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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

25 October 2024

Malcolm Guite turns again to Herbert’s poem ‘Prayer’ and learns about breathing

GEORGE HERBERT makes a good travelling companion. You can tuck R. S. Thomas’s A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse, that handy little Faber paperback, into your jacket pocket, and Herbert is there when you need him: in airport lobbies when you are waiting for a delayed plane; in anonymous hotel rooms, where you can’t turn off the loud air-conditioning; in all the shallow places where you’re crying out for a little depth.

In just such a room now, I find myself turning again to his rich poem “Prayer”, and dwelling again on just one line, which is a subtle meditation on breathing: “God’s breath in man returning to his birth.”

There is a beautiful pairing and playing with the words breath and birth, eschewing the clichéd rhyming of breath and death; but there is much more than that at play in this single line. There is an open ambiguity: is prayer God’s breath in us, returning to its birth in God, the Spirit praying within us with groanings too deep to be uttered? Or is it that in prayer, born by the Spirit, we ourselves return to our birth and our beginnings?

Herbert was at Westminster School when Lancelot Andrewes was Dean of Westminster, and he learnt his Latin, Greek, and Hebrew from that great scholar. So he knew that all three languages use a single word to mean both “breath” and “spirit”. “God’s breath in man” evokes that primal image in Genesis of God breathing the breath of life into humanity, the moment of our wakening as living beings, a moment of tender closeness to our maker.

But after that inspiration comes the equally decisive moment of expiration. We have to trace our history through fall and alienation, pain and sin and death, at last, to the foot of the cross where a second Adam, one in whom also the whole of humanity is bound and involved, stretches out his arms to embrace the pain of the world and breathes back to God that gift of life and cries: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!” “And having said this he breathed his last.”

But Herbert’s single line also takes us beyond the cross, to the resurrection and the new breath of life that comes with the sending of the Holy Spirit. St John’s account consciously parallels the first gift of the breath of life in Genesis: “And when he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”

As I draw breath again on my sometimes breathless travels, Herbert reminds me that in the pattern of my breathing itself is the whole story of my salvation. I breathe in and return to my birth, receiving my life from the breath of God; for I breathe in with Adam in the garden of my beginnings. Then I exhale, offering all that needs letting go and redeeming, as I breathe out with the second Adam, with Christ on the cross. Then I inhale once more, in glad acceptance of new life in the Holy Spirit, as I stand with the disciples in that upper room, and the risen Christ breathes into me the breath of heaven.

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