St. Stephen’s uses poetry in our worship every week. In these posts our rector, Karl Stevens, a poet himself who publishes as KPB Stevens, will reflect on the poems we use. The poems are chosen by our Canticle Club. If you are interested in joining the Canticle Club, send an email to Stuart Hobbs.

One of our Canticle Club members found this poem in the Christian Century, where it appeared in the July issue. It is available on the Century’s website as well, and you can follow this link to read it. When you do so, you’ll note that Ava M. Pardue is a college student attending Wheaton College in Illinois. It’s an amazing sonnet for such a young person to have written, and reading it leaves me feeling excited about what Pardue will write next.

She starts the poem with a literary allusion to Homer’s Odyssey. Telemachus-like, we are waiting still / For justice in the house of the oppressed. Telemachus is the son of Penelope and Odysseus, and the house he grows up in is a troubled one. His father left for the Trojan war when he was still an infant, and his mother’s house has filled with unwanted suitors, men who assume that her husband is dead and who are vying for the chance to marry her, and thus become the king of Ithaca. Pardue’s choice of allusion clues us in to exactly what kind of injustice is happening in Penelope’s house. The oppression is gender based. She, and her son, suffer under the assumed rights of a blithe and unthinking patriarchy.

The next couplet is equally full of suggested meanings. And how long will our Father wait to come, / To end so many years of loneliness? Poor Penelope. Her experience of the suitors is one of loneliness. She must always be on her guard, never allowing herself to grow close to any of them, since their motivations are self-serving to a man. We don’t often think of oppression in terms of loneliness, but surely loneliness is the day to day reality of those who know that their gender, sexuality, or race leaves them open to abuse. There is nothing more lonely than living in a state of constant vigilance. But Pardue pushes the meanings farther. Father is capitalized, so we know that she isn’t referring to Odysseus, even if she is equating us, the reader, with Odysseus’s son Telemachus. In the poem’s terms, all of the oppressed await an absent God.

The poem then shifts to descriptions of the awful suitors. These suitors lining up to steal your bride / Eat up the glory of your royal line. Again, Pardue fills her lines with allusions. The church is often referred to as the “bride of Christ,” and the glory that a Christian eats on Sunday is the eucharist itself. Who are the suitors in her understanding of them? These lines imply that they aren’t those outside of the church, but are among the people who sit in the pews. With these lines the poem becomes about an attempt to steal the grace that all Christians are meant to inherit from Christ. The suitors are guilty of simony, the attempt to purchase and control the Holy Spirit. Pardue reemphasizes this point with her next couplet: They take pride in how fierce their vices are, / Corrupting every feast of bread and wine. Our Canticle Club chose this poem because it echoes the Gospel reading for this Sunday, Luke 14:1, 7-14. But Pardue’s use of eucharistic imagery makes it clear that she is speaking of the corruption of the Gospel feast, that her critique is of Christians who act in exactly the way that the pharisees do in Luke’s Gospel.

In the Odyssey, Telemachus’s life is in danger. He is a threat to the suitors, which is why he leaves home to go in quest of his father Odysseus. Pardue’s next lines read this as a metaphor for the life of Christ: They plotted, too, to kill your only son / And even then your face did not appear; / Odysseus, where are you this dark night / While your own bride must cry so many tears? Telemachus is not a natural stand-in for Jesus. At the end of the Odyssey, he and Odysseus murder all of the suitors. Jesus is not always meek and mild, but at no point is he a murderer. By conflating the two, Pardue simultaneously works against her own simile. But this seems very purposeful to me. Telemachus is not like Jesus. But he is like us. He, too, waits for God to take action against injustice. And while we wait, the church suffers.

The poem ends with an epithet directly quoted from Homer, and with a note of hope. But rosy-fingered Dawn will break the frost. / The Father will restore what has been lost. I live in hope that God will indeed restore the church, which is in a very perilous state at the moment. Megachurch pastors and the propagators of the Gospel of Wealth seem to smugly corrupt the messages of Jesus, taking pride in how fierce their vices are while oppressing those who should be sitting in the seat of honor at the heavenly banquet. They seem to lust after power and will do anything to get it. Telemachus leaves this corrupted home in search of his missing father. Does the poem, and this week’s Gospel reading, suggest that we, too, must leave a corrupted home in order to redeem it?

I am a priest and a liturgist. If I am to travel out from the institution of the church, it will be a strange kind of traveling. A journey that takes the form of visiting the sick and conducting Sunday services. Pardue’s poem makes me think that the most important moment of our worship right now is the deacon’s dismissal at the end. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” the deacon says. Go. Be peaceful in a way that the unjust suitors within the church wouldn’t understand. Serve. Find God within your service. For a Christian, hope must always exist outside of the church. Divine hope, that can return to our worship when we go and find it and bring it back with us.