The Eighth Sermon to the Dead

Andrew Watt of  Wanderings in the Labyrinth  issued a Poetry challenge for April. It went like this: Exercise One: Master a form In medieval and Renaissance Ireland, historical sources indicate that the surviving bardic schools would wrap a student in a blanket after giving the student a theme and a form. The theme would be a figure from Ireland’s myth or history; the form would be one of the traditional formats of Irish poetry. We can deduce three elements from this — subject matter (theme), limitation of distractions (blanket), and structure (form). For this exercise, we’re going to use the Sonnet as our form. There are others — ballades, odes (one of my favorites), sestinas, haiku, and more. Sonnets are good for this, though because they’re longer than haiku and they’re governed by three core rules: 1. They have fourteen lines; 2. The last words of each line rhyme, in a specific pattern: ABABCDCDEFEFGG 3. Each line has ten syllables and a gentle ...

We have just begun our celebration of the Easter Season. Easter Sunday and the First Sunday after Easter have both passed. The light has descended into the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. And the Light returns, bringing the knowledge, the Gnosis, the Logos, that death has no sting, that hell hath no fury, that we are eternal and connected and that nothing can separate us from our God if we could only turn our eyes away from bright, distracting Abraxsas. As Johannites, we affirm that every being contains a Divine spark, a Sacred Flame, within them. We also affirm that Gnosis is the self-knowledge of that spark. Because this is the Easter season, we have been made abundantly aware of this spark. During the Homily at Mass on Sunday, we did a meditation on the Light. We watched the Sacred Flame on the altar, and we imagined, we felt, we reached for, that Divine Spark in our own hearts. We joined it to the light on the altar, to the light of the Divine in heave...