Dcn Susan Erickson

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Today we recognize the Anglican poet and clergyman George Herbert (1593 - 1633).

But in fact, most of Herbert’s poems remained unpublished during his lifetime. And Herbert was a priest only for the last three years of his short life.

Herbert lived most of his life in the public arena. Born to privilege and educated among the elite, he was the university orator at Cambridge for twenty-some years. He had many powerful and influential friends in a time of growing political and religious turbulence that would come to a head in a civil war and the Puritan Revolution.

It appears that Herbert was conflicted about his public role and the typical paths open to an ambitious man:  he also felt a deep, spiritual pull.

At last Herbert struck out on the path to ordination and became a country priest. His friend, the deacon Nicholas Ferrar, published Herbert’s poems under the title The Temple after Herbert’s death at the age of thirty-nine.*

I find the tension in Herbert’s life between public recognition and a spiritual life deeply sympathetic. Like me, he struggled throughout his life to find his true vocation. Though he was a priest for only three years, we have the distillation of his struggles in some of the greatest poems in the English lyric tradition. Below is a poem, “Aaron,” that uses the bells on the hem of the Old Testament Aaron’s priestly robes to depict Herbert’s own sense of unworth as a priest. The poet recognizes that only by having the “same mind … that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil 2:5) can we become worthy of our vocation to follow Christ.

Holiness on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest:
Thus are true Aarons drest. 

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest:
Poor priest, thus am I drest. 

Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest. 

Christ is my only head,
My alone-only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev'n dead,
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new-drest. 

So, holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come people; Aaron's drest.

—Dcn Susan

* I have taken my information about Herbert’s life, as well as the poem, from poetryfoundation.org.