Happy Feast Day to You, George Herbert!

Matthew 5:1-10
Church of Our Saviour
2/27/08

Today we have before us two of the loveliest gifts we could ever hope to receive: The beatitudes of Matthew’s gospel and the life of the remarkable poet and priest, George Herbert.

C.S. Lewis was in his most stridently atheist phase when he was urged toward his Christian awakening by George Herbert. In speaking of Herbert he said:

Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors
I had read in conveying the very quality of life as we live it
from moment to moment. But the wretched fellow, instead
of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through
what I still would have called the "Christian mythology."
The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed, "Christians
are wrong, but all the rest are bores."
-C. S. Lewis

The beatitudes may have done something similar to their first hearers- they were confounding, infuriating, senseless- They took everyone’s dearest held and most jealously guarded priorities and turned them all inside out. But perhaps, after they were heard, everything else sounded boring.

And still today, Jesus, takes all of our worst fears and tranforms them, resurrects them, and in the process, transforms and resurrects us. In the deepest imagingable way, Jesus is simply saying again in the beatitudes the one thing that he and all the angels always said: “Do not be afraid.”

Do not be afraid. The subtext is love. The subtext is a God that loves us so entirely that there is no circumstance from which you will not be redeemed and ultimately, nowhere to fall except into the arms of a loving God. This a love so vast that there can be no poverty of spirit,in it there can be no more mourning. No one can be meek with love this big.

As Rumi would have it:
Don't look for me in a human shape
I am inside of your looking
No room for form
with love this strong

Redemption and mourning and poverty of spirit and the vast love of God were among the great themes that George Herbert brilliantly painted for us in his poetry. Beginning in his late thirties he was Vicar of a small parish near Salisbury, tending his flock with extraordinary devotion. He cared for the poor and he visited the sick and somehow managed to find the time to write an astonishing quantity of poetry. The poem we are probably most familiar with is a hymn we frequently hear. When I read it to myself I heard it differently than I hear it with music, and it did remind me of the beatitudes:

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
such a way as gives us breath;
such a truth as ends all strife;
such a life as killeth death.

He wrote many poems in this style, (reams of them, in fact) but he also wrote in an incredibly practical and almost amazingly contemporary way. “The Country Parson” contains wisdom so down-to-earth that it is hard to suppose it is by the same author as the gorgeously spiritual words to that hymn we just heard. Perhaps these were more the quotes that inspired the very practical C.S. Lewis- the words that proved how Herbert “conveyed the very quality of life as we live it:”

Hell is paved with good intentions,
Living well is the best revenge.
None knows the weight of another's burden
Do not mention my debts unless you mean to pay them.

George Herbert seems to encompass both the world of the spirit and at the same time an utterly grounded and practical sensibility. He in fact described himself as “caught betwixt this world and grace”

Well, we are all “caught betwixt this world and grace,” and the question is, how do survive in this precarious state? Evoking C.S. Lewis again, how do we climb through the wardrobe door away from mourning and meekness and poverty of spirit to the blessing of a hunger, not just for food and for things, but for justice? Perhaps a beginning is to just take Jesus at his word in this beautiful litany of blessings we are given in the beatitudes. Perhaps if we allow ourselves even a glimpse of how deeply loved and blessed we are, it might give us courage to follow that simplest of suggestions: “Do not be afraid.” And if we can truly let that into our hearts, maybe the transformation from bereft to blessed might just begin.