by CCW | 15 February 2026 10:00
“Love bade me welcome,: yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne,/ 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”. Love (III)
So begins the last poem in George Herbert’s remarkable set of poems, The Temple, published in 1633, the year of his death, by his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later of ‘Little Gidding’ fame, during what Helen Gardener calls “the great watershed of the Civil War” in England. Herbert’s poems offer, I think, a kind of English poetic summa of what has come to be called classical Anglicanism and provide a fitting complement and commentary on its embodiment in The Book of Common Prayer, the essence of classical Anglicanism, as it were.
“Love bade me welcome” Welcome to what? To the kingdom of heaven, to the heavenly banquet or marriage feast in the language of the parables of the Gospels and to the form of such things eschatalogical as participated in by way of the Eucharist. The phrase speaks to the beginning and end of the pilgrimage of the soul and thus to the readings for Quinquagesima Sunday. Love invites us to love.
Love is in the air! Or was that just yesterday with Valentine’s Day? What is that? At once the commemoration of an obscure Bishop and Martyr (maybe two or three!), bracketed in the Prayer Book calendar, without any date, thus suggesting that the commemoration belongs mostly to legend and story (probably owing to Chaucer’s satire of courtly life in his bird book, The Parlement of Fowls), and yet it has become a secular and commercial extravaganza of the erotic, the romantic, and the emotional bound up with chocolate, lingerie, flowers, and lots of little red heart-shaped images. Is love then just something sensual and sentimental?
It was the great insight of Plato to use one of the four Greek words for love in his Symposium, namely, eros. Yet he shows that it is more than simply about attraction to the beautiful in terms of bodies. Through the wisdom of Diotima, whom Socrates says taught him everything that he knows about love – something about which in a rather un-Socratic way he actually claims to know! She has initiated him in the mysteries of love understood as an ascent from the beauty of bodies, to the beauty of souls, to the beauty of the mind and beautiful discourses, and, ultimately, to the form of beauty itself; in short to the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’ that is in all things. Eros, she suggests, is “the passionate desire to know” in the journey of the soul to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, a journey up the ladder of love. This is a parallel to going up the divided line in Plato’s Republic, climbing up out of the cave, the ladder of being, we might say, but without negating the realm of images or shadows and of physical things, in the realm of the visible, and of mathematical concepts and the intelligible forms of all things, in the realm of the intellectual. But this doesn’t mean leaving behind the lower things in the ascent to the higher.
Thus in the Republic that upward movement in the ascent of love to what is most perfect and self-sufficient, ultimately the Good beyond the being and knowing of all things, is complemented by a downward movement. Having ascended out of the cave of human ignorance and misconception, the philosopher, who is by definition the lover of wisdom, has to descend back into the cave. Why? Because the ascent to the light of the Good, imaged as the Sun, is not simply about individual fulfillment or self-realization; it is something primarily and essentially ethical since the good, particularly in the quest for justice, the theme of the Republic (or Politeia) is for all; not just for the philosopher, not just for a community of self-appointed elites. What the philosopher knows has to be shared by instruction and education for the good of all.
In the Christian understanding, those two motions, the one upward and the other downward, are united in the love of God and the love of neighbour. This lies at the heart of Faith in Augustine’s work On Christian Doctrine. His Enchiridion or handbook of the essentials of Faith is really a commentary on Paul’s words in today’s Epistle about faith, hope, and charity, of which “the greatest of these is charity”, or love. The Greek word he uses is agape, which is about love in community but complements what Plato ultimately means by eros as “the passionate desire to know” which belongs equally to the good of the polis (city-state) or community.
Paul’s great hymn of love shows that “still more excellent way”, as he puts it at the end of the previous chapter, after having examined “the spiritual gifts” about which he “would not have us ignorant,” that constitute our lives in the Church as the body of Christ using the metaphor of the parts of the body. “For the body does not consist of one member but of many”, each part having its place within the whole. The “still more excellent way” is what unites and perfects each part within the perfection of the whole body. It is love, the love of God and man united in Christ, and that twofold love alive in us as perfecting our knowing and our loving; the redemption of the sensual and the intellectual, we might say.
That in a nutshell is the journey of Lent. “For now we see in a glass darkly; but then face to face … knowing even as we are known” in God’s all-embracing love, the love which unites faith as a kind of knowing and hope as a kind of willing. The further insight, captured in the Collect, is that grace or love is “that most excellent gift”- an echo of that “still more excellent way”? – without which “all our doings are nothing worth.” “If I have not charity, I am nothing.” Charity or love, as Augustine points out, transforms all of the virtues of human activity into forms of love. The ‘gesima’ Sundays show this in terms of the classical or natural virtues as transformed by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
All of this belongs to the Gospel about our going up to Jerusalem, not alone, not by ourselves as trusting in ourselves, but with Jesus. “We go up”, Jesus says. That ascent, that going up is the way of knowing in faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews); the way of hoping for that which we cannot see but to which we aspire, namely, the goodness and grace of God everlastingly; and above all, the way of love perfecting our wayward and broken humanity. All of which has come down to us in Christ, the divinum mysterium himself. “Now we see in a glass darkly”, as Paul puts it, and yet we see albeit imperfectly and obscurely what ultimately belongs to what is more complete and perfect. This is what we yearn and hope for – “but then face to face,” knowing even as we are known in God’s loving and knowing embrace of our humanity. It can only happen in the uniting of these two motions, one of ascent, the other of descent.
Herbert’s opening stanza of Love (III) acknowledges our shortcomings. “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back, guiltie of dust and sinne”. This is contrition, a sense of sorrow for human sin imaged as a turning away from God and towards the dust. We are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit making us living beings. But in turning to the dust we turn away from God and his will for us, hence sin.
Dust and Ashes, as Ash Wednesday will show, is not our ending but our beginning in repentance, itself a kind of turning towards God from whom we have turned away in sin. Love invites us to what God seeks for us. Our contrition and our confession are only possible through a sense of guilt, the realization of having turned away from the goodness of God which is necessarily prior. Sin and evil are negations or privations of the goodness of our very created being. We are good in our createdness but we are evil in the folly of turning away from the source and principle of our actual being; this is the contradiction of the human situation and the reality of human experience. Yet the goodness of God is greater than the empty nothingness of our evil. Love not only bids us welcome but sees us, knows us, in our condition of “dust and sinne” and knows and seeks something more and greater for us. “Quick-ey’d Love,” Love personified, sees our hesitancy, our awareness and sense of sinfulness, yet “draws nearer” to us, “sweetly questioning , if [we] lack’d any thing.” Love comes down to us to draw us up into love, to what is most needful.
In the Gospel for today, Jesus tells the disciples and us about where we are going and what it means. “We go up to Jerusalem”, not simply to an earthly city and place, but to an image of the heavenly city, the place of our communion with God and the whole of redeemed creation. What that means and how it is to be accomplished is pointed out in words and images that belong to Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. Yet, as Luke says, “they understood none of these things.” We don’t get it even when it is told to us. Learning is not a simple process and is only acquired through suffering and discipline.
The point is made clear in what follows: the encounter between the blind man sitting by the way-side, near Jericho, itself an image of the earthly or fallen city, and Jesus and his disciples. Two things are present here. First, we and the disciples are like the blind man – we do not see or at least not clearly, only darkly. This is the problem about the incompleteness of our knowing in our fallenness. We do not know as we should and would like to know. Secondly, we are to be like the blind man in wanting to see, in hoping and desiring to see what we cannot see. Indeed, that desire, that wanting or hoping, must be drawn out of us explicitly. “What do you want that I should do for you?” Jesus asks him. “That I may receive my sight,” he says. This, too, is what we must want.
The second stanza of Herbert’s poem draws out our confession of two things. First, what we seek. “To be a guest worthy to be here” is the soul’s answer to quick-ey’d Love’s sweet and gentle questioning. Secondly, our own sense of sinfulness: “I the unkinde, ungrateful?” the soul says in response to Love’s statement that we shall be guests at the banquet of heavenly love. It is a lovely rhetorical question about the real meaning of sin beautifully captured in those two words: unkindness and ungratefulness. The soul’s response is an awareness of its own distance from the truth of God. “I cannot look on thee,” completes our confession: the confession and contrition for our unkindness and ungratefulness is the awareness of our being “guiltie of dust and sinne”.
At this point, Herbert’s poem marks the shift to the radical meaning of creation and redemption. Having confessed our unkindness and ungratefulness, such that the soul knows its unworthiness: “I cannot look on thee”, “Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, / Who made the eyes but I?” We are returned to him from whom by sin we have turned away, to the truth and goodness of our created being and to who we are in God.
Does that end things? In the Gospel, Jesus says to the blind man, “receive thy sight, thy faith hath saved thee.” What happens then? “And immediately he received his sight, and followed him, glorifying God.” Wonderful. And if that were not enough, “all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto God”. It isn’t just about him. It belongs to the whole body, the community of faith.
The last stanza of Herbert’s poem expands on this way of thinking. First, the soul questions Love about its failings in acknowledging what we deserve. Speaking about the eyes which God has made for us to see, a metaphor for us as intellectual beings, the soul says to Love “Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them” – meaning our folly in turning away from the purpose of our eyes or mind that we have been given – “let my shame go where it doth deserve.” Do things end simply with us in the recognition of our separation from God? Does that not constrain and limit God’s love, his very being, for is it not the case that “God is love”? The love that perfects and restores?
“And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?” Simple words which echo Christ’s words about the meaning of his going up to Jerusalem: namely his Passion and Death, his sacrifice, which reveals the radical meaning of love itself. Does hearing this change us, move us, comfort and strengthen us in our lives as a community of Faith? The soul’s response is the response of faith and hope as shaped by love. “My deare”, the soul says to Love – the Lord as our dear one! – “then I will serve.”
The last words of the last poem of The Temple draw out for us the radical meaning of the opening invitation to love. “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.” Called to the banquet of love and at the same time called to serve, to lives of prayer and care, called to love in sacrifice.
Quinquagesima Sunday invites us to Lent, to our participation in the love of Christ. “Love bade me welcome” and without that love active and alive in us we are nothing.
Fr. David Curry
Quinquagesima Sunday 2026
George Herbert’s “Love (III)”
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
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.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
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