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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.

 

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.  

The Sinner

Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
   What I have treasur’d in my memorie!
   Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I finde there quarries of pil’d vanities,
   But shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture
   To shew their face, since crosse to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heav’n the center.
In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
   The spirit and good extract of my heart
   Comes to about the many hundred part.
Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
   And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
   Remember that thou once didst write on stone.

The inestimable, and theologically grumpy Professor Donald MacKinnon, once interrupted a paper I was giving in Aberdeen with a loud "Yes!" of approval.

I was offering a critique of Julian of Norwich's view of sin, and how at times she seemed to suggest it was no big deal.

I insisted that the cross only makes sense when sin is seen not as temporary inconvenience, but as a cosmic tragedy reverberating in eternity and requiring resolution. It was that insistent seriousness that raised the affirming growl from Professor MacKinnon.

George Herbert's poetry tells of "the many spiritual conflicts between God and my soul".The two primary conflicting forces throughout his poetry, and his life, were human sin and divine love.

When it came to sin as affront to both holiness and love, Herbert got it! Sin, in essence and outcome is moral tragedy, and a destructive shattering of trust and love.

Herbert's own heart was the arena in which he knew himself a sinner, guilty, convicted, conflicted.

Yet at the same time the deepest places of the heart were where he encountered a Love that bade him welcome even when his soul drew back guilty of dust and sin.

Lent is a waste of time if we minimise our sinfulness. The more we trivialise sin, even our own sin, the more we discount the cross, undercut the cost of redemption, and trivialise divine holiness.

We are then in danger of a Gospel made safe, and a God domesticated for our comfort.

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." (H Richard Niebuhr)

Herbert's poem "The Sinner" is packed with clues about the devastating effects of sin on human relatedness to God.

"I am all ague…"; "quarries of pil'd vanities…"; "shreds of holiness…"; "dare not venture to show their face…".

The last three lines are the sinner's prayer.

Repentance, the cry of the heart for renewal yet again, a deep self-knowing of how inarticulate shame sounds more like flinty reluctance than moral brokenness, and the sinner's faith that dares remind the Almighty of his literary skills when confronted by stone. 

"Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
   And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
   Remember that thou once didst write on stone." 

A true Lent, seriously undertaken, compels uncomfortable questions. Such as:

Is gratitude an emotion that arises spontaneously, or a disposition arising from disciplined practice?

What about its opposite, ingratitude, the lost or never learned habit of thanksgiving?

Ingratitude is the moral fault of overlooking that which comes into our lives as gift.

Today we might call it the sin of presumed entitlement of life's goods.

 

But gratitude? If I have to train myself in thanksgiving does that make gratitude less sincere?

Herbert's poem "The Thanksgiving" is impatient with such moral scruples.

Gratitude is duty, privilege, discipline and gift.

And the grateful heart itself a gift to be prayed for and then strengthened by practice.

Such increase of gratitude is both promised and secured,  

provided only that we view life itself from the perspective of the Passion.

 

The 'King of Grief' and 'King of Wounds' loves with prevenient, persistent love.

Christ's love always outbids us, because infinite in resources and eternal in purpose. 

And Christ's love, "Thy art of love", reduces the grateful heart to the perplexity of silence.

But it is the silence of adoration, of absolute dependence, and of grateful surrender.

We give back what we have been given, even our gratitude is Lent.  

 

Extract from The Thanksgiving.

My musick shall finde thee, and ev'ry string

Shall have his attribute to sing;

That all together may accord in thee,

And prove one God, one harmonie.

If thou shalt give me wit, it shall appeare,

If thou hast giv'n it me, ‘tis here.

Nay, I will reade thy book, and never move

Till I have found therein thy love;

Thy art of love, which I'le turn back on thee,

O my deare Saviour, Victorie!

Then for thy passion – I will do for that –

Alas, my God, I know not what.

Whole poem found  here

 
 
 
Is Lent a time for giving up, or for taking up? 
Herbert's 'Agonie' forces consideration of both;
he identifies the two furthest poles 
of life's most excruciating tensions.
We are stretched in crucifixion, 
by the claims of sin on the one hand
and the demands of love on the other hand.
 
Lent is an invitation and a demand
to recalibrate the relation between sin and love.
We give up sin, we take up love, 
and thus God restores the equilibrium of life.
 
Motivation is found in the same darkly illumined places, 
Gethsemane and Calvary. 
Lent is the time to visit those two places, 
where sin meets love in a garden
and mercy bears judgement
on a rubbish-strewn landfill 

Observing Lent helps us get the measure of things.
To know sin in ourselves, 
and to know that we are fully known
and fully loved by by a Love beyond knowing. 
 
               The Agonie
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
        But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.
        Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
        His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
        Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
        If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

 

There are ambush moments in life which jerk us out of the routine, familiar, unsurpising predictability of everyday actions.

Like going out to the car, opening the door, putting on the seat-belt and putting the key in the ignition.

Then the sun shines through the external condensation on the windscreen, which earlier in the morning crystallised into ice, and now there is a filtered light masterpiece a foot from your face.

And I wonder at the way the ordinary transfigures before our eyes by an illumination that comes from beyond ourselves, but touches the deep core of wherever joy comes from.

What are the constituent elements of joy? Can it be analysed by an emotional spectrometer, that clever instrument that can "measure a continuous variable of a phenomenon where the spectral components are somehow mixed"?

Certainly I have found that joy is a "continuous variable" of mixed components. The joy of love, and hope, and discovery; the joy of laughter, achievement, music; the joy of a friend's voice, a skein of geese, a perfectly timed football shot; the joy of reconciliation after an argument, of a shared meal, of silence in good company. And on it goes.

I've sometimes wondered if joy is one of the more persuasive arguments for God, by which I mean those moments of ambush that take us out of our own heads, touch us to a new attentiveness, and so change the way we see the world.

So a frosted windscreen becomes a sacrament of grace, a nudge towards joy, well more of a rugby players shoulder charge impelling us outwards to a world we now notice, and learn to love again.

There's no point in going looking for joy, it usually comes looking for us. Unless we are too busy to notice it, too preoccupied by what's going on in our own heads and hearts.

But all the time, God lays ambushes, plots against our well worn routines that obscure those continuously variable  signs and sacraments of God's beauty, truth and goodness.

Like when sunlight turns a frosted windscreen into a sheet of liturgical lalique! (See photo)

I think it was John Stott, preacher, Bible expositor and world Evangelical leader who first taught me the word 'ornitheology'. Amongst Stott's interests beyond Bible teaching and writing was his lifelong fascination with birds. He was a twitcher, and a very knowledgeable ornithologist. He often used the habits and lore about birds as illustrations of spiritual life.

My own interest in birds goes back to my childhood on the farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I grew up surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, burns, small lochs, endless hedges, farm buildings and always one or two meadows or fallow fields. It was a bird habitat paradise. Without a pause I can rhyme off lists of the birds we heard, saw, and took an interest in. Field birds included lapwing, curlew, snipe, skylark, partridge, pheasant; around the farm pied wagtail, house sparrow, starling, swallow, house martin, jackdaw, wren, robin, jackdaw, wood pigeon; along the hedges and grass verges yellow hammer, chaffinch, hedge sparrow, mavis, blackbird, greenfinch, linnet, goldfinch; down at the lochs there were coot, waterhen, heron, mallard, geese; along the burns and in the woods, dippers, sand martins, mistle thrush, yellow wagtail, kestrel, cuckoo, blue tit, great tit, long tailed tit; and in the meadows blackcap, coal tit, meadow pipit, and several of the above where there were bushes, gorse or other promising nest sites. 

It is one of the great blessings in my life that I lived at a time of ornithological abundance, before so much industrialised agriculture laid waste the habitats and reduced the food sources of all those feathered beauties that populated my days. I remain passionate about birds; their beauty, their fascinating variety, their habits and habitats, and the hard to explain sense of companionship I feel when I hear bird calls and song, and see birds in flight and going about their lives. 

So ornitheology is also one of my subsidiary interests. The geese migrating and heading unerringly where they need to go; murmurations of starlings demonstrating ballet in flight; skylarks soaring and singing as if life depends on it, and maybe sometimes it does; the patience and stillness of the heron; lapwings showing off moves that are amongst the best displays of aerobatic mastery; the partridge chicks clustering together around a mother trying to run an impossible creche; and the kestrel, hovering with deceptive laziness moving only the wingtips tilted in breeze. All of these have been the subject of various poets, not least because of their achievements as creatures who learned to live and survive and flourish, until human activity began to threaten their future.

Jesus said consider the birds. At the risk of anachronism, those urgent words of Jesus come whispering down the centuries to a world increasingly hostile to the non human species who share this planet with us. And whatever else the doctrine of Creation addresses, it raises questions of human responsibility as stewards and curators of a fragile planet. A strong Christian doctrine of creation cannot co-exist in the same mind as an attitude of careless, ruthless exploitation of world resources for economic power. That would require a moral contradiction and a genuine distortion of a biblical theology of creation. 

The near idyllic account of taken for granted diversity and pervasive presence of birds in my childhood only sounds near idyllic because the plight of bird life has become so critical. The catastrophic fall in numbers, and the large increase in the number of endangered species populating lists of birds at risk on our islands means it is very unlikely future generations of children will ever experience what I took for granted as the way the world is. Ornithology therefore becomes ornitheology. Birds, with their relatively recent security, and now their fragile hold on survival putting them at risk of extinction, are reminders that this world is not a supermarket for humans to raid and plunder.

Call it what we will; green theology, ecology, environmental ethics. But one way or another the bird population, its diversity and health levels, are pretty accurate measurements of the overall impact of human economic activity. And unless we consider the birds, we may well find that once they, and the bees, and the ice, and the forests are pushed to the cliff edge, our human future likewise will be put at risk. That would be ornitheology. I for one cannot subscribe to the irresponsible shoulder shrugging of those whose beliefs bring them to say, "God is in control; it's not down to us." Stewardship is freighted with responsibility, and accountability. We have been entrusted with much, and of us, much will be required.