Little Gidding Quiet Day

Little Gidding quiet day

Address 1: Let all the world in every corner sing
Letting God be God

At Morning Prayer just a few moments ago we opened our lips to sing God’s praise, and we used George Herbert’s words to do so, as we will throughout today. Why Herbert? Because of his connection to this place, via his extended correspondence with Nicholas Ferrar, and the latter’s critical role in ensuring that Herbert’s words were preserved and shared so that we may enjoy them now and, perhaps, that they may lead us closer to God.

Let all the world in every corner sing,
my God and King!
The heavens are not too high,
God's praise may thither fly;
the earth is not too low,
God's praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing,
my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing,
my God and King!
The church with psalms must shout:
no door can keep them out.
But, more than all, the heart
must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing,
my God and King!

The title of this first address is ‘Letting God be God’ because whatever else a hymn is for, it is – usually at least – an outpouring of worship from us, God’s creatures, to our creator. When we sing, we may be only a poor echo of the worship in heaven, but it is the best we have. When we sing, we pray twice, as Augustine put it. I gather what he actually said is that ‘when a man sings well he prays twice’ but for the moment we shall imagine that it is not the quality of the singing, but the act of singing at all that enlarges our prayers and sends them heavenwards.

When we sing, we engage our whole selves, body, mind, heart and soul. It is effortful. We find ourselves breathing more deeply, enunciating words more intentionally, needing to feel the ground beneath our feet more firmly, more conscious of our posture, the sound that we are making, and our relationship to the whole body of Christ as our fellow members sing around us. Since singing is a trans-cultural practice (in other words, all cultures do it) it is also something that unites us with our fellow human beings of different nations and faiths. This is no small thing. Singing is a holistic experience in every sense.

Interestingly, I read a piece of research last week which demonstrated that singing, especially in ensemble, releases oxytocin, the hormone associated with love.

So, if we sing, if we sing to God, we engage our whole selves in praise, not only our intellectual and cognitive selves, but our whole selves. This is the sacrifice of praise that we hear about in the Eucharistic liturgy and in the beautiful hymn often used for harvest festivals,For the Beauty of the Earth – interestingly, in John Rutter’s memorable setting it is changed to ‘joyful hymn of praise’. Make of that what you will.

So we come before God, just as we are, and we offer God our whole embodied selves, singing words about God’s glory as our brains respond to the bodily and cognitive experience by releasing hormones that make us feel like we are in love. How does this shape our relationship with God: when we sing, we may be performing a relationship of love that already exists, but in a very real sense we are shaping and growing that relationship through the very act of singing. And, whatever St Augustine says, you don’t have to be a great singer for this to work.

When we sing, we do so in our creatureliness, our materiality, our embodied and emotional selves, coming into the presence of the One who made us and is worthy of our love and our devotion: we are OK with the fact that God is God and we are God’s people, and we are engaging in a process that not only reflects, but shapes our whole experience of that relationship.

If you are accustomed to the daily offices, you will know that they are punctuated by the doxology: glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. Doxology is just a Greek word that means words of glory.

The doxology keeps coming back in the offices, like a refrain, and the implication is that whatever you’ve just said, it’s going to be right and appropriate to finish by singing praise to the eternal Trinity. This can sometimes be jarring – Matins and Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer don’t change much depending on the time of year, and the monthly cycle of psalms simply goes through the book of psalms (the bible’s hymn book) in its biblical order. So on certain days of the month you can easily have one of the more violent psalms, or the most profound laments and cries o desolation, and still be asked to sing ‘Glory be… ‘ straight afterwards.

It is jarring, but also strangely reassuring. It’s a way of saying, God is still God, even when I’m having a bad day, or a bad year. God is still God, even when I hate the people who are giving me a hard time, even when everything is collapsing around me. God is still God even when all I can do is fall on my knees and cry for help, begging for mercy. God is still God even when I’m no longer sure that God understands the true depth of my suffering.

Because who God is doesn’t depend on how we are each feeling at any given moment. God is God, and God is glorious and worthy of our praise and worship, every moment of every day. Actually, it is preciselybecause God does not depend on our feel-good factor to be praiseworthy that we can, in fact, fall on our knees before him asking for mercy.

As the doxology reminds us that God is God, and that we mustn’t remake God in our own image, it also reminds us that instead, we must be continually remade in his image – an image in which mutual love, creativity, sacrifice, blessing and unity in diversity are the hallmarks not just of individuals but of churches, maybe even, in God’s ultimate purposes, of the whole of the human race. This is what the doxology looks like in the extended worship of real life lived in God’s service – again, we will be returning to this theme later.

Doxology, praise, worship – this is a kind of theology. It’s a kind of theology that lets God be God, and that lets us be us, that invites us to be drawn into the life of the Trinity that is all about love, and difference, and self-giving, and creative enjoyment of one another. It’s a sort of theology that allows us to say somethingto God andaboutGod – it is the most immediate form of theology we have.

That’s why it’s so apt that the very Trinitarian formula that we use to praise God in his vastness and greatness is also an expression of all the ways that that mystery has been made known to us – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are also our experience of God through history and in our own lives. The very doxology that reminds us to let God be God also reminds us of all the ways that God always has been, is now, and always will be intimately concerned with his creation. We know what it is to be a child of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, sharing our humanity, and we know what it is to have God within us, and breathing life into us, into the church, and into the whole universe.

If doxology is a form of theology, should we be more choosy about the theology we allow into our hymns? Well, we may return to that in one of the later addresses. But even the most apparently contentless worship song says something about God and our relationship with God.

Many hymns, of course, heap huge amounts of content into their worship: How sweet the name of Jesus sounds springs to mind:

Jesus, my shepherd, guardian/brother, friend,
my Prophet, Priest, and King,
my Lord, my Life, my Way, my End,
accept the praise I bring.

Another Greek word for you: apophatic. Apophatic theology is the heaping up of descriptive images and metaphors for God, none of which tell the whole story, but each of which may contribute to it. Eventually the multiplying images start to contradict one another, and you may be left not with a neat compilation but with what the mystics called ‘the darkness of God’ – the unknowability that is left when you realise that language has failed in its attempt truly to define the divine. The process of getting there has drawn you closer to God than you ever thought possible, like the long walk to the foot of a huge mountain, and yet when you get there you realise that the mountain is so tall that, standing at the foot of it, you cannot take it all in. That is letting God be God, and it is where many of our greatest and most beloved hymns end up:

How weak the effort of my heart,
how cold my warmest thought;
but when I see you as you are,
I'll praise you as I ought.

Or, more poetically, the words of the great John Mason:

How shall I sing that Majesty
Which angels do admire?
Let dust in dust and silence lie;
Sing, sing, ye heavenly choir.
Thousands of thousands stand around
Thy throne, O God most high;
Ten thousand times ten thousand sound
Thy praise; but who am I?

Enlighten with faith’s light my heart,
Inflame it with love’s fire;
Then shall I sing and bear a part
With that celestial choir.
I shall, I fear, be dark and cold,
With all my fire and light;
Yet when Thou dost accept their gold,
Lord, treasure up my mite.

How great a being, Lord, is Thine,
Which doth all beings keep!
Thy knowledge is the only line
To sound so vast a deep.
Thou art a sea without a shore,
A sun without a sphere;
Thy time is now and evermore,
Thy place is everywhere.

So, whatever else hymns are about, or are for, they are – generally – about letting God be God. And they do this not only by their explicit doctrinal content, but more by the way that they engage us in all our creaturely embodied selves in worshipful focus on our maker – they are a journey towards God in worship. They help us love God more.

One of the most challenging commissions I’ve fulfilled as a hymn writer was from Ely Cathedral, who wanted a new hymn for their science festival a few months ago. I offer it to you now as an example of my own journey through the wonder of the material expression of God’s creativity and our human love of learning and understanding to the realisation that God is God and we are just human, and that this is right, and indeed wonderful:
Praise for the depths of space,
its endless scope and scale:
in such a vast embrace
our words and numbers fail.
For what are we,
that mortal mind
should seek and find
infinity?

Praise for the rules that show
the patterning of time,
creation’s ebb and flow
expressed in reason’s rhyme.
Can these great laws
contain our awe,
a formula
for wonder’s cause?

Praise for the complex codes
each spiral strand conveys,
as chemistry explodes
to life in myriad ways.
Can we compare
what’s ours alone
if we are known
through all we share?

Praise for the drive to know;
from human nature springs
a need to learn and grow,
to understand all things.
Yet wisdom’s prize
is never won:
from all that’s done
new questions rise.

Praise to the one whose Word
breathed purpose into chance,
for whom all matter stirred
to join creation’s dance.
For love made known
in every thing
in praise we sing
to You alone.

If you’re not sure what to do in the next 45 minutes or so of silence, here are some ideas:

• Take a hymn book, and choose a hymn of praise that you have found uplifting to sing. Look at the words, meditate on them, see if you can memorise them.
• If you wish, focus just on one line, one that perhaps has always resonated with you, and dwell with it a while.
• If you are feeling brave, pick a tune you love, and have a go at putting pen to paper to write a verse that expresses something of who God is.

Address 2: The God of love my shepherd is
The God who walks with us

Let’s sing again:

The God of love my shepherd is,
and he that doth me feed;
while he is mine and I am his,
what can I want or need?

2 He leads me to the tender grass,
where I both feed and rest;
then to the streams that gently pass:
in both I have the best.

3 Or ifI stray, he doth convert,
and bring my mind in frame,
and all this not for my desert,
but for his holy name.

4 Yea, in death's shady black abode
well may I walk, not fear;
for thou art with me, and thy rod
to guide, thy staff to bear.

5 Surely thy sweet and wondrous love
shall measure all my days;
and, as it never shall remove,
so neither shall my praise.

Our hymnals are not short of metrical renderings of Psalm 23. This one, again, is Herbert’s, and it’s not even the best known. We all know The Lord’s my shepherd, that’s sung to Crimond, and I guess most of are also more than familiar with The King of Love my shepherd is, whose line ‘O what transport of delight’ lent a title to a Flanders and Swann song about London buses. More about that later, too.

I wonder which is your favourite? With words so well known as these, it is their very familiarity which assures them a continuing place in the consciousness not only of churchgoers but also those who are never part of regular worship. This is certainly true of Crimond, as it for All Things Bright and Beautiful, Jerusalem, and Abide with me – though we have sport to thank for the latter two, as well (rugby, and football, respectively).

Familiarity may breed contempt, too, and I have to confess that after over 400 funerals, around 200 baptisms and around the same number of weddings, my tolerance for All things Bright and Beautiful is not what it once was. Yet even as my own heart sinks at these over familiar hymns, and thank God for them, for they provide a means by which a disparate bunch of people, gathered either in sorrow or joy, may raise their voices (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) and, just for those two or three minutes, tap into something familiar, perhaps from childhood, that meant something to them once.

Hymns can reach the parts that other beers can’t reach, delving into the emotional recesses of childhood memories and associations with other gatherings. These hymns accrue a patina of association, layered emotion and memory that allows them to offer hospitality to people who would perhaps find themselves ill at ease in church – all the more so if there’s a body of people willing to hold the tune and give it some welly, providing a critical mass into which those on the outside might be attracted and in which they might find some support and solace.

I wonder what your favourite hymns are? For most people, they will be hymns that have been known for a long time, and carry the weight of memory and experience with them. One of my favourites is Dear Lord and Father of mankind, for the very particular reason that I had my first ever mildly charismatic experience while singing that hymn in a school assembly when I was twelve. Really. Even today, the thought of that hymn reminds me of the warmth of love that was present that day in the singing, at a time in my life when a lot of things were confusing and difficult (I was twelve, after all).

I read recently that this particular hymn has frequently been voted as the nation’s favourite hymn. The tune, Repton, written by Parry, bears some significant responsibility for that. It is a yearning tune, the long pedal the spills over even in the second line, the rising sequence in lines 3 and 4, and the longer rise to the climactic top note and gentle relaxation in the repeated last line. It’s a masterpiece. Also responsible for the hymn’s enduring belovedness is the way it speaks about human experience of turmoil and comfort:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace.

5 Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!

Because of its belovedness, and also perhaps because it is a hymn about which I personally feel warm, I choose to borrow its tune when I was asked to write a hymn for All Souls. Many parishes now hold an annual service around all souls tide to which they invite all the families of those whose funerals have taken place over the past year or more. It’s one of those services to which people come who might not usually come to church. You probably don’t want to choose all funeral hymns, but you want something that will wrap the congregation in a warm blanket of familiarity, while offering a set of words that is bespoke for the occasion. A well worn and well loved tune can do that very nicely. This is what I wrote: