|
A Meeting Most Profound Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 2, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1:26-2:3 James 1:2-8
On this Sunday when the church, save for our own tradition, venerates the saints, we mark the day by a meeting most profound between two men whose doubts compelled each to compose, one giving voice to the other’s verse. “Although a declared agnostic,” wrote Ursula Vaughan Williams of her husband, “he was able, all through his life, to set to music words in the accepted terms of Christian revelation…as if they meant to him what they must have meant to George Herbert or to Bunyan.” Yet this prolific composer and arranger of modern hymnody dwelt in the “as if” of faith from his birth to his death: an atheist, writes Ursula, who by the end of his life drifted into cheerful agnosticism. The son of an Anglican priest and a strict evangelical mother, Ralph Vaughan Williams was also a descendant of Charles Darwin! To her young son’s question concerning his great uncle’s notoriety, his mother replied: “The Bible says God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer; but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.” Intellectually, Vaughan Williams chose the way of his great uncle. He began to read the text of the Bible critically, joining a theological revolution coinciding with Darwin’s scientific revolution that led him to atheism. But textual criticism also led him to liken the creation of Scripture to the communal creation of the folk songs of England. Both “have behind them,” he wrote “not the imagination of one poet, but the accumulated emotion, one may almost say, of the many successive generations who have read and learned and themselves afresh recreated the old majesty and loveliness….There is in them, as it were, the spiritual life blood of a people.” In spite of his atheism, Vaughan Williams believed that this same spiritual life blood ran through the Church of England. Therefore when asked in 1904 to create a new hymnal for a church whose music had fallen victim to the sentimentality of Victorian composers, he seized the occasion. Deeply in love with the language of the King James Authorized Version and the folk-song tradition of the English countryside, he began going door to door throughout villages, asking total strangers to sing their favorite folk tunes. He then wed religious texts with simple musical scales and the restrained emotional character of the English folk-song to transform hymnody. Moreover, “Given his freedom from religious beliefs,” writes Byron Adams, “and his commitment to a notion of art as social expression, he felt no constraints in selecting and adapting these texts for his own devices…transforming them in the process and making them utterly his own.” Needless to say, his hymns and arrangements are among those most loved by cradle Presbyterians to this day! Yet this begs the question of Vaughan Williams’ own struggle to believe. “His religious dilemma” according to Michael Kennedy “was that of a person innately and deeply spiritual, yet far too intelligent to accept unquestioningly the historical reality of the Christian myth.” And while this posed no problem for his Cambridge friends, it “offered him little help….[For] a visionary artist” says Adams, “simply cannot develop an aesthetic theory based solely on rationalistic or positivistic elements that banish anything remotely resembling” the things that pertain to God. Enter the texts of priest and poet George Herbert, whose doubt was not the doubt of a man whose mind was unable to grasp the concept of God: it was the doubt of a human being whose unworthy heart would not let the love of God grasp him. A Public Orator of Cambridge and Member of Parliament, Herbert left the courts of England to answer “the call” of God to the priesthood, choosing to live in the vicarage of the country parish. Herbert’s choice of place, it seems to me, was not only provincial but providential. His dwelling on the solid soil of the English countryside located his poetry in the details of ordinary life and led to a meeting most profound between Herbert and Vaughan Williams. Just as in Vaughan Williams’ nature there was said to be “a vein of mysticism veiled by a thoroughly down-to-earth common sense approach to his art,” Herbert’s faith and art were incarnational rather than transcendent. That is to say, for Herbert “human beings do not transcend the world to achieve union with God; rather, God enters the world to achieve union with human beings. The soul does not come to God; rather, God comes to the soul. The figures are of descent, rather than ascent,” says Gene Veith. Herbert’s incarnational faith met the doubt of Vaughan William in the world created by God not in six days but by the God who--to the eye and ear of the artist--was still creating. But there is more. For theologically I think Herbert’s humble dwelling in the countryside mirrored his own flight from majesty: the love of God that bade Herbert welcome found him fleeing in dust and sin. Here we have to do with a doubt not of the mind but of the unworthy heart. Such doubt, however, was also a theological line deliberately drawn in Herbert’s poetry between Calvinists and Arminians, much like the musical line Vaughan Williams had drawn between the restrained emotion of his hymns and the music of Victorian sentimentality. For Calvin and for Herbert, God’s will was all-important and the decision of God for the one fleeing in unworthiness was eternal (this is the perseverance of the saints of which we spoke last Sunday). Calvin believed that the human will was not a partner in salvation but an obstacle to God’s grace. In contrast the Arminians and John Donne, as well as their heirs who were the Puritans and Methodists, believed us to be cohorts with God in human salvation. A poet of the Reformation, Herbert’s verse is therefore marked “by two balancing extremes” says Veith: “a deep awareness of one’s sinfulness, balanced by a secure assurance of God’s unconditional love…total depravity balanced by the perseverance of the saints.” To wit: 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? Surely the doubt of both artists is known to us even as their meeting most profound invites us, in word and music, to meet anew the God who has come to us in the incarnation. Like Vaughan Williams, having chosen his great uncle’s way of knowing the facts, many here are at most cheerful agnostics. Like Herbert, having cut our teeth on Calvin, we flee in unworthiness at the approach of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Of those who doubt, our text from James (a book rejected by Martin Luther for its lack of grace) says we are like a wave on the sea, driven and tossed about by the wind…unstable in every way, who can expect to receive nothing from the Lord. Yet what is the wind, both poet and composer might ask, but Love Divine come down to seek out this soul of thine? An so, concludes Vaughan Williams’ Down Ampney, named for the village of his birth,
Shall far outpass the power of human telling; For none can guess God’s grace, till Love creates a place Wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling. |