Holly Ordway Academic Turns to Christ

I leaned against the rail of the practice strip, foil in hand, watching Holly Ordway finish her bout. The gym lights buzzed overhead. Her opponent lunged, she parried clean, and the point landed with a sharp tap that carried across the hall. She reset without a word, mask under her arm, already calculating the next exchange. We had fenced together for two seasons at regional events, both of us pushing thirty, both of us carrying the same quiet certainty that the world ran on measurable effort and nothing else.

After the match we sat on the bleachers while she unlaced her jacket. She talked about the upcoming semester, the stack of papers she still had to grade, the way her students treated every poem like a code to be cracked rather than a thing to be felt. I listened. At some point I said I had been at Mass that morning. She gave a small, polite nod, the kind people give when they decide not to pursue a subject that clearly belongs to someone else.

A month later we met again at a conference hotel bar. She asked about the service I had mentioned. I told her it was ordinary, that the words and the silence held together for me in a way nothing else did. She listened without interrupting. When I finished she said she had never seen any reason to look in that direction. Her tone was not hostile, only final.

We kept in touch after that. She sent me drafts of conference papers on Victorian novels and later on fantasy. I sent back comments about the sentences that worked and the ones that still felt guarded. One evening she called from her office. She had been reading Lewis again for a course and had noticed something in the argument she could not dismiss. She asked if I would meet to talk through it.

We met in the library courtyard the next week. She brought a paperback copy of Miracles with passages marked in pencil. We walked the perimeter of the quad while she laid out the objections she had carried for years. I answered what I could and admitted what I could not. She took notes on a small pad. When we parted she said she needed time to test the claims against what she already knew about language and story.

Over the next year the conversations lengthened. She began reading Tolkien’s letters and essays on fairy story. She described the way certain passages resisted her usual categories of myth or metaphor. We met in the same courtyard or sometimes at the fencing club after hours when the strips were empty. She would rest her mask on the bench and ask precise questions about historical claims, about the reliability of the Gospel accounts, about what counted as evidence when the event in question was two thousand years old.

She traveled for tournaments and came back with new stacks of books. She read the Church Fathers in translation. She read modern historians of the early centuries. She kept a running list of objections and crossed them off only when she had examined the sources herself. One afternoon she told me she had started attending a parish near her apartment, not yet as a participant but as someone who needed to see how the words were actually said week after week.

In the spring of 2012 she invited me to the Easter Vigil. We sat toward the back. The church was full, the air cool from the stone walls. When the candidates were received she stood with them. The priest asked the questions the rite requires. She answered in a clear voice that carried to where I sat. Afterward we walked outside into the damp night air. She said little. We shook hands at the corner and she went home.

She finished the academic year at the same secular college. The following fall she accepted a post at Houston Baptist University teaching literature and apologetics. She revised the manuscript she had been working on and published it under the title Not God’s Type. In interviews she described the process as a long examination of evidence rather than a sudden change of feeling. She continued to fence when her schedule allowed, though she no longer traveled for national points.