Few writers have managed to seize each the burden and marvel of prayer. Probably the most lovely try I do know of is available in a sonnet written by George Herbert (1593–1633). Earlier than we plunge into this poem collectively, I’d love so that you can let Herbert’s masterpiece wash over you complete:
Prayer (I)
Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age, God’s breath in man returning to his delivery,The soul in paraphrase, coronary heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine towards th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,The six-days world transposing in an hour, A type of tune, which all issues hear and worry;
Softness, and peace, and pleasure, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the perfect, Heaven in strange, man effectively drest,The milky means, the chicken of Paradise,
Church-bells past the celebrities heard, the soul’s blood,The land of spices; one thing understood.
Double-Edged Surprise
I memorized this sonnet 5 years in the past. For half a decade now, these 27 pictures have been a part of my psychological furnishings, in my soul’s blood. My consciousness of prayer will at all times bear Herbert’s 97-word fingerprint. Nonetheless, at any time when I return to this poem, I’m pulled in two instructions.
First, I’m moved to wonder if I’ve ever actually prayed earlier than. Have I ever tasted the crumbs from the banquet Herbert lays out? Have I ever been inside a mile of this throne room? If that is prayer, have I ever prayed?
Second, I’m moved to marvel — full cease. Herbert brings me up brief, drops my jaw, makes me marvel. No matter this one thing is that he understood, I need in! Along with his wealth of pictures and endlessly suggestive phrases, Herbert calls my creativeness to get up to prayer as life with God.
Then, this double-edged marvel strikes me to do one factor: pray. If, maybe, I’ve by no means actually prayed earlier than, and if this factor referred to as prayer is so huge and so mystical and so (dare I say) magical, what sane particular person might do something aside from dive in headfirst with “Our Father” on his lips? Herbert cracks open the wardrobe door and bids me enter actuality — to desert the fantasy world the place prayer is a few small non-public responsibility I owe to God and step into the true world, the world the place prayer is, effectively, “Prayer (I).”
Recovering Prayer
Pal, do you are feeling that stress between despairing at your individual feeble prayers and staring wide-eyed at Herbert’s portrait? If that’s the case, I encourage you to take a seat there. Soak it in. I think about Herbert himself felt that stress as he wrote and skim his poem. In any case, he was no non secular romantic. He knew despair and delight; he knew the best way to wrestle with God and the best way to wait on him. He knew the sensation of praying in an empty room. However he additionally knew what the Bible says about prayer. He knew emotions don’t decide actuality. And he knew that the trouble to say superbly is a way of seeing magnificence.
So, “Prayer (I)” — for each Herbert and us — is a way of recovering, reenchanting, remembering what prayer is; after which, correctly astonished, we are going to pray. If we lay maintain of even the outskirts of Herbert’s imaginative and prescient, prayerlessness turns into virtually unimaginable.
“Prayer is shorthand for having fun with God.”
Within the the rest of this text, I wish to assist kindle your marvel by meditating on a handful of Herbert’s pictures. The intention right here is extra playful meditation than definitive exposition. Like admirers in an artwork gallery, let’s stand earlier than a number of pictures, invite them to guide us, and give up our personal prayer lives to their scrutiny.
‘Angels’ age’
Let’s start with maybe Herbert’s oddest phrase: “Angels’ age.” On this poem, Herbert plunders the inarticulate by the use of deep creativeness, and the boundaries of language are pressed on this very first line.
So, what’s Herbert getting at with “Angels’ age”? To start, prayer is as historical as angels. Historically, the heavenly hosts have been thought-about the primary created, rational beings that might talk with God and, thus, the primary to wish (Job 38:4–7). Herbert sounds the unfathomably historical depths of prayer. Its roots attain again to the daybreak of time — to the age of the angels. Once we pray, we take part in an exercise nigh on as outdated as creation itself.
However that leads to what’s in all probability Herbert’s major level: private prayer at all times participates in one thing cosmic. Prayer is rarely an remoted occasion. The relentless adoration of the celestial ones resonates on the very foundations of the cosmos (Isaiah 6:3–4). The world has hummed with their song-laden reward since God set the doorways of the ocean (Job 38:4–7). Centuries of chubby cherubs and kitsch artwork have blighted our creativeness with regards to the heavenly host. Herbert is just not so impoverished. For him, prayer is a cosmic affair.
Once we pray, we enter right into a polyphonic refrain millennia within the making. And we additionally stride onto a non secular battlefield. In Revelation 8, John sees an angel mediating the prayers of the saints to God after which hurling them to earth. The result’s what one author calls apocalyptic pyrotechnics — “peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake” (Revelation 8:5). Right here is Herbert’s “reversed thunder”! It’s no marvel Paul closes his manifesto on non secular warfare with prayer (Ephesians 6:18).
But extra fantastic, prayer participates in cosmic celebration. It isn’t misplaced on Herbert that we “have come [now, in this moment] to Mount Zion and to the town of the dwelling God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22). This angelic get together anticipates the marriage feast to return. Prayer joins in that. It’s a foretaste, a forefeast, if you’ll. It’s the “Church’s banquet.”
‘Engine towards th’ Almighty’
As his strains march on, Herbert doesn’t mood the arresting strangeness of his pictures however sharpens them till we’re left reeling earlier than “Engine towards th’ Almighty.” Now Herbert presents prayer as an engine of warfare, a siege weapon, lofting amens towards God himself. At greatest, that is an audacious picture; at worst — effectively, I’m tempted to ask, “Herbert, how dare you?”
We all know prayer is a weapon towards the foes of God, however a weapon towards God himself? That we cringe away from. However not Herbert; his blood ran too bibline for that. He listened to Abraham barter together with his Maker (Genesis 18:22–33). He watched Moses subject an ultimatum to the Lord and dwell (Exodus 33:12–16). He heard Jacob’s bones crack as he wrestled with God and prevailed. The battle cry of engine-prayer is, “I can’t allow you to go till you bless me!” (Genesis 32:22–32), and the artillery launched on excessive are the guarantees of the Most Excessive.
In case your snap response to this line is like mine, maybe it says extra about our small view of prayer than Herbert’s boldness. Absolutely, he’s proper who stated, “It’s the coronary heart that isn’t certain of its God that’s afraid to chortle in his presence.” And Herbert would add, “And shies to besiege him.” But these present in Christ strategy the throne as boldly because the Son himself (Hebrews 4:14–16). And the Son’s boldness, at occasions, took the type of wrestle, of blood and tears, of — may we are saying — holy violence. Not violence as in bodily drive or assault, however violence as “vehemence or depth of emotion, conduct, or language; excessive fervor; ardour” (per the Oxford English Dictionary). Nothing much less captures Gethsemane.
Herbert, a minimum of, noticed prayer thus, and he was not alone. Subdued as at all times, Charles Spurgeon says, “Blessed be God if this holy violence is in your spirit: you shall take heaven by drive but; you shall take it by storm, and carry the gates of heaven by the battery of your prayers.” And Herbert’s mentor, John Donne, preached, “Prayer has the character of violence; within the public prayers of the congregation, we besiege God . . . and we take God prisoner, and convey God to our situations, and God is glad to be straitened by us in that siege.”
Donne’s remaining line introduces an all-important clarification. No “engine towards th’ Almighty” has the slightest probability of success until the Almighty wills it so. Frodo may as effectively besiege the Black Gates. Nobody blackmails God. You can not strong-arm the One whose arm is all-powerful. No “sinner’s tow’r” can scale heaven until God permits it. However God wills to be gained, and prayer is the engine of that enterprise.
‘The land of spices’
We’ve seen pictures of cosmic scale and holy warfare, however what on earth may Herbert imply by “the land of spices”? On the finish of this journey, the place does Herbert lead us? “The land of spices” conjures the enchanted realm of Eden. Lest we overlook, Eden was a backyard, a backyard that delighted the soul with God and the senses with arboreal pleasures (Genesis 2:9). In any case, spice can imply “a spicy perfume” (OED), the signature scent of gardens (Music of Solomon 4:16). Because the backyard, Eden would have been awash with pretty aromas.
Prayer is redolent of the excessive nation the place God walks with man within the cool of the day. It recollects God close to man as soon as — the best pleasure of the backyard — by relishing God in man now and anticipating God with man without end (Revelation 21:3). Pretty aromas certainly!
But Herbert, as at all times, packs extra into this line. In his day, “the land of spices” referred to the Far East, the virtually mythic origin of spices. Within the fifteenth century, staggering quantities of wealth got here to Europe from the Indo-Asian spice commerce. Cinnamon, pepper, ginger, aloe, cloves, tamarind, amber, mace, and coconut far exceeded their weight in gold. “Land of spices” smells of unique wealth and mysterious treasure. As Dennis Lennon writes, it’s a picture of “trafficking within the inexhaustible assets of Christ” (Turning the Diamond, 110).
Right here once more, by the very richness of Herbert’s imagery, we’re confronted with the poverty of our personal prayer. What wonders will we give up, what riches abandon, what joys jettison after we stroll not within the backyard of prayer? Why accept mud pies? Why commerce paradise for a wasteland? Why do I insist on being a non secular pauper, threadbare and penniless, when unsearchable “riches in glory” are freely on supply (Philippians 4:19) — and never simply the riches that God offers however the riches which are God? Herbert wouldn’t have it so. He’s too hedonistic for that.
Holy Intoxication
It needs to be apparent by now that, for Herbert, prayer is an odd and fantastic factor that leaves no inch of actuality unaltered. For Herbert, “Prayer is the whole response of the entire particular person to God throughout the full vary of lived expertise” (Turning the Diamond, 20). In different phrases, prayer is shorthand for having fun with God.
Thus, we should always not miss the hedonistic impulse that pulses on the heart of this poem. Prayer opens entry to “pleasure, and love, and bliss.” Alongside this path, we pursue “gladness of the perfect” — happiness that can’t be prolonged or improved (Psalm 16:11). Even when Herbert employs violent or aggressive pictures, the tone is pervasively jovial. And the way might it’s in any other case? Prayer is the doorway to Trinitarian fullness. Herbert would have beloved how Tim Keller summarizes prayer:
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are adoring each other, giving glorifying love to 1 one other, and delighting in each other. . . . God is, subsequently, infinitely, profoundly completely happy, full of good pleasure — not some summary tranquility however the fierce happiness of dynamic loving relationships. . . . Prayer is our means of coming into into the happiness of God himself. (Prayer, 67–68)
Herbert felt this. He had feasted at this desk, tasted this “exalted manna.” He dressed himself on this gladness, perfumed with this aroma. And providing us this potent brew of pictures, Herbert invitations us into this similar holy intoxication.
Saint, how we could then not pray?
