“Grateful Coolness from the Heat”: a rich Pentecost hymn

We all have our favourite hymns, those we can bear to sing more than a few times and imagine that in heaven we might go on singing for ever.  My desert island list is short: How shall I sing that Majesty, Of the Father's heart begotten, Praise to the Holiest in the height, Soul of my Saviour, O worship the King, King of glory King of peace and Come O thou Traveller unknown. And the eighth? It’s a hymn of Pentecost. Come, thou Holy Spirit, come, one of the greatest ever written.*  

Its author was the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, one of the most distinguished thinkers England produced in the high middle ages. He lived from around 1150 to 1228. They were troubled times in both church and state. Out of that turbulent era came the document dear to all the English, Magna Carta of 1215, the Great Charter of Freedoms. As Archbishop, Langton was present at its signing by the truculent King John. He may well have influenced its content. He was tireless in reforming the church and raising standards of clergy education and conduct. He was a passionate advocate of the new learning represented by the liberal arts including, of course, theology, at that time burgeoning in the recently-founded universities of Paris and Bologna and soon to flourish in England at Oxford and Cambridge.  One lasting legacy of his biblical scholarship is his division of the Bible into chapters, for he was the first to divide up the text in this way. 

So much for the author. What of his hymn? It’s known as the Golden Sequence.  Sequence refers to the position hymns such as this had in the liturgy of the mass. No-one is sure why this sequence is Golden, unless it is a comment on the beauty of its poetry and the profound spiritual insights of its prayer, for here, poetry and prayer are wonderfully married to each other.  It is an invocation of the Holy Spirit to be sung at mass on this feast of Pentecost and in the week following.  Some of the poetry is lost in translation, so listen to the Latin of the first verse: 

Veni, sancte Spiritus, / Et emitte caelitus  / Lucis tuae radium                                        Veni, pater pauperum / Veni, dator munerum / Veni, lumen cordium.  

That fourfold repetition Veni, veni, veni, veni - ‘come' is matched by a fourfold repetition of another plea in the last verse Da - ‘give'.  So the repeated cries of come and give frame the hymn and give it its intense poignancy.  And this coming and this giving respond to our deepest needs, for the hymn knows the complexity of the human soul and names it: poverty, sadness, emptiness, woundedness, weariness, barrenness and guilt.

Langton's skill is to pile up a rich array of images of the Holy Spirit that answer these needs.  They are all drawn from the scriptures, for Langton was a devout biblical scholar.  It's an extended commentary on the vision of one of the Hebrew prophets: ‘a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put my spirit within you....'  For how life is changed when the Spirit comes! Faith is restored, hope reawakened, love renewed; all beautifully told because authentically lived in the human heart, reverencing the deep mystery of the human person and the mystery of God the Holy Spirit that is deeper still. 

In the first stanza the Spirit is the source of light and radiance, the Creator-Spirit whose energy gives birth to all life.  But he is also ‘Father of the poor', the generous giver of all that is good.  This softens the hardness of the image of brilliant yet impersonal light into a kind, personal deity who is gentle with mortals in their need.  His string of beautiful epithets has the effect of making the Spirit irresistible as the object of our hunger and desire: welcome guest, rest in labour, coolness in heat, solace in pain. It's striking that Langton turns away from the dramatic, perhaps ‘obvious', depictions of wind and fire for more tender images: the cool breezes that refresh in the heat, the welcoming hearth suggested by ‘melt the frozen, warm the chill'. It’s a very equable, well-tempered spirituality with none of the overheated rhetoric of the ‘fire of love' that is in danger of losing its currency through endless repetition. It’s what it means to call the Spirit Consolator: ‘Come, of comforters the best', the word used in the upper room when Jesus speaks about going away and sending the Holy Spirit. The poet recognises that the Greek word Paraclete can mean so many different things: comforter, consoler, encourager, strengthener, helper, counsellor, advocate.  It is one of the richest words in the gospels. 

The third stanza returns to the theme of light: O lux beatissima, ‘O most blessed light'.  The thought picks up the movement of the first verse from the light of God's being to lumen cordium, the inward illumination of God's faithful people through the Spirit.  For human beings owe everything to this light within, as the Latin makes clear.  Without it, without this heavenly light to redeem us and make us new, we are nothing.  So the next stanza becomes a prayer that the Spirit may do a divine work in us: healing and forgiving, imparting life and goodness, ruling and guiding us wayward souls in the path of holiness, melting and warming our cold hearts into loving God.  And in the final verse we reach that fourfold prayer that beseeches the Spirit to give what we who confess Jesus Christ need: the reward of virtue, a happy death, and salvation at our journey's end.  

The last word of the hymn is the clue to all of it, for it's to that word that the whole poem has been leading.  Gaudium, ‘joy', ‘happiness', ‘contentment'.  Each word at the end of every third line ends with ium.  You sense that gaudium was where Langton began, and that he needed nine other words to rhyme with it: solacium, fidelium, and in the last verse the wonderful seven-fold word septenarium.  The prophet Isaiah enumerates them in his vision of the coming Messiah who will embody them: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, the fear of the Lord.  

But gaudium embraces them all, for these joyful virtues make us happy in the profoundest sense of that word: if we want lasting joy, then only the Holy Spirit can bestow it.  Only the Paraclete can answer our longing for fulfilment, our hunger to be happy.  We may look for it elsewhere, and do.  But it’s a false trail that turns us back into ourselves.  Only in God's Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life, will we find lasting satisfaction and contentment.  Only in the very heart of God will we find this healer of wounds, this light divine, this shelter from storm and heat, this fount of goodness, this kindest and best of comforters.

When we pray “thy kingdom come!” as we have done in these days between Ascension and Pentecost, all this is what we have been praying for, life as it is transformed by the gift of the Paraclete - in our world, our society, our churches and ourselves. On the Monday after Whitsunday, ordinary time begins. What are days for? To feel after God and find him, then to live in the light of that renewed vision of human life as we glimpse when we are touched by the Spirit of God. What better words to inspire such a vision than this ancient and beautiful hymn we call the Golden Sequence?

******

*Here is the text of the hymn.

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come,
and from thy celestial home
shed a ray of light divine!
Come, thou Father of the poor!
Come, thou Source of all our store!
Come, within our bosoms shine!

Thou, of comforters the best;
thou, the soul's most welcome guest;
sweet refreshment here below;
in our labor, rest most sweet;
grateful coolness in the heat;
solace in the midst of woe.

O most blessèd Light divine,
shine within these hearts of thine,
and our inmost being fill!
Where thou art not, man hath naught,
nothing good in deed or thought,
nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
on our dryness pour thy dew;
wash the stains of guilt away;
bend the stubborn heart and will;
melt the frozen, warm the chill;
guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore
and confess thee, evermore
in thy sevenfold gift descend;
give them virtue's sure reward
give them thy salvation, Lord;
give them joys that never end.


Based on a sermon given in Durham Cathedral.

40 Days and 40 Nights: ordeal or opportunity?

 We've now passed a small milestone on the EU referendum countdown. It's just 40 days and 40  nights till we cast our vote in the biggest political decision any of us are likely to make in our lifetime. Will they be an ordeal, or an opportunity?

It's a number rich in symbolism for Jewish and Christian believers. Let's start with the Hebrew Bible. 40 days and nights was the length of time Moses spent on the mountain when God made a binding covenant with his people. It was a period of preparation, of seeking wisdom and deepening understanding, days of awe when an unknown future awaited and faith was sorely tested.

I've likened this country's relationship to the European Union to the biblical covenant, for strictly speaking, that's what a treaty is - a solemn, binding relationship in which undertakings are made and promises given. It's always important to prepare properly for covenant making and covenant renewing. These days before the vote are an opportunity to do just that: take time to prepare thoroughly for the decision we make. It takes time, patience and often a lot of struggle to do this well. Moses knew that. But we may have to learn it in a fresh way this year. To leap into a momentous decision without taking the trouble to understand what it may mean would be irresponsible. 

40 days was also the length of time Jesus spent in the wilderness at the outset of his work. The first three gospels all agree that it was a vitally formative time for him as he embarked on his ministry: to seek solitude in a fierce landscape, lay himself open to testing and ordeal, get to know himself in a new way, probe the mysterious purpose of the God he knew as Father, and emerge strengthened to encounter whatever lay before him. We commemorate these 40 days in the season known as Lent. Popularly, it's a time to "give things up" in memory of Jesus' desert ordeal. Fasting is certainly a central aspect of Christian spirituality, even if it's not nowadays practised as it used to be. But at its heart, Lent means preparing for Easter and celebrating the Lord's Passover. 

These coming 40 days are calling us to a tough journey. Discipline and hard work come into things if we are serious about doing the "work" I mentioned earlier: pondering the issues surrounding our EU membership, engaging with the debate in a serious way, listening carefully to all sides of the argument and weighing things up. We may feel that at times this aspect of the preparation process is being increasingly submerged by the rising babble of Babel-noise where attentive listening, thoughtful discernment are surely vital to an intelligent well informed decision. Perhaps we all need to be a bit more Lenten in our approach and turn the volume down so that we can contemplate the issues with equanimity, make sound judgments, hear the still small voice of conscience and of God.

Finally, 40 days marks the period of time beginning on Easter Day when Jesus revealed himself to his followers as having been raised from death. It ends with Ascension Day when according to the New Testament story, he was taken from this world no longer to be physically present among humanity. Strictly, Eastertide lasts 50 days rather than 40 because its culmination lies in the gift of the Holy Spirit to humanity, whose advent we celebrate this coming Sunday of Pentecost. But the 40 days of the risen Christ's Easter presence among his disciples is still a significant period. 

So the coming 40 days could be for us all a time of what we might call resurrection. It's a metaphor in this context but it may be a helpful one. It could be an opportunity to "rise" above self concern and obsession about our own fortunes in the referendum debate, and start to think seriously about others and their needs. I've written on this blog about how we should be thinking about the "common good" of all the peoples of continent, not just "what's best for Britain". We need to think globally about the UK's and Europe's place in the world, and what we, in partnership with the nations of the EU can bring to it in terms of peace, justice, security, good international relations and our care for our planet. Through these neighbourly concerns we would find ourselves "rising" above our deadening obsession with self-concern. Resurrection can be an image of transcending our limitations and turning our faces outwards in justice and in love.

I am writing in analogies, of course. 40 days and 40 nights represent a symbolic period. But perhaps this threshold, coming as it does around the time of Pentecost when we seek the wisdom and charity of the Spirit, can give us pause to think about the journey we are making. Will it be a time of thoughtful, disciplined preparation during which we learn and grow? Will it be a time to renounce self-serving arguments in favour of enlightened self-interest that is informed by the Spirit of God and embraces the concerns of others? Will it be a time to "rise" above ourselves and think in a truly outward-facing global way? 

Will these coming days be Sinai, Lent or Easter? How wonderful if they could be all three!