The Foolishness of Preaching 1. Lent Day 6

 

The Windowes (Stanza 1)

 

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

    He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

 

Being a preacher is a calling, and sometimes a stumbling. To preach is to set yourself up for a fall, believing God can shine through a human personality.

 

Herbert's humility as a preaching parson is rooted in realism about the limitations of his humanity and even his best self. The preacher up front stands in a place of serious temptation, desiring to be the light rather than the window through which the light shines. 

 

Without specific reference, Herbert is channelling the Apostle Paul: "Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe..." 

 

Herbert knows that a human being is a fragile, earthen vessel containing eternal treasure; that every Christian witness is a mortal time tied, and often word-tied witness to truth that makes known the glory, holiness and love of God.

 

"Brittle crazy glass"; crazing is a glaze defect of glazed pottery and glass. It isn't a superficial flaw, it affects the quality, value and usefulness of the finished object. If the glass is brittle then it is even less useful, reliable and durable. 

 

So how can such flawed humanity ever be an adequate medium for the grace and love and glory of the Word made flesh? It can't. Herbert implies the impossibility in two lines. Human flesh is opaque, unstable, crazed with cracks, visibly flawed, brittle and breakable. 

 

Yet.

 

There is that word again, Herbert's contradicting conjunction. The reader is wrong footed by the poet answering his own apparently unanswerable conundrum.

 

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

    This glorious and transcendent place,

    To be a window, through thy grace.

 

The "crazie glasse" becomes a focal point in the Temple, the humble preacher is given pride of place. Foolish preaching, and brittle flawed preachers, are used to save those who believe.

 

But how? The rest of the poem is set up by Herbert's answer: "through thy grace." In the next two stanzas Herbert expands his similitude of crazie glasse preaching the eternal word; the next two posts will explore them.

 

The poetry of Herbert's age has been called the poetry of Grace. As an example from elsewhere, here is Milton:

 

Beyond compare the Son of God was seen

most glorious, in him all his Father shone

substantially express'd, and in his face

Divine compassion visibly appeared,

Love without end, and without measure grace.

(Paradise Lost, III, 138-42)  

 

Comments

[Kenneth Mackintosh]

I remember many years ago attending a service in St Andrew's Cathedral on King Street. During the children's talk the priest pointed to the stained glass windows and made the point (which I'm sure is often made in churches with such windows!) that "Saints are people that the light of God shines through".
Ken