BOOK OF THE MONTH: Wounded I Sing: From Advent to Christmas with George Herbst

DECEMBER BOOK OF THE MONTH

REVIEWER: Stewart Henderson

BOOK: Wounded I Sing: From Advent To Christmas With George Herbert
Author: Richard Harries
(SPCK , 2024) 142pp, paperback

Whilst travelling recently on the M6 between Lancaster and Preston, I observed a striking, three word graffiti slogan daubed on the footbridge over the motorway. It stated, ‘We Invented God’, which as an unsupported, national highways metaphysical stone placard certainly arrested the eye, if not leading to doctrinal implosion in this passing motorist.

What the 17th century high-born, transcendental poet and Anglican cleric, George Herbert, would have made of this eradication of the ‘before us and beyond us’ Divine is, of course, speculatively unknown, but it would, I suggest, certainly have engaged his keenest theological scrutiny; further encouraging his constant, critical inner counsel to exercise his regular ritual of rigorous self-examination, and abasement.

For throughout his short, by our privileged standards, life, (he died at the age of 39), Herbert, as Richard Harries winningly reminds us, was of the belief that God lovingly and most definitely ‘invented’ him: even when the poet was chastising his own besetting shortcomings and ‘afflictions’ of ‘ambition, spiritual pride and lust’.

This trio of character blemishes, as Richard Harries reminds us in this excellent and pertinent, seasonal book, seems at odds with the secular spirit of our age, a zealot’s anachronism even. Such beliefs serve as a zeitgeist coconut shy for stand-up acerbic atheists, such as Ricky Gervais, who mock those who cleave to the ‘Someone who isn’t there’.

As the author registers, Herbert ‘seems to be perpetually conscious of his sinfulness’, which, in turn, dares us to examine ‘the deceptions and evasions of our own heart’, through his colossal, searing and tender poetry. Herbert’s technically adept verse disciples us in the ways of God’s constancy and the ecstasy of belonging, even when the Mercy Seat seems to be absent, the symbolic furniture of redemption in storage.

Arranged into four, six days a week short chapters, with commentary, to cover the Advent season, each prefaced by an outstanding poem, this beneficial study manual will immerse you in the buoyant, baptismal waters of an elevated poet of the senses, and literary surgeon of the soul.

Reviewer: Stewart Henderson
Stewart Henderson is a poet, song lyricist and broadcaster. Widely anthologised by Hodder & Stoughton, Macmillan, OUP, Bloomsbury, Random House, Lion and others, his children’s verse appears in many National Curriculum set anthologies.