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A FAREWELL TO PULPITS is a collection of sermons by a retired Episcopal bishop. Though logically categorized as “sermons,” I prefer to call them stories that provoke or inspire some theological reflection. What’s LOVE up to now? Take, for instance, the story about two Black men who spent thirty-one years in a North Carolina penitentiary only to be proved innocent. Though released without apology or compensation, one of them (Leon Brown) still could say, “God is good all the time.” Spoken with the authority of suffering. Or take the biblical story about the inevitable fate of a totally amoral, totally impenitent person (Jezebel). Not pretty. Or consider the story about some German and English soldiers in Belgium on Christmas Eve during World War I, who simply disobeyed orders and met each other in the “No Man’s Land” between their trenches and sang carols and exchanged small gifts — and called each other “our friends, the enemy.” As the author of these “sermons,” I want people to notice the continual and wild happening of grace in the world. I want them to take heart. That’s what this book is all about. +John S. Thornton
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“You only have to write a poem. It doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t fret about form. It’ll be good enough. It may be your last or, maybe, the first of many. Who knows?”
The forty-four poems in this collection, All the Purple Iris, are, definitely, autobiographical and a kind of credo. It’s all just I, watching the world, listening to the music it makes, trying to put it into words. It’s an earnest effort to pay attention. A poem can make a long story short and often memorable, like “When you are old and grey and full of sleep…” (W. B. Yeats) or “For this your mother sweated in the cold…” (Edna St. Vincent Millay) or “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” (Robert Frost). Doesn’t it enliven you?
One more thing: Don’t read the whole collection at once. Just one at a time, please, until it feels like a song and it’s you singing. -
This is John’s sixth book, the second book of poems, many written in the past several years. Most of them are about recent events in America or encounters with particularly poetic persons.
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