Read: Genesis 1:1-2:3

God saw everything that he had made. (1:31)

My mother used to sing alto; some of her music still sits by my piano. My soprano aunt, though in a different league (she was a professional singer, and a very fine one), would have found Mum’s songs difficult, unless they had been transposed to a higher key to suit her higher voice.

In intercession—praying for people and situations and projects—we regularly need to do some transposing. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember when I last spent a whole hour in intercessory prayer for God’s world. An hour, did I say? Only an hour? For a world so big, so complex, that even in the condensed picture of its making that God gave us in Genesis 1, he takes six days to portray it all? And when beyond that we think of its billions of people, let alone the eons of time and the vastness of space in which they are just one tiny phenomenon! Charles Wesley might have exclaimed in respect of the wonders of creation as he did about the wonders of the gospel, “Where shall my wondering soul begin?”

From this point of view, I find Herbert’s next definition of prayer an exhilarating challenge: “The six-days-world transposing in an hour.” To use quite a different metaphor, can you fit a gallon of water into a pint jar? Oh, I think so. Under his guidance we learn how to transpose God’s unimaginable Opus 1 into manageable terms, in a singable key.

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:

Coach me in my part in this chorus of prayer.

Author: Michael Wilcock

 

https://woh.org/