Lenten Series 3: John Donne

Tonight, after Evensong and a supper of Kathy's delicious lentil soup (even little Danny loved it!) and cornbread, Fr. Daniel led the third of our Wednesday evening Lenten classes, building on A Time to Turn: Anglican Readings for Lent and Easter Week, with daily readings from "the best sermons, books, poems and hymns of Anglican writers throughout the centuries" which, one hopes, the rest of the group has been more faithful in reading and pondering daily than yours truly. (But yours truly gets there most days...)

Some of the names of those Anglicans from whom material are drawn are a surprise to some of us -- or at least to me: Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, who provided Monday's compelling reading on discipline from her Earthly Care.

Another surprise (at least to yours truly) was the subject of tonight's class: John Donne. I knew the name, I could add "poet", if really pressed I could perhaps associate "No man is an island" and "send not for whom the bell tolls"... but that would be all. But the day after Ash Wednesday the reading (on sin) was from a sermon(!) by John Donne. It was all made clear tonight, when we learned about the life and times, and trials and tribulations, of John Donne, poet and priest. Along the way we had to learn definitions of "metaphysical" (delving once again, as we do in Sunday Bible Study Class, into the Greek) and "conceit" (quite different from modern American usage).

With all of that under our belts, we were then prepared to revisit "Thoughts on the Sacredness of Vocation," extracted from the sermon in our book, on the following three highlights:
- Divine Origin of Vocation
- Integrity of Vocation ("There is no lawful calling in which you may not be honest")
- Donne's conceits ("Is there no way to be a silversmith, without needing to make shrines to Diana of the Ephesians?")

A lot to digest -- or perhaps "consider," seeing how it's Lent...


(UPDATE: I forgot to post the link for the online collection of sermons by John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's London: http://www.lib.byu.edu/donne/.)