Bittersweet
Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
This poem is short and sweet. It is also short and sharp. The title contains a paradox, a collision of opposites that continues to the last line. Love is never only undisturbed sweetness; love is too essentially human for such colourless perfection. Relationships of love do not grow and deepen unless there is conflict and forgiveness, hurt and healing, routine and excitement, frustration and fulfilment. Love requires the continuing intentional adjustments of self-interest and self giving that enable a relationship to not only survive, but flourish.
Bittersweet was a variety of cider apple in Herbert's day. Taking a bite from an apple is the original bittersweet experience, indeed it was the original sin. Herbert uses the everyday experience of eating fruit to evoke the powerfully evocative story of Eden, and the fall. The first three lines are loud with echoes of Eden, creation, fall, expulsion, and judgement.
"Yet help afford..." As often in these Lenten reflections, we pay attention to Herbert's frequent use of the word that forces a rethink - 'yet'. Sure, God loves yet strikes, because love is not morally neutral, it is the fire at the heart of holiness. But then the word recurs, and 'yet' becomes the sweetener in the bitter narrative of fall, judgement and exile as punishment; "yet help afford", the promise of a Redeemer who would crush the serpent's head.
The angry Lord who loves yet strikes, loves with a holy love. "Love can get angry for good reasons, but is proved in what it does next. Will it work to reconcile and put things right or will it take revenge and withdraw?" That is such a well expressed account of what is going on here. (My Sour-Sweet Days, Oakley, 112)
"I will complain yet praise" carries on the this one sided conversation about contradictions in which Herbert both disagrees and agrees with what God does and who God is. He captures with succinct precision the inner experience of the sinner caught out and forced to say mea culpa, while feeling inside, "since thou dost love yet strike...yet help afford, felix culpa.
This poem about the paradox of Christian existence recalls Luther's strap line that each Christian is 'simil justus et peccator', simultaneously saint and sinner. That's the way life is, and this poem is Herbert's yes to the contradictions of life and of his own inner experience. Every day is a sour sweet day, of guilt and forgiveness, of sin and judgement, of holiness as one step forward, and sin as at least most times, one step back.
The resolution in the last line is a beautiful moment of acquiescence, and note the absence of the 'yet' word. There is no longer an assumed incongruity, but a settled acceptance that this is how life is for now; he will lament his sin and failure, and love the God he seeks to serve and obey. Once again, by design not accident, Herbert gives Love the last word. It is his yes to the ambivalence and struggle inevitable in a forgiven sinner whose grateful love keeps being undermined by sin's persistence.
This beautiful miniature poem holds the distilled essence of Herbert's spirituality. There is realism about the holy love of God that must judge and not indulge sin; and an equal conviction that such love precisely because of its holiness, will help afford and seek to redeem, forgive, reconcile and restore. For now, Christian existence is lived in the discomfort of inner contradiction, because the Christian has dual citizenship of earth and heaven and these have conflicting loyalties, temptations and goals. So every day is a sour sweet day, in which faithfulness will never reach perfection, but will persist and persevere on the road to holiness, lamenting every sin and loving God whose help has been afforded: O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 7.24-25)
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