All of life is Easter: three quotes on Christian feast days

"All our life is a festival. Since we are persuaded that God is present everywhere on all sides, we praise God as we till the ground, we sing hymns as we sail the sea, we feel God's inspiration in all that we do.... Whenever we pay attention to God, every place and every time becomes truly holy."
—Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.7.39.

"So the whole of our lifetime is a festival. For when Paul said, 'Let us keep the feast' [1 Cor 5:7-8], he wasn't referring to the Passover or Pentecost. He was pointing out that all time is a festival for Christians.... For what good thing has not already come to pass? The Son of God was made human for you. He freed you from death and called you to a kingdom. Now that you have gained such good things – and are still gaining them – how can you do anything less than 'keep the feast' all your life? So let no one be downcast about poverty or illness or the cunning of enemies. It is a festival, all of it – our whole lifetime!"
—John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Corinthians 15.6.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.
—George Herbert, "Easter", from The Temple.

A lived Sunday: resurrection and life

Easter Sunday is going about as expected. At the morning service, my one-year-old son is grumbling about something-or-other, and my daughters are distracted by some churchy activity sheets. During the sermon I sit in the infants room coddling my son, chatting about Sydney and mountains and travel. The preacher seems to say something about newness. I feel vaguely guilty for missing the message, but smile and continue the conversation.

After the sermon has finished, someone up the front comments that “the world has changed.” I wipe my son’s spit from my sleeve. We share in the sacrament. There are a lot of bodies in here today; all of them keen to feast on a bit of bread and wine. By the time the cup comes to us, it is half saliva and half bread—the congregation seems undecided about dipping or drinking—I dunk my chunk of bread into the cup, hoping that there is enough moisture left in there to soften the dry and overhandled corner that I got so that I don’t have to make another appointment with the dentist.

“Christ is risen.”

“He is risen indeed.”

“Toilet Time, kids.”

“You can have one biscuit, but then we need to go.”

There is a new world coming—now arriving and pressing up against ours. They are slowly merging, these two worlds, in an explosion of life, like two water balloons colliding in slow motion.

We drive to a nearby National Trust house for some good old secular bunny spotting and egg hunting. The Spring flowers are taking hold in the expansive gardens. The daffodils peer up at us tentatively as we breeze past them. We find the first bunny. It is flanked by warped mirrors. We take the time to chuckle at our distorted appearances. My oldest daughter stands before the mirror with three humps: the one that somehow shows three simultaneously squashed and stretched reflections. She has that smile of quiet delight that she so often wears. She sees that the world is not on a fixed course, but can be playfully reordered when it reflects a new image. She finds joy in the novel distortion of the given order.

“Can there be any day but this?”

Some bunnies later, we stand in front of the maze. There is a princess in need of rescue in the centre, being watched over by another rabbit. We laugh and run, letting my youngest daughter chart our path. We take every single wrong turn. Each dead end is hilarious—a new start. A return. A new vantage on the world. We turn and run and turn and run. We jump the mud puddles and rescue the princess and shout encouragement to the other souls lost with us in the maze. This chaotic mess of paths designed to frustrate and mislead has us thrilled and beaming.

“Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.”

We drive home eating ice-cream. Dancing down the street, we make our way to our friends’ house for dinner. One of the girls reminds us that “dinner” can mean “lunch” here, so we should call it “tea”. Our friends are Russian, so I doubt it will be a problem. The food is delicious and the conversation is lively. We wander home in the dark, warmed by friendship and cake. The family collapses into their beds as though in a carefully rehearsed synchronised dive.

I sit in silence as the day comes back to me. The preacher made some kind of connection between resurrection and newness. The loveliness of that grimy cup and the icebergs of bread that it bore weighs on my mind. A shared cup is a handled cup, it is not pristine. It strikes me that if newness is newness, then it doesn’t replace the thing itself, but only the oldness of the thing. The Christian hope is not to be made into somebody else, but to live a new life in Christ. It is still life that we live.

George Herbert claimed that there is but one true day, all others being noble attempts. What he did not say is that the day of the resurrection of the Lord—the one true day—has not passed, but has come. Its brightness shines through all the brittle perforations of the world: distorted mirrors, fussy infants, and confounding mazes. Today, God makes this world strangely new. The resurrection is witnessed in the stuff of life. 

Christ is risen, and he comes to us now in the homely cup bearing all the smears of fellowship.

The girl and George Herbert (version 2.0)

Yesterday I related this anecdote about my visit to Bemerton and a cafe in Salisbury. When I wrote the post I found the ending quite lame, but didn't know how to improve it. But thanks to a wonderful comment by Alan Jacobs, I've now been able to rewrite the post, and to give it a proper ending. It is a pleasure – a very great pleasure – to be wrong about something when it means you get to be corrected by a person like Alan Jacobs. So here's the new version.

--

Today I walked to the church in Bemerton where George Herbert had been a priest. I sat for an hour alone in the tiny church, reading from a book of Herbert's poems, kneeling to pray, carrying on a private little conversation with the bones of my poet which lie resting somewhere under the altar. I contemplated his poem "The Call," and for the briefest second his description of Christ as "such a feast as mends in length" lit up my mind like lightning, so that I seemed to have glimpsed the naked essential truth of things (though I could not tell you afterwards exactly what it was).

The walk back to Salisbury takes about an hour, and even though it was quite wet and cold I made my way along the muddy path with a light heart, feeling very glad and free.

At an upstairs cafe in a restored medieval building in Salisbury I was brought coffee by a girl with a face like Helen of Troy. When she put down the coffee on the table beside my hand, I thought: men would launch ships, they would send their sons to war, for a face like this. She was turning to leave so I asked her for a glass of water, not because I needed water but because I needed her to come back and stand a moment longer near me, outlined against the wide window and the grey sky. I watched her turn to walk away and I thought, my God, even her knees are perfect. I wondered what her knees would look like without the black stockings. And such small feet! I imagined her gently kicking off the small black shoes, one by one, and walking barefoot across the floor.

I tasted the coffee and it was very good. She came back and put a glass of water down on the table. Her hair was longer than I had remembered and her eyes were darker than I had remembered. Because the table was so low, she had to bend down to place the glass in front of me. I averted my eyes. I looked at the light that rippled on the surface of the water in the glass.

I wished I were a stage director. I would give her the part of Cleopatra and find an Antony to make speeches to her. I wished I were an artist. I would draw her, every inch of her, in blackest charcoal. I wanted to capture the light in her dark eyes. I wanted to bless her, salute her, memorialise her, build an altar to her. I wanted to do so many things.

The glass of water came to rest on the table in front of me. Her fingers slid away from the wet glass. Her small feet padded away on the wooden floor.

I do not mean to make you blush, reader. I record these details purely for the sake of contrast. For am I not the same identical person who, one hour before, had sat in the church at Bemerton thinking the most pious thoughts I ever had in all my life? That entire hour of prayer and contemplation; my proximity to the bones of a saint whom I have loved my whole life; the feeling of God's will wrapping all around me like a cloak – what happened to all that? An hour ago my heart had gone to Bemerton. Now with all my heart – the same heart! – I was contemplating other things.

It makes you realise that pious thoughts and religious feelings are a fine thing as far as they go – but they don't go very far. Less than an hour, as it turns out.

Or was the girl's effect on me more closely related to the effect that Bemerton had had on me an hour before? Did my soul wake up too much at Bemerton, so that instead of stumbling drowsily through life as usual I was, in that cafe, staring reality in the face? Is that why the first human being who crossed my path seemed so unbearably bright and piercing? Was I tempted to worship her for the simple reason that I saw her for what she really is: the image of God in black stockings? Was it merely – merely! – the radiance of a real human being that pierced my heart and knocked my soul off balance?

Was all this, in short, a spiritual side-effect of praying in the little church in Bemerton?

Perhaps it is a mercy that we normally perceive each other so dimly, like shadows gliding by in a dream. Perhaps God dulls our senses out of kindness, knowing that if we saw each other for what we really are, we would spend every day half-blinded by the light reflected in every face. We would be paralysed by glory. We would never get anything done. Our hearts would be so ravished by the sight of even the most unexceptional human beings that we would be constantly struggling against (or yielding to) the temptation to fall at their feet and worship them.

We see one another through a glass darkly: thank God for that! But after going to Bemerton and kneeling in a place where prayer has been valid, I came back out into the light of day and accidentally saw another human being face to face. And now I will have to live somehow with the consequences.

On the limits of thinking pious thoughts

Today I walked to the church in Bemerton where George Herbert had been a priest. I sat for an hour alone in the tiny church, reading from a book of Herbert's poems, kneeling to pray, carrying on a private little conversation with the bones of my poet which lie resting somewhere under the altar. I contemplated his poem "The Call," and for the briefest second his description of Christ as "such a feast as mends in length" lit up my mind like lightning, so that all at once I seemed to have glimpsed the bare essential truth of things (though I could not tell you afterwards exactly what it was).

The walk back to Salisbury takes about an hour, and even though it was quite wet and cold I made my way along the muddy path with a light heart, feeling very glad and free.

At an upstairs cafe in a restored medieval building in Salisbury I was brought coffee by a girl with a face like Helen of Troy. When she put down the coffee on the table beside my hand, I thought: men would launch ships, they would send their sons to war, for a face like this. She was turning to leave so I asked her for a glass of water, not because I needed water but because I needed her to come back and stand a moment longer near me, outlined against the wide window and the grey sky. I watched her turn to walk away and I thought, my God, even her knees are perfect. I wondered what her knees would look like without the black stockings. And such small feet! I imagined her gently kicking off the small black shoes, one by one, and walking barefoot across the floor.

I tasted the coffee and it was very good. She came back and put a glass of water down on the table. Her hair was longer than I had remembered and her eyes were darker than I had remembered. Because the table was so low, she had to bend down to place the glass in front of me. I averted my eyes. I looked at the light that rippled on the surface of the water in the glass.

I wished I were a stage director. I would give her the part of Cleopatra and find an Antony to make long speeches to her. I wished I were an artist. I would draw her, every inch of her, in blackest charcoal. I wanted to capture the light in her dark eyes. I wanted to bless her, salute her, memorialise her, build an altar to her. I wanted to do so many things.

The glass of water came to rest on the table in front of me. Her fingers slid away from the wet glass. Her small feet padded away on the wooden floor.

I do not mean to make you blush, reader. I record these details purely for the sake of contrast. For am I not the same identical person who, one hour before, had sat in the church at Bemerton thinking the most pious thoughts I have ever had in all my life? That entire hour of prayer and contemplation; my proximity to the bones of a saint whom I have loved my whole life; the feeling of God's will encompassing me like a cloak – what happened to all that? An hour ago my heart had gone to Bemerton. Now with all my heart – the same heart! – I was contemplating other things.

It makes you realise that pious thoughts and religious feelings are a fine thing as far as they go – but they don't go very far. Less than an hour, as it turns out.

So I suppose like everybody else I will have to go on living the Christian life the slow way. I will have to remember that it is more important to be faithful than to be pious. I will have to go on saying my prayers and taking communion and giving alms and wetting my fingers in the baptismal font, day after day and year after year.

I am still glad for one calm clear hour in the church at Bemerton, for the chance to pray with the bones of George Herbert sleeping under my feet. I am glad, too, to have been lucky enough to see a face like the face of the girl at the cafe. For all I know she might have been an angel. For all I know, underneath her clothes there are wings. But angels' wings are no concern of mine. For God made me to walk, not fly.

Audio: Reading George Herbert

Drawing of Herbert's church by Guy Ottewell

I'm writing on George Herbert at the moment, and I've spent this week near Herbert's former church in Bemerton. If you've ever tried getting through life without reading George Herbert, I don't know how you do it. Anyway, after breakfast this morning I made some audio recordings for you of a few Herbert poems:

Holy Scriptures I (text)

The Call (text)

Heaven (text)

Dear Mister Herbert: The Altar

A while back I had the idea to write a small book titled Dear Mister Herbert – a series of letters to the English poet George Herbert. Herbert's collection of poems, The Temple, offers a whole theology of the Christian life. My idea is to sketch out his view of the Christian life through a series of short chapters, each responding to one of Herbert's poems. I thought I'd post some of them here – this is the first one, on "The Altar". Do you think this could work as a little book? I've planned for about twenty of these letters, tracing the broad outlines of the Christian life, from "The Altar" to "Love III". (And if any of you publishers out there are interested in a book like this, please get in touch with me!) 

--

A  broken   A L T A R,  Lord,  thy  servant  rears, Made  of  a  heart,  and  cemented  with   tears: Whose  parts  are as  thy  hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch’d the same. A    H E A R T     alone Is    such    a     stone, As      nothing      but Thy  pow’r doth  cut. Wherefore each part Of   my   hard   heart Meets  in  this  frame, To  praise thy  Name; That,   if   I   chance   to   hold   my   peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. O  let  thy   blessed   S A C  R  I  F  I C E   be  mine, And    sanctify   this   A  L  T  A  R   to   be   thine.

--

Dear Mr Herbert

We've never met, but today I read your poem about the altar, and I was moved to write you a few lines.

First I should tell you something about myself. I am one of those people who grew up singing psalms and hearing Bible stories and going along to worship and sleeping on the church floor while the women bashed their tambourines and prayed and clapped and sang. I suppose I was chewing on communion bread before I had any teeth in my head. I listened to sermons before I knew how to speak. I knew King James English before I could say the alphabet. I have religion in my blood; if you prick me, religion comes out. One way or another, I guess I have been trying to come to terms with the Christian faith my whole life, but I have never quite known how to make sense of it all.

There was a time in my life when I repudiated the lot of it, or tried to, though it caught up with me in the end. Then I returned, full of youthful zeal, to the faith of my childhood, and for a while I was pretty sure I'd found the answer to everything. But more familiar to me now are those times when I feel neither wholehearted rejection nor wholehearted acceptance of my faith. I am in another place instead, a place of uncertainty and hesitation, a sort of faltering cautious trust. Sometimes I feel shy of my own faith, shy because it is so strange to me and I don't quite know what it all means. 

Don't misunderstand me, Mr Herbert. I believe in God and Christ and the Holy Ghost and all of that. My problem is not that I don't believe but that I don't know what to do about it. I guess there were times in my life when “giving myself to God” seemed the most natural thing in the world. What could be simpler? As though I could direct myself to God just by an act of will. As though all it takes is dedication.

But that was a long time ago, and I don't feel quite so optimistic about myself anymore. All that business of choosing and willing and deciding: what does it amount to in the end? More often than not my will seems like the problem, not the solution. I can't see how I could change my life just by resolution – even if that resolution was very pious and correct. Is life really the sort of thing you can just make up for yourself? By sheer force of will I can't add a hair to my head – didn't Jesus say something like that? Let alone “giving myself to God” through some kind of pure religious exertion. 

Even if I could do it – even if I could present myself to God as a perfect sacrifice, a total offering of myself – how would I ever know if I'd performed the sacrifice adequately? What does God really want from me, after all? What if I brought my best offering to God and – like Cain – God took one look at it and said, Sorry, that wasn't quite what I had in mind. 

And so to your poem, Mr Herbert. It is quite pretty, the way you've made the words into a picture. But it's a bit misleading too, if you don't mind my saying so. The picture looks quite solid, quite stable, quite sure of itself. A perfectly formed altar. That discouraged me at first. It's a poem about sacrifice, and I was expecting all the usual blather about committing myself fully to God, offering myself to God, that sort of thing. 

But you caught me off guard. The first thing you say is that your heart is “a broken altar”. That each brick is a fragment of your “hard heart”. And that these pieces are held together not, as I expected, by dedication or resolve, but by tears. Why are you crying, Mr Herbert? You make it sound as though dedication to God is not a religious achievement but a kind of misfortune, a failure. As though the real question of life were not how can I succeed? but instead, what should I do with my failures?

I think I can see, Mr Herbert, what you have done with your failures. You have brought them all together in this “frame”. You've arranged them in the shape of an altar, brick by lonely brick, just as the words of a poem are arranged on the page.

Is that how it is? Is dedication to God, the worship of God, a frame that assembles all my flaws, my failings, my stubborn hard-heartedness, and turns it all into something God can use? I thought about that for a while, and I started thinking about the sacrifice I could make to God if only I was completely honest about my own shortcomings. I assumed that this is where your poem was trying to lead me: to a point of penitent renunciation, the point at which I would be able to lay myself bare as an offering to God.

But that's where you surprised me most of all. Instead of presenting your own life as the sacrifice, you say that your life is the altar. The sacrifice is God's. The gift is God's. The devotion is God's. The dedication is God's. And the divine sacrifice is offered on this altar: the flawed, hard, broken altar of a human heart.

Dear Mr Herbert, when I saw this in your poem, I felt that my whole picture of the Christian life had been one great misunderstanding after another. It's not that I need to dedicate myself to God, but that God is dedicated to me. It's not my devotion to God that counts, but God's devotion to me. The secret of life is not my commitment to God but God's commitment to me. God is the sacrifice, my heart is the altar. And it's just my flaws, my hard-heartedness, my brokenness, that make me suitable as a venue of God's sacrifice. A broken altar. Sometimes my life really does feel like little more than a pile of old stones. Yet God has brought a gift to lay upon those stones. God is that gift.

Thank you, Mr Herbert, that’s all I really meant to say. Thank you for understanding me so well and for describing it so clearly. And thank you for reading this letter, even though I'm sure you have much more important things to be getting on with.

Yours sincerely, etc.

--

Heaven in ordinary: George Herbert's poetics

In Atlanta today I presented a paper titled "Heaven in ordinary: George Herbert's poetics", as part of a panel responding to Regina Schwartz's book, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford UP 2008). My paper tried to respond to Schwartz's apophatic reading of George Herbert – here's an excerpt:

——
Now if I asked you, what is George Herbert’s most characteristic way of talking about God, I wonder what you’d immediately think of? Story or narrative? Positive doctrinal statement? Negation? No, surely the first thing that comes to mind is Herbert’s conceits (a technical term for extended, elaborate metaphors). He takes a small, seemingly insignificant item from everyday life – something from around the home – and turns it into a delicate picture of God’s activity, God’s involvement.

In one of his poems, the Sundays of our lives are likened to beads threaded on a string, adorning us and making us beautiful for God. In another poem, Christ’s graveclothes in the empty tomb (he loves writing about clothes) are a handkerchief with which to dry our tears when we’re sad and grieving:

Arise, Arise;
And with his burial-linen dry thine eyes:
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief.

In ‘Holy Scriptures’ (I), Herbert compares the flat pages of scripture to God’s gracious condescension to the littleness of humanity. He says of scripture:

heav’n lies flat in thee,
Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.

Again, a homely picture based on a very simple, childlike observation: God’s word comes to us ‘flat’, and that means we can climb up to God by bending ourselves down low. With even the smallest effort, we can mount up to heaven, since it lies flat in holy scripture. A rather different picture from the mystical ascent of apophatic theology!

In another poem, ‘Jesu’, the human heart is like a children’s word puzzle: the letters are broken apart by affliction and scattered across the floor. When pieced back together, they spell both ‘I ease you’ (when the letters are spelled out individually: I-ES-U), and ‘JESU’ (when the letters are read all together). It’s a playful conceit, a little parable of God’s loving involvement with our lives – and with our language. (There’s a similar word-game in the poem ‘Colossians 3:3’, where the biblical text, my life is hid with Christ in God, is literally hidden in the lines of the poem, just as God’s work is hidden in the ordinary story of our lives.)

For a somewhat weirder conceit, consider ‘The Bag’. Here, the wound in Christ’s side is compared to a postman’s bag – if we want to ‘send or write’ anything to God, we can put our letters in this bag, the hole in Christ’s side, and like a reliable postman Christ will deliver our mail to God. He takes good care of our letters, placing them – here the conceit gets even stranger – placing them close to his heart:

If ye have any thing to send or write,
I have no bag, but here is room:
Unto my Fathers hands and sight,
Believe me, it shall safely come.
That I shall mind, what you impart;
Look, you may put it very near my heart.

Again, this is serious reflection on the way God becomes involved in human language. In Schwartz’s terms, we might even call this ‘language theory’, or poetics. But it takes the form not of positive theology or of negative theology, but of what Herbert himself calls ‘plainness’. Something like parable: a simple, rather humorous observation of daily life in an English village.

I won’t go on multiplying examples, since you can find these kinds of conceits on virtually every page of Herbert. It is his most characteristic speech-act, quite distinct from either apophatic or cataphatic strategies. Like the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels, Herbert can speak about God without so much as mentioning the word ‘God’. His poetry gives the impression that we can find God pretty much anywhere, that we can speak of God in virtually any language, especially the language of ‘plainness’, simplicity, the ordinary. ‘Heaven in ordinary’, as Herbert calls it – that is his language theory.

George Herbert: prayer, language, silence

At the Sarah Coakley symposium next week, I'll be giving a paper on "Prayer as Theological Method". It's partly on the relation between prayer and theology in Augustine's De Trinitate, and partly on the way poetry exemplifies this relation between prayer and theological language. Here's an excerpt from the section on prayer.

George Herbert’s much-loved sonnet, ‘Prayer’ (I), portrays this tendency of language to be overwhelmed by the divine plenitude:

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods 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’ Almightie, sinner’s towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

The whole poem comes rushing out as a single breathless exhilarating sentence, piling image upon image in a kind of rhapsodic abandon. The images are startling, contradictory, incapable of conceptual reduction. Prayer is as gentle as breath or the fragrance of spices, yet it is also a violent ‘engine against th’ Almightie’, a battering ram with which the Christian lays siege against God. It is as soothing as ‘a kinde of tune’, yet it’s a tune that strikes ‘fear’ into the heart of all creation. It is exotic, strange, inexplicable – the Milky Way, the bird of paradise, the land of spices – yet also as homely and familiar as dressing in one’s Sunday best. Yes, prayer is heaven, but it is ‘heaven in ordinarie’. It maps out the contours of the inner self – ‘the soul in paraphrase’, ‘the souls bloud’ – but also reaches ‘beyond the stars’. It’s like a ship’s sounding line, not dropped into the sea but cast up into the sky, a ‘plummet sounding heav’n’. Similarly, it is ‘reversed thunder’: Jove’s thunder is turned back on himself, a bolt shooting up from earth to heaven.

These dizzying spatial images stretch the imagination beyond its furthest limits. The stage on which prayer takes place is infinitely vast. Yet juxtaposed with this immensity is the image of prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’, a tiny abridgement of all the depths and complexities of a human story. Indeed prayer is an hour-long abridgement of the whole ‘six daies world’ – an image that at once evokes the huge dimensions of prayer and its minute scale. It is a gigantic mystery that sounds the most profound depths, yet so small you can fit it in your pocket: like a whale drawn on the back of a matchbox.

In the final stanza, all the senses are engaged. Prayer is soft and supple to touch; it tastes like manna; it is the vision of a star-filled sky; it smells like the land of spices; it sounds like the distant peal of bells (either earth’s bells heard in heaven, or heavenly bells heard on earth: Herbert is tantalisingly ambiguous). This explosion of sensual imagery doesn’t serve conceptual clarity. What would church bells sound like if they echoed from another galaxy? What does an exotic country smell like, a country you’ve never visited? Come to think of it, what exactly does heavenly manna taste like? If these images teach us something about prayer, it is primarily by destabilising our understanding, driving us to the brink of an unspeakable mystery.

And so the whole great cascade of imagery is finally resolved in just two words, ‘something understood’. I say resolved, since traditionally the sonnet introduces a resolution after the volta, or turn: the sestet in the Italian sonnet, or the final couplet in the Shakespearian sonnet. In Herbert’s poem one anticipates a resolution, but it never seems to arrive – until it suddenly interrupts the final line in a way that is startling, abrupt, unexpected. Just as prayer abridges all history into an hour, so the whole poem is condensed into these closing words. What is prayer? It is ‘something understood’. These are the only words in the poem that are not wrapped up in some imagery: here there is neither concept nor imagery, only a quiet understanding.

The real purpose of all the conflicting images was simply to clear this space – not, in fact, a space for understanding (as though the poem were trying to ‘explain’ prayer), but a space for prayer itself. As talk-about-prayer passes over into praying, something is understood that language can never capture. In fourteen lines we have plumbed heaven and earth, feasted and made war, spanned all the farthest reaches of time and space. But now – as so often in Herbert – we find ourselves kneeling alone in the dusky light of a little country church, listening softly to that profound yet homely silence. Here at last, where understanding ceases, prayer is understood.

Certainly, then, there is something akin to an apophatic moment. The moment of silent understanding, however, occurs not in opposition to the clumsy limitation of language, but within it. It is Herbert’s first thirteen-and-a-half lines that create the experience of the poem’s close. It’s not as though there were first of all a sheer wordless experience of prayer, which is subsequently described in words. Rather the poetic language itself creates the conditions for an experience of silence. Wordless prayer is a possibility within language. Contemplative silence is the calm eye at the centre of the roiling storm of language.

To put it another way, Herbert’s poem is not about the poverty of human language, but about the inexhaustible riches of prayer. Prayer is too much – too much for language, too much even for poetry. More than anywhere else in Herbert’s poetry, we catch a glimpse here of language straining against its own possibilities – not as one struggles against a straitjacket, but as a horse champs at the bit before a race, straining because there is too much to say. Silence is not the phenomenon that ensues when language reaches its limit, much less some primordial pre-linguistic abyss from which language subsequently emerges. In the company of a close friend, I sometimes find myself reduced to silence. Not because the relationship is wordless (nothing is more verbose than friendship), but because in friendship one can never say enough; the real goal of friendship is to talk your way into silence. This is just what Herbert portrays in so many of his poetic conversations with God. One can never say enough to God. And so, in its fullness, language ripens into silence. Language is outrun by its own resources, it spills over into the baffled joy of contemplation.

Butterflyfish: songs for children

As a parent of young children, I often gripe about the abysmal quality of products made for kids – especially that dismal cacophony of books and music that is marketed each year to young children. Bright sparkly sticker-infested books, bursting at the seams with bad grammar, colourless characters, incoherent plots, hackneyed illustrations, and all those endlessly repeated psycho-spiritual-gender banalities which have come to constitute The Disney Worldview (a worldview that is infinitely more malignant and more destructive than anything Lars von Trier could ever dream up).

Similarly, where children’s music is concerned (I won’t even mention television shows), the ruling principle seems to be: Any old crap will do; after all, they’re only kids. No need for lyrical imagination; no need for creativity; no need for musical talent or versatility. Just rhyme a few words, grunt out a few lines, bang out a couple of chords on your cheap electric keyboard – it’s good enough for the kids.

If you have young children in your home, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Which is why it’s so refreshing when occasionally you come across a piece of real music for children. That was how we felt when Roger Flyer (a regular friend here at F&T) sent me a copy of one of his wonderful CDs for children: a CD that I know very well indeed, since my kids have been listening to it almost every night for the past 18 months!

Anyway, while I was in Princeton last month, one of the highlights was getting to know the brilliant young Harvard theologian, Matthew Myer Boulton. Not only is he the author of a superb book on Barth and worship, but he’s also the singer-songwriter for a sweet and groovy children’s band, Butterflyfish. He gave me a copy of their brand new debut CD, Ladybug – and after listening to it dozens (hundreds?) of times now, I’m pleased to report that this is the real deal: an album that kids adore, and that grownup folks will also continue to enjoy after countless hours of repeat listening.

The album is musically vibrant, surprising and exciting: it blends styles as diverse as bluegrass, country, jazz and gospel, in a way that brings out that characteristic joy and lilt and humour of American folk music. And the lyrics (all written by Matt Boulton) are quite wonderful: linguistically inventive, poetically playful, and at times also theologically serious and reflective. Where so many kids’ CDs are characterised by attitudes of patronising banality, it’s a tremendous pleasure to hear music like this: music that takes children seriously, music that respects its audience, music premised on the assumption that young children are capable of lively joy, honest reflection, and exuberant aesthetic delight.

The songs range from the light-hearted jollity of “Ladybug” to the fast-paced rollicking bluegrass adventure of “What Jonah Learned Inside the Whale” (“He learned that whales have no teeth, but they do have great big tongues; / God is underneath everything and everyone”), to the delicate and imaginative “Noah’s Lullaby”, the jubilant a cappella celebration “Deep Down in My Heart”, and the rich smoky-jazz-bar groove of “There Is a Love”.

But the real highlight is the extraordinary track, “All Sad Songs.” I’ve never heard a children’s song quite like this – and without getting too carried away in autobiographical pathos, I might also admit that it’s probably the only song from a children’s CD that has ever made me cry. Here are the lyrics:

It’s been all sad songs since you’ve left
I’ve cried and I’ve kept my sorrow so deep inside
And I’ve swept up all of my pride
Sad songs since you died

It’s been all sad songs since you went away
I’ve been lost, and sleeping right through the day
This has cost me all that I had
Now the songs are all sad

Something deep inside of me
So wanted to believe
But that cost me all that I had
Now the songs are all sad

(Male voice: La la la…)

But then Mary came to our house of shame
To proclaim that you were alive again
And the grave was as empty and dark
As my broken heart

Something deep inside of me
So wanted to believe
That the grave is as empty and dark
As my broken heart

(Female voice: La la la…)

I know all sad songs have another verse
It’s the one the heavenly choirs rehearse
For that day when the broken will mend
And the sad songs will end

Not that we’ll forget, we’ll sing those songs yet
In a different key, we’ll sing differently
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change

(Both voices: La la la…)

God will wipe away all our tears
Banish the fears we’ve collected for all these years
On that day when the broken will mend
The sad songs will end

Something deep inside of me
Can’t help it but believe
In that day when the broken will mend
The sad songs will end
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change

A remarkably poignant and sensitive meditation on death, grief, and the triumph of resurrection. The song reflects on music itself as an eschatological metaphor: God is writing another verse for our sad songs, and arranging the score in a different key. In the day of redemption, we will still sing our sad songs – nothing will be lost or forgotten – but these same songs will be translated into something new, utterly sublated so that they become songs of grace and redemption.

This metaphor is evoked very vividly in the song’s own arrangement. After describing his grief in the first verse and chorus, the lead voice sings a melancholy wordless tune, singing only the syllable “la la la…” But then after Mary’s announcement of the empty grave, a female voice enters the song. Again, she sings a wordless tune to the same music, but the melody has subtly changed so that those syllables now convey hope and light and sweetness. Then finally, after the verse describing the eschatological sublation of grief, the male and female voice join their wordless tunes together. Now the two distinct voices and melodies combine to produce a single harmony of redemption: the sad grieving voice is overlaid with a voice of hope and healing; or rather, the sad voice is lifted up into a harmony which fully includes the sad tune, yet utterly transforms it.

The female voice slips into the song so gently, so unobtrusively. The voice alights like a dove, then rises again, leading the male voice upwards. I’m reminded of George Herbert’s poem, “Easter Wings”, where God is depicted as a bird in flight, helping us to fly when our own wings are broken, so that we are raised up together and “combined” in one harmonious song. (As you can see in the picture below, the poem is itself shaped like two birds together in flight.) “With thee / Oh let me rise / As larks, harmoniously… With thee / Let me combine / And feel this day thy victorie: / For, if I imp my wing on thine / Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”


The harmony of the two voices in “All Sad Songs” is like the movement of two birds in flight. The song’s whole theology of resurrection and hope is conveyed most powerfully here, in this simple monosyllabic harmony. My sadness has not fled, but another voice now sings with me, bearing me up, supporting my broken wing, lifting my mournful melody and translating it into a hymn of redemption. The same song – but how different now!

Not that we’ll forget, we’ll sing those songs yet
In a different key, we’ll sing differently
In the music God has arranged
All the sad songs will change.

My wife and I love this album just as much as our kids do. If you’re looking for some good music for your children, then why not grab a copy of Ladybug. And while you’re there, be sure to download the Butterflyfish colouring pages: because everything’s better in crayon.

Theology with Sufjan Stevens: heaven in ordinary

At the moment I’m absolutely infatuated with the music of Sufjan Stevens. Commentators have often talked about Stevens’ creativity as a musician and composer; but he’s also an extraordinary lyricist. Many of his best songs are ballads, stories that relate, with simple poignancy, the everyday dramas of friendship, love and family life. And it’s here that Stevens’ poetic gift really lies: the ability to evoke, with just a few words, the tragic and beautiful ambiguities of personal relationships. Take for example the opening lines of his song about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Jr:

His father was a drinker
And his mother cried in bed

We are brought immediately into a relation of startling intimacy to this troubled child who would become a killer. Or take the delicate opening line of “Flint (for the Unemployed and Underpaid)” – “It’s the same outside” – a line that subtly evokes all the sadness and disappointment of a life that has not gone according to plan, a life stripped of hope and promise.

Or, again, take “Romulus”, a song about children growing up with their grandfather, unloved by their own mother. When their mother moves interstate, Stevens sings:

She moved away quite far
Our grandpa bought us a new VCR

In my opinion, this couplet is one of Stevens’ most perfect accomplishments. The contrast between the mother’s neglect and the grandfather’s tenderness is almost unbearable. The grandfather’s simple gesture – so understated, so gentle in its helplessness – evokes the man’s whole character in just a few words, capturing perfectly the shape of his relationships to the grandchildren and to his uncaring daughter. With these lines, the grandfather immediately becomes the truest and noblest of all the many colourful characters who people Sufjan Stevens’ albums.

Together with this gift for evoking human relationships, we must add Stevens’ exquisite sense of place: with a single phrase, he can capture the precise atmosphere of a place, its peculiar flavour and character. Take for example the lines from “Holland”:

Sleeping on Lake Michigan
Factories and marching bands

Or the description of a road trip in “Chicago”:

I drove to New York
In a van, with my friend
We slept in parking lots

Such descriptions of people and places are like the brush-strokes of an accomplished artist: just a few strokes, deceptively simple, and everything comes to life. The most mundane and unexceptional things – a roadside parking lot, a video player – become full of life and colour and beauty. In a word, they become glorious. The English poet George Herbert has spoken of “heaven in ordinary” – and I think this could also serve as a fitting summary of Sufjan Stevens’ poetic vision.

In particular, the evocation of the beauty of the everyday is characteristic of the religious dimension of Stevens’ songs. Let me focus here on one of his most remarkable songs, “Casimir Pulaski Day”. It’s worth quoting the lyrics in full (but you should really listen to it):

Goldenrod and the 4H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car into the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

In the morning, through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulderblade
I could see what you were reading

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared

All the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you

Sunday night when I cleaned the house
I found the card where you wrote it out
With the pictures of you mother

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

In the morning when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes

The story is plain enough: an adolescent boy loves a girl with cancer; she dies; years later, he finds a card which reminds him of her, and he is again brokenhearted. But throughout the song, there is a peculiar chorus: “All the glory that the Lord has made.” In the first place, it seems strange to speak of God’s glory in a song like this, where God’s own role appears to be a purely passive one. God is distinguished in this story precisely by his absence and inactivity: they pray for healing, but nothing happens; when the girl finally dies, even the cardinal strikes out in confusion and frustration. The God of this song is a God who does not intervene – and yet each moment, each memory, remains charged with God’s glory.

Indeed, as the song progresses we realise that the speaker’s relation to God is marked by a deep ambivalence. What kind of God is this, who lights up even our losses and griefs with beauty? What God is this, who shines on us even in the hour of death, so that our most painful trials are achingly transfigured? When the adolescent boy sees the girl dead, he is struck even then by her beauty, by the light and shade of the scene:

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

And turning from the girl’s face, he looks out the window – only to be confronted by the face of God:

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

Here is God’s glory, lighting up the world, transfiguring an ordinary day into a “holiday” (literally “holy day”). Here is God’s glory even in the midst of death and abandonment. It is indeed a “complication.” In this song, God is not the opiate that makes it easier to cope with death and loss. Death becomes more “complicated” when God is there.

But we’d be misunderstanding the song if we imagined it to be depicting some cold, unfeeling deity who stands at an impassive distance from our pain. On the contrary, we are confronted with the true paradox of God in the final verse. God is the one who displayed his glory “when He took our place” in Jesus Christ, entering into our deepest griefs from within. And yet this same God is now encountered as the one who “took my shoulders and He shook my face / And He takes and He takes and He takes.” The same God who took our place now takes life away. He is there with us in death, and we encounter his presence both as a weight of “glory” and as an unbearable wound.

This is an extraordinarily vivid depiction of grief and loss and memory. But it’s also – and above all – a remarkably hopeful song, full of light and beauty and the freshness of morning air. If there is confusion here – “the complications you could do without” – then even this confusion itself is finally taken up into the light and shade of God’s overcoming glory. The God encountered in grief and loss is the God who has already gone ahead of us, already taken our place in Jesus Christ. And so this God gathers up all things into glory: even in the hour of death, it is his face that turns towards us in the radiance of glory, and in the beauty of grace.

A dialogue with George Herbert

Here’s one of my favourite George Herbert poems: “Dialogue”, from his collection The Temple (1633). If you’re having trouble following, it’s a dialogue between George Herbert and God (God’s speech is in italics). Herbert is arguing with God; he is in despair, since he feels completely undeserving of salvation, and he can’t imagine his own life having any worth to God. God replies twice, and then Herbert interrupts God’s speech in the final line.

Sweetest Saviour, if my soul
        Were but worth the having,
Quickly should I then control
        Any thought of waiving.
But when all my care and pains
Cannot give the name of gains
To thy wretch so full of stains,
What delight or hope remains?

What, child, is the balance thine,
        Thine the poise and measure?
If I say, “Thou shalt be mine,”
        Finger not my treasure.
What the gains in having thee
Do amount to, only he
Who for man was sold can see;
That transferr’d th’ accounts to me.

But as I can see no merit
        Leading to this favour,
So the way to fit me for it
        Is beyond my savour.
As the reason, then, is thine,
So the way is none of mine;
I disclaim the whole design;
Sin disclaims and I resign.

That is all, if that I could
        Get without repining;
And my clay, my creature, would
        Follow my resigning;
That as I did freely part
With my glory and desert,
Left all joys to feel all smart—
        Ah! no more: thou break’st my heart.

Easter: the one true day

“Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.”

—George Herbert, “Easter” (1633)

Good Friday

“Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.”

—George Herbert, “The Agonie” (1633).

Easter

I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.

—George Herbert, from “Easter” (1633).

The dawning

Arise, sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,
Christ's resurrection thine may be;
Do not by hanging down break from the hand
Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee:
Arise, Arise;
And with his burial linen dry thine eyes.
Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
Draws tears, or blood, not want a handkerchief.

—George Herbert, “The Dawning” (1633)

The blood and wine of Good Friday

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

—George Herbert, “The Agonie” (1633)

Fast and feast: prayer

In homage to George Herbert’s poem “Prayer,” our friend Kim Fabricius has written this hymn entitled “Prayer the Church’s Fast and Feast” (to the tune of England’s Lane / Heathlands):

Prayer the church’s fast and feast,
recipes for grief and praise;
prayer the creature’s common speech,
mind and soul in paraphrase:

Father God, how good to share
all our love and pain and care.

Prayer the land of sun and spice,
hearts on holiday abroad;
prayer the blood of sacrifice,
blessed spear that pierced our Lord:

Prayer the compass of desire,
pointing to the promised rest;
prayer the truth against the liar,
passing all the devil’s tests:

Prayer the token of the best,
poetry of cheerful rhymes;
prayer the sound of deep unrest,
thunderclaps for tempest-times:

Prayer the ear that hears the tones,
sounding from angelic spheres;
prayer the voice that moves the stone,
pressing on the tomb of years:

Prayer the raising of the dead,
turning evil into good;
prayer the way the world is read,
sense of something understood.

Heaven in ordinary: prayer

One of the most profound depictions of prayer that I know of is George Herbert’s poem, “Prayer,” published in 1633:

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 dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.