Author: admin

What it feels like when prayer is unanswered, and God is unobtainable. Lent Day 13

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 favours granting my request,

They and my mind may chime,

And mend my rhyme.

If you have felt the anxiety that comes when a trusted friendship seems threatened by a distancing you can't explain, and known the inner foreboding caused by the prolonged silence of someone who matters in your life, then you have an important key to this poem.

Inexplicable silence when conversation is expected, erodes confidence and quickly undermines the security and support on which we have come to depend. So God's silence feels like a problem; and the problem is how we feel.

Herbert's way of describing such spiritual anxiety and disabling neediness comes naturally to a songwriter and skilled player of stringed instruments. He feels like a discarded instrument, a lute with broken strings. Made for music and harmony and the fulfilment that comes from skilled playing, he is now unused, neglected and sad.

His inner spirit is untuned, unstrung and hangs discontented like a frost damaged bud. Just as the reader's mind is getting used to the broken instrument image, Herbert derails expectation by changing to a botanical metaphor. Because there is no music his potential is nipped in the bud. Frosted blossom means later fruitlessness.

These last two verses of 'Denial' spell out the felt consequences of God's silence, the inner tensions created by God's apparent absence and deliberate inaccessibility. This is what it feels like when prayer is unanswered, and God is unobtainable. And it may be that such denial of access, such refusal of our neediness rooted in insecurity, is the only way we grow in that deeper faith we call trust.

To grow into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ requires a growing away from childish dependency. The view of God in this poem is of One who refuses to be coerced by our neediness, or compliant with our complaints. In fact this poem can be read as a calling in question of those forms of spirituality based on feeling, emotion, and intensity of inner experience. It sometimes takes desert silence for us to trust, in the wilderness times, the promise of God's presence rather than the feeling of God's absence. It's a hard lesson to learn.

'O cheer and tune my heartless breast' moves the entire poem into prayer as direct appeal. Herbert is so distressed he hardly knows what part of him needs fixing first. Soul, heart and mind, are either broken or out of tune. They are synonyms for the inner life, but subtly different in their sound, but they are so disordered, that his whole inner equilibrium is out of tune.

Amongst the skills of Herbert the poet is the ability to visualise and evoke the content of a poem by its form on the printed page. This poem is all over the place, just like Herbert's inner life. Only when God picks up the instrument that Herbert is, and restrings and begins to play God's music again, only then will there be harmony between his need and God's grace, and so will be restored the heart and mind and soul of the man.

On an entirely different literary zone, I wonder if growing up in faith, and having a grown up view of God, is similar to the coming and going of Nanny McPhee: “When you need me, but do not want me then I must stay. But when you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.” Now there's an interesting essay assignment topic!

9 March 2020
When Absence Makes the Heart Grow Nervous. Denial (1) Lent Day 12

What happens when two friends stop talking to each other? Has something damaged the relationship? Is the one so preoccupied they don't give the other a thought, so that the other feels neglected, slighted, offended?

The equivalent spiritual experience is sometimes called the dark night of the soul, or the wilderness experience, or called for what it is, a sense of the absence of God.

In the poem "Denial" Herbert is not sure who has stopped talking to whom. What's beyond argument is that prayer isn't working, God's ears are silent, there is no hearing, and he is now anxious and agitated by what begins to feel like God has blocked him, perhaps even unfriended him.

Those whose faith is deeper than superficialities too easily settled for, and for whom love of God and trust in God arises out of the struggles, ambiguities and contingencies of human existence, will know times when God's silence is disconcerting. Purposeful silence can at times be scary, and even in the strongest of relationships can call into question the foundation trust of our lives.

Why the silence? What makes God abscond? Was it something we said, did, didn't do? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with us; it's just that God is not obliged to nurse our neuroses! Whatever the reason for God's apparent unresponsiveness, the experience forces us to face up to the latent utilitarianism of a faith that depends on perceived benefit, rather than loving God for who God is, regardless.

Herbert can be impressive, though, in his persistence, 'crying night and day', 'all day long', and he is suffering for it. To persist in prayer when there is no discernible response, to go on persuading when there is no offer of meeting half-way, to openly complain and lay yourself open by saying how you feel, that's to make the spiritual equivalent of a wronged person's impact statement. It takes a particular quality of faith.

Such faith is formed by more than intellectual assent, and sustained by more than emotional comfort. It requires relational resilience, long-suffering allegiance, and a trust born out of hard won and hard held knowledge that, eventually, there will again be a union of hearts and restored communion and communication. For now, there is the astringent reality that God is not our 24/7 carer; God's absence and silence are reminders that we do not control God, grasp God, or have rights with which to coerce God's co-operation.

Mark Oakley says this well: "As a defence against our idolatry, he often becomes silent so that our certainties are dismantled back into faith and we learn to speak the foreign language of God again." (My Sour Sweet Days, Page 47)

Now read Herbert's trustful complaining. The next post will explore the images of the last two stanzas.

Denial

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 favours granting my request,

They and my mind may chime,

And mend my rhyme.

8 March 2020
Significant Stuttering About the Inexpressible Lent Day 11

Prayer (1)

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

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.

Just read it….slowly….several times…until something is understood.

For those who want more, some years ago I wrote an article devoted entirely to this sonnet. It is open access and can be found here.

7 March 2020
The Complicated Business of Being Grateful. Lent Day 10

"Thou that hast giv'n so much to me,

Give one thing more, a gratefull heart."

See how thy beggar works on thee

by art.

The first of 8 stanzas of a poem titled "Gratefulnesse".

For reasons that may well be not too reasonable, I find the older form of the word, gratefulnesse, more expressive of what Herbert struggled to say.

When enunciated slowly, the voice emphasises the middle syllable 'ful', which sits nicely balanced between two five letter syllables. Fanciful? Literary dielttantism? Maybe.

But I find gratefulnesse, both written and spoken, a more generous word than gratitude.

Herbert is always aware of his indebtedness, that so much of what is best in life is gift from the Thou on whose grace his 'I' depends. God is generous, and it's personal.

Normally when we are the glad receivers of generosity, we say thank you, we are humbled by people's kindness and regard for us, their gifts and the heart that gave them affirm and encourage us. The last thing we would think of is to ask for something else; more.

Herbert knows he skates on thin relational ice, but that's the way it will always be when there is such imbalance in a friendship. So he writes a poem, this beggar has nothing to give but his skill with words, his art.

But he doesn't give his art. He uses it, as persuasion, as a process of persuading God to give him the gift of thankfulness, and in the process of writing the poem he moves from petition to…gratefulnesse.

This is acute psychological and spiritual self-direction. We become grateful by being in the habit of saying thank you. Thanksgiving is a mixture of emotional gladness for the gift, disciplined acknowledgement of debt, and a reassurance of regard and friendship.

The petition for a 'gratefull' heart uses Herbert's favourite stratagem of paradox, that one who has been given so much, is so overwhelmed by the generosity of the giver, he's not sure how to say thank you. But instinctively he knows that only through the further gift of gratitude will his thanks be adequate.And even then.

His heart if full, and finding words for that experience of the full heart requires his utmost art, and also the one thing more, a gratefull heart, a heart filled with grace, a heart so full of what God has given, that it needs God's help to say thank you.

It's quite a thought. And by the time we get to the end of the poem, Herbert knows exactly what is needed, and who can give it:

Not thankfull, when it pleaseth me;

As if thy blessings had spare dayes:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be

Thy praise.

6 March 2020
The Concentrated Hopefulness of Christian Ethics. Lent Day 9

Virtue

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,

For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;

Thy root is ever in its grave,

And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season'd timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

Then chiefly lives.

Lent is a forty day exercise in self-examination. And however much we might try to give such moral auditing a body swerve, the forty day season is inextricably linked with temptation, confession, repentance and soul repair.

What we are looking for is strengthened virtue. But virtue takes time. It is the accumulated ethical decisions and moral commitments that slowly become habits, which give shape to character, and eventually the fruit of the Spirit. Virtue.

This poem is Herbert in deconstruction mode. And what he dismantles is our often unexamined human capacity to take all of life's good for granted, to live for now, to postpone any thought that now is not forever. Carpe diem is a form of practical atheism; God is absent from the reckoning if we determine to live for now, with no thought for the future.

In three consecutive verses Herbert ruins the carefree party of life by insisting on mentioning, indeed shouting above the music, "you must die…all must die". He makes the announcement all the more shocking by contrasting the inevitable extinction of life by death, with the frequent use of a favourite word (sweet), which means intense vitality, lasting pleasure, pure harmony, breathtaking beauty.

Or as Herbert's finest contemporary critic says, "Herbert's concept of sweetness has no trace of sentimentality but covers the full range of meanings from sensual pleasure and artistic beauty to moral virtuousness and redemptive love." (Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert, p. xliv)

Every day dies, despite the bridal promise of beauty and life; every rose withers, despite the colour, bloom and petal perfection; every spring gives way to fullness of life in summer, frutifulness in autumn, but then comes winter, and death.

Everything dies except. Except, "only a sweet and virtuous soul." And here Herbert uses one of my favourite images in all his poetry, "like seasoned timber, never gives." The long process of holiness is likened to timber as matured wood, exposed to the elements but now dried and hardened, made tough and firmly pliable, used in the building of ships which can stand the pressure and force of wind and ocean, and not give.

Herbert is too subtle to reduce such an image to one exegetical application. Yes, seasoned timber for the best, most sea worthy ship. Like seasoned timber the virtuous Christian is one who does not warp under pressure; because the virtuous Christian lives a cruciform life clinging to the seasoned timber of the cross; and if she does, then "though the whole world turn to coal," come Hell or high water, she will chiefly live!

Trust Herbert to get the resurrection in somewhere. That last line contains the concentrated hopefulness of Christian ethics; the seasoned timber that never gives, survives the fieriest of trials. Not far from Paul's lyrical ending, "Faith hope and love abide; but the greatest of these is love."

Perhaps during our season of Lent, it is time to be honest about the storms and waves, the pressures and forces of the society around us, that make it so hard to follow faithfully after Jesus. And to pray that conscience, will, heart and mind, the whole character of who we are, may become by the grace of God, "like seasoned timber, never gives….but chiefly lives."

5 March 2020
The Foolishness of Preaching. 3. Lent Day 8

The Windows.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

    He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

    Making thy life to shine within

The holy preachers, then the light and glory

    More reverend grows, and more doth win;

    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

    When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Any preacher called to fulfil God's summons to preach must start by asking Herbert's question, "How…" A sense of inadequacy is a prerequisite, because a sense of adequacy is embarrassingly graceless.

So start with that discomfiting interrogative, "How?"

How can human limitation express divine fullness? How can "brittle crazy glass" ever be useful in transforming that real human world out there, in all its brokenness, perplexity and ruined potential?

Think stained glass, the colours burned into the very substance of the glass; think the glorious transcendent sunlight filtered through annealed colours; and now think of a human being, made in the image of God, that image as imperfect as "brittle crazie glasse", becomes a window "through thy grace."

When that happens doctrine and life are fused into one integrated whole, just as light and colour and glass coincide in time and place to create an image of beauty. What was brittle crazed glass, is now a work of art, telling God's story, illumined from within by the living presence of Christ the light of the world. Such a preacher is a sight to behold because doctrine and life, what is believed and what is lived, talk and walk, have a visible, arresting, integrity.

Like annealed glass, the preacher's life is infused, made capable of being the medium by which the eternal word, God's story, filters through human words irradiated by divine light.

Then Herbert punctures the first inclinations of the self-satisfied preacher impressed by their own rhetoric, learning, and shining example! The strong regard and awe of a congregation are not to be trifled with, or aimed at. The preacher tells God's story so that the hearer's conscience will ring with the clarity of an uncracked glass bell. Such awe is the vestibule leading to worshipping obedience; it is the divinely given response to a preacher whose character is as annealed glass through which pass the sunlight rays of God's story, word for Word.

What Herbert achieves in this poem, is the powerful effect in personal experience of what it means to say "through thy grace". He sets up a collision of opposites; brittle crazy glass can be a window, "through thy grace." Crazed dull glass becomes a filter for the divine light; man, fallen humanity, can nevertheless become holy preacher of the eternal word, God's story annealed in the heart, "through thy grace."

Lent is a good time for preachers to remember that every word they speak, and we speak millions of them in a lifetime, comes from brittle crazy glass. The light of God's Word filters through the annealed glass; in a contemporary image, the cracks are where the light gets through. The preacher's calling is to allow "brittle crazy glass" illumine God's story, but always, only, "through thy grace."

(The stained glass is from Glenmuick Church of Scotland, in The Square, Ballater.)

3 March 2020
The Foolishness of Preaching 2. Lent Day 7

The Windows

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

    He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

    Making thy life to shine within

The holy preachers, then the light and glory

    More reverend grows, and more doth win;

    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

…………………..

There is a third stanza. That will be for tomorrow.

…………………..

Is it over obvious to say Herbert could only write a poem like this if he was a preacher, and one both troubled by his own limitations, but persuaded of the new possibilities of grace?

Herbert is not soliloquising, he is praying, and his opening question, "Lord how can man preach thy eternal word?" is rhetorical. He goes on to give the answer.

He has known the experience of strength made perfect in weakness, and is reduced to wonder that the foolishness of preaching evidences the wisdom of God. And what is more, this "brittle crazie glasse" becomes a filter glowing with the life of Christ from within.

A stained glass window without the passing through of light remains dull. But when glass has colour burned into it, and the light shines through, plain becomes beautiful, and chemical process figures a transmutation from dolorous dullness to spiritual attractiveness. It isn't that the cracks are erased; they are transfigured.

The contrast between grey, dull, colourless glass and glass annealed with biblical story, looks back to Herbert's experience of being a window 'through thy grace'. In Herbert's day, stained glass windows illustrated and kept in memory biblical stories and personalities. Such windows were a familiar the use of glass, which recorded and replayed key moments of God's story in coloured pictures and emblems.

God's story throughout scripture oscillates between love often unrequited, and tragic sacrifice willingly offered, of promises made and kept by God and promises made and broken by those who knew better. Until that final sacrifice which forever defines this God of light and glory, of love and grace, of word made flesh. Even when the cross is not mentioned, it is often present, unsaid, assumed, the place where the story's resolution has lain from all eternity.

The preacher's calling is to allow that story to be annealed not only into the heart of the preacher, but into the life of the Christian community. So that preacher and communitybecome that "crazie glasse", that "through thy grace", "thy eternal word" "more doth win".

You want to say to Herbert in our dumbed down cliche, "It's a big ask". To which the country parson replies, to preacher and listeners alike, "through [His] grace."

2 March 2020
The Foolishness of Preaching 1. Lent Day 6

The Windowes (Stanza 1)

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

    He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

Being a preacher is a calling, and sometimes a stumbling. To preach is to set yourself up for a fall, believing God can shine through a human personality.

Herbert's humility as a preaching parson is rooted in realism about the limitations of his humanity and even his best self. The preacher up front stands in a place of serious temptation, desiring to be the light rather than the window through which the light shines.

Without specific reference, Herbert is channelling the Apostle Paul: "Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe…"

Herbert knows that a human being is a fragile, earthen vessel containing eternal treasure; that every Christian witness is a mortal time tied, and often word-tied witness to truth that makes known the glory, holiness and love of God.

"Brittle crazy glass"; crazing is a glaze defect of glazed pottery and glass. It isn't a superficial flaw, it affects the quality, value and usefulness of the finished object. If the glass is brittle then it is even less useful, reliable and durable.

So how can such flawed humanity ever be an adequate medium for the grace and love and glory of the Word made flesh? It can't. Herbert implies the impossibility in two lines. Human flesh is opaque, unstable, crazed with cracks, visibly flawed, brittle and breakable.

Yet.

There is that word again, Herbert's contradicting conjunction. The reader is wrong footed by the poet answering his own apparently unanswerable conundrum.

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

The "crazie glasse" becomes a focal point in the Temple, the humble preacher is given pride of place. Foolish preaching, and brittle flawed preachers, are used to save those who believe.

But how? The rest of the poem is set up by Herbert's answer: "through thy grace." In the next two stanzas Herbert expands his similitude of crazie glasse preaching the eternal word; the next two posts will explore them.

The poetry of Herbert's age has been called the poetry of Grace. As an example from elsewhere, here is Milton:

Beyond compare the Son of God was seen

most glorious, in him all his Father shone

substantially express'd, and in his face

Divine compassion visibly appeared,

Love without end, and without measure grace.

(Paradise Lost, III, 138-42)

2 March 2020
“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…” Lent Day 5

Sinne

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,

Pulpits and sundayes, sorrow dogging sinne,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and strategems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,

Blessings beforehand, tyes of gratefulnesse,
The sound of glorie ringing in our eares;
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternall hopes and fears.

Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosome-sinne blows quite away.

Like most nicknames, Metaphysical Poets, is shorthand for a leading characteristic of that which is described. By 'metaphysical' is meant poetry of intellectual complexity, psychological subtlety, and moral and religious intensity.

All of these are on show in Herbert's poem on 'Sinne'. His was an age of intense spiritual introspection, hunting of guilt, troubling of conscience, or theologically, conviction of sin.

Like flood defences, the soul was surrounded by restraining influences, moral training in childhood, respect for law and ordinances, sermons and lectures, open Bibles and spiritual stratagems; and then all the inner strengthening of emotional and devotional focus such as gratitude, praise, and the inner bulwark of conscience and fear of social disapproval, and ultimately fear of Hell and hope of Heaven.

And that fateful word that Herbert uses often and effectively, 'Yet.'

"Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosome-sinne blows quite away."

Every defence and strategy is undermined from within, by the deceitful cunning and impetus to self-preference that lurks deeper than we know, and which ambushes our best intents and overwhelms whatever moral safeguards we thought were secure.

Sin exposes our worst self, against our best intentions, despite our strongest moral defences. Sin is there, and cannot be so easily incapacitated, outwitted, or presumed to be under control, even by the most conscientious Christian.

Yet. Sin does not negate our worth to God. Patient, persistent love is one of the recurring themes in The Temple. God knows our worst selves, 'guilty of dust and sin', and still bids us welcome.

What is required of us is self-knowing, and knowing that we are known, understood more knowingly than we can ever imagine, by One intent on forgiveness, restoration and the renewal of the divine image in the whole God loved person.

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us….But if we confess our sins He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (I John 1.8)

Perhaps it takes a Metaphysical poet to understand the complexity of sin and forgiveness, and the recurring conflicts of a soul struggling with sin while holding on to God, believing that God values us more than we value ourselves.

1 March 2020
Self-accusation and Protested Love. Lent Day 4

The Pearl. (Matthew 13)

I know the ways of learning; both the head

And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;

What reason hath from nature borrowed,

Or of itself, like a good houswife, spun

In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,

What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire;

Both th'old discoveries and the new-found seas,

The stock and surplus, cause and history;

All these stand open, or I have the keys:

Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of honour; what maintains

The quick returns of courtesy and wit;

In vies of favours whether party gains

When glory swells the heart and moldeth it

To all expressions both of hand and eye,

Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,

And bear the bundle wheresoe'er it goes;

How many drams of spirit there must be

To sell my life unto my friends or foes:

Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of pleasure; the sweet strains

The lullings and the relishes of it;

The propositions of hot blood and brains;

What mirth and music mean; what love and wit

Have done these twenty hundred years and more;

I know the projects of unbridled store;

My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,

And grumble oft that they have more in me

Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:

Yet I love thee.

I know all these and have them in my hand;

Therefore not seeled but with open eyes

I fly to thee, and fully understand

Both the main sale and the commodities;

And at what rate and price I have thy love,

With all the circumstances that may move.

Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,

But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me

Did both conduct and teach me how by it

To climb to thee.

"Yet I love thee." Three times in this poem this disclaimer is protested by Herbert.

It isn't that God accuses him, or questions Herbert's love of God. There is self-accusation and protested love in every verse.

Three of the four verses of 'The Pearl' are in the form of confession, honest acknowledgement that when push comes to shove, and the choice is between the ways of God and the ways of the world, Herbert's heart has habitually chosen the ways of learning, honour and pleasure.

"Yet I love thee." That small contradictory conjunction, "yet", used as the first word of the last line, is a powerful braking system on an ego hell-bent on telling all, to his own disadvantage.

Because when all is said and done, the keys of learning, the glories of status, the five senses of pleasure, are not enough to withstand Herbert's sense of a Love more ingenious, glorious and joyous than all the self-advancing ways of the world, powerfully attractive as they are.

The last verse is an honest admission of experience taken to the full; whatever it is, Herbert has been there, done that, and it is not enough, can never be enough.

Compared to the treasures of the world, he "fully understands…at what price and rate I have thy love." That Love, is the pearl of greatest price, the Love that owns and commands his heart.

As always in Herbert, love is the key to the wild inner universe of the human heart, and to the God-loved brokenness of a world. It has taken divine Love to unlock the mystery of sin, using a cross shaped key.

"Yet I love thee." What right has someone like Herbert, to expect something for nothing, or at least something at no cost to himself? But even if he can't repay in kind, he will give what he has.

Immersed as he is in the ambiguities and compromises of everyday existence, getting on in life, focusing on what will bring learning, honour and pleasure, why would he bother with God? And why would God bother with him, more to the point?

As so often with Herbert, the answer is the prevenient grace and loving initiative of God:

Yet through the labyrinths, not my groveling wit,

But thy silk twist let down from heaven to me,

Did both conduct and teach me, how by it

To climb to thee.

In our own Lenten journey, there is much to learn here. Life is busy, demanding and tiring; we compromise, cut corners, make mistakes, try to do better; and in all the preoccupation of trying to make our lives work, we also try to be Christian, to love God, to pray. And often we fail.

We protest, "Yet I love thee." And God believes us!

"Thy silk twist let down from heaven" places the onus where it must be, upon the grace of God. God's love was there before we thought to ask for it; like Jacob's ladder joining earth to heaven, like a threefold cord (the Trinity) not easily broken, love has reached down and we climb by the ladder of Christ to the presence of God.

Herbert is the consoling poet par excellence.

29 February 2020