Easter Wings

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Through Lent With George Herbert
(Wednesday after the First Sunday of Lent)

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Two poems, both named Easter Wings. Easter Wings (1) on the left, Easter Wings (2) on the right. From the first printing of The Temple. George Herbert: The Temple. [University of Cambridge: T. Buck and R. Daniel, 1635.] University of Glasgow Library. Sp Coll Bi6-l.30.

In The Altar George Herbert uses the layout of the poem to reinforce the idea in the text – the poem speaks of an altar, and it looks like an old pagan altar. Here are two more famous examples of these shape poems, both of which are called Easter Wings (and which some critics consider to be one poem). Apparently the use of such an image went back to one Simmias of Rhodes, who wrote in Greek and lived around 300 BCE; it is probable that Herbert knew his work, for he was a classically trained Englishman who wrote poetry in Greek and Latin. Here the two poems each consist of ten lines in the rhyme scheme ABABACDCDC.  The shape is created by the fall and rise of syllables in each verse: ten in line one, eight in line two, six in line three, four in line four, then just two in line five. Then in reverse order, two, four six, eight, and finally ten in line ten.

Building on the simile in line eight of Easter Wings (1), the wings have been identified by Joan Bennett in 1962 as “the rise and fall of a lark’s songs and flight.” It is probably more than that. C. C. Brown and W. P. Ingolds, in an article from 19721  go beyond Bennett to suggest that the key text behind the poems is Malachi 4.2:

But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.

This was read in ancient Judaism as a reference to the Messiah, and so for Christians is a reference to Jesus. Brown and Ingold also connect these wings with that of the two cherubim that sit on the cover of the Ark of the Covenant. Cherubs seem to come in pairs (Cherubim is the plural of Cherub in Hebrew), and the authors of the article note many instances of that in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

Two of these instances is  the story of the resurrection in the Gospels according to Luke and John. Mark and Matthew each have one angel showing up, but in Luke 24.1-9 we read:

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

Likewise in John 20.11-13:

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’

I suspect that the presence of two angels at the resurrection is of greater significance to Herbert than the passage from Malachi. Now to the poems themselves.

Addressing God as Lord, the first Easter Wings describes in its first half, as the syllables descend from ten to two, the Fall of Humanity, alluding to the story in Genesis. But if there is a Fall, there is an ascent, which begins with the words “With thee”, two small but powerful words, pregnant with possibility. The seventh line, “O let me rise” signifies the beginning of the ascent. The simile to larks, both flying and singing, is made in the next line, and the final line refers to the felix culpa, that the further the fall the higher the ascent by the believer in Christ.

The second Easter Wings seems more personal. He starts by saying, “My tender age in sorrow did begin”, which may be a conventional reference to original sin, but perhaps is also a reference to his father’s death when Herbert was only three. We cannot tell when Herbert wrote his poems with any accuracy, but as a young man Herbert contracted tuberculosis, which contributed to his early death. Thus the words, “that I became/most thin” sound like a small self-portrait, ghastly and powerful in its economy of language. Again, line six begins the second half, the ascent, with the words, “With thee”, for only with God in Christ can the ascent take place.

The word “imp” in line nine is archaic and obsolete, but is taken from falconry. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it means:

To engraft feathers in the wing of a bird, so as to make good losses or deficiencies, and thus restore or improve the powers of flight; hence, allusively, with reference to ‘taking higher flights’, enlarging one’s powers, and the like.

It is apparently derived from the Greek, ἔμϕυτος, ἔμϕυτον “implanted”, “engrafted”. The speaker in the poem can only rise “if I imp my wing on” that of the resurrected Christ. Again, the theme of felix culpa emerges, and all of Christ’s sufferings – and the poet’s “sickness and shame/ thou didst to punish sin” – serve to “advance the flight in me.”

Just as two cherubim were set to guard Eden, but now announce Christ’s resurrection, so these two poems stand in Herbert’s The Temple to announce Fall and Flight. They are the wings of angels, but also the wings of sinner and redeemer.

Footnote

1. C. C. Brown and W. P. Ingolds (“George Herbert’s Easter-Wings” Huntington Library Quarterly Vol. 35, No. 2 (Feb., 1972), pp. 131-142)

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George Herbert’s “Redemption”

Posted on March 12, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Through Lent With George Herbert
(Tuesday after the First Sunday of Lent)

After yesterday’s The Sacrifice Herbert has several shorter poems that try to respond to what is said in it. The sixth poem is this one:

Redemption

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
    Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
    And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought;
    They told me there that he was lately gone
    About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
    Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
    In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
    Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
    Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.
Cottage

This might be a “new small-rented house”.

It is a sonnet, in the usual fourteen lines of ten syllables each in iambic pentameter. , with the rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFFE GG. This might strike one as a bit unusual, as Shakespeare always used ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. However, Italian poets often used ABBA ABBA in the first eight lines, so Herbert using EFFE is not that much of an innovation, if one at all (I’m no expert on sonnets, and other English poets may have done this before him).

What I find striking about the poem is the way in which Herbert addresses the relationship of God and human in ordinary terms – a lease between a tenant and a landlord. Most of Herbert’s parishioners would have been tenants of a local lord, and would have immediately understood the worry of “not thriving” and the necessity to “cancel th’old” and get “A new small-rented lease”. The problem is that the tenant is undoubtedly bound by the old lease, and so it is at the discretion of the lord as to whether the old one can be replaced with the new, less expensive one.

Thus far the language is not theological, but in the next verse we read that the lord’s manor house is “In heaven”. Thus, this lord is The Lord. Somehow this tenant, as if in a dream, just pops up to heaven to look for the lord. And, in as matter-of-fact language as that in the first four verses, he is told he’s not there, he’s off to earth, you know, about a rather expensive piece of land.

Our narrator returns to earth and looks for him in places nobility, but does not find him. Then, hearing thieves and murderers and their “ragged noise and mirth”, he sees his lord, who says before a word is spoken, “Your suit is granted.”

There’s a lot of weird stuff going on here, but that’s typical of Herbert. The lord is found among thieves and murderers, just as Jesus would have been found with condemned rebels and robbers at his crucifixion. The land dearly bought is the redemption of humanity, and the tenant suing (i.e. requesting) for a change of tenancy is granted this request, and presumably receives that very expensive piece of land at little expense to him. Typically this is read very much along Lutheran terms (derived from Luther’s debatable reading of Paul) so that it implies a transfer from living under Law and living instead under Grace. However, it may be more ambiguous than that – it may simply be a move from sin and death to life and grace.

Another of the weird things is that the event in which the land “bought Long since on earth” turns out to be coincident with the moment when the tenant espies the lord, hears the lord speak, and then dies. There is no indication that the tenant spoke to the lord – it is as if the lord already knows all about it, and acts before a request is actually made. Time collapses, and the lord acts before being asked. This is the nature of the atonement of the cross – it is made available across time, and God acts without humanity asking him to do so, so caught up in our sins are we.

In other poems Herbert uses similarly ordinary images and relationships to convey the weird and wonderful nature of God’s salvation in Christ. Stay tuned.

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The Sacrifice

Posted on March 10, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Through Lent With George Herbert
(Monday after the First Sunday of Lent)

Passing ByThe third poem of The Church, the fifth poem of The Temple (or sixth, if you include  the Dedication), is The Sacrifice. This makes sense, following after The Altar, for it is on an altar that one makes sacrifices. However, the sacrifice here is not the poet’s heart or that of the reader, but of Jesus Christ in his suffering and in his death. It becomes the reader’s and the poet’s by incorporation into Christ.

The Sacrifice, unlike the majority of Herbert’s poems, is long – 252 lines, or eight pages. It is in triple rhyme, that is, three lines that all rhyme. This gives it, as Ann Pasternak Slater points out, “a remorseless, driving intensity”. Each stanza ends with a fourth line that is almost always the same: the plaintive Was ever grief like mine? This refers to the Lamentations of Jeremiah, which read during Holy Week during Morning Prayer or Matins, and is the basic text that is sung at Tenebrae. “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” (Lamentations 1.12).

The poem is in the voice of Christ and is addressed to the indifferent people passing by:

Oh all ye, who pass by, whose eyes and mind
To worldly things are sharp, but to me blind;
To me, who took eyes that I might you find:
Was ever grief like mine?                                  (vv. 1-4)

It recounts the Passion of Jesus from his perspective, as though on the cross. As the reader we are engaged by asking if what Jesus is addressing us. The references Herbert makes in the voice of Jesus will be familiar to anyone who recalls a recitation of the one of the passion narratives. In the Book of Common Prayer communion lectionaries, a schedule of readings that Herbert would have used, these gospel passions are all read during Holy Week.

The poem is filled with irony that arises from the paradox of the incarnation, in which the Word of God becomes human flesh, and the infinite is joined with the limited. Thus, following Luke, Herbert has Jesus say,

Herod in judgement sits while I do stand;
Examines me with a censorious hand:
I him obey, who all things else command:
Was ever grief like mine?                              (vv. 81-84)

Jesus the narrator points out hypocrisy of Judas, who accepts thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus, but objected at the cost of the nard which was used to anoint his feet:

For thirty pence he did my death devise,
Who at three hundred did the ointment prize,
Not half so sweet as my sweet sacrifice:
Was ever grief like mine?                              (vv. 17-20)

At two points the refrain switches from Was ever grief like mine? to Never was grief like mine. The first is the point at which, according to Mark and Matthew, Jesus exclaims “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a haunting cry of desolation, perhaps tinged even with a sense of betrayal. It is a reference to Psalm 22.1, and in the passions demonstrates the paradox of the enfleshed divinity experiencing the absence of divinity, as well as being on the verge of losing humanity through death.

But, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me,
The son, in whom thou dost delight to be?
My God, my God ——————-
Never was grief like mine.                          (vv. 212-216)

The third line of the stanza (line 215) is left unfinished, and the reader needs to complete it, as if Jesus runs out of strength and breath to even say it, but is carried on by the believer.

The theme that Jesus’s suffering is unique emerges,for while the benefits of Jesus’s obedience is available to the world, it is not available to him. Early in the poem Jesus recalls sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22.44). His suffering is a balsam – a balm – that combined with repentance heals the broken world’s two hemispheres, and can do little to mitigate the fear of Jesus’s human fears.

These drops being temper’d with a sinner’s tears,
A Balsam are for both the Hemispheres:
Curing all wounds but mine; all, but my fears,
Was ever grief like mine?                          (vv. 25-28)

The final line repeats the otherwise unique refrain of line 216:

But now I die; now all is finished.
My woe, man’s weal: and now I bow my head.
Only let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine.                        (vv. 249-252)

The lament in The Sacrifice is, as Arnold Stein observes, a complaint about the brokenness of the world. The ironies and hypocrisies of humanities sinful dispositions and actions is only overcome by the desperate paradox of the incarnation and cross, in which the impassable suffers pain and desolation. Confronted with ignorance and indifference God replies in Christ with profound knowledge of the hearts of human beings and a passionate desire for reconciliation.

The art in the poem is in the urgency of the triple rhyme, the relentless movement from betrayal to death, and that fact that the density of biblical allusions does not overwhelm the pace. It conveys the several theologies of atonement without sounding like a theological treatise. It is a lament, a reproach, that is filled with compassion, and marvels at the particularity of its situation. Whereas The Church-porch is long and a bit off-putting, this poem draws the reader in, and overcomes indifference, calling forth a variety of responses. In the following series of poems Herbert attempts to deal with those responses.

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In The Wilderness

Posted on March 10, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A sermon preached on The First Sunday of Lent at the Anglican Church of St. Thomas, Kefalas, Crete, Greece, at 11:00 am on March 10, 2019.

Finding-wilderness-in-southern-Jordan-Valley-in-Aqaba-mountains-towards-Red-Sea-Photo-credit-Leon-McCarron

After his baptism, Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness . . . (Luke 4.1)

A key point in today’s gospel is that Jesus was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit. He did not just accidentally arrive there, it was meant to be.There he prepared for his earthly ministry. There he was tempted by the embodiment of evil and by the power that is wielded in this broken world, a power that appears attractive, quotes authoritatively from scripture, speaks rationally, and seems quite generous. The Holy Spirit leads us into dangerous places, it seems. The wilderness is a place where one is challenged.

Of course, wilderness is a relative concept. An indigenous person on Twitter said, “What you call wilderness is my home and was the home of my ancestors since time immemorial”. And indeed, what might look bleak or foreboding to those of us raised in farmed lands or cities is in fact bursting with life. Even deserts bloom majestically after a great rain.

What is your wilderness? Where is the Spirit leading you, me, us?

It is not always a “nice” place, but perhaps it is the challenging we need.

  • It might be a place of promise but with many unknowns. In our reading from Deuteronomy (we heard about how Abraham and Sarah, wandering Arameans, followed the promise of God to a land that would be lived in by their descendant.
  • It might be a place of deliverance. The people went down to Egypt in a famine, but were enslaved and oppressed, and the people cried out and were led into the wilderness of Sinai.
  • It might be a place of great fruitfulness, a Promised Land, that once achieved becomes taken for granted, so that it becomes all too easy to forget how you got to where you are, all too easy to forget to give thanks.
  • It may be a place where you confront evil. A place where there are temptations. A place where people authoritatively quote scripture to justify betraying God.

So where is the Spirit leading us?

  • Perhaps the Spirit is leading us into the wilderness to confront evil. It might be the evil of poverty, or of war, of racism, of bigotry.
  • Perhaps the Spirit is leading us into the wilderness to refine us, to test us, to make us stronger. To be tempted by external things so as to return to that which is most valuable.
  • The Spirit may be leading us into the desert to be taught, even as the people of Israel were taught through the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, in the Ten Commandments and the other instructions.
  • The Spirit may keep us in the wilderness to learn patience, even as the people of Israel spent forty years, and being transformed from the mentality of slaves to a people of deliverance.

Well, my impression is that we have been in a few wildernesses.

  • Those of us who are British may feel that we are in the wilderness of Brexit, not knowing what is going to happen. Some of us are fine with the current uncertainty, others less so. “What do I have to do with my dog?” said one concerned person.
  • Perhaps as we look at the politicians and get frustrated with the whole lot of them, whether in Athens, Brussels, London, Washington, or Ottawa. We might feel quite alienated from the whole bunch, just wishing they had the common sense to sort it out. If only we were in charge, eh?
  • As Christians, watching the decline of the faith at home and elsewhere in Europe and North America, we may feel thrust out into a deserted place, where no one sees you or hears us.
  • Perhaps the people of this chaplaincy of St. Thomas, Kefalas feel as if we’ve been in a bit of a wilderness in this chaplaincy, as we had a long eighteen month interim. Are we on the verge of entering a Promised Land? Perhaps, if we are faithful.

But the point of the wilderness is that it is unknown, there are wild beasts, there are temptations, there is not always certainty. It forces us to turn inwards and to work on ourselves.

My hope and prayer in this season of Lent is that we have just the kind of wilderness experience that the people of Israel had, and that Jesus had – that we emerge re-created, ready for ministry, firmly grounded in prayer and scripture, and thankful.

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Superliminare & The Altar

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Through Lent With George Herbert
(Saturday after Ash Wednesday)

Lintel 2

Superliminare

Thou, whom the former precepts have
Sprinkled and taught, how to behave
Thyself in church; approach, and taste
The churches mystical repast.

Avoid, profaneness; come not here:
Nothing but holy, pure, and clear,
Or that which groaneth to be so,
May at his peril further go.

Superliminare is the Latin word for what in English we call a lintel. A lintel is the structure above a door or a window. In Latin super means “above” and “liminare” means “door”. Lintels can be very plain, as in the picture above. They are structural, maintaining the weight of what is above it and distributing it to the walls. Doors and windows built without lintels may contribute to cracks or the catastrophic failure of the walls. It may be part of the door frame, or immediately above it. In the picture above it is made of wood, which is pretty common in this part of Greece. It may also be of stone, or these days, concrete or steel.

Lintels may also be decorated. In the picture below the lintel of the door into the Vaishnavite Temple is particularly ornate.

Door_jamb_and_lintel_over_entrance_into_Lakshmi_Narasimha_temple_at_Vignasante

Lakshmi Narasimha temple in Vignasante, Tumkur district, Karnataka state, India. It was built in 1286 CE during the rule of the Hoysala Empire King Narasimha III.

They may also have writing on them. It may simply be the year it is built, or the name of the family, or perhaps a motto or a coat of arms. It may also be a warning. Perhaps the best known warning on a lintel is that in Dante’s Inferno Canto III.  The poet passes through the Gate of Hell on which is inscribed (translation by John Ciardi):

I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way to a forsaken people,
I am the way into eternal sorrow.

Sacred justice moved my architect ,
I was raised here by divine omnipotence,
Primordial love, and ultimate intellect.

Only those elements time cannot wear
Were made before me, and beyond time I stand.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Well, that’s pretty bleak, but Herbert can be, too. His liminal poem is both encouragement and admonition.In two simple AABB verses he encourages those who live a disciplined life to come in and read and enjoy a mystical meal. Those who are profane – unholy, stained, murky, and whiny – may only bring down condemnation upon themselves, their sins crying out an indictment. As I stated yesterday, Herbert takes poetry seriously. Long before Stanley Fish described Reader-Response Criticism Herbert expects the reader to be truly engaged in mind, body, and soul.

The Altar
The Altar

This poem begins The Church. As is obvious from the above, it’s fun for typesetters. It uses a method Herbert uses in other poems, in that he uses text to literally construct a picture, which serves as a metaphor.

The altar in the poem is neither a stone altar of the Israelites (or the altar in the Jerusalem Temple) nor the Lord’s Table. Perhaps the placement of the poem here is meant to parallel the way in which the stone altar of the ancient Israelites were in front of the Temple proper, or the manner in which medieval church buildings were all oriented on the old stone altars. In all probability the old stone altars had been removed in Herbert’s time, and a plain wooden table would have been used for the Lord’s Supper.

The altar is made of the poet’s heart (which, when we read it, is our heart). The altar is broken and repaired. The heart is the seat of the person’s soul, and not just a pump for sending blood around the body. It has been made and unmade by God, but repaired by tears of contrition and regret. Thus the altar is fit to sing God’s praises, and the poet/reader bids God to accept such praises as a sacrifice, and that the altar belong to God. As the prayer after communion in the Book of Common Prayer puts it,

accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving . . . And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee . . .

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Women’s Ways of Knowing

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

BookOn this International Woman’s Day (March 8, 2019) I would refer my male friends to the book, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. I read it back in the ’80s, and if I was not a feminist before I certainly was one afterwards. Reading it I recognised my own privilege as a white, educated male in North America, and began to see that what I considered “normal” was not so for everybody.

First published in 1986, it was written by four researchers, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. The four authors interviewed one hundred and thirty-five women from their teens into their sixties. From these interviews they inductively derived five ways of knowing, or perspectives:

  • Silence
  • Received Knowledge: Listening to the voices of others
  • Subjective Knowledge: The inner voice
  • Procedural Knowledge: Separate and connected knowing
  • Constructed Knowledge: Integrating the voices

The Wikipedia article is a pretty good summary. Of course, the other thing I might suggest to my male friends is to listen to women around them today, and not to speak too much!

 

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The Church-porch

Posted on March 8, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

Through Lent With George Herbert
(Friday after Ash Wednesday)

Church Porch

The Church-Porch (Peirirrhanterium)

As Arnold Stein points out in the first chapter of George Herbert’s Lyrics there is a plainness about Herbert’s poetry. The plainness is both obvious and concealed, though, and demonstrate great technical skill. He uses plain and easily understood metaphors, but often the metaphors admit of more than one meaning. Herbert wants his poems to be understood, and so his lyrics are in what for him was contemporary, modern language, and not the already archaic language of the Book of Common Prayer and the Authorised Version of the Bible commissioned by James VI & I. He does not create the Latinized English of John Milton (a generation later) and he does not emulate the classical poets. He does not show off his artistry, as Shakespeare so often does (the Sonnets are harder to read through than the poems of The Temple). This plainness of style, veiling deeper meanings that reveal themselves with re-reading, is actually quite hard, and show Herbert to be quite accomplished.

One aspect of Herbert’s plainness in the service of accessibility is the use of the architecture and furniture of the church building as themes for poems. Thus, the second poem is labelled with the Latin term Superliminare, which is the lintel or top frame of the door to the church. The third poem is labelled The Altar. There is also Church-lock and key, The Church-floor, and The Windows. It is as if the reader enters into a church building, and everything is pregnant with meaning. The sight of each of these is a jumping off point for a meditation or devotion.

The first poem is called The Church-porch. The second is the door, and The Church proper begins with The Altar and ends with Love (3) one hundred and fifty-one pages later, and is then followed by a very early poem called The Church Militant. This first poem, The Church-porch, then, is an introduction, a preparation for entering The Church; Superliminare is the transition between the two. The Church-porch has a second name, Perirrhanterium – not exactly a common word. Indeed, the digital Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t condescend to acknowledge it as an English word worthy of inclusion. It means “sprinkler” in ancient Greek, and is what we would normally call an aspergillium, a piece of holy hardware used to sprinkle holy water. In Roman Catholic masses and in some Anglo-Catholic Anglican parishes holy water is sprinkled upon the attendees at the beginning of the service, partly to remind them of their baptisms, but also to symbolically wash their sins away, even as the ancient Israelite priests would sprinkle the blood of sacrifices on the faithful. This first poem, then, is a preparation and a purification.

As Carole Kessner notes in “Entering “The Church-porch”: Herbert and Wisdom Poetry” [George Herbert Journal, vol. 1 no. 1, 1977, pp. 10-25], this poem is a bit of an embarrassment to  Herbert enthusiasts:

Long, ponderous, didactic, structurally rigid, sometimes repetitious, it is altogether unlike the intimate, deeply moving, frequently charming, varied lyrics of the devotional second section, “The Church.”

It’s certainly not where one should first encounter Herbert. We no longer desire teaching from poetry, but epiphanies and enlightenment, or perhaps acute observations.However, didactic poetry has a long tradition in the Classics, whether it was Hesiod in Works and Days, or the philosophy of Parmenides, or Virgil’s Georgics which is all about farming. In Jewish and Christian scriptures Proverbs and other wisdom literature seeks to instruct.

It is 462 lines arranged in six-line verses, in the pattern of ABABCC. In the first lines Herbert writes to the reader,

Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance
Rhyme thee to good

The second verse warns the reader from lust, the second advocates chastity, the fourth and several following warns against drinking too much wine, the tenth against swearing, and so forth. It is didactic in a way that modern poetry never is. Herbert comes across as an even duller Polonius, giving little indication of what is beyond the Superliminare.

However, this preparation has a purpose. Herbert is well aware that there is a strong connection between spirituality and discipline. If one does not have some sort of Rule of Life one will not be able to grow towards God or one’s neighbour. For the most part the advice is given in The Church-porch is good advice that I myself try to live. It is generous advice, knowing the imperfections of people high and low, but assuming the possibility of change in everyone. As the final couplet notes,

If thou do ill; the joy fades, not the pains:
If well; the pain doth fade, the joy remains.

This is not some gloomy Puritanism – Herbert was certainly not a Puritan – but the advice of someone who has read the scripture and lived life. Herbert had participated in the exercise of power and the ascent to high dignity, and had a mature appreciation of it all. Having moved into ministry in a peripheral rural parish Herbert had let go of what the world celebrated. In words that might apply today he writes,

O England! full of sin, but most of sloth;
Spit out thy phlegm, and fill thy breast with glory:
Thy Gentry bleats, as if thy native cloth
Transfus’d a sheepishness into thy story:
Not that they all are so; but that the most
Are gone to grass, and in the pasture lost. (91-96)

Herbert encourages us, then, to move from a complacency, an idleness about our spiritual condition, to something that allows grace to work within us. May it be so.

 

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Through Lent With George Herbert

Posted on March 7, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

HerbertSince 2002 or so I’ve had a copy of the The Complete English Works of George Herbert, the English poet and clergyman who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James VI & I, and Charles I. While I have dipped into it every so often, I’ve never read it all. This Lent I will try to do just that. There are some 184 pages of poems, so divide that by the 40 days of Lent, I need to go through 4 or 5 pages a day. I invite you to join me in this blog as I do so. I won’t comment on every poem, but I will stop and reflect on at least one each day.

The edition I am using is the Everyman’s Library volume, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater  (New York/London/Toronto: Knopf/Borzoi, 1995), which also includes The Country Parson, selected letters, his will, and Isaak Walton’s short biography. I also have a copy of Arnold Stein’s George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), which while old, is a comprehensive analysis of his English poems. Herbert also wrote in Latin, and supposedly he was excellent in that language as well, but I suspect the number of people reading those poems is at best in the hundreds, and the number of studies are even fewer.

Although born in Wales he was part of the English aristocracy, albeit the poorer end of it. He was educated at the prestigious Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the Public Orator at Cambridge from 1620-1627, which meant that he gave speeches in Latin at ceremonial events  such as graduation ceremonies, convocations, and the visits of royals. He attempted a political career, serving in Parliament and receiving the notice of the King, but when James VI & I died he shifted to an ecclesiastical career. Having already been made a deacon in 1624, he was ordained in 1629, and served at the small rural parish of Fugglestone St Peter, with the chapel of St. Andrew’s at Bemerton, just outside of Salisbury. He only served three years when he died of tuberculosis in 1633. He left the manuscripts of his poetry to his friend Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, who put them in order and arranged for their publication as The Temple later that year.

Tomorrow I will consider his opening poem, the 462 line The Church-Porch. For the moment consider the following:

The Dedication

Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee;
Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came,
And must return. Accept of them and me,
And make us strive, who shall sing best thy name.
Turn their eyes hither, who shall make a gain:
Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain.

Herbert, in his first lines, addresses God, not with the flowery invocation found in the classical epics (and emulated by Milton in Paradise Lost) but in the simple language of the psalms. The rhyme is simple enough – ABABCC. Herbert is aware of the quality of what he wrote, but surrenders them to God, and claims that anything that is in them comes from God – “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee”, as 1 Chronicles 29.14 puts it. He bids God accept his poems and himself, encouraging those who dare to sing praises to continue to strive. Then follows two simple requests to God.  First, that God would lead those who might benefit from the poems to them, but, second, that those who would stand condemned by God’s truth revealed in them, or who would misconstrue their meaning to Herbert’s detriment, would not. Herbert had a high understanding of the truth of God, whether revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, the text of scripture, or mediated by a sermon or poem.

For Herbert devotional poetry was a serious business, not trivial. With that in mind, let us continue.

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The Poems You Would Have Written

Posted on March 6, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

On Ash Wednesday 2019

Postscript Auden on MacNeiceW. H. Auden, from the epilogue to his elegy to Louis MacNeice in his book of poetry, About the House(1965), 23.

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Desire and Obedience

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Bruce Bryant-Scott

A sermon preached on the Second Sunday Before Lent at the Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete, Greece, 11:00 am on Feb 24, 2018.

NG 2112

“The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch” (also known as “The Skating Minister” by Henry Raeburn, circa 1790. National Gallery of Scotland.

Once upon a time there was a Church of Scotland minister who had to skate to get to his church. He lived in a manse that was some ways away from the church building itself. He woke up one morning and there was snow all over the ground, accompanied by a strong wind that set up tall drifts alternating with clear icy patches. He knew that there was no way his poor horse would be able to get through it. However, he noted that the river nearby, which ran by both the church and the manse, was clear. Having been a bit of an athlete in his day he strapped on his skates, rather primitive things by today’s standards, but good enough. He got down to the river and in a matter of a few minutes he had skated the distance and went inside. This created a problem for the elders of the church, as it was forbidden to play sports on the Sabbath, and ice-skating clearly was a sport. The elders demanded to meet with the young minister after the service, and while he waited outside they debated among themselves whether the man had broken the Sabbath and could continue. Finally, they agreed on a question to pose to him, a query which would settle the issue. They brought him in and said, “Did you enjoy it?”

This morning I want to talk about obedience and desire.

Obedience to God is always presented in the Bible as a good thing. Obedience in the Hebrew scriptures is rewarded with land and sheep and long life. Jesus is the example of obedience in that he carries out his Father’s will, even to death, even to death on a cross. In the Garden of Gethsemane he prays that he might be spared the results of such obedience, of being bound to death in order to overcome it, but his final wish is not his personal will to avoid pain and suffering, but that “thy will be done”.

Disobedience is not a good thing. In the Hebrew scriptures disobedience is punished with invasions and lives cut short, with exile and the loss of land. Adam and Eve are the examples of disobedience, given just one rule – do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – and they go and mess that up. While we do not read this literally, it is an accurate description of human depravity – give us a rule and we’ll be predisposed to break it; show us what is good for us, and we’ll take the option that shows independence of mind, no matter the downside.

And that creates the need for God’s intervention. Because independence of mind no matter the downside leads to death, whether it be the living death of discord and conflict, or looming death from total war and ecological disaster. And so God enters into this world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the human united with the divine, the finite and the infinite paradoxically made one, and descends into the void of sin and death. Being finite he dies, but being infinite he overflows it and is not overcome. He rises to new life, restoring and transforming our humanity. And we who are in Christ become obedient to God’s will not out of some abstract command to do something, but out of love, out of desire.

Many Christians are uncomfortable with desire, seeing in it something erotic and dangerous, a means by which to manipulate others, or something that is gross and physical. And yet desire is good. We see in the reading from Genesis that the primordial human, Adam, neither male nor female, has a desire for companionship, but cannot find it among the animals. While perhaps surprising to those of us who are quite content to live alone with cats and dogs, it again speaks a non-literal truth, that we humans do need each other. When that strange, God-inflated human is transformed into the binaries of male and female it speaks to the fact that we are not complete without each other, and that our myriad differences are all God-given, and that only in the collective of humanity do we find the image of God. And in the story of the one made two we hear how one half of humanity desires the other. In that desire we see the desire for completion, a reflection of the human desire for God.

I believe that we are here because of love, in this place and in this worship, because of desire for God and our desire for community. It’s a rare thing in today’s instrumental world, where we are seen as means to ends, reduced to being consumers and producers, objects of surveillance that is packaged, aggregated, and sold to online retailers and political parties. In pure desire we desire each other, our souls and bodies, and offer them up to each other and to God, in what the BCP Collect for Peace describes as “whose service is perfect freedom”. We are not the wind and the water, which mindlessly obey the lord of all creation. We obey out of loving desire, inspired by the Holy Spirit to become like Christ as he was on Earth and as he is now.

But of course, as with any good thing, desire can be abused, as can obedience. The conference taking place this weekend in Rome between the Pope and several hundred bishops from 130 countries from around the world is addressing the crisis of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. I have personally dealt with many complaints of sexual abuse within the Anglican Church of Canada and I have, on behalf of the Church, offered to cover professional counseling and significant financial compensation for victims. I have been involved in disciplining the perpetrators and dealing with the devastating fallout in the parishes where they served. So do not get me wrong – I am not naïve about what inappropriate desire can do. Loving desire, whether towards God or another human being, whether sexual or non-sexual, will always be filled with trust, honour, dignity, respect, tenderness, offering, and meaningful consent. Or, as Paul puts it in his First Letter to the Corinthians:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

This kind of love, this kind of pure desire, is from God and of God, but is also so very human.

So my brothers and sisters, let us be passionate Christians, obedient to the will of God and considerate of the wishes of others not out of compulsion or the dread of consequences, but because of our Spirit-filled desire for God and for the image of God that we find in community with others. Let us be very careful, taking seriously the trust given to us, so that we might like Christ follow in the path of serving and not focusing on being served. Let us be bold in Christ, and not ashamed. And when our lives are over and we stand before the judgement of God, and we are asked, “Did you enjoy it?”, may our response be, “Yes, my Lord, we did!”

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