Daily Turning | Epiphany 3
1.25.26 | Acts 16:9-23 | Fr. Benji Davis | Epiphany Basics for Making Christ Known (Conversion)
So far in this series on “Epiphany Basics for Making Christ Known” our sermons have focused on our Identity in Christ alone and Confession of Christ alone. This week Fr. Benji, on the Feast day of the Conversion of St Paul, focuses on Conversion to Christ alone. This series (and year) Christ Church teachings will focus on getting back to the basics of the Gospel message.
Due to the dangerous amounts of ice forecasted for this weekend, the sermon can be found HERE. Fr. Benji and I recorded Morning Prayer with a sermon, which you can do with your family in the prayer book or using THIS pdf.
Last week I gave a note about line breaks, especially in more “free verse” (which just means no strict or specific poetic form, rhyme scheme, or meter). This week’s poem is actually in a loose form. When I say loose, I mean that there is a traditional, specific way of doing a form, and I followed some of the rules of the form, not all of them. For example, a sonnet, perhaps the most well known form, has a specific length, rhythm, rhyme scheme, and even syllable count. However, if I wrote a poem of fourteen lines, and tried to have a “turning point” in the poem at line eight or nine, that would be a very loose sonnet.
Obviously I am a bit of a nerd for poetic form. Modern poets have often broken with form to be more innovative, and yet, same as mastery of painting, you can’t ever completely escape the history and tradition of your art form. There are now many poets who choose to work in form and advocate for its continued use (New Formalists are what these people could be called. Everybody has to have a special name for their ideas! Just wait, there will be Post New Indie Formalists eventually).
All this to say—this week’s tithe poem is a loose villanelle. Villanelles are most notable for the repetition of line one and line three at the end of the later stanzas, and then they are the closing two lines. This means that villanelles are a good form to use for when there is a key idea getting returned to again and gain, but with new insight and understandings gained each time you return to it. A traditional one only has two rhymes throughout the nineteen lines, AND the lines would be in strict iambic pentameter (more on this in a future week’s note) but I didn’t stick with strict rhyme or meter.
The traditional one also would have the complete line one and complete line three repeated as the last line of stanzas later. However, many poets have done an approximation of this, and simply had an idea or key phrase from line one and three repeat.
SO, the way to look for the form in my poem is to notice that a key word/idea from line one also ends stanza two, four, and is in the final stanza, while the key word/idea from line three ends stanza three, five, and the final stanza. These “seeds” of ideas are introduced, and then are woven throughout and conclusively returned to at the end. This is why I chose this form for the topic of Conversion to Christ. It is not a one and done action, but a daily recommitment. We must return and remember, over and over, to our baptism, to communion, to good works, to loving sacrifice, and to the Word of God. Our conversion is the work of a lifetime because God loves us too much to leave us the way we are.
Daily Turning | Acts 16, Conversion of St. Paul
All the passion in the wrong direction.
So much certainty of my own sanity.
Utter blindness to all but my own likeness.
And then—a light disrupts,
In one encounter a complete revelation
Of all my paths in all the wrong directions.
Truth confronts my deepest heart,
an intervention offering redemption.
I almost desire freedom from my own likeness.
Unfortunately, the conversion
From my own error is public,
Announcing all my misguided directions.
This turning point does not claim some of me.
I daily turn again to keep true aim
For still I long to seek out my own likeness.
Again I must choose good, reject the ruse,
Serve, pour out, pray that faith accrues.
I let loose all passion toward the one true direction
and utter Him, alight with His own likeness.