“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.

"Called upon or not, God will be there"

Last week I wrote about sitting on the Areopagus and thinking about St Paul's debate there with the Athenians. I want to return to Greece in this blog. A brief week among its classical antiquities is no more than a taster, but I have to admit that like so many other travellers before me, I've fallen under its spell. I ask myself, how can I never have visited the country before? I'm grateful that I've got there before I die.

If you ask me what the highlight was, I have to pause. How do you compare Athens, Olympia, Epidauros, Mycenae and Delphi? They are all magnificent, all utterly absorbing, all providing not just great beauty but so much food for thought. This includes many of their museums where the artistic heritage of these places is presented and interpreted in fascinating and exemplary ways. But for my wife and me, there was something special about Delphi. Let me try to say why.

 

We visited it on a grey, damp windswept day. It was the tail-end of the Mediterranean mini-cyclone Zorba that landed in Greece the same day that we did. As I wrote last time, for us who live by Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, there's nothing odd about ancient sites in a storm. Indeed, so extraordinary is the site at Delphi on its steep valley-side below Mount Parnassus that the lowering skies only lent it greater dramatic force and sense of place. We stayed the night in the nearby village. It was a new experience to sleep on what felt like a cliff-edge.
 

Delphi was the centre of the Hellenic world, its navel or omphalos. The myth said that Zeus had sent two eagles to fly towards each other from the eastern and western edges of the world. Delphi was where they met. The site was dedicated to Apollo. Here, the prophetess or sibyl Pythia sat on a tripod set above a cleft or "chasm" where vapours emerged out of the ground. Intoxicated by the fumes, she dispensed wisdom to those who consulted her. She was famous for her enigmatic responses. The Lydian king Croesus asked her if he should attack the Persian king Cyrus. The Oracle replied that a great empire would fall if he did. Croesus did not ask which empire, assuming she meant the Persian. Of course it was his own. 

The landscape setting is incomparable. The Via Sacra or pilgrims' way snakes steeply up the hillside through ruins that date back to the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BCE (the fifth was the "golden age" of Pericles' Athens). Highlights include the Temple of Apollo, treasuries built to house the spoils of battle offered to the gods, the Sibyl Rock where the oracle was said to preside, a theatre and right at the top, a stadium. From these heights you look down to the gymnasium and the famous, much-photographed circular Tholos of Athena. The museum houses a memorable display of sculptures, including the legendary Charioteer in bronze, one of the most famous statues from antiquity. (Hadrian is there too, by the way, the Roman emperor who fell in love with Greece and came to Delphi, an unexpected point of contact - in addition to the weather - with our distant Northumberland homeland and its Roman Wall.) 


But it was not for any of these reasons that we were especially touched by Delphi. For me, it was crystallised by a retired school teacher I was talking to about our Greek trip. She is a reader in her local cathedral. She told me she had taken many school groups to Greece and got them performing scenes from Greek drama (did she also mention Shakespeare?) in the ancient theatres they visited. Delphi was one of them. "Of course, the thing about Delphi" she remarked "is that it's a sacred place. Even after all these centuries, you feel something there, something in the stones that remember how mortals once went there to look beyond themselves, commune with the gods and seek their wisdom". I paraphrase but she put into words what I'd been sensing. When I checked it out with my wife, she said she had experienced it too.

She (my wife) is a psychotherapist with a particular interest in Carl Gustav Jung whose influence on analytic practice has been profound. Above the door of his practice in Kusnacht. Switzerland, he carved an inscription: vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. "Whether called upon or not, the god will be there." That saying is attributed to the Delphic oracle, said to be the answer the Spartans got when they consulted her about taking up arms against Athens. Jung elevated it into a universal principle about how urgent it is that humanity seeks a deeper wisdom than is attainable through reason alone. He once said that he had not encountered a problem or question in any of his patients that did not turn out to be religious in origin. The divine, always present in human life even when it is unacknowledged, is the source of hagia sophia, the holy wisdom that alone can grant mortals a new vision of our better selves, the potential we are called to realise if we are to become what we are meant to be - in his language, find individuation.

The Christian question is, of course: who is the deus in that saying, this god who is always present in our midst? This was precisely the matter St Paul addressed on the Areopagus when he observed the dedication on one of the altars he had seen, To an unknown god. I wrote about this last time. Christianity gives a name to this deus, says Paul, and tells us that he is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified and raised from the dead. In him, what is unknown becomes known, the hidden God is disclosed to us. This God invites us to know and to love him and, yes, vocatus atque non vocatus, always find him alive and present among us by the power of Hagia Sophia, his holy and life-giving Spirit.

Delphi bears witness to humanity's long search. It's one more in the long list of places remote from Christian revelation where I've unexpectedly glimpsed "the idea of the holy". In our own parish of Haydon Bridge you can find what is left of a Roman Mithraic temple standing alongside Hadrian's Wall. I quip with the vicar that we are one of very few parishes in rural Northumberland where there is a religious site belonging to another faith community. We shouldn't dismiss the spiritual potency of these places. It's a narrow view of Christianity that limits the ways in which God discloses himself, for there are many names by which he is perceived.

But for us Christians, there is a name that is above every name. Albert Schweitzer wrote at the end of his great book The Quest for the Historical Jesus: "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same words, Follow me! and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is."

Here is Christianity's answer to Delphi, the fulfilment of all that it reaches out for. Here is where our spiritual yearnings and hungers are met; where all our oracles and dreams are transcended; where we find our God-given selves at last.