Of all the messages this Easter past two ideas struck me: the notion that Christ gave himself up willingly; and that the spiritual phenomenon occurring within Christ was of course connected to the flesh and blood and yet was as far removed from it as ‘east is from west’.
Again the notion of internal and external faculties warring against each other reached into my mind; something I have been pondering in some depth since my trip to Florence; the world of emotion/fancy versus the world of logic/reason. To a degree this sonnet of John Donne’s captures that battle, and looked at through the lens of the crucifixion.
HOLY SONNET XIV
Batter my heart three person’d God; for you
as yet but knock; breathe, shine and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’er throw me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captured, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or beak that knot again;
take me to you, imprison me, for I,
except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
And something of this is expressed in this painting of the Trinity; from the Church of St Mark, Gdansk (Northern Poland) and painted in the early Renaissance, around 1435.
