Living Wittily

"Wherefore with My Utmost Art, I Will Praise Thee...."

This book arrived today. I've looked for a reasonably priced and clean copy for a long time. I collect literary criticism on George Herbert, and I have several editions of his poems, from mid 19th Century to the more substantial modern editions. They take up over three feet of shelf space and I don't grudge a centimetre of it. Metaphysical poetry is a niche interest, and academic books for limited interest groups can require an equity raid on your house to afford them. So I was pleased to get this volume, shipped from Kentucky, for under £7. It's an ex-library copy, and inside it says it's a 14 day loan book from Lexington Public Library. It's tight, clean, forty something years old, and as often, I wonder who read it beforre me?

Herbert was never everyone's taste, although there was a surge of admiration and new editions in the Victorian period. Herbert's devotional lyricism, albeit often expressed in clever (too clever?) linguistic conceits, appealed to a deeply religious culture impressed by the immediacy, intimacy and restrained passion of Herbert's poems. 

In celebration of this book, whose title comes from Praise II, one of Herbert's better known poems, here are the first three verses. The direct address to God is caught up in a rhythm of I and Thee and Thou and me. The combinations of intimacy and reverence, of familiarity and formality, and of emotional warmth and devotional frankness, are features of Herbert's best poetry. These lines are a lovely prayer for start of day, or indeed for end of day. There is an entire lexicon of meaning in those two words, 'utmost art', the dedication of skill, energy, gift, artifice and imagination, to the praise of God

KIng of  Glorie, King of Peace,
                I will love thee:
And that love may never cease,
                I will move thee.

Thou hast granted my request,
                Thou hast heard me:
Thou didst note my working breast,
                Thou hast spar’d me.

Wherefore with my utmost art
                I will sing thee,
And the cream of all my heart
                I will bring thee.

The Unanswerable Questions about God, Love and the Incarnation.

I have been a student of your love

and have not graduated. Setting

my own questions, I bungled

the examination. Where? Why? When?

 

Knowing there were no answers

you allowed history to invigilate

my desires. Time and again I was

caught with a crib up my sleeve.

This poem is the last in a sequence of eleven poems under the title 'Incarnation'. They are part of the Counterpoint collection, published in 1990. They are poems in the interrogative mood, and in this last poem the mystery of the Incarnation frustrates by its elusive allusions, and its answerless, or even unanswerable questions.

In eight lines Thomas addresses the one whose love became incarnate. The 'I' and 'you' are, however, the pronouns of a monologue. What is striking on a slow reading of this poem is the honest self-awareness of someone who not only failed the exam, but asked, and then answered, the wrong questions. Central to the poem are three monosyllabic questions essential to understanding the everyday phenomena and events we perceive. The question where is locative, and places the event. The question why is purposive and seeks explanation. The question when is about temporal placement. Together the three questions triangulate the event enabling the mind to fit it into categories of understanding.

Which misses the point. The student of love is not examining an event or phenomenon, but a relationship. The missing question is the clue to the poem; Who? This is the word that prevents the poem being mere description, and exposes the three questions as category errors. The student of love incarnate fails the final examinations by answering the wrong questions. The questions are not wrong because their answers are irrelevant, but because the questions are secondary. The primary question is who is the 'you' whose love is studied. Who is it who invigilates our desires and uses history to keep us honest?

And yet. For all those efforts to tutor our desires and prepare us for the examinations, the student of love incarnate persists in cheating. There is a crib with the correct answers up the sleeve. And that word 'crib' Thomas has packed with playfulness. The crib is the student's secret revision sheet; it is also the place where love incarnate lies, secretly, vulnerable, the Who of the unasked question. 

There is a lightness of touch in this last poem in the Incarnation sequence. There is also the characteristic note in R S Thomas, of unresolved tension and the admitted inadequacy of human answers when faced with the God whose ways are not human ways and whose thoughts are not human thoughts. The line of the sentimental and overplayed nativity hymn 'no crib for a bed',is contradicted by the cleverness of that last line which suggests there was a crib, but it has been stolen by the student of love incarnate who has the answer up his sleeve. 

Reading this poem in Advent I sensed echoes of the Johannine theology of the Word, become flesh. John's Gospel embeds divine love in the history of creation and in human history. Love is embodied, and while the great questions of Where? Why? and When? are all answered in the unfolding Gospel, they can only ever be fully and correctly answered in the light of the central, final and primary question of Who?

The author of the Gospel of John would also have said, "I have been a student of your love and have not graduated." It was he who wrote, "No one has ever seen God. The only one who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." Mystery is not susceptible to our questions, nor answerable to our answers. No student of divine love ever attends a Graduation ceremony. In the divine learning economy sufficiency of knowledge and proficiency in the subject are impossible. However much we cheat, or set our own questions, time and again we come back to the crib.

The reluctant agnosticism of Thomas contrasts with the exuberant confidence and embrace of mystery in Richard Crashaw's poem; taken together they bring us to the crib where we learn that intellectual humility is a precondition of adoration.

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth.”

Prayer at a Locked Door: An Absence that Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

At the back of Drum Castle, amongst the trees, is the private chapel. It is small and old, secluded and quiet, and is reached by climbing a gentle sancta scala. 

On a winter morning of diluted sunlight, the steps softened with autumn leaves, I walked up to the door and stood outside the sacred space dedicated to prayer and worship.

Anticipating a few moments of being enclosed in a place "where prayer is valid" I turned the handle and pushed.

The door was locked, itself a metaphor for those prayers that go unanswered, maybe even unheard.

On this occasion, the locked door disconcerted and then dissolved the intention to stop, sit, reflect, and see what happens when God is given a chance to get a word in edgeways. 

Momentary disappointment. 

Then I started doing the spiritual equivalent of lateral thinking. Why should a closed door get in the way of awareness, attention and contemplation?

Isn't it part of the mystery of God that we experience God as a Presence who is sometimes absent, and an Absence which makes us yearn for presence?

True enough, prayer becomes faithful communion through trust in the One who comes, and to Whom we come. 

But isn't it also true that faith may require we sometimes experience the absence of the One who promised never to leave or forsake, and to be with us to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

Otherwise we take grace for granted.

Standing in the wood, outside a locked chapel door, is an education in such faithful trust, an exercise in the discipline of believing without seeing, a determined communing with a promised Presence without the warm feelings of reassurance. A refusal to take grace for granted.

There is a process of deepening and recovery for the soul best described in the metaphor of winter.  The winter shutdown of the natural world is a time of minimal output, a yielding to slow replenishment, a stripping away of what was last year's foliage, a time of minimal sunlight, low temperatures, and nothing discernible happening. But along with the shutdown, the promise of Spring.

Perhaps now and then, we need the winter season. Only then do we undergo the ascetic pruning back of what is no longer fruitful, the forced slowing down as energy sources reduce output, the inner soil broken down by the rhythms of frost and thaw, and enriched by rotting leaves and the gift og humus.

In other words a closed door is just another kind of gift, a different facet of grace, an absence that makes the heart grow fonder. 

 

Singing Hymns to Sunrise, and Drinking the Sound with Joy!

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the grounds of Drum Castle, about 5 miles from where I live. I needed sky, trees, fresh air, birds, a different diet from books, indoors and people. Now people I love, but not to the exclusion of time to be alone. It has been a demanding time, with far more output than input, more expenditure than replenishment. What was needed was space to breathe, and look and take in. When I feel the need for solitude and new horizons I take my camera.

For some years now I've used my camera as an aid to reflection, and photography as a way of disciplining mind, eye and attentiveness to the world around. I've found that if I want to pay attention to what's going on outside, it has to be intentional. No point trying to find time. Time is there, it just has to be taken! So, sometimes the best way to start dealing with the busyness going on in my own head is to go somewhere to pay attention to what's going on in the larger, richer world outside the propagator of my own self-consciousness. 

So off to Drum Castle and its grounds. Winter in the North East can provide extraordinary light and shadow. Walking alongside a silver birch wood the low winter sun lanced through the silver shining trunks and darker branches. The dialogue of horizontal sunlight and reflective bark highlighted the network of close-knit, entangled branches.

I sat on a drystane dyke and watched it for a while, a theatre in which the action was sparse and the low lighting was an impressionist masterpiece. The contrast of liquid light and blue sky, of green frozen moss and trees picked out in monochrome, gave the impression of a natural sunbreak, diffusing the light so that it was possible to look without being blinded.

Walking amongst trees is an exercise in humility. Feet trampling on years and years of leaf compost, moving amongst trees that have mostly survived, with one or two dying off and over years adding to the humus, life returning life to the earth. Amongst silver birches there is also the low murmuring of the breeze playing ancient rhythms and tones on the hanging branches. It isn't difficult to walk speechless, and listen to another form of speech.

Where there are trees there are birds. I heard the jays before I saw them. Like their name they are sociable, party birds whose song and call are unmodulated loudness. I walked around the pond which is surrounded by mostly conifers but with some berry bearing trees intermingled. The birds love it in there.

The song thrush (mavis) was busy chasing dinner high up, and appeared on a branch in silhouette. From childhood years I have admired the sheer virtuosity of the song, and the architectural brilliance of a nest shaped like a large cup and lined inside with mud smoothes to a shell and lightly lined with soft grass and feathers. Seeing this one yesterday is precisely why it's worth the bother to go looking for newness, and a reconfiguration of the imagination.

John Clare was a wonderful observer of the world around him, and his bird poems are amongst the most keenly attentive descriptions of birds, their habits and habitats, their songs and their colours. In the early 19th Century garden and field birds were common and part of everyday life, in days long before changed agriculture, chemical pesticides, destroyed habitats and overworked fields, took a toll that has pushed many species to the point of endangered status. Here are a few lines about the thrush:

I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy

Seeing a thrush, high in a tree amongst the berries, on a bright and frosty winter morning isn't something you see every day. Nor is it something you will ever see if you don't go looking. That moment when you see what you are seeing, when you hear what you are hearing and start to listen, when you quieten your own inner commentary and allow the world to get a word in edgeways - that moment is a gift. The photos took a few minutes of standing still, being patient, taking the risk of wasting time if it flew away before a photo was possible.

Those ten minutes sitting on a dyke watching trees filter sunlight, and those five minutes watching a thrush filling up with calories and energy on a freezing morning, those are times when prayer happens without us realising it. The unexpected encounter with a beautiful bird living its life in the simplicity of its needs is as good an illustration of Jesus' teaching on trust as I know. And walking amongst trees you hear the wind and don't know where it came from or where it's going, but like a sacrament of the Spirit we necome aware of the movements and currents of grace in our lives. I had come into the countryside poor and went away rich; I had come hungry and had gone away full; I had come anxious and inwardly dissipated, I came back reconfigured in heart and mind.

Here is John Clare's poem, including the lines quoted earlier.

The Thrush's Nest.

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

Isaiah 9: Poem of Protest and Faith-Reconfiguration

When Archbishop Michael Ramsey walked to his enthronement in Canterbury, his biographer described him as bearing “the perplexed look of a lion who had turned vegetarian for philosophical reasons” Ramsey was fond of hard questions, and he always gave himself time to think about the answer by muttering, “ Yes ... yes ...Yes..” It was a way of looking for light in a dark conundrum.

Isaiah was “one acquainted with the night” to quote Robert Frost. He understood human distress, darkness and fearful gloom, and the human spirit, crushed by the weight of darkness.   Isaiah is a prophet whose whole view of life, even of a darkened world was, Yes... Yes...Yes. Isaiah also took time to think, to look for light in a dark conundrum. Acquainted with the night, but no stranger to hope either. Hope is a defiant yes to life in the face of and in the presence of darkness. And faith is to trust that light will come as new freedom, fresh growth and emergent new life. Another poet, Robert Browning faced up to the same stark contrast of darkness and light, and the search for hope and faith:

If I stoop into a dark tremendous sea of cloud

it is but for a time: I press God’s lamp

close to my breast: its splendour, soon or late,

will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge some day.

Isaiah 9 is about darkness, the hope for light, and a poem about God's astonishing planned reversals. In this poem of protest and faith-reconfiguration, all the distress, darkness and fearful gloom of Isaiah 8.22 encounter their opposite; gloom is eclipsed by light. Hope takes the courage to look back on despair, to imagine a different future, and then to see the present reality, however dark, transformed by that thread of light racing across the horizon.

Gloom and darkness are real, but behind it all is a deeper reality, a truth even more real. Isaiah tells it as it is, like an existentialist who discovers something more ultimate than personal existence. We either look at the darkness across our world, feel the hopelessness of millions, and weep over all the shattered dreams and blame God for not being there. Or we look with tear filled eyes at that darkness, feel the weight of that hopelessness, shed our tears over all those shattered dreams and hear that past tense made present experience – “those living in the land of the shadow of death, on them light has dawned".

Those words about darkness annd dawn take Christian imagination to another past-tense eclipsing of the gloom, when the darkness of Calvary was eclipsed by the sunrise of resurrection. Darkness is real but it is not the final, last reality in the universe. James Denney wrote of this often: “What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is...you wish to know the final truth about God; here it is, eternal love bearing sin’. No more gloom, ...unto us a child is born.

What follows in verses 3-6 is one of the most astonishing passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. War is reversed, disarmed, and the implements of oppression are shattered beyond repair. Isaiah uses the very images of war to show how God extorts peace from conflict, prises liberty from the iron grip of oppression, and forces the darkness, distress and fearful gloom give way to light, human welfare and shalom. The 'enlarging of nations' in verse 3 is a term for imperial conquest but this time, God's time, it is to be an empire of joy. The increase isn't by plundering the weak but by curtailing the destructiveness of the strong. Yes there is joy, but now it will be rooted in justice. That violent word, ‘shattered’,when applied to a nation, is the word for national humiliation, devastated hopes and destroyed communities. To people in exile, the terminology of ‘shattering’ has a permanently bitter flavour in the nation’s vocabulary. But now it is the yoke that is shattered, the chain gang shackles of POW’s are shattered, the machinery of oppression is smashed beyond repair. War is reversed…for unto us a child is born.

The imagery of fire used in verse 5 is never ambiguous in the context of war. Fire represents the destructive, punitive power of the conqueror. What isn't plundered is torched; home, culture, community, economy all burned, reducing the conquered people to aimless despair. You break hearts and you prevent rebellion. But here is the great reversal.  It is the marching boots that trample that are burned, along with the soldiers uniforms…for unto us a child is born.

This is a magnificent poem of defiance; peace defying war; joy defying distress; hope defying fearful gloom. No wonder oppressors imprison poets. No more gloom because God’s hope child is born. A world reversed from darkness to light. And it is not yet finished. The great messianic text of verses 6 and 7 redescribe the world into a new created order. Chaos is ordered by the establishing of justice and righteousness. Isaiah is unafraid to look into darkness, not because he belittles fears and distress, but because this prophet poet knows that no darkness is absolute in a universe created and loved by God. The last reality of the universe is not darkness, distress and fearful gloom...but a child born, a pin-point of light shining with the dazzling holy love of God who will not abandon his creation.

One of the great creation hymns begins, “Thou whose almighty word, chaos and darkness heard and took their flight” I remember being present when that happened at a musical Premiere. James Macmillan’s, Veni Emmanuel, was premiered in Aberdeen in 1992. The Scottish concert solo percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf and feels music in the soles of her feet, was the percussionist that evening. The music begins in the harmony of creation and relentlessly descends into the darkness of discord and noise. Out of the discordant noise there is the occasional fragment of a tune that may be familiar. As the vibrations of drums, bells, chimes, cymbals threaten to drown out the music, the vibrations of chaos are subverted by tremors of hope, then there is a fanfare of defiance and the half recognised tune is played in all its glory,  O Come O Come Emmanuel. The percussion is now allied with the orchestra, beating back the darkness, hammering out a message of hope until the triumphant noise gives way to the triumph of a slow quietening of the tubular bells to the peace of silence.

Isaiah plays similar music; the darkness distress and fearful gloom of his people are like the noise and discord of a tune gone badly wrong, an orchestra out of control, until his message, muted and fragmented is blazed forth, "No more gloom...the people who walked in darkness...seen a great light...for to us a child is born....and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

...........................

Robert Frost's 'Acquainted with the night' can be read over here.

Veni Emmanuel, composed by James MacMillan, performed by Evelyn Glennie can be heard and seen here

Guest Post on Eugene Peterson 4. Reversed Thunder

Eugene H. Peterson: Reversed Thunder – The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination Harper Collins p/b edition 1991

Reversed Thunder is not, by Peterson’s own admission, ‘a work of expository exegesis (xii).’ ‘Mostly I have enjoyed myself. I have submitted my pastoral imagination to St John’s theological poetry, meditated on what I have heard and seen, and written it down in what I think of as a kind of pastoral midrash (xii).’

Those familiar with his canon will recognise the themes in this short quote: pastoral, imagination, theology, poetry, meditation, midrash – and pleasure. He applies his fertile mind to Revelation and unpacks a series of ‘last words’ – on Scripture, Christ, Church, Worship and seven others – working his way through the Apocalypse as he does so. It is a book full of quotable quotes.

What is it that grabs people, especially Pastors, about Peterson’s writing? Here are a few examples.

The breadth of his reading. Pastors are bibliophiles, but often in certain areas of biblical studies or theology. Peterson has read, and in this book draws on, theologians and exegetes from across the centuries, but also from poets, novelists, literary critics and preachers. He soaks himself in words and brings them to bear on the text of Revelation to illuminate its meaning and arrest his readers.

The depth of his reflection. Peterson is enthusiastic about Scripture and for decades has chewed on it, then he gave us the benefit of his ruminations. Often the words are simple, but the thoughts expressed are profound, and strike home like a sharp double-edged sword, as in his comments on Christ and the Apocalyptic image of military violence (37). Words for today’s politicking.

The beauty of his language. I have no idea who edited this book, but I sense their task was easy. Peterson has a way with words that make this work a joy to read slowly, savouring the flavours that infuse it. Technical language is rare, whereas the skill of the wordsmith abounds, transporting the reader by disciplined use of a sanctified imagination into the son et lumière world that is the Apocalypse. He is an artist in his use of words, just like John the Divine.

His passion for pastoral work. Preaching, prayer, worship, spiritual direction: these are the forces that shape Peterson’s style and rhetorical purpose. He says that his primary question here is about how Revelation will work among the people he pastors (xiii). It is not a book of predictions. It is a book that spoke to the pastoral situation of the church of the first century and speaks now to ours. ‘In the Revelation we are immersed not in prediction, but eschatology: an awareness that the future is breaking in upon us. Eschatology involves the belief that the resurrection appearances of Christ are not complete (21).’

Revelation is a book that touched Peterson’s own soul. ‘What walking through the Maryland forests does to my bodily senses, the Revelation does to my faith perceptions (x).’ We are the beneficiaries of these perceptions, for in this work he not only teaches us what to think about Revelation but how to think about it – and how to respond to it in our time.

Jared Hay, 30 October 2018. (Jared is a retired Church of Scotland minister, who knows a lot, I mean a lot, about the Book of Revelation.