Easter tidings
Clerical life
by Alice Goodman
But my hope is the flower and the fruit and the leaf and the branch
And the sprig and the growth and the germ and the bud.
And she is the growth and the bud and the flower
Of Eternity itself.
Should I say that? Have they heard it from me before? These lines from Charles Péguy’s The Mystery of the Holy Innocents, which always strike me as like reading Whitman through stained glass, push up through my mind every year when I sit down to write an Easter sermon. “Where there’s hope, there’s life.” Is that Samuel Beckett? No: to my surprise, I find that it’s Anne Frank.