George Herbert’s constant companions were personal inadequacy, melancholy, and frustration at his perceived uselessness for God. “A blunted knife was of more use than I,” he wrote in one of five poems he titled “Affliction.” Yet, his contribution in his poetry, as in his life in the tiny country parish, is his transparency.
Holy Mr. Herbert was wholly honest about his struggles with his calling, but by the time of his death, he was content. On his deathbed, he bequeathed his poems to a friend, calling them “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.”
How he found this “perfect freedom” remains a mystery. The poems are not chronology; there is no “eureka” moment. His mood swings from rebellious to resigned.
In “The Collar,” he shouts: “I struck the board, and cried, No more.” Herbert rages for several stanzas, then suddenly is quiet in God’s presence:
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, Lord.
Herbert’s verses often begin with affliction, but end in trust. The country parson regularly meets grace:
Who could have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greeness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root when they have blown
. . . . . . . . . . . .
And now in age I bud again
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: Oh my only light
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
Today at the Bemerton church where he served only 36 months, there is over the entrance a stained-glass window of Herbert with his favorite lute tucked under his arm. Light passes through the panes and spills in pools at the altar. The image is appropriate. Herbert seemed aware that his life was the model for his congregation.
Lord, how can a 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.
. …. … …
Making thy life to shine within
The holy Preacher’s; then the light and glory
More rev’rend grows, and more doth win:
Which else shows wat’rish, bleak and thin.
Richard P. Hansen First Presbyterian Church Visalia, California
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