydding Methodist Church
Our Minister is the Revd Shannon DeLaureal and you can contact her by finding her details
on the Visit or Contact Us page
See the Services page for times and details of services
Happy Eastertide!
Church Charity
The third and final talk in this short series which aims to raise funds for Parkinson's UK
See the What's On page
Go to the Fair Trade page
in About Us
Make no mistake
if he rose at all
it was 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 his flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that - pierced - died, withered, decayed, and then
regathered out of his Father's 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 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.
John Updike
DD