Tag Archives: George Herbert

Righteous Anger? Herbert’s The Collar

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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Portrait of George Herbert

 

I struck the board, and cried, “No more; 

I will abroad! 

What? shall I ever sigh and pine? 

My lines and life are free, free as the road, 

Loose as the wind, as large as store. 

Shall I be still in suit? 

Have I no harvest but a thorn 

To let me blood, and not restore 

What I have lost with cordial fruit? 

So begins George Herbert’s poem, The Collar. Herbert loved playing with words, it’s one reason I love his poetry. At first sight the subject seems to refer to the limiting effects of a collar, most obviously, his clerical collar, but of course the word is, in its sound, similar to the word “choler”, or “anger”, as well as to the word “caller”.

According to the theories of early modern medicine, “choler” was the humour which made one angry, hence our word “choleric”, and this poem has that in abundance.

He begins with anger expressing itself in physical form. The “board” he strikes may be taken to be a table, but it could equally be the altar, and given the subject of the poem, that may be the preferred reading. Herbert’s patience is at and end, he’s leaving. The constant search for something he cannot have is, he declares, at an end. He’s telling God that that’s it! He wants to be “free as the road.” We might note in passing the echo of the “rood” or Christ’s cross, whose sacrifices the poet is now rejecting. He wants a secular life and its happiness.

“Shall I still be in suit?” he asks querulously. This is almost a tantrum. He feels he has no control, that he is always the petitioner; he wants freedom. All he feels he has is a thorn, and we hear the echo, again, of Christ’s crucifixion when he was crowned with thorns.

   Sure there was wine 

Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn 

Before my tears did drown it. 

Is the year only lost to me? 

Have I no bays to crown it, 

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? 

All wasted? 

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, 

And thou hast hands. 

Of all Herbert’s poems, this is the one closest to modern free verse. He eschews his usual style, and the poem sprawls across the page, as ill-disciplined as the poet’s temper. He looks back with anger at what was, and longs for something better. Then it occurs to him that there is still time to do so.

 

Recover all thy sigh-blown age 

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute 

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, 

Thy rope of sands, 

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

And be thy law, 

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

Away! take heed; 

I will abroad.

He can reject the academic life and the discipline of theology and of God. The constraints on him are, after all, self-imposed, and he can, if he so pleases, loosen them and leave.

And so, as the poem itself rages on with the poet’s wrath, another voice, a still small one is heard off-scene.

Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears; 

He that forbears 

To suit and serve his need 

Deserves his load.” 

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 

At every word, 

Methought I heard one calling, Child! 

And I replied My Lord.

And in response to the “caller” Herbert’s “choler” subsides. Yes, it is his choice to follow Christ, and despite his anger and his hurt, he will do so. However much his human will rebels against God, the poet knows he cannot live without him, and when God calls the poet, like Samuel, may wonder “Is it I, Lord?” But he knows that, like Samuel, he will follow.

In many ways this is one of the most personal of Herbert’s poems, and for me, and I know others, one of the most reassuring. If a man like Herbert could so rail against God, then is it suprising that the rest of us have done so from time to time and wondered whether we could carry on living a Godly life in the face of temptation,  not least the temptations of our own wilfulness. But for me, as for the poet, when I hear “the caller” I, too, reply “My Lord.”

The church’s banquet

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry, Prayers

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I hadn’t realised how long I’d been away, and if you asked me ever so hard, I’m not sure I know why now broke the writer’s block, but people have been sweet, so thank you. I think it helped with Audre here. Having another female Anglican voice was somehow comforting – again, don’t expect me to say why, it just was.

I’ll apologise here for the passive-aggressive tone in some of my early responses on Newman. I don’t mean to come across that way, and don’t know I do it, so thank you to Phillip and C for both, courteously, pointing it out. As I said to Phillip, I will try to be good rather than be good at being trying! I have been reading back a bit, and would like to thank Nicholas and C who have done a great job of keeping this going, as well as Scoop and others who’ve played a noble part.

Writing, and reading a blog, as I discovered, is either a routine you get into, or it doesn’t happen at all. Is that just me? I say that because I find the same is true of prayer. Prayer can seem an odd thing to outsiders. If God knows everything we need, why are we telling him? If God is omnipotent, why do we have to praise him and flatter him all the time? Such questions and comments fail to understand prayer, and I want to say why I think that.

Prayer is, for me, tuning into the God who is always there, and it’s about nurturing the relationship I have with him. That’s where church is vital to me, as the church is Christ’s. Routine helps me here in two ways. I pray the same three Offices every day at about the same time: Morning Prayer; Evening Prayer and Compline. It was C who recommended the habit to me and I am grateful. It helped me overcome two of my natural reactions to private prayer, one of which was that it was a bit of chore when I was tired or busy and couldn’t think what to say, and the other was an anxiety to try to be good for God and in some way win his approval. The words of Common Worship provide me with a text which I have come to love, and in the repeating of the words, I find they mean more to me; it is as though whatever ‘tuning in’ is happening deepens. It’s the same when listening to a beautiful piece of music, the more you play and listen, the more you get out of it. My prayer seems to me to become part of a bigger and ongoing prayer and the more I do it, the closer I feel I get.

And that’s where the bit about adoration comes in. When I say the Psalms or the Litany I’m not flattering God, I’m simply expressing my love for him. Prayer is who I am at those moments, it takes me deeper into the reality of Jesus. I feel as though I am stepping into an ongoing conversation. I marvel at God’s love and his glory. Its why I like that bugbear of some, icons. I look at him in my icons, in the same way I look at the Eucharist when, in church, I practice Eucharistic Adoration; looking is important. As some saint or other (someone here will know) once said about prayer: ‘I look at him and he looks at me.’

I love him and in those precious moments I can feel the love he has for me. I repent of my sins, but they pale because the overwhelming feeling is of his love and connectedness. I can set aside, because he has, my sins and concentrate on being in his presence, feeling his gaze on me, bathed in love. That’s the point I offer up my prayers for others, not because I think he doesn’t know, but just because being human, that’s the way I express my love for others too. And even though I am often alone in my room when I pray, I know I am praying with the whole church, here on earth and in heaven – so it seems natural to use ‘we’ rather than “I.’

Prayer is the way the church gives me to deepen my communion with Jesus, and I think of my beloved George Herbert’s poetry and want to finish this little piece with a poem of his which expresses all I just tried to say much better than I can:

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

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth

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

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

 

The silent God?

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman, poetry, Prayers

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“Thus religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, which forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines and isolated masses.”

Religion without dogma made no sense to Newman; without that it was “mere sentiment” – and that was a foundation of sand. But he was well aware of the limits of humanity and acknowledged that the application of the intellect to religious matters might well produce a diminution of faith. It was, he commented, as though it was assumed that theologians were “too intellectual to be spiritual” and thus “more occupied with the truths of doctrine than with its reality.”

For Catholics the Church is the rock upon which dogma rests; we accept the historical reality of the Revelation it transmits to us. But intellect alone will not suffice; that is where prayer and devotional practices are needed; we do not worship by brain-power. For Newman,“Revealed religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.” Prose was inadequate to convey the Truth of revealed religion, but, without an Authority to pronounce on revelation and tradition, private judgement would simply lead to the sort of chaos he came to discern within the Church of England in his own day. Thus, the mixture of light and dark in the quotation which heads up this essay.

Although we are each the subject of our own experiences, and whilst Christ came to save each of us, our egos are but a vehicle when it comes to understanding that Christ Himself is at the centre of our Faith. The central truth of the Christian Faith is the Incarnation. God became man and died that we should have eternal life. And yet knowing this, we can, nonetheless, in times such as this lose sight of this and, in despair, wonder why God is silent in the face of our prayers for healing and safety.

Much prose has been given over to the problem of why God allows mankind to suffer – the technical term is theodicy. But the intervention which speaks most to my heart is the poem, “Denaill” by George Herbert:

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder

This is no intellectual exercise, it is the heart-felt anguish of the poet who agonises at what he feels is God’s refusal of his prayerful requests. He feels abandoned, as though his soul has no mooring. It is only in close reading that we see that the poet is, himself, in “denial”. Each stanza concludes with a last line which does not rhyme – except for the last one which concludes:

 O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhym

Which, of course, is a rhyme. God has answered, it is the poet who has been in denial. God’s answer may not be the one we expect; it maybe that we are not listening.

We are made in God’s image; but we are not God. How much we long for a God whom we can understand, as well as worship, how often we think that God is absent; but how often to we think that it is we who are absent, we who are deaf?

T.S. Eliot, as so often, expresses it best in the first part of Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

We have to put away our worldly concerns. Our intellects can rest secure on the rock of the dogma proclaimed by the Church. What should concern us is prayer, and even the best of prayers is but the antechamber to our encounter with God. We intersect with the past and the present, the living and dead, and above all with Him whose Kingdom shall have no end.

God is not silent; we lack the ears with which to hear Him if we think so.

George Herbert: seeking the face of God

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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Yesterday was is the 500th anniversary of the birth of George Herbert, a favourite poet of Jessica, and one of the greatest of theologians, if, as we ought, we define the term as being to talk about God. We proceed, as Herbert saw, from the consequences of the Fall. Once, mankind walked with God and saw His face, but we pursued the devices and desires of our own hearts, we thought to be as wise as God – an endeavour showing how foolish we are as a species. So we were banished, and we no longer see Him face to face. One consequence is that, like Isaiah we fear to see His holiness for we know we are men of unclean lips. And yet the Psalmist expresses what is in the hearts of all Christians when he writes

‘My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” /  Your face, Lord, I will seek.’

Augustine says the same thing and extends it when he says that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God, and if we will, even for a moment, turn from the clamant noises we seek and which fill our ears, then our hearts too, will tell us this; the Spirit reaches out to us all, and we know that even though we are far off, God reaches out for us. George Herbert puts it well in his poem, The Pulley

But keep them with repining restlesnesse:

Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,

If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse

May tosse him to my breast

That emptiness we strive so hard to keep at bay, is the longing to which we yield when we give in – as Herbert suggests, it is a natural process designed by God. When we think we know better, we strive and use our strength, as though we really can take the kingdom of heaven by storm. However, if we will strip away our pride of self, if we will receive him as a small child, then that balancing of which Herbert wrote, can take place.

Sometimes our theologising with our heads misses what our hearts tell us – which is that we are loved of God. Herbert caught our feelings so well here:

‘Love bade me welcome.

Yet my soul drew back
God, being love, does not, in the poem, accept our refusal to look on Him, but rather:
“Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?”’

Like the Prodigal, Herbert’s sinner cannot accept the love, but offers rather to be a humble servant – to which God/Love responds:

‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat / So I did sit and eat.’

If we will but ‘sit and eat’, then our restless heart will find fulfillment in Him.

Teaching & the Faith

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith, poetry

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Two weeks ago I wrote a little about a seminar group I am taking in which we are using the poetry of George Herbert as a way of explaining to a generation unfamiliar with it, something about Christianity.  Today we were dealing with poems on the themes of death and faith, and this brought them – and us – up against the idea of atonement.  The concept of a God of wrath was one with which they had some familiarity, and the discussion went along lines about how hard they found the ideas of Herbert. So, in Faith they were quite expecting the litany of things which man thought would save him, and couldn’t, to end with him being condemned to hell, and were shocked by the lines:

 I owed thousands and much more:
I did beleeve that I did nothing owe,
And liv’d accordingly; my creditor
             Beleeves so too, and lets me go.

How on earth, they wondered, could that be? If, as was the case, Herbert was saying that nothing we could do could secure our own salvation, how was it that God forgave us? One young man asked how that could be squared with the idea he had picked up from the media that very few souls would be saved? How, he asked, could that be aligned with what the Bible said?

That led us into a discussion about how the Bible should be read and what it was for? This mapped onto parts of the discussions we have been having in the comments boxes with our welcome new commentator, pancakesandwildhoney. Jesus did not write a book; there is no reason to think he could not have done if he had so wanted, but he chose not to; he founded a Church. That Church was the body which established what was and was not scripture. That is not to say that the Church wrote Scripture, but it is to say it told us what Scripture itself cannot – what the Canon is, and, indeed, that there should be a Canon. None of this is clear from Scripture.

The Catholic view is that the Scriptures are best read within and interpreted within the Tradition of the Church. We are, after all, a fallen race. We can all, like Adam and Eve, pluck the fruit of the tree of life – in this instance, the Bible – and claim that we are authorised to know its meaning. We can even, as our friend Bosco does, claim that because we are ‘saved’ we have a unique insight into what Scripture means, even though we did not establish the Canon, and have no way outside of the history of the Church of establishing what it is. Our prideful ways are such that we can think we know better than the Church.

Bosco is fond of saying that the Catholic Church says that only Catholics will go to Heaven, and it matters not how many times we quote various documents, he insists that medieval documents trump them; not that he is the only one here of that view. But St John is clear – Jesus’ sacrifice is for all who will receive Him by faith, in their hearts with thanksgiving. Or, as Herbert puts it:

 A peasant may beleeve as much
As a great Clerk, and reach the highest stature.
Thus dost thou make proud knowledge bend & crouch,
             While grace fills up uneven nature.

The idea of God as love was clearly something new to the class, as was the notion that God wants everyone to be saved, and the rejection, when it takes place, is not God rejecting us, but us rejecting Him.  As one young woman said to me after class, that has made her ‘think again’. Education is about helping people think, so that seemed a good thing. It will be interesting to see how they are feeling when we reconvene next Friday.

Being saved – what next?

24 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith, poetry, Salvation

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I sat in today on a class taught by Chalcedon where he was going through George Herbert’s poem, Redemption – an interesting experience. As we discussed it, especially the last line: Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died, it brought from one of the students a good question: ‘If the tenant is now saved by the sacrifice of Jesus, what is to stop him behaving badly?’  I know C wants to ponder more on the class before writing anything here, so I said I’d say something, as I have always loved Herbert, and as the question seems to me a very good one, not least in the light of our discussions this week.

It is, of course, a question St Paul wrestled with in his letters to the Corinthians and the Galatians, as well as being something of a heresy which has haunted the Church from time to time. Put bluntly: if Christ’s sacrifice once and for all on the Cross redeems us, then we are surely free to behave as we want? If works will not save us, then why should the damn us? I’d be interested in your reaction. This is mine, with all its inadequacies.

If you read the whole of the poem, it is ostensibly about a tenant farmer who, feeling he is not making it, wants to renegotiate his lease for one he thinks he can fulfil. He sets out to find his master, and he looks in all the places he thinks an important man is to be found. Then, in a manner very common in the metaphysical poets, he shifts focus, and suddenly the tenant is confronted with Christ on the Cross, where he finds his suit is granted freely. For me, this is about the journey on which the man goes.

He thinks that his own actions can find a way to negotiate his salvation; he hasn’t done enough; he should do more, but if he can just negotiate with God, he can find a way through; in short, the journey upon which the tenant embarks is one where he is actively engaged in finding a solution to his problem. This is typical of the then new Protestant attitude, which avoids the sacramental in favour of the practical and of the efforts of the Christian. Yet Herbert, who sees the Mass not as a memorial but as the reenactment of Calvary, tells us that salvation is to be found in it – in the atoning sacrifice. But that does not mean that journey availed nothing.

The journey was prompted by the tenant’s own feelings of inadequacy. This sent him on a journey to discover a better way; that journey, prompted by Grace, begins the change in him. If he truly believes that Calvary saves him, then that seals the change; if the faith is real, then it will show itself; if it isn’t, then the feeling of inadequacy will continue.

So, that is my answer to the question – namely that if faith in Christ is real, it is part of a journey and continues to be so. We are redeemed, but we are not perfected in faith. So, if we simply continue in our sin, then Grace is not working in us, as St James was right, true faith cannot help being seen in some form of works. What do you think?