George Herbert is one of a triumvirate of writers in whose company my faith has been deepened, and whose poetry has enabled me to interpret much of my own spiritual experience. I first encountered George Herbert in several of his hymns.
At the prayer meeting in the Baptist Church in Carluke, in the late 1960s, we sang hymns of devotion and consecration. One of them was 'Teach me my God and king, / in all things Thee to see…' I still remember as a very recently converted teenager more used to lyrics from the Rolling Stones, The Hollies, The Who and The Beach Boys, raising my inner eyebrows at the phrase 'drudgery divine' – not least because during much of my childhood on the farms I wielded a byre brush, a barn brush, a whitewashing brush, and any other brush needed to keep a farm tidy! I knew about sweeping rooms, and I called it many names, but never 'drudgerie divine'!
On a memorable June evening in 1982, in the vast and spacious beauty of Thomas Coats Memorial Church where I was minister, we sang 'Let all the world in every corner sing', with a full choir, a Hill organ, and late evening sun streaming through the plain glass windows. Four decades later I still feel some of the holy hush when the hymn finished. The photo is of the chancel in Coats where the choir stood, and we sang God's praise with a quality of music Herbert would have approved and appreciated.
Then there is Herbert's clever but lovely play on John 14.6, 'Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life', still included in the Church of Scotland Hymnal (CH4). This and the two subsequent verses form a beautiful prayer of invocation, Christ centred in their devotion, their simplicity of faith evident in the choice of words, and all bar one, words of one syllable. Some time early in my ministry this poem found its way into the small commonplace prayer folder I have collected and curated over several ministries.
The point is, through those hymns George Herbert had sneaked into my head, and I wouldn't forget him. By the 1980s I had a copy of his poems and began to read them, alongside several other poets who became important conversation starters, interrupters of my inner status quo, and companions on the journey of faith seeking understanding.
In 1992 I presented a paper to a group of theologians on Herbert's sonnet, Prayer I, later published with the title, "Significant Stuttering About the Inexpressible."1 Some years later I taught a three-week intensive course, Cruciform Spirituality in a Broken World, in Hanover, New Hampshire, on George Herbert, Charles Wesley and Julian of Norwich. By then I was well into all three writers, and they were well into me, shaping and reshaping my spirituality, helping me articulate my own faith, oscillating between resting and wrestling, and providing deep sustenance in the demands of both pastoral ministry and academic leadership in theological education.
More than quarter of a century after teaching that course, and what now feels like a culmination of all those years of reflection, reading, teaching and writing on those three very different Christian theologians, my indebtedness to their work has been expressed in my own preferred art form – tapestry. The Julian tapestry, 'Benedicite Domine', completed in 2022, I've explained in the post for January 20.
Since the start of Advent 2023 I worked on a tapestry dedicated to the other two, George Herbert and Charles Wesley. I knew from the start what poem of Herbert's, and what hymn of Wesley's, I would try to expound in colour, tone, image and symbol. The tapestry is finished and with the framer, and will be collected within the week.
The Herbert poem woven throughout the tapestry is The Altar, the first poem in ''The Church' section of Herbert's The Temple. The last line of 'The Altar' leads into the next poem The Sacrifice, Herbert's long, powerful meditation on the atonement. The Altar is one of only two 'shaped' or 'pattern' poems', the other being Easter Wings.
From the outset, The Altar is concerned with the poet's strong sense of human inadequacy in the face of divine holiness. The poet recognises the recalcitrance of his heart, the hardness and impenetrable spirit of resistance which has the character of stone. And not just any stone, but like flint, granite, or any other stone with an adamantine quality. Such a heart of stone nothing but divine power can break, nothing but grace can soften; and nothing but love can reframe such a heart and will towards praise.
The last two lines ambush the devotionally complacent, who may be lulled into thinking the poem is all about the sacrifice of the broken heart, the believer's transformation by grace. Readers of Herbert will quickly become familiar with such theological rigour and poetic irony, and the well laid ambush of the last lines, often employed to startle the reader awake to deeper truth.
The poet isn't praying out his own sacrifice, He knows that such devotion is only possible for a heart broken by a power such as only God can wield. And divine power is revealed and wielded on the cross, in the death of Christ, where "He who knew no sin was made to be sin, that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
O let thy blessed sacrifice be mine,
and sanctify this altar to be thine.
Whose altar is it? Mine or Thine? The poet builds the altar, but of stone so hard it can't be shaped and fashioned by human hands or tools. Not only so, but hard as the stones are, the human heart is harder still. What breaks the stony heart is the power of God, and that power throughout Herbert's poetry is cruciform, energised by holy love, and in the nature of sacrifice for sin. The death of Christ is the true sacrifice, which opens the way for Christian sacrifice in response: 'we love because he first loved us.' Only when the sacrifice of Christ is received by faith upon the altar of the human heart, only then can that heart be sanctified, set apart to belong to Christ alone.
The Sacrifice is the long, sonorous, poem that follows The Altar. Sixty three stanzas, spell out in graphic detail, the tragic Theo-drama of the crucifixion, sounding the unprecedented and incomprehensible grief of the God-man, Jesus Christ. The poem The Altar, is not unlike a precis of what follows, in which its key emphases are to be be woven throughout the epic-scale telling of the Passion.
In the next post I'll explore in similar personal vein, 'O Thou who camest from above', a hymn by Charles Wesley, also concerned with how it can be that the stony human heart might be reshaped to become a place on which the new life in Christ becomes a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
1 Available online: https://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/eq/2001-2_155.pdf
2 Tapestry photo is a detail of the work in progress. The iris is traditionally a symbol of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. The church interior photo was taken by Charlee Maasz, now Chief Executive of Glasgow City Mission.
