Holy Week reminds us, in case we're in danger of forgetting, that Christianity is a historical faith, its claims embedded in the messy particulars of time and place even as it transcends them. To celebrate that "curious contingency"—and to mark the beginning of National Poetry Month—here is a poem by T. M. Moore:
A Curious Contingency
Confessions of a Wordsmith
The modern order is largely a product of contingency. - Stephen Jay Gould
The fruits of my vocation blossom from
a kind of cosmic soup of latent power:
books, note cards, memos, shreds and shards of some
fresh-excavated pile or file; an hour
on this, an hour on that—the only plan
a loose and highly opportunistic scheme,
a kind of curious contingency more than
a plan: so my haphazard style must seem
to some—things finished, in the works, or just
not ever put away, the sediment
of labors past now buried beneath the dust
of new endeavors. An unlikely bent
for one whose work insists on forms, designs,
and arguments tight as a sonnet's lines.
As COVID-19 sends the globe into crisis, it also sends us to our knees.
A Korean pastor helped birth one of the world's largest charities. Why did he disappear from history?
Psalms of lament felt hyperbolic before COVID-19. But amid 10,000 deaths, my locked-down church in Rome resonates with David more than ever.
