One of my favorite poets is Anne Sexton. She was difficult, deeply complicated and suffered from mental illness, but her thirst for spiritual redemption and her use of imagery, while at times shocking, was and continues to be deeply exciting to me. When researching her work (I wrote my final twenty-five page undergraduate paper on her themes of containment and domesticity), I came across one of her many delightful phrases: “weird abundance.” It comes from her poem “The Black Art” where she writes, “There is too much food and no one left over / to eat up all the weird abundance.” Like I said, complex stuff. Yet, I can’t help but think of the phrase when reading this Sunday’s Easter season Gospel. Christ tells us, “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” More abundantly. Like Sexton’s poetry the term seems nonsensical, superfluous. Abundance by its very definition means “a very large quantity of something.” Why would we need more of it?
Christ, I believe, is telling us that the life-giving nature of spirituality, of holiness and happiness is for those who need it most: the forgotten, the abandoned, the deeply hurting. The use of the word “more” tells us that Christ’s life-giving love is for those who are doing okay too. This Easter season if we are doing okay, if we are attending Church regularly and the kids are alright, if bills are paid and the work project complete, the gift of Christ is still for us. We are given even more! That’s what this Easter season is about. As demanding as Lent was, Easter is as demanding. It stresses us to realize how bountiful this season is, what a feast Resurrection can be for us. Sexton is right: “there is too much food” and our lives, this “weird abundance” as Sexton describes it, is made beautiful by resurrection. I’ll say it again, Happy Easter!
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot