Faire is the Heaven

Faire is the Heaven

The second sermon in a series on communion motets.

Faire is the heaven
Edmund Spenser (1552-99)
William Henry Harris (1883-1973)

Faire is the heaven where happy soules have place
In full enjoyment of felicitie;
Whence they do still behold the glorious face
Of the Divine, Eternall Majestie;

Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins
Which all with golden wings are overdight.
And those eternall burning Seraphins
Which from their faces dart out fiery light;

Yet fairer than they both and much more bright
Be the Angels and Archangels
Which attend on God's owne person without rest or end.
These then in faire each other farre excelling
As to the Highest they approach more neare,
Yet is that Highest farre beyond all telling

Fairer than all the rest which there appeare
Though all their beauties joynd together were;
How then can mortal tongue hope to expresse
The image of such endlesse perfectnesse?

“One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.” Ps 27:4

I’m glad I’m old enough now to be a grumpy old man – I miss buses you can jump on and off; you can’t get fish and chips in newspaper anymore; there’s no snow at Christmas; kids are too noisy; and worst of all, worst of all – when you ring a company you don’t talk to a real person anymore!

It’s that annoying electronic lady, who gives us a menu of buttons to push for services which are not quite what we want. And we know that our conversation may be recorded for training purposes. And we know that after we have push-buttoned our way through several layers of menus, we will eventually hear that, our call is very important to them, but all their operators are currently busy and we will be held in a queue.

And we will listen to Eine kleine Nacht music played on a Woolworths music centre or worse, the Spice Girls. And if we’re lucky enough not to be cut off after 30 minutes then we’ll probably end up back at the original menu again.

Which brings us on to Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. These were writings, probably from the early 6th century, which claimed to have originated with the first century Christian bishop, Dionysius of Athens. (Acts 17.34)

It’s a mystical strand of theology which, in one aspect, resembles our infuriating telephone exchange. You never get straight through to God.

God is mediated to humanity through three orders of Angelic beings, each divided into three choirs. So from the top, next to God, we have Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; then Dominations, Virtues and Powers; and finally Principalities, Archangels and Angels - and only these last two, Archangels and Angels, have a direct mission to men and women.

This sort of neo-Platonic theology had great influence in the Western church, but after the Reformation by the late 16th century, it began to lose its unspoken authority. This is the era of Edmund Spenser who wrote the words of our offertory motet, Faire is the heaven, towards the end of his life in 1596. This is the era of Richard Hooker, one of the first great Anglican theologians. It is the era of a Reformed Protestant Catholicism.

Spenser is most famously remembered for his epic work, The Faerie Queene, his great allegory of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth who ruled from when he was six until after his death. He’s buried here in Westminster Abbey.

Spenser’s Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beautie are a poetic reflection on what was happening in theology at this time. Heavenly Love begins in the Divine Trinity and moves toward creation, embracing humanity and drawing them into the motionless motion of the everloving Trinity.

The contemplation of Heavenly Beautie starts from the opposite end of the cosmos and through stages takes us from the earthly realm, through the heavenly spheres to arrive at the very Godhead. It is from this work, An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, that William Harris selected these words for his motet.

Now Spenser seems deliberately to have reversed the Dionysian order of the Angelic choirs. This can be no accident, or a lapse of memory.

The Seraphim and Cherubim are furthest from God, and ‘fairer than they both and much more bright’ are the Angels and Archangels, ‘Which attend on God’s own person without rest or end.’ This was an outrageous thought to a church schooled in Dionysian thinking.

Later on in the poem (beyond the words that will be sung today) we see the thinking behind this reversal.

You see, Spenser was also deeply influenced by the Reformation rediscovery of Augustine’s theology. It is by grace that we are saved. We have immediate access to God through the mediation of Christ alone. Immediate means ‘nothing in the middle’.

Further on in the poem Spenser writes that we must
lowly fall before his mercie seate,
Close covered with the Lambes integrity

It is the Lamb who was slain, it is Christ who allows us to approach the beauty and perfection of God.

This motet expounds that great biblical truth of our faith: all may approach God through the finished work of Christ.

It is not for those who discover hidden knowledge and mystical ways. It is not for those who persevere up rungs of the celestial ladder of powers. It is not for the top of the hierarchy of Cherubim and Seraphim, of aristocracy or intelligentsia, of clerics or prelates.

It is a direct spiritual transaction: Emmanuel, God with us. This is reflected in today’s communion motet, Wherever you go.

But of course there is much more to a poem than a theological treatise, or an exposition of doctrine.

And this is why William Harris picked up these words for his motet.

Harris was born in 1883 and studied at the Royal College of Music, where he later became a professor. He was organist of New College, Oxford, Christ Church Cathedral and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, where he gave piano lessons to the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.

He composed this in 1925, recovering from the horrors of the First World War and nostalgically musing on his privileged Edwardian boyhood, surrounded by beauty and optimism. The motet is full of yearning, for lost innocence and the beauty of youth; for the release of death and the ascent to Beauty beyond compare - ‘that Highest’... ‘endless perfectness’.

And here we see that Augustinian immediacy does not completely negate Dionysian hierarchy, because there is a hierarchy of longing; of longing for God. The Christian soul who seeks the Beloved, is drawn ever higher and nearer to the Cloud of Unknowing, to Dionysius’ ‘dark ray’.

Spenser wrote at great length on human beauty and love, but this was as a prelude to that consummation of beauty and love found in Christ and echoed in these words.

Harris’s setting, for double choir - perhaps reflecting the choirs of Angels & Archangels - is deliberately romantic and evocative, drawing us into the very presence of God.

It does what music and poetry is supposed to do in Christian worship: it gives voice to what is inexpressible. It takes us far beyond the rational arguments about the existence of God or the nature of the incarnation. It resonates with that deeply implanted image of God within every human being.

All sorts of music and poetry are able to rekindle our longings for God. They express our immortal longings for him who is Love, who is Beauty, whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. (Wittgenstein)

Let all the music and words this morning remind you of your deepest longings for God, and as you eat bread and drink wine, let his love enfold you in the embrace of Christ.

No wonder King David was glad to go to the temple and to linger in the presence of God:

“One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.” Ps 27:4

The Lamb Blake/Tavener

The Lamb

Trinity 2 & Adult Baptism

In the order of service sheet:

The Lamb

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

And mentioned in the sermon

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes!
On what wings dare he aspire!
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!” Revelation 4.12

My maternal grandmother lived with us until she died. I remember asking my mother when I was about 11, what granny Steele’s maiden name was. “Steele”, my mother replied somewhat curtly. In what was probably one of my last acts of childhood innocence I reasoned out loud: “so she was called Steele and then she married someone called Steele.”

I won’t give you my mother’s exact words of reply, but it was a strong suggestion that I was stupid and that I should grow up. Of course, it was unthinkable to me that this little old lady had conceived 3 children out of wedlock in the 1910s.

I began to realise that the world of adults was anything but straightforward, and that many things, in my family, among the neighbours, at church, were not what they seemed to be. And, horror of horrors, neither was I.

Loss of innocence is a gradual process, but most of us can remember some defining moments. The Bible traces the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden, through the violence and injustice of tribal humanity that culminates in the death of the one innocent man – our Lord Jesus Christ - to the final book, Revelation, which looks to a new and different age of innocence.

In my sermon this week and in a fortnight’s time, I want to explore this Bible theme through the offertory motets. Today it is William Blake’s The Lamb.

William Blake was absorbed by this idea of loss of innocence. He grew up during the turbulent 18th C, with all the uncertainties of revolution and war in Europe. He was a London journeyman engraver. But he was more than that. He was an artist and a free thinker. His Christian views were shaped by his own mystical visions and a strange romantic mythology that he developed in his later writings.

When he was barely 30 in 1789 he published his first, very unusual book, comprising 31 colour plates of poems intertwined with design and illustrations. It was called Songs of Innocence and was influenced by Rousseau’s belief that children are free and innocent until society corrupts them.

But in Blake’s peculiar belief system, there was also a more traditional Christian understanding of a fallen creation. Blake and his wife, practised nudism, as a gesture towards returning to the innocence of Adam and Eve. They would have been at home with the 1000 naked cyclists who were here yesterday!

In the early church, baptismal candidates, both children and adults, went naked into the waters, and were then clothed in white as they emerged to a new innocence in Christ – it is a theme in the baptismal liturgy. (Time will not permit me to tell you of an adult baptism by immersion that I carried out while wearing white, designer cotton trousers, which turned transparent as I walked down into the water of the baptistry!)

In The Lamb, Blake draws a picture of an innocent child... and of an innocent God. The engraved and then painted illustration in his book shows a small naked, androgynous child, talking with an attentive lamb, in a rustic setting.

Here are two of God’s creations, harmlessly wandering in a paradisial idyll - “and was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?” - well here, at least, it was.

Christ became a little child, and became known as the Lamb of God, meek and mild. Blake wonders at the beauty and simplicity of it all; the resonances between Creator and created; the sheer grace of God experienced in the delight of nature.

The child senses his kinship with the Lamb and all creation, and with the great God who made them all, and yet who is immanent within his world, walking in the garden with his creation. The child sends up the simplest of innocent prayers - “Little Lamb, God bless thee!”

This is the sweet innocence that haunts us throughout our adult life. If only our life could be full of simple pleasures and simple childlike trust. But it’s not.

Blake was wrestling with those age-old questions:

How do we retain our innocence, and yet grow up and gain experience?
How do we gain worldly-wiseness, and yet retain a childlike trust and sense of wonder?
How can God be all loving and all good, and yet create a world red in tooth and claw?

In 1794 Blake published Songs of Experience. The perspective of the child in Songs of Innocence is now replaced with the perspective of an older and more bitter man, who has seen the evils and suffering of the world. The poems in these two volumes run in loose parallel and the corresponding poem to The Lamb is The Tyger. (Which Tavener also set in a complementary setting to The Lamb.)

Who dared frame the tiger’s ‘fearful symmetry’? Was it the same God who made the little lamb?

Blake is unequivocal in his answer. Yes, it is the same God. There is no escape into a dualism which places blame elsewhere – in some other god of chaos. Luther’s striking words encapsulate the problem for Christians:

“Always remember the devil is God’s devil!”

The Tyger is about having your reason overwhelmed at once by the beauty and the horror of the natural world. "When the stars threw down their spears / And watered heaven with their tears" – a couplet from The Tyger.

For Blake, the stars represent cold reason and objective science. Blake greatly appreciated the explosion of scientific knowledge during his era, but he was hostile to any attempts to reduce all phenomena to chemistry and physics – such as we see in the current writings of Richard Dawkins.

Blake's contemporary "rationalists" who had hoped for a tame, gentle world guided by kindness and understanding must face the reality of the tiger.

To change the historic setting to our own, postmodernity with its ironic and wry take on the world has nothing to say to the jackboot or to the brutal rawness of nature. It has no power to tame the tiger within or the tiger without. Pure rationalism, the enlightenment project, has failed. As all the recent surveys show, human beings are irrepressibly religious. There is more to life than what we see, and it is that which humanises us and gives us hope for a second innocence.

John Tavener, who composed the musical setting of Blake’s poem, is a Russian orthodox convert and is making a similar point as he describes the icon-like nature of his compositions:

'There is in ikons an uncontrolled wildness, a coarseness almost, a deep sense of the untamed ferocity of the desert… I try to recreate today in my music just this uncivilised and surrealistic wildness'.

Our text today, comes from a passage which attempts to paint an impressionistic picture to help us in our understanding of innocence and experience. In the Revelation of St John the Divine we see the central figure as the Lamb, slain yet standing.

John has in his mind the writings of the Old Testament pseudepigraphal book, the Testament of Joseph (19.8f), in which the lion and the lamb appear together: the Lion is the Messiah from Judah and the Lamb is the Messiah from Aaron. And in this Testament of Joseph, the Lion and Lamb are not contrasting figures, they are different ways of looking at the same victorious and righteous God.

St John takes the conflation of the images one step further and proclaims Christ as both priest and victim; Passover lamb of sacrifice and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who opens the seals and judges the world; the crucified, risen and ascended Lord, the lion of Judah.

There is no loss of innocence in Christ, only a carrying forward of that innocence into experience. ‘He who knew no sin became sin for us’ as Scripture puts it.

And so the Christian path becomes for us not so much a loss of innocence - our childhood is still with us, sometimes in very positive, and sometimes in very destructive ways – not loss, but a maturing of innocence.

In Emperor Constantine’s time, the 4th century, it was common practice to delay baptism until the deathbed, in the hope of passing through death in pristine innocence.

This was a mistaken understanding of baptism and forgiveness. Rather, as baptized Christians we must persevere until that time, after death, when we join all those who have struggled through innocence and experience, both in themselves and in their understanding of God.

Here in this life, we must keep on trusting even when our trust is sometimes rejected.

We must keep on loving, even when the love is not returned.

We must keep on forgiving, even as God constantly forgives us.

Then, in the life after death, at last our innocence will be restored and will make perfect sense of all our experience, and of all that we do not understand about God. Then we will join the unnumbered host and proclaim:

“Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and praise!”