Love III
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
Today's Herbert post is not as in previous posts, literary analysis in aid of theological reflection. It's a piece of spiritual autobiography.
Late in my final year at College, having previously completed my MA majoring in Moral Philosophy, I picked up a Victorian leather bound pocket volume of Herbert's poems. It cost me fifty pence at the recently established Voltaire and Rousseau's secondhand book shop in Otago Lane.
I doubt you could persuade me to sell it for a hundred times that now. The reason has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with personal history, and the importance of remembered joy in the weaving of our own spiritual growth and formation.
My first remembered encounter with George Herbert's poetry was when I read Love III for the first time. "Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back..." As I read that line, and moved on through the poem, I was pulled into a spiritual experience. This was not so much a literary encounter as hearing and heeding a voice which mapped my longings more accurately than any marketing algorithm.
At the age of 15 I had been expelled from school before the O level exam diet. The hoped for trajectory for an able pupil took a radical downturn and I found myself driving a tractor on Clydeside market gardens, labouring in a brickwork, and started an engineering apprenticeship. And in the midst of all this I was converted and gave my life to Christ, and all my priorities were reinvented and reconfigured.
Within a year I felt an insistent inward call to be a minister, a preacher of the gospel that had turned my life round, a pastor like the one who had believed in me and encouraged me to rebuild my life. That required attendance at night school, then day release and Langside College in Glasgow, which atypical two year educational road map produced enough qualifications to go to Glasgow University.
I had loved, and excelled at English in school. But in my degree I chose philosophy (that's another story), and so missed the chance to study English at degree level. So a quite intense young Lanarkshire evangelical, nearing the end of a seven year educational process from start to finish, and about to be ordained a Baptist minister, came across arguably the finest poem in the rich tradition of Anglican spirituality.
Love III opened windows on to a different theological landscape. This poem, and several other key texts in my life, (yet another story for another time) has helped to shape me, particularly my mindset, as someone who is instinctively ecumenical, intellectually curious and open to newness, seeking to be hospitable to the ideas and experiences and perspectives of others, requiring what I believe is one of the harder fruits of the Spirit to nurture and cultivate, theological humility. I've a ways to go on that one.
It's quite a hard ask to identify the clues and nudges within the poem, that give Love III its continuing significance for me, as a touchstone of what I think Christian existence feels like from the inside. I only offer them as the conclusions of someone in whom this poem has lived and been life-giving for over 45 years.
The personification of Love, as the proper name of Christ
the dialogue form in which host and guest try not to offend each other
the repeatedly patient voice of Love, contradicting the unworthiness, lack of self-esteem and lack of trust in Love itself
the profound lessons in hospitality as Love bids welcome, observes the guest's need, taking the hand and smiling
the insistence which isn't an attempt to overpower, but to persuade
and throughout the poem, an argument only Love was ever going to win
And, as so often in Herbert, the power of the last line, in which Christ has the last word. Except Christ's last word is in the penultimate line; it is the guest who has the last word, and it is acknowledgement of defeat in argument, the acquiescence of the heart, the acceptance of Love's invitation, the relieved capitulation of heart to heart, and thus a shared Eucharist of guest and host.
(Picture is an early postcard of my undergraduate Alma Mater, University of Glasgow)
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