Posted by Holly Ordway in New poetry | 2 Comments
A Christmas Poem
I am posting here a poem that I wrote on Christmas Day. Remember that there are twelve days of Christmas, a whole Christmas season, not just one day! The occasion of this poem was that I went to the Christmas morning Eucharist at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. My flight had only gotten in at seven that morning; I was rather groggy, quite hungry, and extremely cold. The...
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Advent Sonnet 4: Angels
My Christmas cards this year had reproductions of medieval paintings of the Annunciation. I noticed that the angels (Gabriel and any attendant angels in the background) were made to look human, yet were still a bit more dressed up, as it were, than the typical 21st century angel. Modern angels apparently do not dress in gold brocaded robes, and their halos tend to be less flashy....
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in Literature & Literary Apologetics | 0 Comments
Advent Reflections 4: Awe – John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 15”
The Greek word used in the Gospel for “Word” is Logos. It also means order, reason, logic. The universe is an orderly place, one in which laws of nature can be discerned. Cause and effect function; we can observe nature and draw conclusions from it; we can use our own minds, our own reason, to interpret the world rightly and put our interpretations into practice. We take all...
Read MorePosted by Fr. Doran Stambaugh S.S.C. in Fr Doran, Guest Post, Sermons | 3 Comments
The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins: Preparing for Our Lord’s Second Coming
A few months ago, San Diego County experienced an unprecedented power outage that stretched all the way to Arizona and left millions of people in the dark. Our curate, Fr Matthew, had at that point only just moved from the Midwest where the power goes out all the time. He noted that people’s reactions were a bit more extreme in North County San Diego than what he was used to. He...
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Pain Sonnet 9: Unmaking Language
This sonnet takes its theme from a line in CS Lewis’ poem “Re-Adjustment” (found in Poems): “For devils are unmaking language.” In our culture today we often use words to draw veils over sin so as not to be confronted with it so forcefully. As a writer and speaker, I sometimes have to negotiate the tricky boundary between truth-telling and wounding...
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Advent Reflections 3: Conversion – T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”
We all know the story of the Three Kings, even if only from the chorus of “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” However, Holy Scripture does not call these men kings, but rather magi, “wise men from the east” (Matthew 2:1) Their story reminds us that Christmas is a call to conversion, if we will only hear it. T.S. Eliot, arguably the finest poet of the 20th century, converted to...
Read MorePosted by Holly Ordway in New poetry | 1 Comment
Advent Sonnet 3: The Coming Light
My sonnet for the third week in Advent is based on the image of John the Baptist as “a burning and shining lamp” (John 5:35). As I did for Advent Sonnet 2, I considered the image in a modern setting, thinking about what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ mean when the touch of a switch can keep a room perpetually lit. You can hear my reading of the sonnet by...
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