It’s good to think that one can learn something even in one’s seventh decade when the brain has begun to stiffen with the rest of one’s body. Today I think I have learned something, or at least thought about something familiar in a new way. Easter isn’t about welcoming the happy morning, at least not at first.

I had been thinking about the Easter Vigil, how we light new fire in darkness at the begining of the service and begin the Mass with bells and organ sounding for the first time in three days. A friend had written me to say that his pastor had quoted James Weldon Johnson’s lines about Gabriel’s silver trumpet in her Easter sermon. Somehow it occurred to me that the passage from death to life must be a sudden occurrence, the body snapped into being like a spoken thing. That’s why resurrection, if there be such, is different from birth.

And that’s why scripture tells us that God comes suddenly — when one is unprepared — like a thief in the night. The watchmen cries out from his high tower; but God comes with the watchman’s utterance still unheard, and nothing is the same afterwards. It’s the twinkling of an eye of which Paul speaks. It’s the bugler in Krakow cut off in mid voluntary by an arrow in the throat. And it’s because of the traditional painful imagery that surrounds the whole idea in scripture that I missed it. It isn’t at first about judgment at all. It’s about hierophany.

I think Mozart understood what I’m talking about, and maybe that’s why the Glorias in one of his most famous mass settings sting the ear and run up the scale like birds flushed from underbrush, startling the bonae voluntatis, “the living and the dead in the twinkling of an eye . . . caught up in the middle of the air,” as the poet says.