Revelation

On falling asleep with Christopher Derrick

By what game’s rules does he play peek-a-boo
with us like parent toying with a child?
Or is he shy, a bashful lover who,
so much in love with us would mask his smile?
Or has he writ a tragicomedy
that needs five acts to come to its summation?
So, reading, I asked myself what might be
the mystery gift-wrapped in revelation.

Recently I came across a book published more than forty years ago by Ignatius Press called That Strange Divine Sea: Reflections on Being a Catholic by Christopher Derrick. I had never heard of Derrick, though now Wiki tells me that his father was a friend of GK Chesterton and that Derrick fils wrote on Catholic subjects and died in 2007, a year before I myself became a Catholic.

As I write this note late on Easter night 2026, I cannot find the line in Derrick’s book that triggered this poem, though I’m sure it contained the word revelation. As with the word breakfast, which I once heard in awe, realizing that it meant to break one’s fast, I was suddenly brought up short by the thought that God—for some reason—had actually revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ. Like literally. Came out of hiding. Or something. And so but why?

Thus, having decided previously that from now on (my Easter resolution) I would read one book at a time, and always such a book that I would be happy to think I might be found dead with it on my chest, as Pope John Paul I (not JP II) was found in the morning with The Imitation of Christ clutched to his stopped heart, I fell asleep on Easter night to the wonderful rhythms of That Strange Divine Sea and awoke 90 minutes later with the kernel of this poem.

All this after a Lent in which I (unintentionally) gave up writing new verses, a Lent that where poetry is concerned was as dry as a master’s thesis on Hegel.

Alleluia, he is risen, and so it seems is my desire to write!