• Home
  • About
  • Awards
  • Dialogue with a Muslim: links
    • 1st response
    • Second response
    • Final response
  • Saturday Jess

All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: poetry

The silent God?

04 Saturday Apr 2020

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

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

George Herbert, Newman, poetry, prayer, T.S. Eliot

Newman image

“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.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

George Herbert: seeking the face of God

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Christianity, George Herbert, poetry


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.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

The silences of God

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Faith, poetry

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Doubt, God, poetry, RS Thomas

 

saint-hywyn-aberdaron-wales

Jessica’s evocation of R.S Thomas in her post on Saturday prompts some thoughts about his poetry and his faith. He spent his working life as a priest in the Church of Wales, moving ever further westwards until he reached the last village before Ireland, Aberdaron. There was a symbolism in this journey, as the Llyn peninsula gets ever starker as you move down it, leaving behind the clutter and detritus of civilisation, even as the land grows narrower and narrower until, at the end, it plunges into the sea. It was hardly the parish that a clergyman ambitious for preferment would have chosen, and some of his flock were rather surprised to learn that their priest was a famous poet.

For a man whose life was spent in the service of the Word made flesh, and in using words in a sublime way, Thomas’ relationship with words was a conflicted one. Born in an era when the speaking of Welsh tended to be confined to the peripheries, Thomas’ first language was English, and although he learned Welsh in his thirties, he could never write poetry in it. Destined for the cloth from an early age, and a conscientious pastor, Thomas nonetheless wrestled with the silences of God and with his absence, and those themes run through his poems like blood down the Cross. Some, there were, who alleged that he was in fact more like an atheist, but such critics missed what was in the silence, and the epiphanies which hinted at what could not be spoken.

Thomas himself said he thought there was no conflict between his role as priest and poet, because poetry was metaphor, and religion was also metaphor. He saw no conflict between administering the Christian sacraments, which were metaphor, and administering the metaphor of poetry. Predictably, some reacted to this as though he had said that Christianity was merely a metaphor, but Thomas used words with more care than his critics expended on reading them if they thought this. By ‘metaphor’, Thomas meant “an attempt to convey an experience of a kind of new life, an eruption of the deity into ordinary life, a lifting up of ordinary life into a higher level.”

Silence was one of Thomas’ great themes – as was kneeling in it in prayer. He wrote of:

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak

It might seem as though what the poet wanted was what we all want, for God to speak, but the silence itself held something valuable, as he commented at the end of the poem:

Prompt me, God;
But not yet.
When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

In our clamant world where words come cheap and silence is all but impossible, Thomas knew its true value – but also its cost. But he offered no easy platitudes about that being the place where we could rest with God and contemplate him. Sometimes, no words came, but epiphanies did:

Was he balked by silence?
He kneeled long
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

Elsewhere he noted:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep
of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean.
We launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.
It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still

And what was to be found in those silences?

Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences.
Is this where God hides
From my searching?
I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate

As the priest observed, the poet noticed:

Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

That theme of the ‘untenanted Cross’ is one to which Thomas returns on many forms, and it is little wonder that his fellow Welsh Christian poet, Rowan Williams, should have called him the ‘articulator of uneasy faith’.

Sometimes we hear a priest saying that God’s absence is much the same as his presence, but Thomas could not rest easy with what sounded like a platitude, but had to wrestle with it and what it might mean.

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

Here Thomas confronts the usual answers offered in our age – modernisation of liturgy, become more ‘relevant’, without seeing in any of it an answer to the question he poses, and so he returns, in the end to the fact that he needs to ask the questions, and that very need may be the answer he is looking for.

Thomas was essentially a Christian apophatic poet. This Eastern Orthodox way of doing theology is a method of approach rooted in humility, in the recognition that though we can only describe God using language, that medium is an inadequate one to describe the Ineffable and the Eternal.

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Since God is ineffable, even to assign ‘being’ to him in the way we do to ourselves, may well be to say more than we can know. To those who want a simple and comforting faith, there is nothing here, because Thomas did not find faith comfortable, and he refused to settle for the pious waffle which says God’s absence is the same as his presence, because he knew from experience it was not so – and it is that fact that he knew the difference which allows us still to say that Thomas is a great Christian poet. An orthodox one? Hardly, that is not the function of mystic or the bard. One of Thomas’ late poems, Evening, takes us where we need to go at the last:

Let us stand then, in the interval
of our wounding, till the silence
turn golden and love is
a moment eternally overflowing

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Listening to God

23 Saturday Jan 2016

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

≈ 79 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Christianity, Faith, poetry, RS Thomas, Testimony

post03-rsthomas

Now that my health seems up to doing things without my feeling as though a ten ton truck has hit me after the slightest exertion, I’ve told Chalcedon and Neo that they can stand down from their ‘Saturday Jess’ duties. I’d like to thank them, not least Neo who delved through the back posts to great effect, and also Steve Brown, whose idea it was. I found it interesting to read, because it was almost like reading what someone else had written. They charted an odd trajectory. When I started AATW, a few of the idiots who had trolled me elsewhere tried to post comments saying that it was obvious where it was going – at some point there would be an announcement that I had become a Roman Catholic. As early though, as July of 2012 (only a few months after I started) I set up camp on what I called Mt Nebo – where I’ve remained.

My Anglicanism is of the Catholic variety, and where I worship we kneel at the altar and receive communion on the tongue, we pray the Rosary, and on Thursdays we have an hour’s eucharistic adoration; my priest understands my Marian veneration and shares it. I have not been given the signal to cross the Tiber, and so I remain in Canterbury, fully acknowledging everything we have inherited from the first Roman mission of St Augustine, but also taking on board the older, Celtic Christianity which came here under the Romans, and the insights and gifts of the Reformers. Without George Herbert, John Keble, T.S. Eliot and R.S. Thomas, my life would be infinitely the poorer, and in their lines I trace the spirit which moves the Anglicanism of my heart – and my faith is one of the heart, as well as the head. We pray, and we might expect an answer, after all it is a conversation with God, but sometimes it seems otherwise, as answer comes there none. As a Welsh Anglican, I find it is R.S. Thomas who describes this best for me in his poem, Nuclear:

“It’s not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognise
as speech”

In one of his early poems, the beautiful and moving In a country Church, RST describes perfectly what can happen when you open yourself to that realisation – that God speaks to us in ways we need to become attuned to:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

Who could see love in that broken and battered body on the bloody Cross? Who would have looked to such a place for redemption? Yet that is what God is telling us, that is where we must look, there is no other place.

The best reflection on my own journey as a Christian is this from RST’s Pilgrimages:

It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

The answer God gives to the question of man’s suffering takes the form of the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

And for those who want to her RST reading one of his great poems which says so much about my homeland, here’s a treat.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

First Sunday in Advent: John Keble

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by John Charmley in Advent

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Christianity, John Keble, poetry

John_Keble

Now it is high time to awake out of sleep:
for now is our salvation nearer than
when we believed.–Romans xiii 11.

 
Awake–again the Gospel-trump is blown –
From year to year it swells with louder tone,
From year to year the signs of wrath
Are gathering round the Judge’s path,
Strange words fulfilled, and mighty works achieved,
And truth in all the world both hated and believed.

Awake! why linger in the gorgeous town,
Sworn liegemen of the Cross and thorny crown?
Up from your beds of sloth for shame,
Speed to the eastern mount like flame,
Nor wonder, should ye find your King in tears,
E’en with the loud Hosanna ringing in His ears.

Alas! no need to rouse them: long ago
They are gone forth to swell Messiah’s show:
With glittering robes and garlands sweet
They strew the ground beneath His feet:
All but your hearts are there–O doomed to prove
The arrows winged in Heaven for Faith that will not love!

Meanwhile He passes through th’ adoring crowd,
Calm as the march of some majestic cloud,
That o’er wild scenes of ocean-war
Holds its still course in Heaven afar:
E’en so, heart-searching Lord, as years roll on,
Thou keepest silent watch from Thy triumphal throne:

E’en so, the world is thronging round to gaze
On the dread vision of the latter days,
Constrained to own Thee, but in heart
Prepared to take Barabbas’ part:
“Hosanna” now, to-morrow “Crucify,”
The changeful burden still of their rude lawless cry.

Yet in that throng of selfish hearts untrue
Thy sad eye rests upon Thy faithful few,
Children and childlike souls are there,
Blind Bartimeus’ humble prayer,
And Lazarus wakened from his four days’ sleep,
Enduring life again, that Passover to keep.

And fast beside the olive-bordered way
Stands the blessed home where Jesus deigned to stay,
The peaceful home, to Zeal sincere
And heavenly Contemplation dear,
Where Martha loved to wait with reverence meet,
And wiser Mary lingered at Thy sacred feet.

Still through decaying ages as they glide,
Thou lov’st Thy chosen remnant to divide;
Sprinkled along the waste of years
Full many a soft green isle appears:
Pause where we may upon the desert road,
Some shelter is in sight, some sacred safe abode.

When withering blasts of error swept the sky,
And Love’s last flower seemed fain to droop and die,
How sweet, how lone the ray benign
On sheltered nooks of Palestine!
Then to his early home did Love repair,
And cheered his sickening heart with his own native air.

Years roll away: again the tide of crime
Has swept Thy footsteps from the favoured clime
Where shall the holy Cross find rest?
On a crowned monarch’s mailed breast:
Like some bright angel o’er the darkling scene,
Through court and camp he holds his heavenward course serene.

A fouler vision yet; an age of light,
Light without love, glares on the aching sight:
Oh, who can tell how calm and sweet,
Meek Walton, shows thy green retreat,
When wearied with the tale thy times disclose,
The eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose?

Thus bad and good their several warnings give
Of His approach, whom none may see and live:
Faith’s ear, with awful still delight,
Counts them like minute-bells at night.
Keeping the heart awake till dawn of morn,
While to her funeral pile this aged world is borne.

But what are Heaven’s alarms to hearts that cower
In wilful slumber, deepening every hour,
That draw their curtains closer round,
The nearer swells the trumpet’s sound?
Lord, ere our trembling lamps sink down and die,
Touch us with chastening hand, and make us feel Thee nigh.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Teaching & the Faith

31 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith, poetry

≈ 41 Comments

Tags

Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christianity, controversy, George Herbert, Grace, poetry

herbert

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.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Hid in Christ

07 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith, poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Christianity, orthodoxy, poetry

interior churchIn the writings of Andrewes, Herbert and Eliot, the lineaments of the Christian life are traced out. We enter the Church through baptism:

            SInce, Lord, to thee
                       A narrow way and little gate
Is all the passage, on my infancie
                       Thou didst lay hold, and antedate
                                          My faith in me.

and we are subsequently fed by Christ in the Eucharist:

            O what sweetnesse from the bowl
            Fills my soul,

Such as is, and makes divine!

Is some starre (fled from the sphere)

Melted there,

Are we sugar melt in wine?

Or hath sweetnesse in the bread

Made a head

To subdue the smell of sinne;

Flowers, and gummes, and powders giving,

All their living,

Lest the enemy should winne?

What is received in the Eucharist is food for the soul which comes ‘in the bread’ and it has the power of God’s grace to overcome sin.  The Eucharist therefore is an effective means of conveying God’s grace to the communicant and which ‘perfumes the heart’.  God, in Christ is seen to be present in the Eucharist since the power of God ‘as broken’ is ‘here presented’.  Through the Eucharistic feast we are in God and He in us. As Herbert puts in it his poem Holy Communion:

            
Onley thy grace, which with these elements comes,

Knoweth the ready way,

And hath the privie key,

Op’ning the souls most subtile rooms;

While those to spiritis refin’d, at doore attend

Dispatches from their friend.

Give me my captive soul, or take

My bodie also thither.

Another lift like this will make

Them both to be together.

Before that sinne turn’d flesh to stone,

And all our lump to leaven;

A fervent sigh might well have blown

Our innocent earth to heaven.


Thou hast restor’d us to this ease

By this thy heav’nly bloud;

Which I can go to, when I please,

And leave th’earth to their food.”

The Anglican belief in the ‘Real Presence’ has seldom been better expressed. It is through this Holiest of Sacraments that we grow in our faith.

As S Paul tells us, our real life is hid in Christ, something Herbert captures in the very form of his poem on that passage:

            

MY words and thoughts do both express this notion,
That LIFE hath with the sun a double motion.
The first IS straight, and our diurnal friend :
The other HID, and doth obliquely bend.
One life is wrapt IN flesh, and tends to earth ;
The other winds t'wards HIM whose happy birth
Taught me to live here so THAT still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which IS on high—
Quitting with daily labour all MY pleasure,
To gain at harvest an eternal TREASURE.

All Christians are called to holiness of life through the spiritual disciplines of regular worship, reception of the Sacraments, and prayer. We are not atomised Christians, isolated each from another, but rather part the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church as the visible divine society founded by Christ himself to carry forth his mission on earth until the end of time.

 

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

‘Where prayer has been valid’

06 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith, poetry

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Grace, poetry

giddingYou 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

[T.S. Eliot: Little Gidding]

George Herbert’s great series of poems, The Temple, was published by Nicholas Ferrarai in 1633. Ferrarai (or Ferrar) was the founder of an Anglican semi-monastic community at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire. Eliot’s poem of that name is often said to be representative of ‘any’ religious community, but that, I think, is a secular critic’s view; it misses what Little Gidding represented to the Anglo-Catholic Eliot. The community was founded on High Anglican principles and devoted to the Book of Common Prayer; it was not, therefore, an image of ‘any’ place, it was of that particular place, that special tradition, and that manifestation of it. The passage quoted above is, itself, part of that tradition.

In his poem. ‘Prayer’, Herbert called it: ‘the church’s banquet, angel’s age, /  God’s breath in man returning to his birth’, and finishes with words Eliot echoes: ‘Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, / The land of spices; something understood.’ Those last words connect us to prayer being more than ‘an order of words’. Herbert’s poem, which is one long sentence (and without a main verb at that), is itself an expression of one overwhelmed by the power of prayer, by that connection with God it brings; it is an expression of the beauty of holiness.

In his Private Devotions, Lancelot Andrewes summed up the six aspects of prayer thus:

  1. adoration
  2. confession of sin
  3. prayer for grace
  4. confession of faith
  5. intercession for others
  6. thanksgiving and praise

These were the characteristics of the Little Gidding community, which was part of the tradition of which Andrewes and Herbert were such distinguished members. It was, and is, one which recognises the beauty of holiness, that aesthetics matter when it comes to helping us transcend the quotidian. But it is also a tradition in which place matters.

Eliot admired the intimate tone of Herbert’s work, directed as it was to the interiority of life in a small parish as part of a community; both men recognised the communal nature of Christianity. Eliot was writing during the early stages of the Second World War, a time when the very survival of England was at stake – what Church called ‘Christian civilization’ – and he saw, in Little Gidding and its Anglican tradition:

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always

Place and history matter, this Eliot saw as plainly as we fail to see.

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England

The Anglican tradition of public prayer and witness in the quiet and forgotten places, the ministry to all, especially those who do not appreciate or even know they need it, its ability to identify with the local and the particular, are what has made, and makes, the tradition of Andrewes, Herbert, Keble and Eliot, one which we need to reemphasise. It is here, it is now, and it is at once universal and English. The prayer for Herbert read in Anglican services of commemoration captures something of this:

Our God and King, who called your servant George Herbert from The pursuit of worldly honours to be a pastor of souls, a poet, and a priest in your temple: Give us grace, we pray, joyfully to perform the tasks you give us to do, knowing that nothing is menial or common that is done for your sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Good intentions

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith, poetry

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Grace, poetry, sin

hellAs well as writing marvellous poetry, George Herbert was the author of a book of aphorisms, one of which reminds us:

“Hell is full of good meanings and wishings.”

Herbert, like all churchmen of his time, had a keen sense of the effects of sin, as he showed in his poem on it:

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.

How true. Indeed, now, could we honestly say that we are as well guarded against sin as the people of Herbert’s day? I cannot recall the last time I heard a sermon on the subject. Nor, I fear, are we, as Herbert was, much shored up by the daily discipline of the Church and its practice. For Herbert, doctrine and practice helped transform our experience by informing it with Christian meaning; doctrine and public practice help provide that stability we need when, as will happen, God seems remote from our experience, and it is as though we cannot access Him.

That is the real meaning for me, of the Anglican via media, or middle way. It encompasses the experience of the Evangelical and the personal encounter with God, but it does so within a Catholic setting of doctrine and an ordered church life – we have the hope of glory, but we also have the discipline of confession and shame. Yet, as Herbert sees, all of these can be overthrown by one moment of carelessness – a chance we increase if we think we can wish away hell and sin by talking much of God’s love.

God is love and that love finds its focus in the redemptive death and resurrection of the Incarnate word. Christ, the one without sin, is made sin for us and offers us forgiveness if we will repent and turn to Him. Our experience of Him takes us close to Him, but how can we, unstable and sinful as we still are, find stability and the strength to keep going when our experience fails to light the way? Our faith leads us into the sacraments and participation in the life of the Church. In that way, even when He is near, but our sin makes Him seem far away, we can dwell in Him, and He is us.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...

Faith & Prayer

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by JessicaHoff in Anglicanism, Faith, poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Grace, love, Marian Devotion, poetry, Prayers

herbertWe have often discussed ‘faith’ here, but one of the best descriptions I have seen of it comes from the poem of that name by the Caroline Divine, George Herbert; these lines in particular I love:

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

Faith makes me any thing, or all
That I believe is in the sacred story: 
And where sin placeth me in Adam’s fall, 
Faith sets me higher in his glory.

If I go lower in the book, 
What can be lower than the common manger? 
Faith puts me there with him, who sweetly took
Our flesh and frailty, death and danger.

If bliss had lien in art or strength, 
None but the wise or strong had gained it: 
Where now by Faith all arms are of a length; 
One size doth all conditions fit.

Do read the whole poem. Being brought up on the Welsh/English border, Herbert was someone with whose poetry I grew up, and when I was a teenager I would spend hours reading it.  Back then, as teenagers will, I was keen on what might be called the ‘experiental’ poems, that is those which emphasised the personal experience, but as I grew older, I came to see that for Herbert, the collective experience was just as important, and that for him, the Church and its public worship was critical:

Although private devotion has its value, according to Herbert it is the corporate worship of the Church that must be at the center of one’s relationship with God. As he puts it in ‘The Church Porch‘:

Though private prayer be a brave design,
Yet public hath more promises, more love …

Pray with the most: for where most pray, is heaven.

‘All’, he reminded his very class-conscious readers, ‘are equal within the church’s gate’. His advice then is still good: ‘Resort to sermons, but to prayers most:
Praying’s the end of preaching’.

He wrote about the Anglican services, and in many ways anticipates my beloved John Keble in the quiet piety which finds itself in service to others. Herbert and Keble were both devoted parish priests who knew that it was in living life in Christ everyday that one found the right way. Not for either great and heroic martyrdom, but rather, as Keble put it:

The trivial round, the common task, /Would furnish all we ought to ask; /Room to deny ourselves; a road /To bring us, daily, nearer God.

For most of us, if we can do this, we do well.

No one, I think, quite captured th way in which, in prayer, we can be overcome by the richness of God’s gift to us:

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age, 
Gods 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’ Almightie, sinner’s towre, 
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, 
The six-daies world transposing in an houre, 
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear; 

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse, 
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best, 
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest, 
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud, 
The land of spices; something understood.

And in that ‘something understood’ we yield in silence to God’s will.

Share this:

  • Tweet

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

AATW writers

  • audremyers
    • Internet
    • Context
  • cath.anon
    • What Brought You to Faith?
    • 2021: Year of Hope
  • John Charmley
    • The Epiphany
    • The Magi
  • No Man's Land
    • Crowns of Glory and Honor
    • Monkeys and Mud: Evolution, Origins, and Ancestors (Part II)
  • Geoffrey RS Sales
    • Material world
    • Christianity and religion
  • JessicaHoff
    • How unbelievable?
    • How not to disagree
  • Neo
    • Christmas Eve Almost Friends
    • None Dare Call it Apostasy
  • Nicholas
    • 25th January: The Conversion of Saint Paul
    • Friday Thoughts
  • orthodoxgirl99
    • Veiling, a disappearing reverence
  • Patrick E. Devens
    • Vatican II…Reforming Council or Large Mistake?
    • The Origins of the Authority of the Pope (Part 2)
  • RichardM
    • Battle Lines? Yes, but remember that the battle is already won
  • Rob
    • The Road to Emmaus
    • The Idolatry of Religion
  • Snoop's Scoop
    • In the fight that matters; all are called to be part of the Greatest Generation
    • Should we fear being complicit to sin
  • Struans
    • Being Catholic
    • Merry Christmas Everyone
  • theclassicalmusicianguy
    • The war on charismatics
    • The problem with Protestantism

Categories

Recent Posts

  • 25th January: The Conversion of Saint Paul Tuesday, 25 January 2022
  • The Epiphany Thursday, 6 January 2022
  • The Magi Wednesday, 5 January 2022
  • Christmas Eve Almost Friends Friday, 24 December 2021
  • The undiscovered ends? Sunday, 1 August 2021
  • Atque et vale Friday, 30 July 2021
  • None Dare Call it Apostasy Monday, 3 May 2021
  • The ‘Good thief’ and us Saturday, 3 April 2021
  • Good? Friday Friday, 2 April 2021
  • And so, to the Garden Thursday, 1 April 2021

Top Posts & Pages

  • Raising Lazarus: the view from the Church Fathers
  • 25th January: The Conversion of Saint Paul
  • The Fathers on the Papacy: Irenaeus, St Jerome
  • Dagon fish hats and other nonsense
  • Saturday Jess
  • Man's Loss of His Sense of Wonder, Awe and Mystery
  • Dagon fish hats revisited
  • A Journey through Lent: Universalism & Julian of Norwich
  • The Road to Emmaus
  • Recovering a reputation: St Cyril of Alexandria

Archives

Blogs I Follow

  • The Bell Society
  • ViaMedia.News
  • Sundry Times Too
  • grahart
  • John Ager's Home on the Web!
  • ... because God is love
  • sharedconversations
  • walkonthebeachblog
  • The Urban Monastery
  • His Light Material
  • The Authenticity of Grief
  • All Along the Watchtower
  • Classically Christian
  • Norfolk Tales, Myths & More!
  • On The Ruin Of Britain
  • The Beeton Ideal
  • KungFuPreacherMan
  • Revd Alice Watson
  • All Things Lawful And Honest
  • The Tory Socialist
  • Liturgical Poetry
  • Contemplation in the shadow of a carpark
  • Gavin Ashenden
  • Ahavaha
  • On This Rock Apologetics
  • sheisredeemedblog
  • Quodcumque - Serious Christianity
  • ignatius his conclave
  • Nick Cohen: Writing from London
  • Ratiocinativa
  • Grace sent Justice bound
  • Eccles is saved
  • Elizaphanian
  • News for Catholics
  • Annie
  • Dominus Mihi Adjutor
  • christeeleisonblog.wordpress.com/
  • Malcolm Guite
  • Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy
  • LIVING GOD
  • tiberjudy
  • maggi dawn
  • thoughtfullydetached
  • A Tribe Called Anglican
  • Living Eucharist
  • The Liturgical Theologian
  • Tales from the Valley
  • iconismus
  • Men Are Like Wine
  • Acts of the Apostasy

Blog Stats

  • 453,503 hits

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 8,577 other subscribers

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

The Bell Society

Justice for Bishop George Bell of Chichester - Seeking Truth, Unity and Peace

ViaMedia.News

Rediscovering the Middle Ground

Sundry Times Too

a scrap book of words and pictures

grahart

reflections, links and stories.

John Ager's Home on the Web!

reflecting my eclectic (and sometimes erratic) life

... because God is love

wondering, learning, exploring

sharedconversations

Reflecting on sexuality and gender identity in the Church of England

walkonthebeachblog

The Urban Monastery

Work and Prayer

His Light Material

Reflections, comment, explorations on faith, life, church, minstry & meaning.

The Authenticity of Grief

Mental health & loss in the Church

All Along the Watchtower

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you ... John 13:34

Classically Christian

ancient, medieval, byzantine, anglican

Norfolk Tales, Myths & More!

Stories From Norfolk and Beyond - Be They Past, Present, Fact, Fiction, Mythological, Legend or Folklore.

On The Ruin Of Britain

Miscellanies on Religion and Public life

The Beeton Ideal

Gender, Family and Religious History in the Modern Era

KungFuPreacherMan

Faith, life and kick-ass moves

Revd Alice Watson

More beautiful than the honey locust tree are the words of the Lord - Mary Oliver

All Things Lawful And Honest

A blog pertaining to the future of the Church

The Tory Socialist

Blue Labour meets Disraelite Tory meets High Church Socialist

Liturgical Poetry

Poems from life and the church year

Contemplation in the shadow of a carpark

Contmplations for beginners

Gavin Ashenden

Ahavaha

On This Rock Apologetics

The Catholic Faith Defended

sheisredeemedblog

To bring identity and power back to the voice of women

Quodcumque - Serious Christianity

“Whatever you do, do it with your whole heart.” ( Colossians 3: 23 ) - The blog of Father Richard Peers SMMS, Director of Education for the Diocese of Liverpool

ignatius his conclave

Nick Cohen: Writing from London

Journalism from London.

Ratiocinativa

Mining the collective unconscious

Grace sent Justice bound

“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.” — Maya Angelou

Eccles is saved

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you ... John 13:34

Elizaphanian

“I come not from Heaven, but from Essex.”

News for Catholics

Annie

Blessed be God forever.

Dominus Mihi Adjutor

A Monk on the Mission

christeeleisonblog.wordpress.com/

“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few" Luke 10:2

Malcolm Guite

Blog for poet and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite

Bishop's Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy

The Site of James Bishop (CBC, TESOL, Psych., BTh, Hon., MA., PhD candidate)

LIVING GOD

Reflections from the Dean of Southwark

tiberjudy

Happy. Southern. Catholic.

maggi dawn

thoughtfullydetached

A Tribe Called Anglican

"...a fellowship, within the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church..."

Living Eucharist

A daily blog to deepen our participation in Mass

The Liturgical Theologian

legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi

Tales from the Valley

"Not all those who wander are lost"- J.R.R. Tolkien

iconismus

Pictures by Catherine Young

Men Are Like Wine

Acts of the Apostasy

  • Follow Following
    • All Along the Watchtower
    • Join 2,222 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • All Along the Watchtower
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

You must be logged in to post a comment.

    %d bloggers like this: