The Invisible Seen
When our dull wits had so declined
as to set us mid the squalor of the merely
sensible creation, the Very God consented
to become a body of His own, that He
as one among us might gather our dim senses
to Himself, and manifest through such
incommensurate occasion that He
is not simply man, but also God,
the Word and Wisdom of the One.
Thereafter, He remained His body, and thus
allowed Himself to be observed.
His becoming joined to us performed
two appalling works in our behalf:
He banished death from these
our tendered frames, and made of them
something new and (take note here) renewing.
~Saint Athanasios
The Death of Death
Put fear aside. Now
that He has entered
into death on our behalf,
all who live
no longer die
as men once died.
That ephemeral occasion
has met its utter end.
As seeds cast to the earth, we
will not perish,
but like those seeds
shall rise again—the shroud
of death itself having been
burst to tatters
by love’s immensity.
~Saint Athanasios
From Scott Cairns, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life
