This Scepter'd Isle 4: George Herbert: Sunday 29 July 2012

George Herbert died, aged forty, in 1633. He had been parish priest of Bemerton near Salisbury for barely three years. Revered for nearly four centuries as the archetypal English country parson, his ministry was brief - and he appears to have been curiously reluctant to begin it. Educated at Westminster, Herbert shone at Cambridge, reading Divinity, lecturing in rhetoric and proceeding to a role as the University's Public Orator, before being elected as Member for Montgomeryshire in James I's Parliament of1624.

 That Parliamentary session is remembered for the bellicose  campaign waged by Prince Charles in favour of war with Spain. The King eventually capitulated and tore up the peace treaty that existed between the two countries. Herbert had a horror of war: two of his brothers had lost their lives in conflict, and in his Cambridge orations he had spoken against its costly ravages. With England now set on this course he obtained leave of absence from his University duties, and sought ordination as a deacon, probably at Advent 1624.

 How might we understand this change? Herbert's immersion in the prayer of the Church, begun at Westminster and continued in Cambridge, combined with his theological studies, seem first to have persuaded him to attempt to serve God through the legislative agencies of a Godly monarch - an unimpeachably Reformed intent. When that service was frustrated through the declaration of war he turned to the Church as a preferable forum for such service. Yet even now his progress towards priesthood was remarkably slow. He served as a canon of Lincoln Cathedral for a number of years, and was only ordained priest when, eventually, he accepted the living of Bemerton in 1630. He devoted the last three years of his life to the service of that small rural community, living with his family in the rectory opposite St Andrew's Church, and accompanying them there for twice-daily prayer.

Priesthood was thus for Herbert the culmination of his life and career, the culmination of a lifetime of searching and exploration of how he might best fulfil God's purposes. The searching and exploration were not always easy. We caricature Herbert as blissfully happy among the Wiltshire shepherds with his God, and in these struggles his voice speaks to us as clearly as it did to his Stuart contemporaries. The scholars assume that his two literary works, the clerical manual The Country Parson, and the collection of poetry The Temple, were largely written before his Bemerton years. In the poems we hear him rebelling against the inexorable claim that God appears to have on his life:

I struck the board, and cried, No more.

   I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode...

   Shall I still be in suit?

The frustration is palpable and resonates deeply with anyone who has ever contemplated doing the thing that is right but deeply unattractive. But Herbert discovers God to be patient even if he is not:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild

   At every word,

Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:

   And I replied, My Lord.

Herbert's Church had emerged from the long years of Elizabeth's reign with its Protestantism re-established but also with its liturgy and holy order intact. It was a Church both Catholic and Reformed. One consequence of this is the very high view that Herbert takes of the sacraments. He writes poems on Holy Communion, Holy Baptism and Priesthood. It is in one of these that he writes:

But th' holy men of God such vessels are,

As serve him up, who all the world commands:

When God vouchsafeth to become our fare,

Their hands convey him, who conveys their hands.

Oh what pure things, most pure must those things be,

               Who bring my God to me!

Herbert understands that in  the consecrated elements of Holy Communion God himself visits the faithful, and this divine use of commonplace things becomes for him a complete way of looking at the world. In the poem that we will sing as our final hymn this morning he asks:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see...

Sacramental presence is not confined to the altar. With instruction and assistance the divine is visible in any- and everything. Recalling an image from St Paul he continues:

  A man that looks on glass,

  On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

  And then the heav'n espy.

If we choose we can discern the hand of God wherever we look.

Yet this profoundly incarnational theology is balanced by Herbert's Reformed inheritance. It's not just that the poems are saturated with Biblical references, whether explicitly cited or implicitly relied upon. It's not just that the poems assume a regular diet of worship founded upon Cranmer's Prayer Book. It's that they also constantly emphasize the individual's responsibility before God. The first person predominates: I struck the board; Teach me, my God and King - as we have already seen. Yet this individual responsibility is never full of terror because of the nature of the God to whom it is owed. The Temple reaches its climax in the third of three poems to bear the name 'Love'. Herbert writes of the soul's encounter with the divine and fro that encounter offers his reader the hope of acceptance and the assurance of salvation. The scene is not a law-court or a battlefield but a hospitable dining-table at which Love invites the soul to sit and eat. Conscious of its sin, the soul shies away. But Love, the soul's maker and the bearer of the blame that attaches to its sin, insists:

You must sit down...and taste my meat:

       So I did sit and eat.

Herbert is more than the unworldly priest of popular imagination. His history is  the history of the age in which the English Church was beginning to understand itself anew, and he both reflects and forms that understanding. Rooted in the transience of the world, rooted in God's word, and rooted in the sacraments; convinced of God's immanence in all things, and convinced of our personal responsibility before God; and, above all, fed by constant prayer, Herbert's words still enjoin all the world, in every corner, to sing 'My God and King'.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,

  God's 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'Almighty, sinners' tower,

  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

  The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

  Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

  Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

  The land of spices; something understood.

Something understood. Amen.

This Scepter'd Isle 1: Julian of Norwich: Sunday 8 July 2012

The approach of the first anniversary of last summer's riots has been marked by the completion of the tallest building in Europe. It is a considerable irony that one year after events which testified powerfully to the fractures which disfigure our splintered city we have unveiled a mighty tower whose very name is synonymous with fractures and splinters.

There is a lazy way of preaching history traditionally favoured by High Churchmen which treats the Reformation as the first great splintering of English life and which treats everything which precedes it as a fracture-free, unified, and harmonious whole. Yet the quickest glance at the late fourteenth century exposes the shortcomings of this ideal. In those fifty years the Black Death and the successive pandemics of plague that it spawned killed up to one half of the population of this scepter'd isle. Fearful of the economic power that the consequent shortage of labour handed to the rural poor the landowning barons clamped down on their tenants' new aspirations, and clamped down hard. In response the peasants marched on London. Their target was not trainers and iPods but visible symbols of oppression and authority. The Savoy Palace was burned, the Tower of London was attacked, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered.

Such was the splintered world which gave birth to a golden age for English mysticism. Death and unrest stalked the realm, but Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle recorded their visions of God and their direct experience of the divine in the newly-confident English tongue. So too did a woman who lived in an East Anglian town grown prosperous through the wool trade. This woman was not ordained; she belonged to no religious order; and she has never been declared a saint; yet her book, the first to be written in English by a woman, has informed the theology and prayer of the Church for six hundred  years.

She was an anchoress. She lived, bricked into a small cell built onto the wall of the parish church. She is unnamed. Margery Kempe visited her and calls her the Lady Julian, but Julian was the saint to which the parish church was dedicated. Her identity has become indistinguishable from his. She suffered grave ill health. It was while she believed she was dying that she received the visions that were to determine the course of her life. She gave herself to prayer, contemplation and spiritual counsel for over forty years. In response to the fractures of her age she gave her life to her God; she surrendered her identity; she experienced ill health as a point of visionary departure; and she was faithful for decade after decade. Those scant biographical facts might themselves be instructive for a generation that is manifestly confused by the contemporary spectacle of societal splintering.

Julian's visions are of the Passion of Jesus Christ, described with a gory frankness that is quite shocking to modern readers. Yet these visions, soaked as they are in Christ's blood, reveal for Julian not God's judgement or God's victory, but only God's love. In a famous passage she is shown something as tiny as a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. 'This is all that is made' God tells her, and she discerns that all that is made has three properties: 'First, God had made it: second, God loves it; and third, God keeps it'. This discernment, that God has made all things, and that God loves all things, is the foundation of her convictions.

She sees clearly that there is no anger in God. 'It is utterly impossible that God should be wroth' she writes 'For wrath and friendship are two opposites. He who wastes and destroys our wrath, making us meek and mild, must accordingly ever be in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath. For I saw very clearly that where our Lord appears, there peace is established so that wrath has no more place'.

And these observations lead her to a very particular view of human sin. 'It has neither manner of substance nor part of being' she writes 'and it would not even be known save for the pain it causes'. Sin is not a foe to be vanquished and driven from the world. Its reality consists only in its effects, perceived by Julian as human pain. Sin has a purpose. It is not to catch human beings out, trip them up or condemn them everlastingly. Sin hurts us, and these hurts purge us and heal us. They make us know ourselves. And they are the cause of the compassion Christ lavishes upon us, a compassion so overwhelming that Julian is obliged to write of its origin in Christ our Mother. 'Our Saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, yet we will never come out of him'.

It is this image of an eternally hospitable God that is Julian's gift to her readers. It is perhaps no wonder that CS Lewis described her book as 'dangerous'. 'I'm glad I didn't read it much earlier' he wrote to his former pupil Bede Griffith. If God is not to be compared to a double-crossing earthly monarch such as Richard II, who betrayed his promises to Wat Tyler; if human beings facing God are not in the same dire straits as human beings facing the bubonic plague; then can any person can ever be safe from the divine love revealed to Julian? The scandal of universal salvation beckons. It is this theme that TS Eliot picks up as he quotes her best-remembered words:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

God 'the ground of our beseeching'. London's newest landmark points proudly heavenwards from the ground on which it is built. Julian reminds us that the ground upon which we are built is the eternal love of God. That is a vision that may yet draw together even a generation that clusters in the shadow of a Shard. Amen.