Read: Romans 8:26-30

The Spirit himself intercedes for us. (v. 26)

Herbert’s second line, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” links his poem to a hymn of Charles Wesley’s, written a hundred years later: “O thou who camest from above / The pure celestial fire to impart / Kindle a flame of sacred love / On the mean altar of my heart; / There let it for thy glory burn, / With inextinguishable blaze, / And, trembling, to its source return / In humble prayer and fervent praise.”

The poem speaks of “God’s breath” returning to his “birth,” or source. So we should ask ourselves not what, but who, is returning. Who is the Breath, or as we might say, the Wind? Who is Wesley’s Fire? We know very well: these are divinely given titles of God the Holy Spirit. Here he is at work interceding “for the saints” (v. 27). We should not picture the Spirit starting from our end and giving the prayers that we have dreamed up a kind of divine boost to get them to heaven. The Scripture is quite explicit: “we do not know” even what to pray for, let alone how to pray for it; our prayers have to come from him before he will take them back to the Father for us. He will emphasize one thing and play down another. He will highlight for us the what, rather than the how or the when. He will remind us that all the answers are already there at the back of the Book!

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:

When I pray, Lord, feed me my lines.

Author: Michael Wilcock

 

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