Christian Art | George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Christmas
George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Christmas
All after pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tir’d, bodie and minde,
With full crie of affections, quite astray;
I took up in the next inne I could finde.
There when I came, whom found I but my deare,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to him, readie there
To be all passengers most sweet relief?
Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in nights mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,
Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger:
Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have
A better lodging, then a rack, or grave.
The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymne for thee?
My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is thy word: the streams, thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Out-sing the day-light houres.
Then we will chide the sunne for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I finde a sunne
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly.
Then we will sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine
George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Christmas
The poem presents a spiritual progression from weariness and disconnection to renewed purpose and communion with the divine. Herbert describes a personal journey marked by exhaustion, seeking rest after being drawn away by worldly pleasures. Imagery of travel, with Herbert and his horse both ‘tired, body and mind’, introduces a state of spiritual depletion. The search for respite in an inn, a place of temporary shelter, symbolizes the soul pausing in its pursuit of lasting fulfillment. The moment of pause becomes transformative, as Herbert unexpectedly encounters Christ, described as ‘my dearest Lord’, waiting as a silent presence, ready to offer comfort once the grief brought by pleasures subsides.
The poem emphasizes Christ’s humility. The phrase ‘glorious, yet contracted light’ reflects the paradox of divine majesty reduced to human form. His ‘contracted’ state, wrapped in ‘night’s mantle’ and lying in a manger, recalls the nativity and the divine choice to enter the world in vulnerability. This image of Christ as both powerful and humble mirrors Herbert’s spiritual state: despite the darkness of his soul, described as ‘brutish’, he recognizes that Christ holds a rightful claim over it. The request for Christ to ‘furnish and deck my soul’ reflects the desire for personal transformation, as Herbert invites the divine presence to occupy his being. The contrast between the soul as a potential ‘better lodging’ and its current condition, likened to a ‘rack’ or a ‘grave’, underscores the spiritual need for purification and grace.
The poem shifts from introspection to praise as Herbert identifies his soul with the image of a shepherd, tasked with guiding a ‘flock’ of thoughts, words, and deeds. This pastoral metaphor connects Herbert’s experience with the biblical narrative of the shepherds at Christ’s birth, emphasizing the simplicity and sincerity of worship. The divine word is described as ‘the pasture’ and grace as ‘the streams’, images of nourishment and growth, suggesting that spiritual sustenance arises from both divine revelation and human response.
Imagery of light and music emerges as central to Herbert’s understanding of worship. He criticizes the sun for permitting night to interrupt praise, expressing a longing for continuous divine illumination. The sun’s presence, fleeting in earthly time, is contrasted with Herbert’s search for a ‘willing shiner’, a divine light that will endure beyond temporal rhythms. The desire for perpetual praise culminates in the merging of light and song, where the ‘beams’ of divine presence ‘cheer my breast’ and blend with Herbert’s music. This fusion of imagery implies that true worship is not confined to words but is embodied in the entire self—thought, voice, and spiritual openness intertwined with divine presence.
Tension between human limitation and divine grace runs throughout the poem. Herbert’s initial fatigue and awareness of his spiritual inadequacy contrast with Christ’s quiet readiness to offer relief. The divine presence is constant, yet Herbert must reach a point of surrender and self-recognition before receiving it fully. Worship, as described, becomes both an act of personal expression and a participation in divine reality, where human devotion and divine presence meet in harmony.
The poem concludes with a vision of spiritual wholeness where light and music become one. Herbert’s desire to ‘sing and shine’ mirrors the earlier wish for his soul to be made a fitting dwelling for Christ. A progression from weariness to praise reveals a spiritual journey where brokenness gives way to restoration. Divine grace is not earned but received in the readiness to be transformed. Through its layered metaphors and reflective structure, the poem articulates the soul’s yearning for divine intimacy, portraying worship as both a response to grace and an expression of unity with God.
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
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