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Something Understood
September 30, 2016

Read: Matthew 13:34-35, 51-52
Have you understood all these things? (v. 51)

The last of George Herbert’s pen pictures is the simplest of all, yet it is as unexpected and as thought-provoking as any. The experience he writes of here is not one that our prayer answering God will give us every time; but as we get to know him better, we may find it happens increasingly often.

Here is the problem: if prayer is “something understood,” why do so many Bible people say to God in bewilderment, “But Lord, I don’t understand”? Here is the answer: they are being trained to trust where they cannot see; to trust that behind the scenes he has everything under control, and is working his purposes out in a way that they can’t yet grasp, but which will turn out to be the best of all ways.

And here is a quote, plus the concluding prayer, from just one more of Herbert’s fellow poets, Richard Trench (another archbishop, like yesterday’s Robert Leighton!). He writes of the times when we kneel to pray in a fog of not-understanding, and then somehow, rising from our knees, we find that “all, the distant and the near, / Stands forth in sunny outline, brave and clear; / We kneel, how weak; we rise, how full of power!” We may not know the answer, but we know the Answer Man.


Here is the poem in its entirety:

 

Prayer (I)

BY GEORGE HERBERT

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,

    God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

    The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

 

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower,

    Reversed thunder, Christ-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,

    Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

 

    Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood.

    The land of spices; something understood.

Prayer:
“Why therefore should we do ourselves this wrong, / Or others, that we are not always strong? / That we are ever overborne with care? / That we should ever weak or heartless be, Anxious or troubled, when with us is prayer, / And joy, and strength, and courage are with thee?” (Trench)

Author: Michael Wilcock

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