St. Francis The Episcopal Church In Potomac

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." —Hebrews 12:1–3

[Normally, any text that looks like this or this is a link to a relevant external web page.]

George Herbert April 3, 1593 – March 1, 1633 

"Fundamentally the judgment of contemporaries doesn't matter. There are people who are honored in their lifetimes and disappear without a trace. The only important judgment of poets is made by posterity." —Helen Vendler

"Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had read in conveying the very quality of life as we live it from moment to moment, but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I still would have called the 'Christian mythology.' The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed, "Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores." 

—C. S. Lewis, on his discovery of Herbert at a time when he was still an atheist.

George Herbert was born in Montgomery, Wales, on April 3, 1593, the fifth son of Richard and Magdalen Newport Herbert. After his father's death in 1596, he and his six brothers and three sisters were raised by their mother, patron to John Donne who dedicated his Holy Sonnets to her. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His first two sonnets, sent to his mother in 1610, maintained that the love of God is a worthier subject for verse than the love of woman. His first verses to be published, in 1612, were two memorial poems in Latin on the death of Prince Henry, the heir apparent.

        After taking his degrees with distinction (B.A. in 1613 and M.A. in 1616), Herbert was elected a major fellow of Trinity, in 1618 he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric at Cambridge, and in 1620 he was elected public orator (to 1628). It was a post carrying dignity and even some authority: its incumbent was called on to express, in the florid Latin of the day, the sentiments of the university on public occasions.1 In 1624 and 1625 Herbert was elected to represent Montgomery in Parliament. In 1626, at the death of Sir Francis Bacon, (who had dedicated his Translation of Certaine Psalmes to Herbert the year before) he contributed a memorial poem in Latin. Herbert's mother died in 1627; her funeral sermon was delivered by Donne. In 1629, Herbert married his step-father's cousin Jane Danvers, while his brother Edward Herbert, the noted philosopher and poet, was raised to the peerage as Lord Herbert of Chirbury.

        Herbert could have used his post of orator to reach high political office, but instead gave up his secular ambitions. Herbert took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630 and spent the rest of his life, three years, as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury. At Bemerton, George Herbert preached and wrote poetry; helped rebuild the church out of his own funds; he cared deeply for his parishoners. He came to be known as "Holy Mr. Herbert" around the countryside in the three years before his death of consumption on March 1, 1633.

        A Priest to the Temple (1652), Herbert's Baconian manual of practical advice to country parsons, bears witness to the intelligent devotion with which he undertook his duties as priest. Herbert had long been in ill health. On his deathbed, he sent the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish the poems only if he thought they might do good to "any dejected poor soul."3 It was published in 1633 and met with enormous popular acclaim—it had 13 printings by 1680.

        Herbert's poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets.3 They include almost every known form of song and poem, but they also reflect Herbert's concern with speech--conversational, persuasive, proverbial. Carefully arranged in related sequences, the poems explore and celebrate the ways of God's love as Herbert discovered them within the fluctuations of his own experience.2 Because Herbert is as much an ecclesiastical as a religious poet, one would not expect him to make much appeal to an age as secular as our own; but it has not proved so. All sorts of readers have responded to his quiet intensity; and the opinion has even been voiced that he has, for readers of the late twentieth century, displaced Donne as the supreme Metaphysical poet.

—from Luminarium

Collect: Our God and King, you called your servant George Herbert from the pursuit of worldly honors to be a pastor of souls, a poet, and a priest in your temple: Give us grace, we pray, joyfully to perform the tasks you give us to do knowing that nothing is menial or common that is done for your sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Pulley                     

WHEN God at first made man, 

Having a glasse of blessings standing by; 

Let us (said he) poure on him all we can: 

Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie, 

            Contract into a span. 

            So strength first made a way; 

Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure: 

When almost all was out, God made a stay, 

Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure, 

            Rest in the bottome lay. 

            For if I should (said he) 

Bestow this jewell also on my creature, 

He would adore my gifts in stead of me, 

And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: 

            So both should losers be. 

            Yet let him keep the rest, 

But keep them with repining restlesnesse: 

Let him be rich and wearie, that at least, 

If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse 

            May tosse him to my breast. 

               

The Elixir

TEACH me, my God and King, 

In all things Thee to see, 

And what I do in anything, 

To do it as for Thee.

Not rudely, as a beast, 

To run into action; 

But still to make Thee prepossest, 

And give it his perfection.

A man that looks on glass, 

On it may stay his eye,

Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heav'n espy.

All may of Thee partake;

Nothing can be so mean

Which with this tincture ('for Thy sake')

Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause 

Makes drudgery divine: 

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws, 

Makes that and th' action fine.

This is the famous stone 

That turneth all to gold; 

For that which God doth touch and own 

Cannot for less be told. 

               

Love (III)

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, the 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."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

        So I did sit and eat.

               

February 12, 2008

Abraham Lincoln —by Mark Noll

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 –April 15, 1865), sixteenth president of the United States, has become a mythic figure in America's civil religion. Born into relative poverty on the midwestern frontier, he rose from humble origins through self-discipline, honesty, common sense, a considerable measure of ambition, and a ready wit to shepherd the nation through the black days of the Civil War. After his death, Americans found it irresistible to see his achievement in a religious light. It was soon noted, for example, that Lincoln -- the "Savior" of the Union -- was shot on Good Friday (April 14, 1865), that his efforts to liberate the bondslave and bind up the wounds of war were cut short by "martyrdom," and that his very name -- Abraham -- spoke of the father of his people. Although Lincoln himself originally saw the Civil War as a political struggle to preserve the Union, he came to regard it as a crusade for truth and right. He spoke of the United States as "the last, best hope of the earth," of its citizens as "the almost chosen people," and of the War as a test to see if a nation "conceived in liberty . . . can long endure."

Considerable uncertainty arises, however, when Lincoln's own religion is examined. On the one hand, it is obvious that Christianity exerted a profound influence on his life. His father was a member of Regular Baptist churches in Kentucky and Indiana. Lincoln himself read the Bible throughout his life, quoted from it extensively, and frequently made use of biblical images (as in the "House Divided" speech of 1858). It was said of him, perhaps with some exaggeration, that he knew by heart much of the Psalms, the book of Isaiah, and the entire New Testament. His life also exhibited many Christian virtues. He was scrupulously honest in repaying debts from ill-fated business ventures of the 1830s. He offered tender sympathy to the widows and orphans created by the Civil War. He pardoned numerous sleeping sentries and other soldiers condemned to death for relatively minor lapses. He kept his head concerning the morality of the contending sides in the War, refusing to picture the North as entirely virtuous or the South as absolutely evil. And during his years as president he did regularly attend the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.

On the other hand, Lincoln never joined a church nor ever made a clear profession of standard Christian beliefs. While he read the Bible in the White House, he was not in the habit of saying grace before meals. Lincoln's friend Jesse Fell noted that the president "seldom communicated to anyone his views" on religion, and he went on to suggest that those views were not orthodox: "on the innate depravity of man, the character and office of the great head of the Church, the Atonement, the infallibility of the written revelation, the performance of miracles, the nature and design of . . . future rewards and punishments . . . and many other subjects, he held opinions utterly at variance with what are usually taught in the church." It is probable that Lincoln was turned against organized Christianity by his experiences as a young man in New Salem, Illinois, where excessive emotion and bitter sectarian quarrels marked yearly camp meetings and the ministry of traveling preachers. Yet although Lincoln was not a church member, he did ponder the eternal significance of his own circumstances, a personal life marked by tragedy (the early death of two sons) and difficulty (the occasional mental instability of his wife). And he took to heart the carnage of war over which he presided.

Whether it was from these experiences or from other sources, Lincoln's speeches and conversation revealed a spiritual perception far above the ordinary. It is one of the great ironies of the history of Christianity in America that the most profoundly religious analysis of the nation's deepest trauma came not from a clergyman or a theologian but from a politician who was self-taught in the ways of both God and humanity. The source of Lincoln's Christian perception will probably always remain a mystery, but the unusual depth of that perception none can doubt. Nowhere was that depth more visible than in his Second Inaugural Address of March 1865: "Both [North and South] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes." Even more to the point was his reply when a minister from the North told the president he "hoped the Lord is on our side." Responded Lincoln, "I am not at all concerned about that. . . . But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side."

November 29, 2007                                                                                                     C. S. Lewis  Happy 109th birthday, Jack! He was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1898, and he died in Oxford, England on November 22, 1963.* He gave his last interview in May of 1963. We commend to your reading a fine essay by James Houston titled 'The Prayer-life of C. S. Lewis.' He was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1947. He wrote fifty books, some of them scholarly, others popular, and all of them are still in print. Perhaps his best known and most beloved books are The Chronicles of Narnia, the series of seven novels that inspired the imaginations of millions, including one fan, J. K. Rowling, who wrote seven Harry Potter novels as an homage to Lewis. The Chronicles are being made into movies by the Disney Company. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends; both of them professors at Oxford University. Tolkien was an important influence in Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity.

An Anglican, Lewis wrote Mere Christianity, one of the two great modern defenses of our faith. (The other, The Everlasting Man, was written by that great British Roman Catholic G. K. Chesterton.) 'The Weight of Glory' is a sermon Lewis preached at the Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1942. In short clips, you may hear him talking about love here, here, and here. 

Lewis encourages. One of the secrets of his skill as a writer is that, as massively learned as he was, he never condescends to the reader. As we enter into Advent, he is most encouraging indeed, a Christian brother helping us who also believe in the Risen Christ to go "farther up and further in." Unfailingly mindful of the eternal verities ("All that is not eternal," he said, "is eternally out of date."), his writing doesn't age. For example, a friend of ours received the following message from his elderly father recently: 

Dad here: It's now 7:40 am and couldn't sleep. Mom still in bed. Made coffee and here I am... We have to go to a funeral today in Bessemer. Rudy Martinson died unexpectedly. He was Ruth Potter's brother, and a real great guy. Visited us here many times. Helped me bring my boat in one year. The older I get, my circle of friends gets smaller. Guess that is the way it will be if I remain. Ho hum. Dad

The friend was able to write back:
The circle gets smaller but only for a breath, like a comma. "One short sleep, we wake eternally . . . " You will wake up one day and have a hard time feeling sorry for yourself at those commas. The circle gets smaller and we get older, but on this side of that waking up the alternative isn't appealing: not getting older means not seeing your kids and your grandkids grow up and have their own adventures, their own errands to run for the Most High, God not doing anything on this stage, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, that He can get someone else to do for Him. The Captain of our salvation be praised, death itself will one day finally be no more: Our heavenly Father having raised his beloved Son from the dead, 'we have a lot more future with the Most High, and with each other, than we have past.'

Here are several passages from C. S. Lewis worth considering now and again:
[From Mere Christianity]"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine."
[from The Great Divorce]
"I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in "the High Countries."
[from The Silver Chair]
"Look here! I say," [Eustace] stammered. "It's all very well. But aren't you?—I mean didn't you—?"
"Oh don't be such an ass," said Caspian.
"But," said Eustace, looking at Aslan. "Hasn't he—er—died?"
"Yes," said the Lion in a very quiet voice, almost (Jill thought) as if he were laughing. "He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven't."
[from The Last Battle]
...The Lion bowed down his head and whispered something to Puzzle at which his long ears went down, but then he said something else at which the ears perked up again. The humans couldn't hear what he had said either time. Then Aslan turned to them and said:
   "You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."
   Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."
   "No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"
   Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
   "There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadowlands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."
   And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which  no one on earth had read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

November 5, 2007
Robert Bracken White He died November 5, 1982. We wondered at the wisdom of posting something about him here because he's father-in-law to one of us. Then again, everyone in this archive is also a member of the family of God that we are brought into by baptism. Rather than a link about Dr. White, below is an excerpt of a letter written about him. It is dated June 13, 1996, Father's Day.

As you lie in your sleep, a number of eyes gaze down on you. There are several rabbits, including Peter, dancing in a print from the Boston Museum of Fine Art which your Aunt Cindy gave to you when you were born. There are cross-stitched bears and horses which other aunts and friends made for you. There’s Brett Favre, the Green Bay Packers quarterback. As you lie in your sleep, a number of eyes gaze down on you, but these are the eyes I mean.
   I mean the eyes from two photographs in your room. One stands next to a castle night-light on your dresser. Another is tucked in the corner of the dresser's mirror. These are the eyes in your firmament, gazing down on you. Two men among a cloud of witnesses. They are the eyes of your mother’s father and your father’s father.
   You do not belong to one of the families whose genealogy is full of power and glory; there are no Cabots or Lodges or Astors. It is not a gallery of the noble and renowned under whose eyes you sleep. Or rather, not the renowned. But not noble? On two accountings at least I ought to reconsider that. First, being a Christian, I stand under the authority of the divine law that enjoins us to honor our fathers and mothers. That may seem an oddity in an era of overweening self-analysis which eagerly and remorselessly begins by rooting one’s own problems in one’s parents’ shortcomings, thereby dismantling any honor supposed to attach to them. But for any serious Jew or Christian, a most solemn interdict lies across this path. “Honor,” the commandment says, and our Lord Jesus affirms, “thy father and mother.” Jesus adds, quoting from Exodus (21:17) and putting not too fine a point on it: “He who speaks evil of father or mother, let him surely die” (Matthew 15). What does this mean? It means at least this: whoever it may be who bears the responsibility for pointing out to others a man’s faults, it is not his son.
   But also, I rescind the suggestion that these fathers who look down on you are not among the noble. To be sure, you will not find them in Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage. It doesn't matter. Their names and achievements are kept in a higher register, one kept with faithfulness by angels, at least so one might gather from the visions of Saint John the Divine.    Your mother’s father died before you were born, so the only way you will ever have of remembering him as anything more than a cipher is by borrowing on the memory of others. Evan Robert, you bear the name of his friend Evan Welsh, a beloved Chaplain of Wheaton College; and you bear his name: Robert Bracken White. What is a name? What makes a name 'good'? As far as the history books go it would seem to be a matter of the bearer having exhibited some valor or integrity or service to humanity. For most of us, the only throng witnessing what we are making of our name will be not the jostling multitude with klieg lights and video cameras, but merely the host of saints and angels. And that is as venerable a company as any we will ever find in the White House or Buckingham Palace.
   So what do you owe to this man of whom you know nothing first-hand, the man who in this photograph is not a man but a boy atop a pony, a boy with hair full of curls? You don’t have to have known him to see in his eyes great gentleness and vigor dancing oddly with great wit and humor. As a boy, he was full of mischief. In Detroit, where he was born and raised, he and his chum one day sneaked up behind a squad car and tied to its bumper some rope the other end of which they had looped around an ogreish neighbor's picket fence. The juveniles provoked the cops and took off running. The squad car went. So did the fence.
   He went to Wayne State College for two years and then to Wheaton College to study music but he was there only a semester when he received his induction papers. He served in the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion in the Army during World War II. On December 14, 1944 the Battle of the Bulge began. When it ended six weeks later, only fourteen of the 144 men in his battalion were still alive, most of them captured and then massacred in a field outside Malmédy, Belgium. Two days before the Malmédy massacre, your grandfather received orders to return to England.
   When the war ended, feeling called to be a physician, he went to the University of Michigan and to Case Western Reserve. He was a medical missionary in the Belgian Congo, where your mother grew up. For Christians who trace their religious lineage back through mainstream Christianity and evangelicalism, your Grandpa White did all the public things that mark him a saint. For a time the only physician in a six-hundred-mile radius, he paddled down African rivers like his hero, Albert Schweitzer, to minister to sick people, including countless sick children.   There are a lot of other stories to tell about him. But the Grandpa White I am privileged to remember was not just this public figure but a man coming out of his bedroom at night scratching his rump unconsciously, summoned by the sound of music in the living room, a Chopin nocturne played by your Uncle Russ, or your mother and Russ playing an arrangement of Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. He had a terrific baritone voice, your Grandpa, and he loved to sing. Every day after supper he would lead the family in worship, which included singing at least one hymn from the Methodist hymnal, prayer, and godhelpus the latest jokes....  
   Your grandfathers would want you to follow their example in this respect: both decided, once upon a time and through time, as night fell and morning came, to open their hearts and hands to Christ. Both of them cling like infants, simple and unashamed, to Jesus Christ our Lord....
   As you lie in your sleep, a number of eyes gaze down on you, Evan, but these are the eyes I mean: I mean the eyes of your grandfathers. Christ being raised from the dead, you are in their company as surely as you are lying asleep beneath their photographs.

October 21, 2007
Phoebe Brown-Cave You know about Idi Amin, and you may have seen the movie The Last King of Scotland. We want you to consider Phoebe Brown-Cave, Church Mission Society missionary to Uganda. Her name here doesn't link to anything: the internet isn't abounding in articles about her. Googling her produces nothing other than the link we provide below. She was a polished arrow in the Lord's quiver, to use the prophet Isaiah's metaphor. She served the Lord the way almost all of us do, in disciplined obscurity, no Klieg lights on her, no write up in a newsweekly. No photographs of her in the public eye. She wrote nothing that we know of. Trained in Hebrew and Greek in her native England, what Phoebe did was translate the Bible into the language of the Lango people whom she served for thirty years. And the Lango people loved her for it. We learned of Phoebe because we're friends of The Rev. Dr. Philip Turner and Dr. Christopher Seitz, fellows of the Anglican Communion Institute. She was brought to our attention by a powerful sermon, Look Toward Heaven and Number the Stars, delivered this summer by Dr. Turner. 

        Listen to me, O coastlands,
           and give attention, you peoples from afar.
        The LORD called me from the womb,
           from the body of my mother he named my name.
        He made my mouth like a sharp sword;
           in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
        he made me a polished arrow;
           in his quiver he hid me away.

                                                         — Isaiah 49: 1–2

October 7, 2007 
Karl Barth. He remains the most important theologian of the last one hundred years, and he continues to tower over the theological academy. Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University and one of today's most influential theologians, writes, "The heart of Barth’s theology is the presumption that if we get God wrong, we get everything wrong—our politics, our science, our art, our very lives." Barth (rhymes with heart) started his career “as a liberal theologian hoping that the kingdom of God could be built by the efforts of dedicated men.” But by the time he wrote his commentary The Epistle to the Romans in the 20's, he would turn out the lights on liberal theology. He stood against Hitler and Nazism when his colleagues at the University of Bonn did not. He was a pastor—all the great theologians in Church history were at some point in their lives pastors—who in the 50's preached exclusively to prisoners, and so it was that some in Basle considered breaking the law just to get to hear Barth preach. His Church Dogmatics is a monumental work. To open it and take a whiff effects the cleric the way smelling salts effect the concussed. Dogmatics in Outline, based on lectures Barth delivered without notes, will set you back a thousand dollars less. Barth wrote a letter of thanks to Mozart and a book collects several monographs he wrote about the composer. You can read an excerpt from his magisterial essay The Strange New World Within the Bible. That monograph is an exquisite introduction not just to Barth (you can hear the growl in his voice in lines like the ones quoted in the sidebar of this page), but more importantly to the Bible. Reading it, you might consider as if for the first time what power and glory sits there on your bed table, what a fool you've been to have taken it for granted and how actually you deserve it not at all. 

Asked once if he believed in the devil, Barth answered, "Of course not." [Pause.] "He's the father of all lies."