Christ Church

“Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me”

John Donne’s sonnet serves as a commentary on this verse from Psalm 51. “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/ As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seeke to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.”

The sonnet’s extravagant imagery, unlikely as it might seem, helps us to take Ash Wednesday seriously in the sense of our extreme separation from God, on the one hand, and the desire for restoration and renewal, on the other hand. Both belong to the project of Lent and to the dynamic of love, “love divine, all loves excelling,” as finishing, perfecting, and renewing our human loves and lives. In another poem, The Good Night, part of an epithalamion, a poem celebrating marriage, Donne notes that “fire ever doth aspire,/ And makes all like it self, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” only to note about the newly-weds that this is that “which these cannot do”. Ashes are not the end of love. Dust and ashes on this day mark the beginning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love renewing and restoring or setting in order our disordered selves.

That love is the divine love which, as Donne suggests, we seek in order to be made new. Nothing else will do. Our returning to the Lord, our God, with all our heart, as the prophet Joel exhorts us, is only possible through God turning us back to himself from whom we have turned away. Donne’s sonnet meditates on the radical meaning of what that turning means for us. It means being made new.

He asks God as Trinity to “batter” him, an image of violence and force. He suggests that something more extreme is necessary for our good beyond the milder, more gentle biblical images of piety about God “knocking” on the door of our hearts, “breathing” his spirit upon us, “shining” down benevolently upon us, and “seeking to mend” us. Donne says this is not enough. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” The alliteration of the ‘b’ sound in batter, bend, break, blow, burn reinforce these images of force. Overall, the poem makes the necessary but forceful point that God has to break us to make us. Yet the imagery of violence which is maintained throughout the sonnet really reflects the violence of sin and evil in all that opposes God, in the devil and us, that results in the violence that God suffers on the Cross for us.

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“If I have not charity, I am nothing”

“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.

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