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Poems for Lenten Meditation

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I have been writing poetry over much of my now rather long lifespan, but haven’t published much of it. (The main exception would be my book of conversations with God called Lovesongs and Reproaches.) This Lent, I plan to put some of the others online and invite you to make use of them for Lenten meditation.

2/14


ASH WEDNESDAY 

The cross of ashes drawn above my eyes

I faintly sense as it sheds its fragile dust. 

Yet, the mind has an eye to see it. And if wise,

can claim its own mortality— as it must.

The limits of our breath, the certainty

of death—let the image here impressed set free

the soul from arrogance and selfish strife,

and give us back the wonder of this life. 

But which of us is wise except by fits

and starts? We, soon enough, forget it all,

complain again of stingy gifts

and find new fault with God—until we’re called

back to this altar, here again to learn

that dust we are and to dust we shall return.

2/15/2024

JESUS WITH THE WILD BEASTS

And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan: and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him. Mark 1:12-23

I. How crowded the desert was when you matched wits 

with Satan—the Spirit as impresario

for the Conflict of the Ages, the wild beasts

to cheer you on, angels to come and go,

bringing wet towels to cool you. The fight was pitched

between your innocence and the Devil’s guile—

all eagerness to share some helpful tricks

just to smooth your way—well worth your time!

Would you remember that the choice of tool

must always shape the end, that violence

or bribery can never lure a fool

into the mystery of faithfulness?

And nowhere to be heard a human voice.

Did you fear that Satan would prove to be our choice?

2/16/2024

II. In the desert you made yourself at home with beast

and angel as of old in Eden. There

the lion and gazelle, greatest and least,

made forty days of truce and took a share

in your distress, your struggle to decide

whether the prize was worth the cost: to confront

the powers with their wrongs and then to die

without a fight, the quarry helpless in the hunt.

Angels and beasts could only watch and wait 

and give companionship. When you come back,

your people—those who love you and who hate—

will try to turn you off your chosen track.

The thing you seek for them—what you’ll have won—

they won’t begin to understand until it’s done. 

2/17/2024

A LITANY FOR LENT

For fear by which we justify our hate,

for pride that feeds our foolish arrogance,

for selfishness that sees our world’s sad state

as if it were mere inconvenience,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

For gluttony on mere consumption bent,

for lust that shatters faith with friend and neighbor,

for sloth that renders us indifferent,

for envy that resents another’s favor,

forgive us, God of all compassion.

Teach us, instead, to trust your love, to hold

our neighbor’s life in honor as our own.

Teach us and strengthen us to live by grace

to love and foster what your love has sown.

to live in hope and therefore to be bold

until we come to meet you face to face.

Forgive and renew us, God of all compassion.

2/18/2024

SONNETS ON CREATION 

Genesis 1

. . . the earth was without form and void. . .

Isness could have been nothingness. Or worse,

could have been something so entrained, entrapped,

encrystaled that it could not move—some terse

reduction of all to one, cooped up and strapped

into itself, invulnerable and devoid

of movement—body, mind, or soul. It would

have been stillborn—a lifeless, changeless void,

free of decay, like stone that mimics wood

perhaps but never was a tree. Such cold

perfection as might gratify the eye

of a collector, with no one to be bold

and fault the work as cold and dry.

Isness could have been nothingness, did One not say,

“Let there be light and dark. Let night follow day.”

2/19/2024

Let there be a firmament. . . .

Having made room for change, the One stepped back—

that One to whom all time is Now, all place

is Here, that One who nothing knows of lack,

sensing the whole in even the barest trace—

stepped back so that eternity could play

its raptures out in time, infinity

resolve itself in chords, the rhythms of day

and dusk, of night and dawn, in passing, free

truth into narrative, break the unbroken

Now into past and present and what’s yet 

to come. For only so can life be spoken,

what’s dimly sensed be caught in speech’s net.

And yet eternity holds firm to form the heaven,

the enduring loom on which our saving tales are woven. 

2/20/2024


Let the earth bring forth grass. . . . 

Grass—not at once. Before the grass the earth.

Before the earth the rocks. Then wind and rain 

eroding, age on age, to bring to birth 

fine particles and rush them down amain

into the sea, where they turn into—stone!

For earth, the One needs helpers in the toil,

creative atomies that on their own

can turn the barren sediment to soil.

Then from such beings, vanishingly small,

evolves the whole astounding panoply

of earthly creatures: plant and animal, 

life’s outward branching, leafing, burgeoning tree.

The microbes, made by God, have made the world we see.

A lesser God would work alone from jealousy.

2/20/2024

God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Great lights and lesser ones—we thought we knew

how to tell each from each. We watched the sun

pass north and south, leading the seasons through

the turning year. We watched the waning moon

pause for a moment and then wax again,

pulling the tides behind. Pillars we made

to mark their progress; we began to spin

our ordered web of calendars. And, splayed

across the firmament, the lesser lights

we marshaled into orderly arrays:

a track for sun and moon; for sailors’ nights

markers of south and north; signs for our ways.

And now we know our sun is but a lesser star.

Only the One saw great and lesser as they are. 

2/21/2024

Let the waters bring forth abundantly. . . and God saw that it was good.

We have long thought you made the earth for us,

but we were wrong. Your purpose was delight,

yours and the world’s. The hippopotamus

lives to enjoy the pastures of the night.

Leviathan you made for the sport of it.

The breaching whale has reason enough for life.

The oriole at its nest, the small bushtit

scrambling through branches, the melodious strife

of mockingbirds, the kestrels’ soar and stoop,

the secrecy of owls, the effortless

float of condors, the waddle of a troop 

of ducklings—every piece of it you bless.

Your purpose was delight, yours and the world’s; your grace

to share delight with even an ungrateful race.

2/24/2024

And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . . And on the seventh day God . . . rested . . . from all his work which he had made.

The labors of six days combine to form

a world, fashioned of water, air, and earth,

of light and dark, of calm succeeding storm,

a world whose inner fires bring to birth,

new mountain steeps that rain will carry down

to form new plains, while ponderous continents

creep across the globe and seas now drown

and now withdraw, a world whose elements

have sprung to life in vast variety.

And then, the story tells us, you decreed

that labor makes of rest necessity.

What finitude requires you concede.

For us, rest leads to work and work leads back to rest.

For you they are the same thing—love. And that is best.

2/25/2024

EDEN (Genesis 2-3)

God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

This was your pleasure garden, was it not?

You planted it with spreading trees for shade,

divided it with water channels, made

a cooling refuge here when the sun grew hot.

You fashioned open glades of limber grass,

rich pools and marshes, austere rockeries;

and nothing there could ever fail to please

the viewer’s eye and heart and mind. And last

you brought the earthling there, still fresh, new-formed

of clay and breath, and offered him the land

to tend and treasure—left it in his hand

that heart, through hand’s engagement, might be warmed.

In Adam, you hoped to give the earth a friend.

To him you gave a world to love and tend. 

2/26/2024

. . . and took the rib and closed up flesh in its place.

Why not have made two earthlings from the start?

Was it so much more difficult than one?

Already master of the potter’s art,

you could have made many, laid them in the sun,

breathed life into them with a single breath.

Did you not know that a single one, alone,

no friend but you, would find it a kind of death?

Ah no! For how, indeed, could that be known

that had not yet been felt? But you could see

the sorrow that fastened on his soul.

And you lanced the wound of singularity,

making one two to make of two a whole—

each with a heart to turn toward the other,

each one the beloved and the lover.

2/27/2024

. . . the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil

The Tree of Life grew in the garden’s heart,

more flourishing in flower and fruit and leaf

than even the highest mastery of art

can represent. And those who stood beneath

its shade could breathe from it a calm, unspoken

certainty of God. A boundless grace

made one God’s friend, a calm delight was token

of a blessed soul that never left this place.

But we chose otherwise and ate from the Tree

not of stability but Knowledge, not

the perfected life but stumbling search—to see

both good and evil, tangled in their knot.

Thus God may have some lovers who abide

and some who come back wiser to God’s side.

TRUE KINGSHIP

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Bill Countryman Good Shepherd Berkeley
Christ the King, November 25, 2018
Year B: 2 Samuel 23:1-7; Psalm 132:1-13; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.
George Herbert, “L’Envoy”
[The form of the poem as I give it here, isn’t the original, but Edward Bairstow’s adaptation of it in his “Five Songs of the Spirit” for baritone, which I sang to introduce the sermon—with the great help of Randy Benway as pianist.]

Today is the Feast of Christ the King—and that word “king” is one that many—maybe most—of us here at Good Shepherd are not too happy with. There are good reasons for that. What does “king” even mean to people in the US two hundred and some odd years after we got rid of the whole lot? And isn’t it hopelessly tainted with assumptions of patriarchy—not to mention hints of violence and arbitrariness?
But I want to say today that we need to rethink our suspicion. I”m not going to propose that the US should replace our elected president with a crowned monarch. But I can’t help noticing that many, many people in the world today seem to have a great hunger to have some one significant person to lead them, guide them, tell them what their lives mean and what to do about it—someone to protect them, to make them feel better about themselves.
It seems to be a fairly basic human longing. And it can take a bad turn. Some of it is as trivial as the worldwide fascination with celebrities. Some takes the form of giving too much credit to the self-proclaimed experts that tell us what to eat and how to decorate our homes and how to raise our children and . . . you name it. But some of it has become very political and has sweeping consequences.

We’re living right now in a new and unexpected era of “strong man” governments. For a long time, we thought this sort of thing was restricted to third-world countries. But Mr. Putin in Russia and Mr. Orbán in Hungary have been making quite a career of it in Europe. And they have lots of wannabes trying to follow in their footsteps—including our current president. But don’t, please, think that this disease is limited to political conservatives. Leftists like Mr. Maduro in Venezuela and Mr. Ortega in Nicaragua play it, too. And the Ortegas seem to have become increasingly hard to distinguish from their right-wing predecessors, the Somoza family. And the rest of us now find ourselves wringing our hands and being perplexed and appalled that people would actually vote such regimes into office.
Of course, these “strong men” aren’t literally kings. (The word “dictator” comes closer.) Traditional kings, even in their heyday, were typically surrounded by political and social checks and balances—and by sacred ideals, as in David’s poem about the true king in our first lesson this morning:

One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.

Our current crop of strong men are nothing like this. They’re committed only to the narrow interests of their own factions. Their goal is not to unite people but to eradicate all opposition. They seek to dominate and reshape their communities with the tools of fear, suspicion, and hatred.

Against these developments, we can and do set the ideals of democracy, of justice, of human rights—ideals that match well with our Christian faith. But that may not be enough by itself. Abstract ideals aren’t always enough to sustain human beings, even the most rational of us. We need not just ideals but embodiment. We need to see ourselves and our hopes and our highest values embodied in a person.
The approaching seasons of Advent and Christmas should, in fact, remind us of that. Why? Because they proclaim how God’s boundless mercy and generosity have now come to us embodied in the person of the Christ—this person we celebrate today as our “King.” And Jesus is a king who presents the sharpest possible contrast to the strong men of our time. For our king rejects the strategies of fear, suspicion and hatred and founds this kingdom of which we are part on trust and hope and love.
Jesus makes all this clear in his audience with Pilate: “If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over. . . . But . . . my kingdom is not from here.” And this is the kingdom of which we are a part. This is the person we acclaim freely as our king. Say “monarch,” of course, if you prefer. I, too, like its ungendered character; I only fear that it summons up the image of a political office more than that of a concrete person who can help me know who I am and how I want to live in this world.

I know there is also a danger here—the danger of remaking Jesus in the image of the strong men around us. In fact, we Christians have done that again and again—invoking Jesus as our leader against heretics, against people of other religions, even against each other. Protestants and Catholics of the seventeenth century were mirror images of one another in their confidence that Jesus was on their side. And, as Abraham Lincoln ruefully observed, both North and South in the Civil War prayed to the same God and expected God’s favor for their cause.
So, yes, there’s danger in calling Jesus “king.” There is nothing so pure in our world that we humans can’t misuse it; we’re very good at that. And that’s why I began with that poem by George Herbert. “King of Glory, King of Peace.” We’re apt to think of “glory” as something military. But Herbert undercuts that idea and restores the truth of Jesus’ kingship. Jesus’ glory is shown in bringing peace, even at the cost of his own life
Herbert prays for Jesus’ kingship to become truly manifest among us and in us—prays that we will trust Jesus’ glory and power in a way that can make us, too, agents of peace. Otherwise, what good did it do to shed his blood, to let his body be hung up on the wood of the cross, to feed us again and again in this Holy Communion with his own life?
Sin would like to convince us that it was all for naught. Sin would like to convince us to take the way of the strong man, the one who deals in fear and suspicion and hatred. Sin would like us to believe that Jesus’ blood was wasted, that his life can no longer nourish us, that the cross was just ordinary wood.
But we are people of Jesus. We do not accept that. We belong to a kingdom of glory and peace, of love and mercy. We have a heritage that has again and again given life to true human community after times of destruction. And we will not dishonor our king. In fact, we will proclaim his kingship in our lives. Even if the word “king” may seem hopelessly tainted for many of us, let our lives continue to show the trust and hope and love—the allegiance—to which it points.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy blood is cold,
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.

King of Glorie, King of Peace,
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.

ANOTHER STORY

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We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:

The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.

In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.

“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”

“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.

The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.

Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .

They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.

At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.

They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”

All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.

It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.

But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.

And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.

This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.

TRUTH—PERMANENTLY EVICTED?

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Truth really has fallen on hard times. It’s partly her own fault for having settled right in the heart of the city, the middle of all our gang warfare. Her sister Wisdom, an introvert if there ever was one, had the foresight to build her house in a quiet part of town where you can have a real conversation over dinner. But Truth, for better or worse, had to be in the thick of things. And every time another horde comes through, burning and pillaging, they throw her out, then patch up the remains of what was once a handsome mansion, and install their own candidate in her place, all tarted out to look like the real mistress of the house.

There are the Positivists, for example, with their motto of “Anything I can’t see for myself doesn’t exist.” And there are the Fundamentalists whose motto seems to be “Anything we didn’t know a hundred years ago can’t possibly be so.” Assertion, said by some to be Truth’s distant cousin, has served both groups by turns. Truth may be homeless at the moment, but at least she doesn’t have to go through Assertion’s misery—essentially a complete personality transplant depending on which mob has control of her dining room this afternoon. It must be wrenching to go from “knowing” skeptic to “devout” believer and back in the twinkling of an eye.

More recently the post-modern crowd has gotten into the fray and installed a very good robotic simulacrum of Truth in the front hall that tells all callers, “There is no Truth.” This enables them, in effect, to claim Truth for themselves while denying her existence at the same time. A nice trick as long as you can compartmentalize effectively enough.

It’s not just the philosophers and theologians, of course. Other mobs have been getting into the fray. Righteous Regulation is one. Having taken on the responsibility of saving us from global warming and all other ills, they tried to enlist Truth as their hit-person. Failing that, they enlisted a person of the same general size and shape, named Single-Mindedness. But she managed to disappear and they finally employed a former member of an East Bloc secret police force to don her outfit and act in her place. He doesn’t look the part but he’s very effective when he says to some hapless farmer or coal miner, “The climate adjusted future has no room for the likes of you!” The Righteous Regulation gang, meanwhile, has taken to wearing earplugs so as not to hear the cries of outrage.

And, of course, Righteous Regulation’s archenemies, members of the Populism Gang, have seized the obvious opportunity to lead an assault and install their imitation Truth, a largish man in what appears to be a wig, in the house. He seems to have taken on a name beginning with T, but is rumored to be the same persona as the ancient goddess the Greeks called “Demagogia.” It must be uncomfortable for him/her, since by now there’s very little left of the structure. But who cares?. Nobody is paying much attention to Truth now anyway and no one cares whether s/he looks much like the original or not.

It does all seem pretty hopeless. But I find myself thinking often of a quite different take on Truth found in a puzzling line from George Herbert’s poem “The Call”:

Come my Way, my Truth, my Life. . . .

such a Truth as ends all strife. . . .

It’s been a long time since Truth had the power to end any strife, much less all. What did Herbert’s Truth have that our Truths don’t?

She has, above all, an intimate link to Love, as the rest of the poem goes on to show. No wonder she’s disappeared from our gang-dominated environment! The Positivists’ Truth exists only to justify sneering at members of other gangs. The Fundamentalists’ Truth is there solely to pass judgement on dirty mis-believing outsiders. Righteous Regulation only wants clear, certain, and inalterable rules—and freedom from having to deal with the troubles they cause. Populism only wants some sense of being in full control again (as if it had ever been).

The only Truth that has a chance of returning to her house and taking up residence again, of shoring up the walls, refurbishing the dining room, and inviting people in for dinner will be a Truth that honors not only the seen but the unseen, not only faith but science, not only science but the people. Then perhaps we’ll be able to agree with one another that Truth still exists, even though our grasp of her meaning will still, as always, be far from perfect.

The only Truth that can match this description will have to be the Truth also known as Love.

THE REAL CHALLENGE OF CHRISTIAN FAITH AND LIFE

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Bill Countryman					Los Angeles Clergy Conference
Sermon	May 10, 2017

Readings:  Genesis 12:1-4; Ps. 42; Matthew 5:43-48


	The scripture readings we've just heard underline how difficult it can be to accept God's call to love:  love God and love all our fellow human beings, even our enemies. I don't think I need to do any exegesis. If anything, they're too clear. 
	What I want to say instead, is that this is, after all the basic problem, the basic challenge, and the basic wonder and splendor of all Christian faith and life. To my mind,  no one has ever put a finger on it more precisely than a certain predecessor of ours, a seventeenth-century priest with a gift for poetry named George Herbert. And I want to share with you a couple of his poems this morning and say a few words about them.

	The first is "The Call," which shows up in our hymnal set to a beautiful tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams (Hymn 487):

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.

We recognize Herbert's starting point—Jesus' words in the Gospel of John:  "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." Herbert is inviting Jesus in, and also meditating on what these three terms mean in his life. Perhaps we think of "the Way" as a narrow path of duty and struggle. He seems to think of it as a broad open way where we find space to breathe. Truth in our world has become a bone of contention; he imagines it as a moment of discovery so profound as to leave no room, no desire for strife. And the Life he envisages is not just the physical one we carry inside us, vulnerable to sickness, accident, and death, but a creative power that will ultimately destroy death itself and all its works. The audacity required to invite such powers into your life! But that's what Jesus asks us to do.

	Herbert continues with another triad of invitations, ones we can easily connect with this Eucharist we are about to receive:

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light, as shows a feast:
Such a Feast, as mends in length:
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Here comes a light that will illuminate the whole heart and mind—and reveal what? Not our failures, our sins, our unworthiness, but a banquet laid out for us. And unlike our daily meals, it's a banquet that never grows stale, never leaves us sated, weary, longing for a nap. To the contrary, it "mends in length"; it gets better the longer we sit together. It is the true Christian feast of love.

	And then, that strange line:  Such a strength as makes his guest. What can he mean by that? What could ever make us strong enough to sit at the heavenly banquet, in this life and the life of the age to come? The answer, I think, comes clearer in another of Herbert's best-loved poems, also about a banquet (Love-III). It begins, "Love bade me welcome." And then the trouble starts. The thing that hinders us from Love's banquet is our own reluctance to be loved, humbly and simply. We would be happy to be admired for our goodness, our perfection, our moral worth. But simply to be loved because it is Love itself who has made us and seeks us out? Really, it's too much for us:

Love bade me welcome:  yet my soul drew back,
	Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
	From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
	If I lack’d anything.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
	Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
	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, says Love, who bore the blame?
	My dear, then I will serve.

A clever ruse that one! It sounds so humble, so virtuous, so deserving almost, when it is really just a last-ditch effort to escape being loved. And the Love that has given us life and breath, and trust and hope, and the gift to be loved and to love, will not grant us this exemption:

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
	So I did sit and eat.

	Sooner or later, we must all consent to be loved. And by God's grace this is also how we learn to love God and our sisters and brothers, our neighbors, even—however long it takes—our enemies. For how can we hate all these others whom God loves just as God loves us? 
	And George Herbert summed it all up—the perfect triumph of love—in the final verse of "The Call": 

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a Joy, as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joys in love.

	Even so. Come, Lord Jesus!