IN SCHOOL!!

Doin' the Happy Dance - well, my heart is; my knees simply will not cooperate. I'm afraid I'm looking at surgery - will have to see an orthopedist when my financial aid disbursements roll in.

But I'm not blogging about my yucky knees. I'm blogging about -
SCHOOL!!!!

My first three courses arrived on Wednesday, and I've listened to the first two lectures in all three and begun reading the assignments in Plato's Republic and in Henri de Lubac's (the very name has me in awe) The Splendor of the Church.

This same course that requires de Lubac also has a supplemental package containing... POETRY - T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets), Tennyson, John Henry Newman ("Dream of Gerontius") -

Poetry in a theology class!

Which got me thinking - and of course poetry belongs in a theology class. Theology is poetry, the only possible medium for speaking of the Eternal, the Ideal, the Beautiful, the Ineffible. Prose is the language of pragmatic things, the delineations of rules, regulations, and measures. Only Poetry can move beyond the practical to the glories of the Mysteries of vast, eternal things.

I've now got a new medium for reading the Catechism (required in two of my courses- Theology of the Church and Sacraments) - although that great work is arranged in Paragraphs, it is no more Prose than Aquinas' Corpus Christi hymns; it is Poetry, through and through. And suddenly it is ever so much friendlier to my heart.