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Good morning and welcome to our third Westervelt lecture with Dr. Wood, the call to devotion in Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert. And to begin our time, we will sing hymn number 455. Let us pray.

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Gracious and ever-living Lord, free our minds and hearts to be attentive to you and to your word and to your way among us. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, we pray. Amen. Yes, you have it right.

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It's Ralph Underwood introducing Ralph Wood. I think the reason there's so much excitement about Dr. Wood's lectures with us this time is because he is a master teacher. And I think he's a master teacher because he has been savvy enough

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to find outstanding mentors. Take Martin E. Marty, for example. Ralph Wood is one of his inner circle.

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And that means that Ralph Wood is one of 7,000 intimate friends of Martin Marty, whereas a number of us are among the 2 million semi-intimate friends of Martin Marty. But we could mention Martin Marty and Wayne Booth and a number of others, but I think the attention that I want to focus on is that not only those persons with whom he has shared time in the teaching mentor role, but also the literary greats have been not only writers, not only authors, but close mentors of Ralph Wood. And because that is the case, we have this opportunity for Ralph Wood to be our mentor and to remind us of what these great writers have to say to us.

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Dr. Wood, we are so glad that you are here, and God bless. Thank you, Ralph, for that very, very generous introduction. And thank you for having been a very generous congregation.

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I tell students that the test of a lecture is to see whether they are gulping no doves in its midst. I've not seen a lot of that, and that is enormously encouraging. I want to thank again, President Shelton and the faculty for this invitation to come my first time, and I hope not my last time, to Austin Prez.

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I'm about out of Baptist Presbyterian jokes. I've got just a couple more, and I'll have to waste them on you. I told some of you that my teacher at the University of Chicago, among others, was Norman McLean, the author of The River Runs Through It. Many of you will know that wonderful film Robert Redford did.

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One of the low lines, low points of that movie is when, as you may remember, young McLean's father, a Presbyterian minister, says, You know, when Baptists learn how to read, they become Methodists. Someone has added a couple of footnotes to that, that when Methodists make money, they become Presbyterians. And when Presbyterians stop speaking to people, they become Episcopalians.

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Another little progression you've probably heard about, that Pentecostals pick them up out of the ditch. Baptists teach them the Bible. Methodists instill a social conscience. Presbyterians give them culture.

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Episcopalians teach them how to drink. Pentecostals pick them back up out of the ditch again. I also heard about a conversation between a young Presbyterian boy and a Baptist boy in which the Baptist boy asked him, Why are you a Presbyterian? He said, Well, obvious.

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My parents were Presbyterians. I was brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Presbyterian Church. It's the only tradition I've ever known. I'm a Presbyterian.

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The Baptist boy then said, That's the most stupid reason I've ever heard for being a member of this denomination rather than that. Surely you know that it's so important a matter of your churchmanship must be a matter of individual choice. You must let your conscience be your guide. You've got to choose these matters.

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They're not just matters of how you're brought up or what your parents were. For example, what if your parents were absolute idiots? What would you be? The Presbyterian boy said, I guess I'd be a Baptist.

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So we come then to do you all have the poems because you will need them. Alas, we'll have some fun at the end extricating some of these poems. But to get there, let's meander a bit by talking about what constitutes real devotion and the kind of theology that should underlie it.

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By beginning to talk about the way in which the character of God is both knowable and unknowable, as incomparably near and incomparably far from us, must lie at the basis of our faith, therefore the basis of our devotion, and not least of all, the basis of our art. I've tried to argue this week that all six of our writers reject the old scholastic notion, whether it be Catholic or Protestant, that nature, the realm of created being, is a world existing separately and unto itself. So that in the old way of speaking, grace must be super added, added from above,

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for it to be completed and perfected. For many traditional Catholics, this means that this upper story grace is lowered down from above by miraculous disruptions of the natural order. For many of us Protestants, that old notion of the upper story and lower story, notions of grace and nature, was this, that we ourselves must activate the supernatural potency that's above us by our own right choices and decisions, whether they be moral or religious.

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The two books that have helped me most in overcoming that notion, you probably know them already, one is by Michael Buckley. It's called At the Origins of Modern Atheism. And the other is by William Platcher. I think he's one of yours, is he not?

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A fine book called The Domestication of Transcendence. What both Michael Buckley and William Platcher show is that This kind of layer cake theology has done a great deal of mischief in the modern world. It has led to a terrible body-soul, heaven-earth dualism.

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And of course, far more disturbingly, it has denied the basic biblical teaching present, for example, in Colossians 1, that the entire creation has an intrinsic orientation to God, not an extrinsic relation, but an intrinsic relation. My favorite Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, likes to say that there is no ungraced nature. We'll see that in our poem by Hopkins this morning. There is no ungraced nature awaiting some kind of supernatural fulfillment through either some miraculous spirituality or some individualist morality.

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Instead, the triune God, whose very life is characterized by mutual self-surrender of the three persons of the Trinity, is enabling the whole creation to participate in God's own life. Therefore, to make God and the creation extrinsic to each other leads to atheism on the one hand, and to its mirror image on the other, a smarmy pietism, which turns God into a sort of heavenly step and fetch it who does our will rather than we doing His will. Platter shows that both classic Protestantism and classic Catholicism have not understood grace and nature that way at all.

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Instead, they have seen them as interstitial and entirely enmeshed. The visible and the invisible worlds always being woven into a single, seamless web of interlocking natural, human, demonic, and divine reality. We've been seeing that all of these three lectures. Let me illustrate by way of miracles, the whole idea of miracles.

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The modern idea of miracle is that miracle is a divine interruption into a fixed cosmic order of cause and effect. Again, Platter notes that that's the Newtonian idea of miracle, that neither Luther nor Calvin, neither Augustine or Aquinas, would have recognized, the notion that miracles contravene the natural order. These are my own illustrations, not platters, but for example, in the very first gospel, the mark of Jesus guards against any such sensationalist conception of his powers. For example, he abjures those who mean heels or raises or feeds to retain strict secrecy about these matters.

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He doesn't want to be known as some miracle monger. The fourth gospel, for example, eschews the word miracle altogether. My colleague David Garland at the Truitt Seminary points out that the Johannine Jesus always calls his mighty deeds by the word signs, not miracle, but signs, because they always point to the kingdom whose presence they manifest. They never demonstrate Jesus' arbitrary power over ordinary causality.

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So this sentimental notion that miracles are God's willful violation of nature for merely our own selfish benefit is an entirely modern notion. Instead, our ancestors in the faith have a virtually unanimous estimate of miracles as God's working in and through the natural order for God's own purposes.

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As Augustine said, The whole of creation is at once natural and miraculous. Aquinas described miracles as those events which, because their natural causes are hidden from us, excite admiratio. Admiratio is a Latin word meaning wonder. And it lies both existentially and etymologically at the root of our word miracle, straight from Admiratio.

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Calvin added that God is the continuing, sustaining cause of the cosmos, who is not sometimes, but always acting in the world. I quote Calvin from his commentary on Genesis. If God should but withdraw his hand a little, all things would perish immediately and dissolve into nothing.

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And yet this newly minted Newtonian nature-contravening God of the gaps has very largely triumphed in much of modern Christianity, especially in the evangelical world. I cite as a case in point the work of Bruce Lockerbie from a recent book entitled Dismissing God: Modern Writers' Struggle Against Religion. 1999, from Baker Press. You can see in Lockerbie this old layer cake theology still at work.

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He there in that book chides modern writers for their unbelief. He argues that the preponderance of 19th and 20th century authors, and I'm quoting him, have forsaken belief altogether and chosen the vacuum of unbelief. Still others, more aggressively, seem obsessed by a warring spirit against belief that compels them to challenge God's supremacy.

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I'm still quoting Lockerbie. In a manner of speaking, these writers seem to have wished to battle God on his own terms, equal terms. To me, the low point of Lockerbie's book comes when in what he thinks he's making a word of mighty praise for God is in fact an unintended irony. because he calls God the heavyweight champion of the universe.

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Well, such a dictatorial autocrat jumps in and out of his creation as if he had one life and the cosmos another. This divine dictator usually, of course, remains truant from his universe, as if he were an absentee landlord. What Lockerbie fails to see is that writers like Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were mocking not the true God, but what Karl Barth calls the no God.

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William Blake, you may know, called this Newtonian God, Old Nobadaddy, a wonderful name, Old Nobadaddy. Ernest Timingway in one of his short stories has one of his characters, Pray, the Pater Noster, the Our Father, in this proper fashion, our Nada, who art in Nada. Nada be thy name. When the no God does act, he enters the world largely as a result of his own arbitrary decision to answer our prayers.

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If we beseech him piously enough, he will even do our own bidding. This no God exists as largely our own factotum, a sacred Santa Claus who brings us what we want when we are not naughty but nice. My friends at Notre Dame tell me that this deity has even been given a nickname. He's called Touchdown Jesus because he presides over the campus with great, uplifted, game-winning arms.

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At Baylor, where ambitions are more modest, we call him Parking Jesus. Maybe that's the name also at the University of Texas. Being no hopers about a national football championship, we're quite happy to settle for divinely provided parking places.

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Yet finally, this is no jesting matter, as Karl Barth makes clear in his withering account of this Jim crack, no God, whom we have created in our own image. I'm quoting Barth. The cry of revolt against this God is nearer to the truth than all the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him. We suppose that we know what we're saying when we say God.

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We assign to Him the highest place in our world. And in so doing, we place Him on fundamentally one line with ourselves and with things. We assume that He needs something, God does. And so we assume that we are able to arrange our relation to Him as we arrange other relationships.

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We press ourselves into proximity with this God. And so, completely unthinking, we make God nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with Him.

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We permit ourselves to reckon with Him as though this were not extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as His companions, patrons, advisors, commissioners. We confound time with eternity.

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So what I want to be arguing this morning is that we must recover a radical sense of God's unfathomable otherness precisely in and through His equally unfathomable nearness. The God self-identified in Jesus Christ has not only drawn incomparably near to us in the incarnation and cross and resurrection, but in this very act of divine self-identification, God has also revealed His unfathomable otherness. As the Eastern Orthodox tradition reminds us, we know God in His energies rather than His essence, so that all of our names for God must be negative. We've used some this morning in our hymns.

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Immortal, invisible, ineffable, inscrutable. All conventional categories must be radically revised in light of the mystery which gleams darkly from the cross. Von Balthasar's strange language, almost to the point of breaking, when he declares that Gethsemane and Golgotha constitute a radiant darkness. blinding even as they enlighten.

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The cross, says Paul Tillich, is the one form-breaking form. He's again using language to the point of exquisite tension. The God of the cross does not disclose Himself in a schematism of unambiguous logical clarity. On the contrary, the crucified Christ extinguishes all meaning as the incarnate Son Himself dies.

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even as the resurrected Lord restores all meaning when God raises Him from the dead. Therefore, to behold God in His cruciform goodness and beauty and truth is not to transgress against, but rather to insist upon the radical unknowability of God. Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous Greek theologian of the 5th or 6th century, insisted that Christians must do two things at once.

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We must fear and tremble at our ever greater unlikeness and dissimilarity to God the Father, even as we give joyful gratitude for God's drawing ever nearer to us in the work of the Son and the Spirit. The Second Lateran Council of 1215 gave succinct statement to this basic distinction I'm trying to make. I quote from the Second Lateran Council. As great as may be the similarity, so much greater must the dissimilarity between creator and creatures be preserved.

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I'm going to quote that again. As great as may be the similarity, so much greater must the dissimilarity between Creator and creatures be preserved. This, then, is the mind-staggering truth we're confronted with, that we know the God of Jesus Christ both ever less and ever more, and yet also at one and the same time.

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And that fact has profound consequences, both for Christian life and Christian art. In Christian life, it means that radical faith will always be very near to radical unbelief. That's the heart of Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Her atheists are just an eyelash away from being Christians, and her Christians are just an eyelash away from being atheists.

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It means that we will never have a manageable God. It means that we will know God as much in His absence as in His presence. One of my friends, my real hero in the faith is named Warren Carr. He was asked to speak to the Wake Forest chapter of the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship.

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And he stood before that crowd of what I call slappy, happy, sloppy, agape kind of Christians. And he said, I worry about you young people. He said, You don't seem to know God well enough to miss him when he's absent. It means that true devotion will be cast down by doubt and perplexity, no less than it will be lifted up with joy and delight.

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I think this may have been what T.S. Eliot meant when he says in the Four Quartets, Humility is endless. It may also be what Calvin meant when he formulated, to me, the most succinct definition of what sanctification is about. Calvin said,

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The only growth in grace is growth in humility. Both Eliot and Telvin, I think, are calling for, obviously, an ever-increasing repentance of our own and the world's sin, as well, of course, as our ever-increasing gratitude for God's or abounding grace, but I think they may be calling for something more as well. They are summoning us to the humility which confesses how little our faith has fathomed the inexhaustible mystery of God, and thus how much our faith remains a shallow and trite, what St.

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Paul would call a childish and milk-drinking thing. To feed fully on the strong food and drink of the kingdom is to know, for example, the terrible truth that C.S. Lewis confesses Until We Have Faces. One of the most startling lines in that novel where Lewis has his narrator say, The divine nature wounds us simply for being what it is.

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That God heals us by wounding us, that God has drawn near to us in order to demonstrate His drastic foreignness, means that Christian poetry, and especially devotional poetry, must do two things at once and again at the same time. It must give praise and thanks for the God who in Jesus Christ has drawn incomparably near and dear to us, while also remaining stricken with fear and trembling. at God's inscrutability and ineffability. Art worthy of the name Christian will thus have a cruciform character that stresses the darkness no less than the light, or better still, which reveals the darkness at work in the light and the light in the darkness.

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Which of course is but to make the obvious more obvious, that is, our devotional poetry, like our devotional living. should take its cue from the Psalms and from the Book of Job. And so we turn this morning to two supremely cruciform poets, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. So if you'll get out those poems, I'd appreciate it and we'll read them.

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Just a brief word about Herbert. You may know that many of you will know, he's a 17th century Anglican parson and poet. Who served, how many of you have been to Bemberton? Anyone been to the tiny little rural parish outside Salisbury?

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Next time you're in England in the West Country, don't miss going to Bemberton. It's a parish whose church is roughly the size of the balcony of this fine chapel. Bemberton, Herbert was born to enormous wealth and privilege, and his worry was not whether He could find a parish worthy of him, but whether he could find a parish small enough for him.

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His life and ministry were cut short, again in his 39th year by tuberculosis. He never published anything in his lifetime, but he left behind a stunning collection of devotional verse that I think outranks any other in the English tomb. He was an Anglican, a close friend of King James I, a vigorous opponent of the Puritans, And yet, as a young Jewish scholar at the University of Chicago, Richard Stryer, has pointed out, Herbert's theology is dripping with John Calvin's theology.

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If you want to understand Calvinism well, read Herbert well, especially concerning the absolute sovereignty of God's grace. So let's look first at his sonnet called Prayer One. He wrote more than one poem on prayers, why it's numbered Prayer One. Prayer, the church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, the Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth.

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Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, reverse thunder, Christ's side piercing spear, the six days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune which all things hear and fear. Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss. Exalted manna, gladness of the best.

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Heaven in ordinary, man well-dressed. The Milky Way, the bird of paradise. Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, the land of spices. Something understood.

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Well, you'll recognize, many of you will, this as a Petrarchan sonnet, three quatrains and a concluding couplet, whose rhyme is regular, AB, AB, CD, CD, EF, EF, GG. But given the obvious form, it turns out to be quite subtle in its manner. For example, I have my students search for the verb in this poem. It's a single sentence, you can see.

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If you look long and hard, you'll discover that there is no verb. A subtlety in which Herbert is implying on the one hand, this is what prayer is, but of course it's also a proclamation and an appeal, let prayer be. this thing.

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Notice well that Herbert sees prayer as first of all belonging to the church. He does not begin with the assumption that prayer is first of all private. It's communal prayer before it's private prayer. It's the church's great festival prayer is, the church's banquet.

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And to get at the absolute wonder of that banquet feast, Herbert then begins to reverse all of his images. So watch what he does. He turns things deliberately upside down to try to get us to see what an unnatural act prayer is. Prayer, the enormous privilege.

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Prayer made possible for us because God has become flesh, because Christ in His session is at the right hand of God the Father making intercession for us. So what is an angel's age? By definition, an angel has no age. Angels are not mortal, they're eternal.

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Notice how God's breath breathed into Adam, and the creation now returns into Adam in prayer. Prayer is that which brings the soul to utter summation and clarification, what the word paraphrase means there. In prayer, one is sitting in one place and yet going on pilgrimage, on quest. As we were saying yesterday, it's the heart on a journey to God.

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It's therefore the Christian plummet, the plumb line that rises not, that falls down not from heaven to earth, but that rises up from earth to heaven, sounding the depths between them and connecting them in their inextricable linkage. Herbert's vision of God is that God is the target who wants us to aim our thunder at Him. The word engine is the old word for cannon.

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God wants us to fire our petitions, our protests to Him. It's engine against the Almighty. It's the good Babel. Babel is, of course, the idolatrous tower.

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This is the tower we sinners build up, that God wants us to build up to Him. Rather than thunder being that which comes down from the skies, this is reverse thunder, thunder from us to God. Here we pierce Christ's side, not in betrayal and persecution, but of course that the water and the blood might flow into us communally. The whole six days creation, which we undid in but an hour of our fall, has now been redone.

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Creation has been remade in this hour of prayer. Herbert was a great lutonist. He loved to go over to the cathedral at Salisbury and play his lute. And so he turns and uses a musical image.

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It's a kind of tune prayer is. It's to become truly attuned to God's whole creation. A tune which all things, if they would but listen, hear and fear. You probably know in the Middle Ages it was held that there were nine concentric circles around the earth.

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Each of them fixed in a crystalline glass. And that crystalline glass, rubbing very lightly against each other, made what was called the music of the spheres, a wonderful heavenly music, which if you rightly listen, you can hear. If you know Milton's great sonnet on the birth of Christativity, he said all creation could hear that music on the morning Christ was born. And so Herbert begins using his typical iambic rhythm,

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to lay out the great virtues deriving from prayer, softness, peace, joy, love, bliss. But again, rather than manna falling down from heaven, this is manna exalted, where God, as it were, feeds on our prayers. Here is true gladness, gladness not of the mediocre, but gladness of the very best. Here is heaven in ordinary.

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Ordinary is a noun, not an adjective here. And it means, to the shock of many, a pub or a gambling house. Ordinary was a place where you went to either gamble or to drink. It's heaven right in the midst of our ordinary celebrations and joys.

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It's human beings really dressed rightly and well. And so Herbert then, once you get human life truly in order, takes off. Prayer now goes all the way to the uttermost part of our own solar system, our stellar system, the Milky Way. It becomes a bird that arrives all the way to paradise.

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In prayer, the church bells are not heard just on earth, they're heard beyond the stars. Here, the soul receives its very lifeblood. Here, our lives get the wonderful spice of the East. And so, as Herbert gets more and more exalted in his praise for prayer, he turns and brings everything back to a very humble close.

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Not everything understood, something understood. He may be echoing the wonderful phrase of St. Thomas Aquinas who said, The smallest understanding of ultimate things is infinitely to be preferred over the largest understanding of small things. I once quoted that statement, by the way, to a student who went and dropped her business major after that.

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The smallest understanding of ultimate things is infinitely to be preferred over the largest understanding of small things. So that's Herbert celebrating the wonder, the miracle, the drastic, staggering fact of God's nearness, and therefore of our communion with him in prayer. But Herbert knows that God is also distant and far. In his poem called Denial, he writes about that.

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So if you'll turn to that poem, Denial. If you will, listen very carefully to the way in which Herbert will use iambic pentameter and then shorter lines, but then he will break and not use the rocking rhythm. And watch how the rhyme also is going to be off.

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We'll have rhyme and then non-rhyme. And that's going to be crucial for understanding the whole poem, and especially note what happens with a rhyme in the last stanza. Now, I'll try to pronounce these words as I think they were in Herbert's time. When my devotions could not purse thy silent ears, then was my heart broken as was my verse.

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My breast was full of fears and disorder. My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, did fly asunder. Each took his way. Some would the pleasures go, some to the wars and thunder of alarms.

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As good as go anywhere, they say, as to benumb both knees and heart in crying night and day, come, my God, oh come, but no hearing. that thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to thee and then not hear it crying. All day long my heart was in my knee, but no hearing. Therefore my soul lay out of sight, untuned, unstrung, my feeble spirit unable to look right like a nipped blossom hung, discontented.

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O cheer and tune my heartless breasts, defer no time, that so thy favors granting my request, they and my mind may chime and mend my rhyme. It's a devotional confession of God's absence, of God's deafness, of God's unhearing. For Herbert, form and content are inseparable, matter and manner cannot be divorced. So watch what happens.

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He's using the iambic when my... I'm killing it reading it this way, but you can hear it. When my devotions could not purse thy silent ears, then was my heart... And he reverses it.

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He uses what's called a trochee. Yada, not da-dum, but yada. My heart, then was my heart broken. as was my verse.

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The verse breaks at the very point that his heart was broken. And the rhyme scheme is likewise broken. Purse, verse, ears, fears, disorder. Can you hear?

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Perfect rhyme and then terrible, non-rhyme. Uses in the next stanza what's called a spondee, two accented syllables side by side. You would not read this.

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My bent thoughts like a brittle, but rather my bent thoughts. It's an archery image. He says, like a bow that has lost its resilience. Now, no longer can shoot the arrow where it's supposed to go, but the arrow flies asunder.

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But he says, each of my thoughts took its own way because God is absent. There's no target there to hit or to find. So his mind begins to wander in prayer. He goes off to pleasures, goes off to wars, whether they be spiritual or physical, goes off into fears, thunder of alarms.

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But lest someone accuse him of just not concentrating on God, just not being pious enough, he says, why not? Might as well go anywhere. These brittle bent thoughts say is to be numb, notice, not just knees, before the altar of God, but to benumb one's own heart, crying to God, come, but no hearing.

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Then he turns to make a general complaint that's worthy of such an atheist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. You probably know Sartre famously declared that man is a sorrow. project. He's using his words quite literally.

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Sartre says, The human mind evolved into self-consciousness so that unlike any other animal, we can jump out of ourselves. Our heads let us leap beyond animality into, Sartre said, nothing, void, cosmic emptiness. Herbert's saying something very much the same. He complained, Why, oh Lord, would you give dust a tongue?

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making your human creatures the only articulate beasts, so that they would cry all day to thee, and then not hear them crying. Notice he picks up the knees and heart image there. So that now my heart, already numb, has dropped down into my knees, and still no hearing. And so he turns once more to musical images in the next to last stanza.

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Herbert is using the ugly dentals. Listen to the T sounds in this next to last stanza. Therefore my soul lay out of sight, untuned, unstrung, my feeble spirit, unable to look right, like a nipped blossom hung, discontented. You hear the Ts there?

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Ugly sounds. Again, where the sound echoes the sense. His whole life is a badly tuned instrument. His feeble spirit cannot look upright.

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Herbert was a gardener, which he compares the human soul to a blossom that is just ready to burst into flower. But when the frost comes, as you know, bends over and hangs as if dead, discontented. And so his final plea, What's so miraculous about this poem is that his prayer is answered in the praying of it.

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John Updike very wisely says, The prayer for greater faith is the one prayer that never goes unanswered. For to cry out for greater faith is, of course, already to acknowledge one's lack thereof and one's receipt thereof. cheer and tune my heart. We used to do the heart image again.

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Now my breast is without a heart. It's in my knees. Defer no time. Don't wait, God, because he knows we were made for communion with God, so that so thy favors, God's blessing, granting my request, they, those favors, and my mind may chime and mend my rhyme.

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The only stanza that has perfect rhyme is the last one. Breast, quest, time, chime, rhyme. Marvelous poem.