What are your favorite worship traditions of Holy Week and Easter? For me, I love singing “Christ the Lord is Ris’n Today” on Easter morning, along with “Were You There?” anytime of year. Last Sunday — Palm Sunday — my family took part in an old tradition that was new to us: processing around the church sanctuary waving palm branches to celebrate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. Though our small Lutheran church in suburban Kentucky has little in common with Jerusalem, it became Jerusalem symbolically for a few minutes on Sunday morning.
At Regent College, way back in 2003, I completed a masters in Christianity and the arts. I chose Regent, in part, because it allowed students to complete a “creative” thesis, a portfolio of artwork instead of a traditional, er, “uncreative” academic paper. As you may have gathered from my post a couple of weeks ago, poetry has been important to my for a while, and I enrolled at Regent intending to complete a collection of poetry.
While there, I became interested in the theology and practice of community, and I began to explore the idea of poetry written for other people. I began to notice that, for example, many of Auden’s poems were dedicated to or written for specific people, and he took his role as Professor of Poetry at Oxford seriously as a “community poet,” to be enlisted to write poems for the personal milestones of his colleagues. So I began to think of ways that my poetry could serve other people, rather than merely express my own thoughts and feelings. [Read more…] about A Hymn for Good Friday