Holly Ordway Academic Conversion

I sat across from her in the department lounge, the afternoon light cutting across the table between us. She had just set down a stack of student papers and was flipping through an old anthology, the one with the cracked spine we all used for the surveys. Her fencing bag leaned against the chair leg, still zipped from that morning’s practice.

She mentioned the friend casually at first, a colleague from another department whose name I knew only from committee meetings. He had told her over coffee that he went to church on Sundays. She repeated the words as if testing their weight. No argument followed, only a long pause while she traced the edge of a page with one finger.

For months after that she kept the same routine. Early classes on Milton, office hours that ran long, then the drive to the fencing club where she drilled footwork until her shoulders burned. At night she read the same poets she had assigned, but slower now. I noticed the marginal notes multiplying in her copies of Donne and Hopkins.

One Tuesday she stayed late. The building had gone quiet except for the hum of the lights. She read aloud from the sonnet about the three-personed God, the lines about battering the heart. When she stopped, she looked up as though the words had left a mark on the air itself. She closed the book without marking the place.

She began asking questions in the hallway, small ones at first. Whether the resurrection accounts had any historical weight. Whether imagination counted as evidence or only decoration. I answered what I could from the books on my own shelf, but she already knew those volumes better than I did. She wanted something else, the part that held when the arguments were done.

By spring the change showed in her teaching. She no longer dismissed the Christian references in Eliot as period detail. She let the lines stand and asked the students what they made of the claim that the world was charged with grandeur. Some of them wrote longer papers than usual that term.

She drove to the cathedral alone the first time, late on a weekday afternoon when the nave was empty. She told me later she had expected the space to feel foreign. Instead the silence matched something she had already started to recognize in the poems. She returned the next week, then the week after.

The rational step came through books she borrowed and returned with pages flagged. She read the historians who treated the empty tomb as a claim that could be tested, not merely believed. When she spoke about it, her voice stayed level, the same tone she used when correcting a student’s misreading of a metaphor. She said she could not accept one without the other.

Her parents received the news without surprise or argument. They asked only whether she still planned to visit at Christmas. The department meeting where she mentioned her plans drew mostly nods and a few quiet jokes about the odds of an English professor finding God in the library stacks.