Looking for a Lectionary?
Tired of reading the same old biblical stories year after year come December?
Okay, that’s a rather audacious question and you’ll certainly not find me advocating against advent but a friend of mine recently invited me to a reading of W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being (A Christmas Oratorio)” at her church.* Faithful blog readers and friends may remember that for three years running my yearly Good Friday reading has been from Auden’s Horae Cannonicae. Now, wouldn’t it be great to set up a lectionary around great poems written by anglo-catholic writers? We could start off with Auden’s For the Time Being for Advent and Christmas, segueing into Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (I currently know no good liturgical Mardi Gras poems) and round out the Paschal Season with the Horae Cannonicae. I think this will be my lectionary for this year. If you know of any great works I’m missing, please let me know.
I cannot, of course officially recommend the first two works as I have not yet read them. Maybe next year.
*I’m afraid only an Episcopal church would have the wherewithal to host an event like this.
posted by Kurt at Wednesday, December 12, 2007
1 Comments:
a couple of suggestions come to mind, though i'm not sure about their liturgical placement, unless you want supplements for 'ordinary time':
1) john henry cardinal newman's "dream of gerontius" (perhaps the feast of all souls?)
2) thomas aquinas' "pange lingua" makes for good meditation on Corpus Christi.
these may not qualify as great literature, but i leave that to you.
this is an inspired idea, by the way. you might put a list together and pitch it to a publisher. i'm seriously considering using some spare time to string together all of my favorite 'liturgical' poems, if only for myself.
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