Singing
the song
King
of glory, king of peace – I WILL love thee
A
decision has been made – an act of will as deliberate and
determined as that which we encounter in the marriage service
This
is to be the course of Herbert's life, through good and ill.
Contemplating
his own mortality in “The Forerunners”, he faces the same griefs
and fears that so often accompany age and frailty – but repeatedly
pulls himself back to a statement of stubborn belief “Thou art
still my God”.
Rowan
Williams has written of Herbert's struggle with the question
“If
God is in the environment, what does it mean when the environment
looks terrible...and goes on to speak of his “Sustained exploration
of what it is to let go of an assumption that assurance of God's
grace can be tied to positive feelings...Faith is the glorifying of
God as God, not the glorifying of God as provider of attractive
spiritual experience; salvation rests not only on how we feel, or
what we understand, but only the radical willingness to go on
standing in the presence of God's judgement and mercy”
For
me, as an off-the-scale “F” in Myers Briggs terms, this is a huge
challenge – but it only increases my admiration for Herbert, who is
prepared to go on praying “Teach me my God and King in all things
thee to see”, no matter what those things might look like, or FEEL
like.
God
is inextricably involved in the world's pain, whether as cause or
participant scarcely matters. Though we may declaim “Let all the
world in every corner sing, My God and King” and hear triumphant
fanfares of universal praise, we could also pause to remember that
corners are dark and undistinguished places where dust and decay
might lurk – or we ourselves hide when life's messy reality
overwhelms us. Even here, says Herbert, from his gloomy corner –
even here God is sovereign, and we are called to praise him “seven
whole days, not one in seven”, no matter what. Herbert is steeped
in the Anglican tradition of Scripture prayed as liturgy (in that
same hiim the calling of the church is to something very much like
Choral Evensong “The Church with psalms must shout”
Herbert's
God is the God of psalm 139...the God whom we find even if we take
the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea...the one who penetrates even the thickest darkness, as though it
was clear as the day. Whatever our current perception, he asserts
that God is present..Moments of exalted delight can be cherished but
they cannot ultimately be enshrined even in the perfection of verse.
Here's The Temper – a title in which Herbert plays on both the idea
of tempering steel and his own extremes of emotion....
How
should I praise thee, Lord!
How
should my rhymes
Gladly
engrave thy love in steel,
If
what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My
soul might ever feel!
Wouldn't
that be easy? And enjoyable too...a faith that is one long summer's
afternoon. But unfortunately it's not reality....so as the poem
continues Herbert enables us to build a bridge, to give voice to our
faltering belief that God remains God amid cataclysmic disaster,
personal tragedy – or even the round of APCMs...
Although
there were some forty heav'ns, or more,
Sometimes
I peer above them all;
Sometimes
I hardly reach a score;
Sometimes
to hell I fall.
O
rack me not to such a vast extent;
Those
distances belong to thee:
The
world's too little for thy tent,
A
grave too big for me.
Wilt
thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch
crumb
of dust from heav'n to hell?
Will
great God measure with a wretch?
Shall
he thy stature spell?
O
let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,
O
let me roost and nestle there:
Then
of a sinner thou art rid,
And
I of hope and fear.
Yet
take thy way; for sure thy way is best:
Stretch
or contract me thy poor debtor:
This
is but tuning of my breast,
To
make the music better.
Whether
I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy
hands made both, and I am there;
Thy
power and love, my love and trust,
Make
one place ev'rywhere.
Again
he reaches the place of harmony. It seems that for Herbert the
process of writing out his feelings in poetry enables him to reach a
resolution – but the process of tuning and tempering him (think of
Bach's Well-tempered Klavier) is never easy...though the end more
than justifies the means.
Sometimes
it is not Herbert but God himself who is re-tuned.
Easter was
originally two separate poems, brought together in one in a structure
that reflects the structure of many lute-songs of the day in which a
more stately opening section, based on a pavane, was followed by a
joyously leaping galliard. Here the exalted invitation of the first
verse, 'Rise
heart;thy
Lord is risen',and
the musical images of verses two and three, find their fullest
expression in the song of praise of the final three verses.
RIse heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined1 thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.
Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts2 vied
And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.
|
I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.
The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
|
The
poet draws on Scripture to illustrate the poem: the words of
praise from Psalm
57:8-10 and
the theme of Paul’s letter to the Romans, with its exploration of
how people are made right with God - justified - through Jesus’
death on the cross. Christ, stretched out in death on the wood of the
cross, becomes God’s instrument, playing a melody of love to the
world. The heart responds to the melody by joining with it, as
instrumentalists join together in consort to make music. But
since none can sing this tune perfectly, a further strand needs to be
woven: that of the Spirit who makes up 'our
defects with his sweet art'.
In
the following song of joyful celebration, the poet sees the day of
Christ’s resurrection as unsurpassed in glory. 'Can
there be any day but this' - the
sun that rises each day of the year cannot shine as brightly as the
Son of God as he brings light to the world – and the glory of this
day will never come to an end, but shine forever.
And
so at last God and sinner are reconciled so it is time to give voice
to prayer...
PRAYER,
the Church’s banquet, angels’ age,
God’s
breath in man returning to his birth,
The
soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The
Christian plummet, sounding heaven and earth;
Engine
against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,
Reversed
thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The
six-days’-world transposing in an hour,
A
kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness,
and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted
manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven
in ordinary, man well drest,
The
Milky Way, the bird of Paradise;
Church
bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The
land of spices, something understood.
Reading
that can feel rather like hearing in swift succession all of those
parables of the Kingdom – it's a bit like a
mustard seed – a merchant – a man sowing seeds – a woman
sweeping a room...Just as you settle down to focus on one idea or
image, it is replaced by another, - like trying to hold onto mercury
.This is a sonnet with no main verb, but with a
succession of metaphors tumbling over one another, suggesting that
ultimately prayer cannot be described, only occasionally experienced,
for in it we are touching ultimate Mystery.
Both
the Kingdom – AND Prayer – are concepts that are beyond the
normal range of our understanding.
So
as we try to explore them, we get brief glimpses of the truth – but
need to remember that the truth is always greater..How
can we be in conversation with the creator of all
things? What do we think we're doing when we come to God with our
agenda?
No
wonder we struggle.-so that there's a risk that you might emerge more
confused than enlightened
Prayer
is of that of God in us reaching out to God once more – God's
breath in man returning to his birth...It is terrible and awful
“Engine
agains th'Almighty, sinner's towr, Reversed thunder,
Christ-side-piercing spear”
But
it is also simple, gentle, “the six days world transposing in an
hour” ( as Creation is retuned to a key that matches God's) and
becomes“a kind of tune which all things hear and fear”. It is
majestic, but simple – remote but intimate...Here is
God encountered within the ordinary and everyday. So the phrase
‘Heaven in ordinary’ suggests not only the bread and wine of the
eucharist, ‘the church’s banquet’, but also God descending to
our ‘ordinary’ level, a meaning strengthened by the 17th
century use of the word ‘ordinary’ for a fixed-price meal in a
tavern. ...and of course what is ordinary for heaven is humanity at
its very very best...
I
love the ambivalence of “Church bells beyond the stars heard”...are
these our bells, making themselves heard on high – or a faint echo
of heavenly bells beyond the stars heard here on earth...Prayer, at
its best, is a two way process...but though we cannot define or
confine it, at the end it is something that we know, hold and
practice almost by instinct...not something to spend time examining
but rather something understood...needing no further words of
explanation or commentary.
