by CCW | 19 February 2023 10:00
“Love bade me welcome”. So begins George Herbert’s poem, “Love (III),” which concludes a wonderful collocation of poems known as The Temple. They are poems that continue to attract across the spectrum of ecclesial identities. As the Puritan theologian, Richard Baxter notes, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his Books.”
Today is Quinquagesima Sunday, commonly known as ‘Love Sunday;’ in part because of Paul’s powerful hymn to love from 1st Corinthians 13, and, in part because of the Gospel story. “We go up to Jerusalem,” Jesus says. Like Herbert’s poem, it is an invitation to love. The journey is the pilgrimage of love. Love is God.
This challenges many of our assumptions about love as something personal, emotional, sexual, and psychological; in short, our all too human loves are incomplete. What Paul sets before us is Divine Love, the love which seeks the perfection of our human loves by gathering us into the life of God himself. It is very much about a kind of wisdom in love, about the divine knowing and loving which is greater than the partial, fickle and limited forms of our human loves and our human knowing. We “see in a glass darkly.” Even more, we are meant to see ourselves in the “certain blind man” sitting by the way-side near Jericho, itself the image of the earthly city in contrast to Jerusalem, the image of the heavenly city.
Without charity, we are nothing, and, as the Collect says, all our works without charity are “nothing worth,” drawing upon the language of the Epistle. Charity is the Englishing of one of the several words for love in Latin, namely, caritas, itself the Latinising of one of the several words for love in Greek, namely, agape. Charity means more though not less than the idea of providing for the poor and needy. The point is that through the recognition of the limitations of our human loves we are awakened to the Divine love which seeks our good in the motions of the Goodness of God himself.
In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feelings to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone. (Sonnet # 141)
Thus Shakespeare indicates an awareness of the incompleteness of our human loves as measured by “my five wits and my five senses,” as he puts it. Or again, as he puts it in another sonnet:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon my myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least. (Sonnet # 29)
He is describing a sense of despair, of hopelessness. “Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think of thee,” of love. At the very least, it is an image of the greater love that transforms and changes us from misery to felicity. “For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings/ that then I scorn to change my state with kings.” T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash Wednesday takes the line “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope” and makes one small but telling change, “desiring this man’s gift”, indicating the sense of grace that makes the turning of the soul back to God at least a possibility. It is a love which somehow has to be learned and lived even in the face of our uncertainties and doubts.
Yet, as the Gospel makes clear, that learning is through our going with Christ. Jesus tells the disciples exactly what going up to Jerusalem means. It means his passion, death and resurrection. But the disciples “understood none of these things.” It is not enough just to be told. “This saying was hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.” This is an important feature of the Gospels; the awareness of our incompleteness, a kind of self-criticism crucial to our being opened to God’s grace.
Our not knowing or not understanding what Jesus is saying to us is immediately followed in the Gospel with the encounter with the blind man. We are, I think, meant to see ourselves in him and in two ways. First, our blindness. We do not know the things which God wants us to know even when they are told to us. To be aware of our unknowing or our ignorance is an important and ancient teaching. Oedipus had to learn that he didn’t know what he thought he knew even about himself. But he came to know the truth about himself through the discovery of how his form of knowing was not absolute, not the only form of knowing but only a partial form of knowing. That discovery was only because of his passionate desire to know. So, too, with the blind man by the way-side. It is not simply his blindness that is important. It is his desire to see, a desire which sees that possibility in the mercy of Jesus, the Son of David.
The disciples rebuke him and try to shut him up but Jesus “commanded him to be brought unto him” and asks him, “what wilt thou that I should do unto thee?” In other words, Jesus draws out of him what he seeks. It is really what belongs to all of us, the desire to see or to know who we are in the sight of God. To “know even as also I am known,” as Paul puts it. Loving and knowing are necessarily connected. The forms of our human knowing and our human loving are partial and incomplete without the Divine Love. What we see is that Divine Love in its own truth in Christ and in motion towards us.
The journey of Lent is simply the concentration of the Christian life as the pilgrimage of Love through illumination, purgation, and perfection or union. “We go up,” Jesus says.
In Herbert’s poem, Love is God, the God who bids us welcome. That love is the condition and principle of all our loves. But we come to it through the awareness of our own sinfulness and the awareness of our finitude. What is our response to the divine invitation? As Herbert puts it, “yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne.” This is the first moment, the soul’s own sense of separation from God. It recalls us to the story of the Fall, literally our turning to the dust. “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” We shall hear those words on Ash Wednesday.
They recall us to the dust of creation, the dust into which God breathed his spirit making us living beings, made in his own image, but also to the dust of our disobedience, the presumption that our reason is greater or at least equivalent to God’s. This is the awakening to self-consciousness through the experience of separation. God’s questions mark the beginning of the long journey of redemption. The paradox is that the good news is the knowledge of ourselves as sinners. Good news? Yes, because we can only know ourselves as sinners by knowing the truth and the goodness of God as that against which we have acted. The first moment is contrition, a sense of sorrow. But we are not left with simply the separation and division of ourselves from God.
“But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack/ From my first entrance in, / Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/ If I lack’d any thing.” This is like Jesus asking the blind man by the way-side what he seeks. In the poem, the soul replies, “A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here” to which “Love said, You shall be he.” This is what Love seeks for us, to be worthy of love. The soul responds with confession, the conscious awareness of one’s sinfulness. “I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare, I cannot look on thee.” Unkindness, ungratefulness – this is an explicit awareness of the deeper problem of sin, our inattention to God in his beauty, truth and goodness. This is what ultimately underlies all of the disorders of our loves and our lives. But once again, we are not left with just this sense of separation confessed and acknowledged. In a beautiful and moving image, “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/ Who made the eyes but I?”
This is to be recalled to the truth which is greater and prior to our sinfulness and in such a gentle, convincing, and convicting way, our being recalled to the Creator and the goodness of creation which is prior to our sins. Yet the poem, like the Gospel does not end just with our being reminded of God as Creator. The soul accepts that truth intellectually, as it were, but God seeks something more for us, more akin to what Baxter calls “heart-work.” “Truth, Lord,” the soul says, “but I have marr’d them” – marred our sight – as if to suggest that our misuse of what God has given us is the end of the story. “Let my shame go where it doth deserve.” But no. That is to remain in a state of division within ourselves and with God. Charity, after all “suffereth long,” “seeketh not her own,” “beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” The pilgrimage of Lent especially in Holy Week is the great illustration of the charity of Christ. It convicts but so as to illumine and to purge and so to restore. All heart-work.
“And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” This recalls us to God as Redeemer. Like the prodigal son, the soul in the poem says, “My deare, then I will serve,” returning to the father not as son but as simply a servant, “no longer worthy to be called your son” (Lk. 15.21) “having sinned against heaven and before thee.” But God is more, far more, and will not be constrained or limited to our sense of things. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat.” “Love bade me welcome.” The pilgrimage of Lent is the journey into the deeper understanding of the banquet of love. “So I did sit and eat.”
Herbert’s poem is at once eschatological and eucharistic but it also reveals the patterns of contrition, confession and satisfaction that belong to the spiritual principles of justification, sanctification and glorification. It is all a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God as love and that love in us. Such is the love which never faileth and which seeks our good.
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima 2023
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