Asking for Wonder

Writings & Works by John Jones

Tag: writings

A Liturgy for Those Whose Plans Did Not Go How They Thought It Would

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On July 31, 2022

In POETRY, WRITINGS

The following is a liturgy I crafted by combining and adapting elements from Douglas McKelvey’s Liturgy for the Death of a Dream and Liturgy for Those Who Have Not Done Great Things for God from the book Every Moment Holy.

I had the opportunity to give a sermon during a Spring Break trip for Campus Christian Fellowship at Truman on my experience with graduate school applications and rejections, and I closed the sermon out with this liturgy. I thought it may be useful to others that have experienced similar feelings as I have.

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A Response to Christian Wiman’s ‘Every Riven Thing’

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On October 20, 2019

In POETRY, WRITINGS

Christian Wiman is a fantastic poet whose poetry has been the first in a while to make me stop and want to reread a poem to really internalize it. And then reread it again. And again. And again. His poem Every Riven Thing is a beautifully written poem (which you can read here) in which the line “God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made” is repeated throughout, but the syntactic structure changes each time, changing the meaning of the phrase and building upon itself in a linguistic and poetic crescendo. I highly recommend reading Every Riven Thing before reading on.

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Finding What’s Been Found

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On October 5, 2019

In WRITINGS

Learning to Use Liturgy

I didn’t grow up Catholic. Or Lutheran. Or Methodist. Or Anglican. Or any of the denominations that even remotely use liturgy. And while I did grow up in within the faith, I never used liturgy growing up.

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You have a nice bottom, too.