Today I found myself in the daunting position of leading a quiet day for my clergy colleagues in the deanery - at the beautiful Bernardine monastery of Our Lady and St Bernard at Brownshill. I'm never quite comfortable presuming to "lead" my peers - but I did enjoy revisiting some of my earlier writing and thinking about Herbert to provide three addresses - with a good long gap between.
28
years ago, I ran our of funding and reluctantly abandoned a PhD with
the snappy title
“The
use of musical imagery in the poetry of George Herbert as a metaphor
for the human relationship with God”
My
1st degree was in English lit and I began my
explorations from an agnostic literary viewpoint, but I found that it
was well-nigh impossible to linger amid what Herbert describes as
“the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my
soul” without absorbing at least some hint of the divine. In fact,
it was through the heady mixture of Herbert, Lancelot Andrewes and a
daily dose of Choral Evensong that God drew me to him – so
agnosticism didn't stand a chance!
Fast
forward 2 decades and my friend Justin Lewis Anthony published abook, advocating a healthier approach to parish ministry, with the
dramatic, even provocative title
“If
you meet George Herbert on the road – KILL
HIM!”
Justin
had succumbed to the view of Herbert as the model of priestly
perfection, a devoted pastor whose writings in “The Country Parson”
have provided ample ammunition for stressed clergy to use against
themselves for far too long. Herbert was quite blatant about it
“The
country parson desires to be all things to his parish”
he
wrote – before cataloguing every desirable gift, from teaching and
preaching to pharmacopia – so it's small wonder that most of us
would simply roll our eyes and walk away at top speed. All of this,
together with the suspicion that you already think you know Herbert's
work pretty well, makes me decidedly dubious about asking you to
listen to me today.
But
I'm not wholly apologetic about inviting you to engage with the
poetry of Herbert afresh...As I said, spending time with him was an
important stage in my own faith journey – Though we might tend to
think that he was such a sunny soul that his writings have little to
say to us in a world where ministry has changed almost beyond
recognition and the life of faith is rarely sweet and easy, he might
just surprise you. Even those hymns which we sing most regularly
include traces of a darker reality – mess and mystery, God's
absence causing disorder and jarring dis-ease in place of harmony and
grace. The fact that we encounter him most often when we sing his
words as hymns means that the tune can subvert the meaning of the
poem...So, in
“King
of Glory, King of peace” (Praise 1) we pass
smoothly over his painful consciousness of guilt. We chorus
obediently
“Though
my sins against me cried”
but never stop to consider that feeling of contending with an army of
rioting inner voices that threaten to drown out the the faltering
voice of the person we aspire to be...Herbert's sins are witnesses
for the prosecution as he finds himself on trial – and though we
move swiftly on to celebrate the mercy God shows as judge “Thou
didst clear me”
this doesn't completely resolve the preceding tumult. We are carried
on the gentle tune past the frantic desperation of a writer wracked
with sobs as we sing cheerfull “thou didst note my working breast”
- and barely pause for breath ourselves at all! The tranquil cadences
of tune and rhyme working together seem to guarantee that peace is a
foregone conclusion – but the lived experience is nothing like as
tidy or harmonious. Perhaps this is why Herbert writes poetry, rather
than simply journalling his inner struggles...No stranger to the dark
night of the soul, to God as the great Absentee
(“Thy
absence doth excell all distance known” he wrote in The
Search) his constant quest is to arrange the chaotic jangling
human experience so that he has some sense of control and order,
creating harmony in metre and rhyme at least, as a way of holding
unruly feelings in check.
That
idea of harmony is crucial to Herbert's personal faith...Again and
again he uses music as a metaphor for our relationship with the
Creator...In our prayer and praise we catch the faintest echo of the
everlasting song of heaven – but so very often our lives are out of
tune..creating unwelcome discord where there should be peace and
concord. This is very real to Herbert, whose sense of his own sin is
as keen as his vision of the overarching perfection of God in
creation....
I
think that sometimes the perfection of his verse makes us miss the
sense of painful aspiration. He so wanted to live a holy life – and
was so consistently appalled by his continuing sinfulness: ‘I
could not use a friend as I use thee’; - he says to God...
Like
St Paul he is challenged by his own confusion and inconsistency, as
he repeatedly does not do the good that he longs to...
‘I
will complain, yet praise;/
I
will bewail, approve:/
And
all my sour-sweet days/
I
will lament, and love.’;
Sometimes,
it seems that God is absent, forsaking Herbert as surely as he
forsook the psalmist. So in Denial, we encounter the
poet is knocking urgently on heaven's gate – but seeming to find
nobody at home, and here even the semblance of an ordered world is
lost. Instead we share a sustained experience of doubt and
abandonment that is frightening in its intensity
When
my devotions could not pierce
Thy
silent ears,
Then
was my heart broken, as was my verse;
My
breast was full of fears
And
disorder.
My
bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,
Did
fly asunder:
Each
took his way; some would to pleasures go,
Some
to the wars and thunder
Of
alarms.
“As
good go anywhere,” they say,
“As
to benumb
Both
knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come,
come, my God, O come!
But
no hearing.”
O
that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To
cry to thee,
And
then not hear it crying! All day long
My
heart was in my knee,
But
no hearing.
Therefore
my soul lay out of sight,
Untuned,
unstrung:
My
feeble spirit, unable to look right,
Like
a nipped blossom, hung
Discontented.
O
cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer
no time;
That
so thy favors granting my request,
They
and my mind may chime,
And
mend my rhyme.
This
is no mere intellectual struggle but an agonised lament, in which his
whole being is caught up in chaotic earthquake of emotion...So, the
structure of the poem breaks down too...Try and work out the rhythm
of the piece and you'll see what I mean...His heart is broken, his
breast full of fears. Here, knees and heart are numb with crying out
day and night to God -"My
heart was in my knee" -but
still God is silent and unresponsive. The final line of verse 3 "But
no hearing"is
repeated in verse 4. Nothing the poet can say or do seems to pierce
God’s "silent
ears" – silent because they are stopped to the pleas of
distraught humanity – but also embodying the divine silence the
poet experiences.
Further, it is God who has given mortal man (verse 4) the capacity to
cry to God, and then
not
to hear…Is God wantonly cruel? Where is he? What, oh WHAT,
is going on? God invites us to share our deepest pain with him, and
then seems impervious to our struggles – busy with something more
interesting, like the infinitely various designs of a snowflake
perhaps. It seems monstrously unfair that in the penultimate verse
the soul is seen to be laid aside, a broken viol abandoned in a
corner "Untuned,
unstrung"....
Does
God have no use for it, for us, after all?
In
her commentary on this poem, Helen Wilcox sees the coming together of
the musical metaphor and the metaphor of war of verse 2: an unstrung
bow cannot even send arrow prayers.
In
the last verse, the narrative of the rest of the poem is replaced by
a prayer that God will indeed meet with the soul and bring tune and
harmony. Herbert finally allows harmony to come in the rhyming
sequence:disjointed rhyme in the first five verses is replaced by a
rhyming last line in the last verse. The final order in the words
mirrors the new order to be found by the soul:outer form and inner
spirit find harmony. and desolation is redeemed as Herbert once again
celebrates a convergence of his mind with God's.
So
a troubled and troublesome period is brought to a tidy conclusion but
that, in itself, doesn't make Herbert helpful reading for those
striving to find God in all situations, whether of pain or of joy.
What does matter, though, is that even in the times of darkness when
God's absence is the one certainty, Herbert keeps the one-way
conversation going. Again and again he offers us the experience found
most profoundly in the psalms of lament -the dogged refusal to leave
God alone, the insistence on asking the question “Why” again and
again, even when there seems no evidence at all that there is anyone
there to answer. For Herbert, as for the psalmist, silence is just
not an option. We are designed to communicate with God, to tune our
prayers to his melody even if it is set in the darkest key.
I'm
reminded of the story of the rabbis who met in the wake of the
Holocaust to determine who was to blame...Was it God, or man? They
argued and debated while day turned to evening, evening night and
night dawn. Finally they agreed that there was no escaping God's
culpability. A deep and despairing silence fell. At length, one of
their number welaked over to the window and drew back the blind.
“Look,”
he said “the sun has risen. It's time to worship God.”
There
is nothing else.
To
whom else shall we go. You have the words of eternal life....
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