I recently delivered this short reflection for a chapel service centred around the poetry of 17th century Anglican poet George Herbert. My reflection was on Herbert’s poem “Redemption” and is only tenuously connected to the poem.
Herbert’s poem “Redemption” puts us in the place of a person saddled with an unpayable debt to a rich Lord. This, Herbert contends, is our condition. We—you and I—have debts, burdens, and obligations towards God and our neighbour that we can never hope to repay.
Perhaps in our cybernetic, ecological age we can understand this more readily. We are aware of all of the ways that our lives—and our decisions—are bound up with those of others. As Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima recognized: “… we are each responsible to all for all…” We may think of how our small acts of consumption, waste, or gluttony, contribute to the destruction of the natural world. We might think of the suffering or loneliness we pass by each day; the beggar we have refused; the family member spurned; the million acts undone; the uncountable ways that our actions negatively affect others and the world. We are ensnared one might say, in ‘webs of wickedness.’ We often desperately long to be free from these webs, to be pure. It seems that the more we become aware of the extent of our obligations, and the more we try to meet them, the more anxious and paralyzed we become.
If we have an unpayable debt towards our neighbours, our debt to God may be even greater. The Christian doctrine of creation is that God’s act of creation is not a one stop deal, as if God creates and then steps back, but rather, it is an ongoing, act of sustaining the world—and each of us—in existence. Genesis has God blowing his breath into Adam to bring him to life: we might imagine every breath we take as God continuously breathing us into life. If this is so, if our every breath is a gift—we are in another sense, eternally in God’s debt. There is nothing we can do to repay God for the ongoing gift of existence. Our debt to God, we might say, is like our debt to our mothers: how could we ever repay them for what they have done for us?
We do not like dependence or to be in another’s debt, we want to stand on our own two feet and owe no one anything. Much of our energy is spent trying to take matters into our own hands, to do it on our own, so that we don’t have to depend on anyone.
It is here that Herbert brings us the good news of the gospel. Our obligations, burdens, and debts have all been discharged. The price has been paid. As the Lord tells us in Herbert’s poem: your suit is granted, your debt canceled, it is finished… he said, and died.
On the other side of this gift of Grace, the world looks different. We are no longer anxiously struggling to be free from the webs of wickedness, but in the light of grace are free to laugh at the absurdity of own intractable sinfulness. Our works of mercy and justice are no longer performed as a desperate need to settle all accounts, to make the world turn out right. Instead, we rest the conviction that “it is finished” and our works of mercy flow from a sense of joy rather than desperation.
We come to see our dependence on God and others as an ongoing gift. We see the world through the eyes of gratefulnessand see the many good things in our lives as the care and provision of a loving God: The blessings of good food, wine,and friends, the birds, and trees and all the living things, the sun, the steady ground beneath our feet, the breath in our lungs. And we may find that it is as Wendel Berry writes:
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
Coffee with Kierkegaard 