Thought for the week: Noël Staples has words with George Herbert
‘The intense and lovely feelings came of their own accord, sometimes at odd times.’
I read George Herbert’s lovely Love III in ministry recently. It’s significant for me, and I keep a copy in my wallet.
I find the overt eucharistic meaning of the poem almost distasteful, yet I still love to read it: it is just beautiful! It’s meaningful because only someone deeply moved by the spirit could have written it – someone moved by what we might just call ‘God’ or ‘the Light’.
To identify or understand things in daily life we consult memory. Today, if that fails, we also have vast information resources to search. But George Herbert, born in 1593, would have relied on his memory. His would likely have been better than ours, since we’ve become reliant on technology. Herbert’s mind would have been stocked with theology, biblical passages, and the limited scientific knowledge then available (scientific experimentation was in its infancy; the Enlightenment and industrial revolution were still more than a century away).
Back in 1982, after reading Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, I realised that I had probably been experiencing something called ‘the Holy’. Otto called it ‘the numinous’, describing it as the sense of a mysterium tremendum et fascinans – the sense of a tremendous mystery which fascinates and draws one in.
Until Otto I could not think about or identify my experiences. The intense and lovely feelings didn’t come from anything I remembered, and didn’t seem attached to any particular occasion. They came of their own accord, sometimes at odd times. They still do, but now more often at Meeting for Worship – though the feeling came once while filtering on a powerful motorbike through a traffic jam on the A14!
We all occasionally experience powerful feelings of awe and wonder. They happen when contemplating beautiful sunsets, vast mountain landscapes, or (light pollution permitting) staring at the utter blackness of the night sky. There are billions of suns visible just in our galaxy, let alone the unseen billions of other galaxies. That puts us humans in our place! Our particular sun, on which life as we know it depends, is a relatively small star. Herbert knew nothing about this, nor about aeroplanes, nuclear energy, mobile phones, cars, radio, television or the internet. His was a very different world, a mindset we can’t imagine.
Faced with the transformative experience of his encounter with the divine, Herbert drew on his own memory and experience to try to describe it. One of the results is this beautiful poem. This spiritual force, which drove him to write, is something with which I strongly identify.
Love III
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, 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 marred 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.
George Herbert (1593-1633)
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