For my Lenten observance, I read “Faerie Queene,” Book I–in which (at one point) Lenten observance gets taken to an extreme.
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Tag Archives: Lent
Reporting on My Lenten Observance
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Easter, Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene, Lenten penance Comments closed
A Different Way to Observe Lent
Madeleine L’Engle breaks with stereotyped version of Lent in the 1966 lyric.
Life and Death Make a Goodly Lent
Christina Rossetti’s poem “Lent” is powerful in its simplicity.
Come Down, O Christ, and Reach Thy Hand
In Wilde’s poem “E Tenebris,” the speaker feels unable to reach up to God.
God as a Stern but Loving Gardener
Herbert’s Lenten poem “Paradise,” about the pruning necessary to ensure growth, literally prunes the line endings.
Pondering Our Ashness, Hoping for Easter
Buggeman’s “Marked by Ashes” is a good poem to kick off the season of Lent.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Marked by Ashes", Ash Wednesday, Walter Bruggeman Comments closed
Lent: The Air Heavy and Thick
Spiritual Sunday I share today a good Lenten poem by Denise Levertov where the poet finds herself in a funk, albeit not a dramatic funk. She’s experiencing neither a “dark night of the soul” nor a scorching wasteland desert, those extreme moments of crisis that have pushed people to revelation. (Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’s […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Hound of Heaven", "Oblique Prayer", Denise Levertov, Francis Thompson, Mary Oliver, T. S. Eliot, Waste Land Comments closed
Harry’s Lenten Message: Love over Death
Rowling’s “The Deathly Hallows” can be read as a Lenten meditation.
Act in All Things as Love Will Prompt
My lectures on Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Shakespeare and Sophocles all seem to track back to Lent these days.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Flannery O'Connor, Good Man Is Hard to Find, James Baldwin, King Lear, Oedipus at Colonus, Sonny's Blues, Sophocles, Suffering, William Shakespeare Comments closed