THANK God for church organists who have the gift and skill of transposition! So many great hymns are set in keys that most worshippers can’t manage; but then along comes an organist who sees the problem, transposes the hymn down to a reachable key, and then — behold! — the whole church is singing again, and not just the choir.

Transposition itself is a beautiful and mysterious thing and, therefore, a compelling metaphor for much more than itself. In one sense, transposition changes all the original notes in a piece and so makes it new; but, in another sense, it changes nothing: it preserves everything that made the original music in the first place. It preserves tempo and melody, the intervals between the notes remain constant, all the harmonies and possibilities of new harmony are preserved — and more than preserved; for the new key makes them available to those for whom they were previously out of reach, out of range.

This is why George Herbert, himself such a lover and practitioner of music, reached for transposition as a metaphor for prayer in that mysterious line from his poem “Prayer”: “The six-days world transposing in an hour.”

“The six-days world” refers not only to the whole world that God made in the six days of creation, but also to “the six-days world” that is our working week, the week past, whose memory and impact we bring into church with us, and the week to come, for which our Sunday worship is preparing and reorientating us

So, Herbert offers the insight that prayer itself is a kind of transposition: that everyday experiences that have been somehow unmanageable for us, out of our range, might be transposed as we pray through them, accommodated within our range. For Herbert, prayer does not ignore “the six-days world”, the constant cycles of unnerving news, the noise and pain and clamour of daily life, but, rather, seeks to transpose that dissonance into the key of love — a transposition, perhaps, from a minor to a major.

As I worked on a poem about this phrase of Herbert’s, I realised that I was articulating something that I had felt for a long time about the damaging and depressing effect of barrages of bad news, unprayed through, accumulating as a kind of cacophony in the mind. We need the gift of transposition, and the power to hear, however tiny it might seem, the eternal tuning fork that sounds Christ’s love in the midst of things. If you have been as disturbed and distressed, as I have, by the news in recent days, I hope this sonnet will help.

The six-days world transposing in an hour 

Twenty-four seven in “the six-days world”,
In endless cycles of unnerving news,
Relentlessly our restless hurts are hurled
Through empty cyber-space. Is there no muse
To make of all that pain an elegy,
Or in those waves of white noise to discern
Christ’s inner cantus firmus, that deep tone
That might give rise at last to harmony? 

We may not seal it off or drown it out,
Nor close our hearts down in the hour of prayer,
But, listening through dissonance and doubt,
Wait in the space between, until we hear
A change of key, a secret chord disclosed,
A kind of tune, and all the world transposed.