Living Wittily

Category: poetry and theology

  • George Herbert Week (iii) Trust, the Fusion of Humility and Confidence

    http://livingwittily.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c6bd853ef0120a56a35e3970b-pi

    (George Herbert's Church, Bemerton)

     

    George Herbert's hymns are so old fashioned they are almost forgotten, not just out of favour but out of sync with
    current taste and preference. His poem King of Glory, King of Peace recalls a spiritual atmosphere and
    intensity of devotion requiring more of us than our usual contemporary
    attempts at dumbed down intimacy and informal conversation with One who is Holy
    Love, both transcendent and immediate.

    It's a hymn best sung in a cathedral, a place where beauty and light, architecture and acoustics, give visual and aural expression to the same sentiments of devotion. And it should be sung with that restrained politeness that in Anglican spirituality comes near
    to the spiritual quality of courtesy and quiet gratefulness, not
    spiritually greedy or emotionally ambitious, but showing that quality of
    balance that makes Herbert's poetry such a fine example of what he
    himself called "my utmost art".

    The structure of the poem is both simple and flawless; the rhythm is as easy as breathing; the only word of more than two syllables is 'eternity's', and it's always reckless to assume such conceits are unintended in Herbert – the longest word for the vastest concept; Praise, thankgiving, petition, confession and dedication are forms of prayer represented in lines that are brief arrows of devotion; and the encounter is intimate without being familiar, the personal pronouns of address showing the fusion of humility and confidence, which together make up trust. It is a beautiful hymn, a technically brilliant poem, and one of my favourite personal prayers:

    King of glory, King of peace,

    I will love thee;

    and that love may never cease,

    I will move thee.

    Thou hast granted my request,

    thou hast heard me;

    thou didst note my working breast,

    thou hast spared me.


    Wherefore with my utmost art

    I will sing thee,

    and the cream of all my heart

    I will bring thee.

    Though my sins against me cried,

    thou didst clear me;

    and alone, when they replied,

    thou didst hear me.


    Seven whole days, not one in seven,

    I will praise thee;

    in my heart, though not in heaven,

    I can raise thee.

    Small it is, in this poor sort

    to enroll thee:

    e'en eternity's too short

    to extol thee.

  • George Herbert Week (ii) Making Drudgery Divine

    Amongst the more amusing forms of serendipity is to do a search on Amazon. A search for the more recent books published on George Herbert is a case in point. As well as the 17th Century priest poet there are works by the American social philosopher and psychologist George Herbert Mead, himself an influential thinker around areas of pragmatism and social behaviour. The juxtaposition of Anglican country parson and a philospher contemporary with Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau is odd enough. But then a few items further down come books about George Herbert Walker Bush, previous President of the United States, and father of the other George W Bush who was also U S President, and the inevitable collision of ideas that happen when world views are a couple of universes away from each other.

    I'll get to the point in a minute. Amongst my favourite books on the Bible and Art is Painting the Word by John Drury. That is a fine book which opened up a lot of windows when I was trying to get a handle on the role of Art as a form of biblical exegesis and as evidence of how biblical texts were received and interpreted through the centuries. So when I put in George Herbert and came across the social philosopher and the two previous Presidents, I also discovered that John Drury has a full length monograph coming on the poetry of George Herbert. The description on Amazon says: 

    For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

    That I think is saying too much too soon. Others have convincingly integrated the life and poetry of Herbert, including Amy Charles, Helen Vendler and my favourite by James Boyd White, "This Booke of Starres". Still, a New Testament scholar who is immersed in Christian Art and Christian text, and who has spent decades reading and working through Herebrt's "The Temple", is a good choice of critic and expositor. So I'm looking forward to reading this latest addition to some of the more thoughtful and accessible treatments of Herbert's "utmost art".

    Here's another of the better known poems, familiar to those who still sing old hymns, and for whom daily holiness is found in the ordinary services and courtesies of human exchange:

    Teach me, my God and King,

    in all things thee to see,

    and what I do in anything

    to do it as for thee.

    A man that looks on glass,

    on it may stay his eye;

    or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

    and then the heaven espy.

    All may of thee partake;

    nothing can be so mean,

    which with this tincture, "for thy sake,"

    will not grow bright and clean.

    A servant with this clause

    makes drudgery divine:

    who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

    makes that and the action fine.

    This is the famous stone

    that turneth all to gold;

    for that which God doth touch and own

    cannot for less be told.

  • George Herbert Week: (i) Quaint complexity and Spiritual Intensity

    The quaint complexity, spiritual inensity and metaphysical reach of George Herbert's poetry have made him one of the most popular devotional poets in the English tradition of religious poetry. In the 19th Century he was printed and re-printed in all kinds of editions, from the leatherbound deluxe to the small popular fit in your pocket devotionals. I have several copies, of various ages and values, and I try to resist the temptation to pick up others as they are published, or older ones with their copper plate illustrations, extravagant fonts and decorated pages.


    Herbert 2

     

     

    The critical edition by Helen Wilcox, published by Cambridge a few years ago, and costing an arm and a leg in hardback ( in my case a gift from Sheila) but mercifully now available at an affordable paperback, is definitive. The introduction, critical notes and comments demonstrate the editor's easy expertise in the history, culture and religious thought of the 17th Century, and as a reader who loves the poetry enough to be a true critic – wise, informed, erudite and generous in the rich flow of information and comment. 

     


    Herbert 1The Everyman Edition is a lovely volume, as the new Everyman volumes are – clothbound, high quality paper, clear print in a good sized font, and again good introduction and notes full of information. And in hardback at £12.99 almost one tenth!! of the cost of the hardback Cambridge Edition.

    The Editor is Ann Pasternak Slater – her middle name one of the celebrated names of Russian literature – she is Boris Pasternak's niece. Describing Herbert's capacity to take ordinary things and discern eternal significance, and commenting on his phrase 'heaven in ordinarie', she says, "The commonplace is not merely capable of sanctity; it is what can most easily explain the transcendent to us".

    Only a few of Herbert's poems are anthologised these days; understandable for a writer whose every line is resonant with biblical words, ideas and associations, and whose every other line alludes to Christian experience, or classical reference, or theological or liturgical connections. Take the poem below; replete with suggestion yet no active verb – he never says what prayer IS. But every clause is a facet glinting with possibility and hesitant insight. If you know it, enjoy it. If you haven't come across it before, enjoy it. Maybe, when all is said and done, the most we should hope for in our prayers is that there is "something understood."

     

    Prayer (I)

    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 heav'n and earth;

    Engine against th' 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 dressed,

    The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

    Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

    The land of spices, something understood.

  • Make no mistake! Jesus is Risen! The Unambiguous John Updike.


    IconResurrectionSometimes Christian theology needs to stop qualifying and nuancing and just announce what it believes is the truth that dissolves all other claimed certainties. Now I know that when it comes to the central mysteries of our faith the last thing necessary is strident certainty, shouted loudly, with eyes closed to other possibilities and mind sealed against deeper apprehension, so that the truth so mistakenly protected is limited to our own human criteria.

    Still. There's something refreshing when someone decides to draw an epistemic line in the sand, to say it as he sees it, to do a Thomas from the other side of doubt and say My Lord and My God. That's what John Updike did in 1960 when he wrote his Seven Stanzas for Easter. Every year I read them, and smile at the take no prisoners bluntness of a poet defending a mystery by insisting on miracle.

    Seven Stanzas for Easter

    Make no mistake: if he rose at all

    It was as His body;

    If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse,the molecule reknit,

    The amino acids rekindle,

    The Church will fall.

    It was not as the flowers,

    Each soft spring recurrent;

    It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

    Eleven apostles;

    It was as His flesh; ours.

    The same hinged thumbs and toes

    The same valved heart

    That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered

    Out of enduring Might

    New strength to enclose.

    Let us not mock God with metaphor,

    Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

    Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

    Credulity of earlier ages:

    Let us walk through the door.

    The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

    Not a stone in a story,

    But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

    Time will eclipse for each of us

    The wide light of day.

    And if we have an angel at the tomb,

    Make it a real angel,

    Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in

    The dawn light, robed in real linen

    Spun on a definite loom.

    Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

    For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

    Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed

    By the miracle,

    And crushed by remonstrance.

  • Look at the Birds of the Air: Epiphany Moments in the Company of Birds

    Epiphany moments come as gifts.They cannot be contrived, rehearsed, controlled or repeated.

    They are unique moments of insight, seeds of wonder, which grow into praise, thanksgiving and a humble surrender to the beauty, the surprise, the daily miracle of life.

    My earliest years in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire gave me a love for birds that is now part of who I am and how I see the world. I notice birds, their songs and sounds are signals and summons to attention. I trekked for miles, risked life and limb, read books and remember the first pair of old binoculars given to me by the farmer who was my father's boss. By secondary school age I was an amateur encyclopedia of evidence based research on Scottish birds. If there had been a Higher in Ornithology I'd have done it in half the time and upset the invigilator by walking out early.

    To this day the sound of the curlew, the whirring of the snipe's wings, the oyster catcher's alarm, the mimicry of a starling, the concerto of a skylark, the song of a mavis, the aerobatics of lapwings, the choreography of starlings before roosting in the hayshed, the white flash of a looping pied wagtail, the miracle of motionless flight that is a kestrel balancing in the wind, the ned-like behaviour of magpies, and the gossipping chirping of house sparrows, remind me I live in a woerld that I share rather than own. And that the voice of the birds is no lesser voice than my own.

    And some of my epiphany moments have come from a surprise encounter with one or other of those other residents of this country whose right to live, have a habitat, be free of pesticide contaminated food, and whose contribution to the richness of our lives is also essential to the welfare of our country, and our spirits.

    One of these was in 1982. Thirty years on I remember Sheila and I looking out the window at the wall along the garden that retained a fastflowing burn. The water was frozen during a long spell of frost. And sitting within 20 feet of us, bathed in frosty sunlight, was a kingfisher, hoping for a thaw soon. It is one of the most beautiful moments of our married lives which we still remember as vividly as the colours that vibrated with light and seemed to cast an irridescence across the space between bird and birdwatchers.

    That memory is an inevitable hermeneutic to this poem, which sits way up the modest list of poems that are themselves capable of being epiphanic.

    As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
    As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
    Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
    Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
    Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
    Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
    Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
    Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

    I say móre: the just man justices;
    Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
    Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
    Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
    Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
    To the Father through the features of men's faces.
       As I said at the start.
    Epiphany moments come as gifts.They cannot be contrived, rehearsed, controlled or repeated.
    They
    are unique moments of insight, seeds of wonder, which grow into praise,
    thanksgiving and a humble surrender to the beauty, the surprise, the
    daily miracle of life. Praise God. 

  • Paradise Lost: Where Inevitable Human Failure meets Infinite Divine Resourcefulness

    Sorry. Not been here for a few days. Two reasons. Tired. Busy. Answer to both – take it easy.

    On the other hand I've just been reading Leland Ryken on John Milton and came across the moment of epiphany at the end of Paradise Lost, when Adam finally realises what the loss of Paradise means, and how to live in a post-Paradise world. The sympathy of the poet for the human condition, the hopefulness that even cosmic tragedy is not final in the providence of God, and the psychological and spiritual sensitivity by which Milton describes not only repentance, but the positive outcome of repentance in a life of trust, risk and obedience to God.

    Having spent recent weeks immersed in several psalms, as texts to nourish and console the heart, as poems to interpret and pray with faith defiant or reticent, and as images to stir my imagination as I worked the Shalom tapestry which is now ready for framing, Milton's pastorally valid descriptions of the heart's desire towards God resonate deeply and comfortingly. Because what is portrayed in the lines below is the reality of failure, and the deeper reality of grace; the inevitable consequences of sin, and the infinite resourcefulness of Holy Love to meet that inevitability with new possibility; and for the forgiven penitent the promise that walking in obedient trust and costly love, we serve once more the "love that moves the Sun, and other stars" – I know – that's from Dante, but why not bring two epic poet visionaries together?

    Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,

    And love with fear the only God; to walk

    As in his presence; ever to observe

    His providence; and on him sole depend,

    Merciful over all his works, with good

    Still overcoming evil, and by small

    Accomplishing great things, by things deemed weak

    Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise

    By simply meek: that suffering for truth's sake

    Is fortitude to highest victory,

    And, to the faithful, death the gate of life;

    Taught this by his example, whom I now

    Acknowledge my Redeemer ever blest.

    Book12. ll. 561-573

  • The Mystery of Gratuitous Beauty and Ubiquitous Gift

    DSC00228

    The Summer Day

    Mary Oliver

    Who made the world?
    Who made the swan, and the black bear?
    Who made the grasshopper?
    This grasshopper, I mean-
    the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
    the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
    who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
    who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
    Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
    Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
    I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
    I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
    into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
    how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
    which is what I have been doing all day.
    Tell me, what else should I have done?
    Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
    Tell me, what is it you plan to do
    with your one wild and precious life?

    This is the poem that brought Mary Oliver's poetry to my attention and I've read her regulary ever since. On a blue sky sunny day in Westhill, Aberdeenshire, this celebration of life and its unique unrepeatable giftedness is a reminder of responsibility to live life well and grateful for the gift it is and the gifts it brings.

    The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Garden – such fragile transient beauty, – cause for wonder, and praise and grateful holding of all that is Gift.

  • The Poet reveres the word, the mind and the heart

    Sargent_-_Alice_MeynellEvery now and then I come across a poem by Alice Meynell, and decide to go look for her and find out more about her. Till now, I haven't. But already it's obvious she was someone whose life experience was rich and enriching, whose contribution to her times like that of many women was overlooked by virtue of her being a woman. Late Victorian patriarchy and anti Catholic bias led to her being shunned for Poet Laureate; her contribution to the Suffragist movement is all but ignored, and at times misleadingly omitted from the narrative. She was one of a growing number of literary Catholics whose poetry and essays explored those realities of faith and questioning, from the standpoint of a Catholic heart and mind seeking to be faithful, yet doing so with intellectual integrity and emotional honesty.

    I want to know more about her, and I want to read her best poems. Because again and again I've found that the poet who reveres the word as the currency of human thought and feeling, has a charsimatic quality of language that makes mystery communicable; not as lucid clarity and definition, but as articulated longing, as holy imagination, as intellectual and spiritual humility in the presence of the sacred.

    Here is one of Meynell's poems which I know well, and need to know better, because it points to a way of seeing people, and seeing Christ in and through others.

     

    "The Unknown God”

    One of the crowd went up,

    And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,

    Received the Lord, returned in peace,

    and prayed Close to my side. Then in my heart I said:

     

    ‘O Christ, in this man’s life

    This stranger who is Thine in all his strife,

    All his felicity, his good and ill,

    In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

     

    ‘I do confess Thee here,

    Alive within this life; I know Thee near

    Within this lonely conscience, closed away,

    Within this brother’s solitary day.

     

    ‘Christ in his unknown heart,

    His intellect unknown – this love, this art,

    This battle and this peace, this destiny

    That I shall never know, look upon me!

     

    ‘Christ in his numbered breath,

    Christ in his beating heart and in his death,

    Christ in his mystery! From that secret place

    And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!’

  • Ultimate Grace for Our Ultimate Concerns

    DSC00331John Donne is one of the greatest English prose writers. He was also one of the most accomplished and metaphysical of Seventeenth Century poets. His sermons and poems are richly embroidered with imagery and allusions, classical and biblical, theological and philosophical, many of them obscure and at best enigmatic to those less familiar with Donne's cultural and intellectual worlds. He treated the big themes of human existence and the overwhelming questions posed to the guilty conscience by a God whose love and justice he saw as absolute, and therefore absolutely decisive for the destiny of each individual soul, including and especially his own.

    Anguish and ecstasy, fear and joy, guilt and forgiveness, desolation and consolation; such are the poles of human experience between which Donne composed his sermons and poems. And when allowances are made for the rhetoric and discourse of Seventeenth Century divinity, many of the poems still speak with universal relevance to those deep inner turmoils of conscience and those serial disappointments that can so dishearten us when we would be better than we know we are.

    First_046The tortured uncertainties of Romans 7 describe Donne's oscillation between regretted sin and longed for holiness. "For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do….O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

    Few poets have faced death with such honest human terror balanced by a faith "troubled on every side but not distressed…perplexed but not in despair,…cast down but not destroyed…" And he often finished his most searching poems with recovered assurance resonant with Paul's great sigh of relief – "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord…."

    Here is one of my favourite Donne poems – for those not familiar with it remember Donne's name was pronounced "Dun" – and so the wordplay becomes a playful dialogue with God in a prayer about Donne's ultimate concerns.

     

    HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
    by John Donne

    I.
    WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
        Which was my sin, though it were done before?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
        And do run still, though still I do deplore?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    II.
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
        Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
        A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    III.
    I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
        My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
    But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
        Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
            And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                        I fear no more.

  • Wild geese, Loch Skene, and our place in the world

     

    DSC00385

      

    In Scotland the wild goose is an image that goes back to early Christian days. The Iona Community has almost made the metaphor its brand name. Migration as the search for food and home, the costly but lifegiving freedom of flight, the forward lunge of the wings, the honking in unison of a long skein, the collaborative use of the slipstream, the lead goose giving direction and creating impetus – it isn't hard to see the spiritual implications of wild geese in flight.

    The photo is of Loch Skene – at this time of year a major stop-off point for migrating geese. Long noisy skeins of them fly over our house. A field a mile away was brown with grazing geese and must present a headache and dilemma for farmers who see young grass being eaten with frightening thoroughness.

    Mary Oliver's poem about Wild Geese is one of her best, and she is one of the best North American poets writing today. You can have your own go at working out the significance of the migrating goose for our understadning of the human journey, the spiritual quest, the hunger for home, for community and for what lies ahead. For now, here's Mary Oliver's take on those chevrons of fellow pilgrims and travellers on this beautiful fragile planet

    .

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.     Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.

     

      .