Christian Art | George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Grace
George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Grace
My stock lies dead, and no increase
Doth my dull husbandrie improve:
O let thy graces without cease
Drop from above!
If still the sunne should hide his face,
Thy house would but a dungeon prove,
Thy works nights captives: O let grace
Drop from above!
The dew doth ev’ry morning fall;
And shall the dew out-strip thy dove?
The dew, for which grasse cannot call,
Drop from above.
Death is still working like a mole,
And digs my grave at each remove:
Let grace work too, and on my soul
Drop from above.
Sinne is still hammering my heart
Unto a hardnesse, void of love:
Let suppling grace, to crosse his art,
Drop from above.
O come! for thou dost know the way.
Or if to me thou wilt not move,
Remove me, where I need not say,
Drop from above.
George Herbert | The Temple | The Church | Grace
In this poem, Herbert expresses a yearning for divine grace to enliven and sustain his spiritual life. Herbert begins by admitting a sense of spiritual stagnation, stating, ‘My stock lies dead, and no increase / Doth my dull husbandry improve.’ Here, Herbert characterizes his inner resources or spiritual vitality as unproductive, and he attributes this lack to his own insufficient efforts, likened to a ‘dull husbandry’, or poor cultivation. This admission reveals Herbert’s dependence on external, divine intervention for renewal, as he implores grace to ‘drop from above’.
The repeated refrain ‘Drop from above!’ emphasizes Herbert’s awareness of grace as a necessary force, one that must be continually bestowed by God. Each stanza builds on the sense of this need, linking the grace of God to natural imagery. Herbert compares his dependency on divine grace to the dependence of the earth on the sun: ‘If still the sun should hide his face, / Thy house would but a dungeon prove.’ Here, ‘Thy house’ can be read as both the earthly world and the human soul, both of which rely on God’s grace, symbolized as sunlight, for life and purpose. Without this divine ‘sun’, Herbert suggests, his existence would feel dark and imprisoning.
The image of morning dew introduces a gentler parallel to sunlight as a source of grace: ‘The dew doth every morning fall; / And shall the dew outstrip thy dove?’ The reference to the dew, which naturally ‘falls’ each morning without needing to be called, serves as a quiet yet essential blessing from God. This comparison implies Herbert’s desire for God’s grace to be just as constant and life-giving as the dew that sustains plant life. The dove, symbolizing the Holy Spirit, is called upon to grant a similar quiet but sustaining grace.
Herbert contrasts divine grace with darker forces at work. Death, personified as a mole, ‘digs my grave at each remove’, reflecting Herbert’s awareness of mortality and the constant threat it poses to his soul. In parallel to death’s destructive actions, ‘Sin is still hammering my heart / Unto a hardness, void of love’. Here, sin is portrayed as shaping the heart into an unfeeling, hardened state, devoid of spiritual life. In response to these threats, Herbert asks for ‘suppling grace’, or a softening force, to counteract sin’s hardening effects. This dual presence of grace and sin reflects the inner struggle faced by Herbert, who feels vulnerable to forces of both spiritual decay and salvation.
The final stanza introduces a tone of urgency and surrender: ‘O come! for thou dost know the way.’ Herbert’s invitation to God to ‘come’ implies a desire for direct divine intervention. Acknowledging that God knows ‘the way’ highlights Herbert’s trust in God’s wisdom and omniscience, despite his own lack of direction. Herbert closes with a paradoxical plea: if God will not descend to him, then let he be removed to a place where grace is present without need for further asking. This suggests a longing for spiritual elevation or a transcendent state of union with God, where Herbert’s need for grace will be fully satisfied.
In this reading from his letter to the Ephesians, Saint Ignatius of Antioch continues his instruction on the Christian life, concentrating on faith, love, and the power of common worship. Writing to a community he knows well, Ignatius encourages regular gathering for prayer and thanksgiving, seeing this as a central defence against spiritual danger [ … ]
‘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 […]
On Thursday, there is more lost-history to contemplate. More Christian life unknown. Certainly, His Grace tacitly withdraws some measure of the veil of – more creative years. Though what he has to say does not overtly contradict received Church teaching. His Grace moves the beginnings of Christian faith – the Church – as from stunned remains: Jerusalem razed – as our first generations looked back onto it. This nexus of salvation-history – all history pointed forwards-backwards either way in faith in Jesus. As, in intervening centuries, disparate communities scatter through what is becoming a wreckage of Empire, spiritual waste, gather their scraps, and they begin to communicate. Truth-recalled – reverse-transcribed like RNA like a retrovirus – penetrated into the pagan world laid out for it – became life [ … ]
