Under Contract (GH #33)

"Light of the World" by William Holman Hunt, Keble College, Oxford

How often do we pay attention to what words could mean? Most of us go for the most obvious or first definition that comes to our minds. The English language has such linguistic richness to it, yet sometimes we miss that richness. I've been digging into George Herbert's poem "Christmas," and, in reading it for the hundredth time, I suddenly thought about one of the words: "contracted." I'll quote the stanza, the closing sestet (6 lines) of the sonnet that forms part one of "Christmas":

  O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,

          Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger ;

          Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,

      To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger :

          Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have

          A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.*

I've always read the word “contracted” (first line above) in its meaning of "condensed": God's great glory shrunken to fit into human form in the Incarnation. His "glorious ... "light" drawn into the flesh, blood, & mind of a smaller, lesser being.

But in what other potential ways could the light of God be "contracted"? Why had I never seen the word "contract" contained within "contracted"? So obvious! Time to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary.

For those not familiar with it, the OED is extremely helpful in that it not only gives definitions the word has had over time, but it supplies examples of historical usage of the word. This way I can check to see what meanings the word would have had during Herbert's time of the late sixteenth & early seventeenth centuries, but also examples of how it was used.

So, the word "contracted" in Herbert's time indeed had the meaning of "agreed upon by contract." Now this opens up a new meaning to Herbert's sestet about the Incarnation. Contract: or how about a more familiar word for us: covenant. The New Covenant is an unconditional covenant between God and man that Christ came to fulfill and that he instituted at the Last Supper.

Let me go even further with the now-obsolete definition of "contracted": "agreed upon." What about the Triune God having agreed amongst the 3 persons to establish this new contract to replace the old? (See Herbert's poem "Redemption" for his metaphor of this replacement of old with new.) What about Jesus Christ having agreed to fulfill the New Covenant, not just before the foundation of the world (1 Peter 1:20), but in the Garden of Gethsemene on the eve before: "not my will, but Thine be done" (Matt. 26:39)? I love how Milton's Paradise Lost pictures the Son's agreement in the salvation plan. In Book 3, the Son of God stands up before all Heaven and offers himself as the substitute for mankind: “Me for him, life for life / I offer. On Me let thine anger fall” (3.236-7).

So we have “contracted” as “condensed” (also “shrunken” or “narrowed”) and as “agreed upon by contract,” but we're not done with definitions. Another definition of the adjective "contracted" used in Herbert's time is "betrothed," a theologically rich idea. Christ the Bridegroom is betrothed to his Bride, the Church. The Incarnation of the Son of God anticipated, set into motion by instituting the Church, the ultimate happily-ever-after wedding between the Lamb and his righteous Bride (Revelation 19:7-8). Reflecting on the holiness of Christ and his great sacrifice in both putting aside his divine glory to take on human flesh and bearing the weight of our sins upon the cross, the speaker in “Christmas” feels keenly his own unworthiness: his “dark” and “brutish” soul (line 3 above). Therefore, he asks that his soul be redecorated by the Lord to be a fit place of habitation for God’s glorious light.  

* You can find Herbert’s poem “Christmas” on Luminarium’s Herbert page: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/christmas.htm

Dusty with a Chance of Dirt Balls (GH #32)

"Dust to Dust": ruins of church, Chester, UK

At a conference I attended last spring, a colleague introduced me to A. S. Byatt’s short story called “Raw Material,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 2002. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/04/byatt.htm Last week I finally read it.

The main character, a creative writing teacher (Jack), asks the best writer in his class, a slightly deaf older woman (Cicely Fox), what she likes to read. She responds,

"Oh, the old things. They wouldn't interest you young people. Things I used to like as a girl. Poetry increasingly. I find I don't seem to want to read novels much anymore." . . .

He said, "Which poems, Miss Fox?"

"These days, mostly George Herbert."

"Are you religious?"

"No. He is the only writer who makes me regret that for a moment. He makes one understand grace. Also, he is good on dust."

"Dust?" Jack dredged his memory and came up with "Who sweeps a room as for thy laws / Makes that and the action fine."*

"I like 'Church Monuments.' With death sweeping dust with an incessant motion: 'Flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust / That measures all our time; which also shall / Be crumbled into dust.' And then I like the poem where he speaks of his God stretching 'a crumme of dust from Hell to Heaven.' Or 'O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to thee / And then not heare it crying.'"**

"He knew," Cicely Fox said, "the proper relation between words and things. 'Dust' is a good word."

Herbert does like to use the word “dust.” He often reminds us that we are made from dust (Gen 2:7), will return to dust, and are as dust in comparison with God’s glory and greatness. Herbert takes the idea of man as formed from dust, now acting as supplicant before his Creator (cf. “Denial”), a (literal) step further in “Longing”:

  Behold, thy dust doth stir;

It moves, it creeps, it aims at thee;

Wilt thou defer

To succour me,

Thy pile of dust, wherein each crumme

Says, Come? (stanza 7, lines 37-42)***

I love the image Herbert paints of the creeping dust: poor pathetic dust trying to reach the King with his petition for aid. (Herbert explores this image of God as ruler denying relief to the supplicant later in stanza 10: “Thou dost reign / And rule on high, / While I remain / In bitter grief” [lines 56-59].) Indeed, the speaker is hoping this picture will tug on the Lord’s heartstrings enough to move Him to respond in compassion. Yes, “dust” is a good word.

Not surprisingly, George Herbert’s poems inspired many other poets in the seventeenth century, not the least of which is the early American colonist Edward Taylor, a Reformed minister on the Connecticut frontier.

In the “Prologue” to Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations, the speaker refers to himself as “a Crumb of Dust,” asking the Lord to “Inspire this Crumb of Dust till it display / Thy Glory through’t: and then thy dust shall live” (lines 21-22). We may be dust, Taylor acknowledges, but if God “inspire” us (in the original meaning of the word, as in God breathing into man the breath of life in the creation), His glory can both shine through us and give us life. (I might also note that Taylor’s opening poem is about humbly taking up his pen in a poetic theodicy: to demonstrate God’s “Properties” [that is, attributes; line 28]. He’s playing on the idea of poets being “inspired.”)

 

Taylor’s poems (almost exclusively religious) are evocative in their own right. He knows how to use words as well, but, unlike Herbert, who uses them in subtle and clever ways, Taylor almost shocks with them. I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, from his “Meditation. Rev. 3.5. The same shall be cloathed in White Raiment.” In the first stanza, Taylor’s speaker considers himself too lowly to be arrayed in white robes with all the saints, calling himself “but a jumble of gross Elements” (line 5). As the second stanza begins, the poet has found his vivid image. What does it look like for a sinful human being to wear the white robes of the righteous? According to Taylor, it looks like “A Dirt ball dresst in milk white Lawn” (line 7).****

I’ve always thought of a big ball of brown dirt dressed in one of those white, ruffled christening gowns. It’s a metaphor that’s almost ludicrous, and yet does not a ball of dirt or a crumb of dust more adequately express how small sinful humanity is compared to God’s holiness than what we usually envision?

* From Herbert’s “The Elixir.”

** From Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” “The Temper 1,” and “Denial,” respectively.

*** Herbert’s spelling of crumb (crumme) enhances its sight rhyme with “Come.”

**** An excellent edition of Taylor’s poems is the one edited by Donald E. Stanford and published by UNC Chapel Hill (The Poems of Edward Taylor).

Praying Like a Beggar (GH # 31)

-->

church in Harlech, Wales

In a sermon on prayer this morning, my pastor challenged the congregation to “pray as a beggar.” His biblical text was Psalm 66 (v. 17 “I cried to him with my mouth”), but so many verses from the Psalms would have suited this point as well. Crying out to God beggar-fashion, explained my pastor, is not the same as standing on the street corner with a sign, hoping someone will eventually stop. Instead, it’s putting aside all self-sufficiency and coming to the Lord for everything. “Apart from me,” says Jesus, “you can do nothing” (John 15).

George Herbert’s wonderful poem “Longing,” full of the frustration of unanswered prayer, uses in its second-to-last stanza the metaphor of the beggar. I’ll quote stanzas 11-13 of this 14-stanza poem:

  Lord, didst thou leave thy throne

Not to relieve? How can it be

That thou art grown

Thus hard to me?

Were sin alive, good cause there were

To bear:

  But now both sin is dead,

And all thy promises live and bide;

That wants his head,

These speak and chide,

And in thy bosom pour my tears,

As theirs.

Lord Jesu, hear my heart,

Which hath been broken now so long,

That ev’ry part

Hath got a tongue:

Thy beggars grow: rid them away

To-day. (lines 61-88) 

In this poem, Herbert’s speaker has been crying out to be heard by the Lord, but he has not received (or perceived) a response. He tries various arguments to persuade God to respond. Stanza 11 asks why God would condescend to leave his throne (in the Incarnation) and come down to humanity and yet not relieve human suffering? Herbert follows this argument in stanza 11 with another line of reasoning: if sin were getting in the way of the speaker’s communion with God, then that would be an appropriate cause of God’s not hearing his prayers. Herbert’s reasoning here is modeled after that of the psalmist in Ps 66:18: “If I had cherished iniquity [sin] in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.”

Yet sin is not the problem. Again following the psalmist (66:19 “But truly God has listened”), Herbert reveals in stanza 12 that (a) “sin is dead” and (b) God’s “promises live.” Sin is not gone (it “wants his [its] head,” that is, its way), but God’s promises keep the speaker from completely giving in to sin (“these [the promises] speak and chide” the narrator). Not only that, but God’s promises are pleading to the Lord on behalf of the speaker (“these . . . in thy bosom pour my tears”).

Herbert’s speaker is left with no answers still. He’s a child of God (stanza 10, lines 59-60), he isn’t given over to sin, and he has God’s promises on his side. Approaching God with arguments to persuade him (logos) isn’t working. Time to resume pathos, reminding the Lord about the speaker’s broken heart in stanza 13. Even in the midst of trying to tug on God’s compassion, Herbert slips in one more argument. If God won’t respond through positive appeals, maybe he will through a negative one. The speaker envisions the pieces of his broken heart each having its own tongue, surrounding the King like a bunch of beggars. All you have to do to get rid of these annoyances, the speaker states, is to grant their request. I’m reminded of Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow, who wears the judge down with her repeated requests (Luke 18:1-8). (Many a mother has no doubt been worn down by her children’s requests this way. “Fine! You can have whatever you want. Just stop bothering me.”)

Herbert uses this metaphor of begging in prayer in the poem “Gratefulness” as well, where he is asking God to give him a grateful heart. “See how thy beggar works on thee / by art,” his speaker says (lines 3-4), where “begging” is revealed to be a tactic to move God through “Perpetual knockings at thy door” (13).

While the speaker has not yet received any answers to his requests in Herbert’s poem “Longing,” other poems from Herbert, such as “Praise 2,” reveal the poet’s responses to the Lord having heard his prayers:

Thou hast granted my request,

     Thou hast heard me;

Thou didst note my working breast,

     Thou hast spared me. (lines 5-8)     

Psalm 66 concludes with praise to the God who does answer prayer, in His own time; who forgives sin when we confess (1 Jn 1:9); and who loves his children with an everlasting love: “Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me!” (66:20).