Tag Archives: Exultet

Stories That Save Us: Performing Scripture as an Act of Resistance

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Biblical stories can be retold in many ways with a variety of media. This is part of The Prodigal Son parable in an elaborate and moving installation by Alexander Sokurov at the Venice Biennale in 2019. (Photo by the author)

This is the third in a series of posts responding to the alarming events in Minneapolis. It may be the most arcane, of interest only to worship planners and storytellers. I usually try to write posts of more general interest, but my long experience as a liturgical creative and biblical storyteller impels me to set this down, for what it’s worth, as a small personal contribution to the ongoing efforts of the faithful to resist public malice and hold fast to the good with all the means at our disposal.

In evil times such as these, how can churches be faithful to the Baptismal Covenant to “persevere in resisting evil … seek and serve Christ in all persons … strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being”? In recent weeks, we have seen many clergy and laity adding their voices and bodies to the resistance against tyranny and cruelty in Minneapolis, and to the increasingly dangerous work of loving our neighbor and protecting the vulnerable.

As a longtime liturgist, I find myself wondering how—and to what degree—our worship gatherings, in addition to our witness in the public square, might themselves be responsive to what is happening around us—and inside us—during America’s current authoritarian nightmare. Prayer and preaching are two vital ways, and I have given some striking examples in my two previous posts, White House Brutality (prayer as a “refusal to consent to an unredeemed world … It breaks the silence, awakens the passive, and cultivates action, both human and divine.”) and Murder in Minneapolis (featuring one priest’s prophetic sermon, forged in the crucible of tyranny and protest).

Singing is also a powerful weapon against evil and its sad progeny—discouragement, fear and despair. It’s been said that the Civil Rights movement succeeded in part because it had a great soundtrack. Its stirring adaptations of black spirituals, sung not only in the marches but also in the jails, kept voices high and spirits strong. As they say, the people united will never be defeated. And nothing unites like communal singing. The resistance to American fascism is taking this to heart as collective song becomes once again a vital part of public protests.

Prayer, preaching and singing are all powerful ways to say yes to God and no to evil. And to that list I would add the telling of our sacred stories. Creative engagement with Scripture deserves equal attention as a means to lift up our hearts and shine the light of hope against the darkness.  Week after week, year after year, Christians tell formative stories of sin and redemption, strife and reconciliation, despair and hope, losing and finding, oppression and liberation, death and resurrection. Then the preacher strives to connect those biblical stories with our own lives and times. But what if we were to make those connections not just in our homiletic reflections following the stories, but in the storytelling act itself?

As a young priest in Los Angeles during the Vietnam War, I staged a dramatized version of Jesus’ parable of the Unforgiving Debtor for an experimental eucharist. The man whose debt was very small was a draft resister, thrown into prison by an angry creditor dressed as Uncle Sam. That creditor was then reminded of the immensity of his own debt, illustrated by projected images of the atrocious violence in Southeast Asia.

Such a pointed retelling of Scripture might be too edgy for typical Sunday worship, but there are times when biblical stories really want to be heard in fresh and compelling ways. Holy Week 2026 can be a great opportunity to do that. How might worship planners think creatively about the Paschal journey from death to life in the context of our current experience of state-sponsored hate and violence?

The next No Kings march is scheduled for March 28, the day before Palm Sunday. How will it feel to reenact Jesus’ provocative entry into Jerusalem after millions of us will have shouted our own hopeful hosannas in the streets of America? What will be in our hearts on Maundy Thursday when our beautiful feast of loving one another concludes with the arrest our Lord by armed thugs? And when we come to the foot of the cross, will we see the God who not only shares our present suffering but also transforms it, making a Way where there is no way?

I love the traditional Scriptural texts for the Holy Week rites which take us on the Paschal journey from death into life. As containers for all the thoughts and feelings we bring to that journey, especially in times of immense public distress, they need no inventive retelling. They will be heard in fresh ways simply by virtue of what is in our minds and in our hearts throughout Holy Week 2026.

But when the sun goes down on Holy Saturday, and the Great Vigil of Easter begins to transport us from the world of sin and death into the realm of light and life, the world of the past is gone, and it is time to let imagination flourish, that we may find our own struggles and hopes vividly enacted in the performance of biblical narratives.

At the Easter Vigil, which I take to be the molten core of Christian worship, it is critical to experience those stories as if they are happening to us. We need to feel ourselves delivered from the flood of chaos and liberated from bondage to the powers-that-be. The dry bones of our damaged hopes need to rise again and inhale the breath of the Spirit. As the ancient Exultet chant declares at the outset of the liturgy,

How holy is this night, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. It restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to those who mourn. It casts out pride and hatred, and brings peace and concord.

What does it take to do the Vigil stories justice? Well, it takes time and effort, a creative team, prayerful engagement with the stories, and openness to the Holy Spirit. Before offering a few tips for your own Vigil storytelling, let me give some examples from a Vigil I curated last year, as described in my April 2025 blog post, “For God so loved our stories”—Tales from the Easter Vigil:

The author as one of the dancers in the Red Sea story at the Easter Vigil 2025.

The Red Sea: Noirish projected images (from Bela Tarr’s bleak film, Werckmeister Harmonies) show anonymous figures shuffling through an imprisoning corridor, while dancers on the stage express the experience of oppression with their bodies. An offstage narrator explains:

Three thousand years ago, in the land of Egypt,
there were people who had no name.
They were the faceless many,
exploited by the powerful,
forgotten by the privileged: slaves, immigrants, the poor,
the homeless, the vulnerable, the invisible, the outcast.

Then dismissive terms for the oppressed appear on the screen in stark animated graphics: Not like us … worthless … horrible people … trash … less than human. More images of “the faceless many” are shown as the dancers continue, until an offstage choir sings a verse of “Go down, Moses.”

Suddenly, the divine breaks into this dark world: the screen flashes red, and we see the words from Psalm 68 that are always used in Orthodox Paschal liturgies:

Let God arise!
Let the foes of Love be scattered!
Let the friends of justice be joyful!

Then a song from the Civil Rights movement fills the room: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle … Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long, we must be free.” The dancers’ bodies shift from oppression to liberation, while the screen shows powerful footage of crowds on the march for justice. As we hear a dub track with a repeated phrase by Martin Luther King, Jr.(“We cannot walk alone!”), the dancers begin their own march across the stage to the “Red Sea,” where they halt while the narrator declares:

This too is a creation story:
On this day, God brought a new people into existence.
On this day, God became known as the One who delivers the oppressed,
the One who remembers the forgotten and saves the lost ,
the One who opens the Way through the Sea of Impossibility,
leading us beyond the chaos and the darkness into the Light.
When the world says No, the power of God is YES!

As the dancers, joined by a small crowd of others, begin to cross the Sea, the choir (offstage) sings Pepper Choplin’s moving anthem, “We are not alone, God is with us …” After the song, a bidding to prayer begins:

Pray now for the conscience and courage
to renounce our own complicity
in the workings of violence, privilege and oppression.
Pray in solidarity with all who are despised, rejected,
exploited, abused, and oppressed.
Pray for the day of liberation and salvation.

The Fiery Furnace: This story from the Book of Daniel is borrowed from the Orthodox lectionary for the Paschal Vigil, and its humor (yes, the Bible can be funny) provides some comic relief after the Red Sea. The story’s mischievous mockery of a vain and cruel king, outwitted in the end by divine intention, feels quite timely. The idol shown on the screen is a golden iPhone, which will be destroyed by a cartoon explosion from Looney Tunes. The humorously tedious repetition of the instruments signaling everyone to bow is performed with the following (admittedly unbiblical) instruments: bodhran, bicycle horn, slide whistle, chimes, train whistle, and Chinese wind gong. The Song of the three “young men” in the furnace is recited by three women in an abbreviated rap version. At the end, the cast of twelve exit happily, singing the old Shape Note chorus, “Babylon is fallen, to rise no more!”

Then we give thanks “for the saints who refuse to bow down to the illusions and idolatries of this world” and pray for “the grace and courage to follow their example, resisting every evil, and entrusting our lives wholeheartedly to the Love who loves us.”

Valley of Dry Bones: Unlike the embellished retellings of the other stories, this one sticks closely to the biblical text, but is delivered in a storytelling mode by a single teller (me) in a spooky atmosphere of dim blue light. The voice of God is a college student on a high ladder. The sound of the bones joining together is made by an Indonesian unklung (8 bamboo rattles tuned to different pitches). When the story describes the breath coming into the lifeless figures sprawled across the valley, I get everyone in the assembly to inhale and exhale audibly a few times so that we can feel and hear the spirit-breath entering all of us. Then I move among them, bidding one after another to rise until everyone is standing, completing the story with their own bodies: the risen assembly itself becomes a visible sign of hope reborn.

Easter Vigil 2025 at St. Barnabas, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Many churches don’t do the Easter Vigil, and of those that do, all too few give it proper attention as the richest and most luminous liturgy of the entire year. It requires a lot of preparation, effort and energy at the end of a very labor-intensive week. It also involves a long-term project of educating a congregation to understand the Vigil as the preeminent Easter rite.

You can celebrate the Resurrection gloriously on Sunday morning, but if you want to experience Resurrection in a kind of Christian dreamtime, come to the Vigil as well. And if you are in a community which already knows the unique power of the Vigil experience, I encourage you to explore the potential of its stories to empower our bodies and restore our souls in this dark and dangerous age.

If you are not part of a community that does the Easter Vigil, I thank you for reading this far anyway. But if you are in a position to shape a creative Vigil, here are some suggestions to get you started.

You may want to begin with just one or two stories. Find the creatives in your community and form a team to study the texts and discern what they are trying to say now. And think about the connections they make with our lives and our society. For example, footage from the Minneapolis protests could be part of the Red Sea saga, or the king’s ruffians throwing their victims into the fiery furnace could be dressed like ICE agents.

Decide for each story whether to use simple storytelling (one or more voices, scripted or retelling freely) or more theatrical means (scripts, actors, visual design, visual media, singing, musical score, sound effects, etc.). Think about ways to involve children (e.g., animals on the ark, or part of the Red Sea march to freedom) and even the whole assembly, through singing or collective reading, like a Greek chorus, of projected words on a screen. Involving as many people as possible in creating and performing the stories bolsters both attendance and enthusiasm. Play with ideas, images and words until the stories take shape. Then provide sufficient time for learning lines and rehearsals.

Ideally, the Story Space will be separate from the worship space. A parish hall is usually more flexible than a church interior in terms of seating and a stage area. If there is a screen or a large white wall, large images can be projected. Strings of party lights on a dimmer and LED spotlights with variable colors are easy ways to restrict light to the stage area and establish the mood for each story. The other advantage of a separate Story Space is that a liturgy conducted in a sequence of spatial locations underscores the Vigil as a journey—from the New Fire outside to the Story Space to the font to the altar and finally back into the world.

And let each story be followed by an appropriate song (I use both folk music and contemporary songwriters to fit the relaxed spirit of “tales around the sacred campfire,” in contrast to the chant and hymnody in the church portion of the liturgy). Then comes a bidding to prayer, summarizing the themes of the particular story.

Let me close with the bidding I wrote to follow The Valley of Dry Bones. It expresses everything I want to say about the liberating power of our stories to resist evil, proclaim hope, and lift up our hearts:

Dear People of God: There are those who tell our story as a history of defeats and diminishments, a narrative of dashed hopes and inconsolable griefs. But tonight we tell a different story, a story that inhales God’s own breath and sings alleluia even at the grave. By your baptism, you have been entrusted with this story, to live out its great YES against every cry of defeat.

Psalm 68:3, one of the texts projected in the background of the Red Sea story.




“For God so loved our stories” — Tales from the Easter Vigil

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Marc Chagall, Noah and the Rainbow (1961-66)

How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined …

— The Exultet [i]

The Easter Vigil is the molten core of Christian worship: a multisensory passage from darkness to light, death to life. With fire and water, stories and prayers, hymns and chants, candles and incense, bread and wine, it is the most luminous and wondrous of liturgies. The morning rites of Easter Sunday celebrate Resurrection, but the Easter Vigil on the night before feels almost like Resurrection itself. When it’s over, you come away a little dazed, wondering “oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?” [ii]

After the New Fire is lit at sunset on Holy Saturday, one of the first things that happens at the Easter Vigil is the recitation of narratives and prophetic texts [iii] from the Hebrew Scriptures, beginning with the Creation story (Genesis 1:1—2:4a). In most churches, the texts are read from a lectern, but for nearly four decades, in a dozen different West Coast churches, I have curated the performance of the Vigil lectionary using drama, storytellers, music and projected media.

There’s nothing wrong with a well-read passage of canonical text—I’m quite fond of a good reading by a practiced and thoughtful voice—but sometimes a telling or dramatization can reach places which a reading cannot. Instead of a reader as a passive, transparent window for a sacred text to pass through without inflection or distortion, a teller embodies the text in breath, intonation, gesture and movement, making it alive and present and urgent in the moment of its speaking. And a dramatization can make a familiar story be freshly encountered. A story told or performed rather than read has a unique kind of authority, coming from the heart instead of a book.

The Easter Vigil is the Christian dreamtime, and we try to engage its lectionary accordingly. Biblical stories aren’t just memories about the past. They are living words meant to guide and shape our own responses to the present. As we become steeped in the stories, they begin to dwell in us, and we in them.

When we hear of the world drowning in its own evil, while a faithful remnant tries to navigate the sea of chaos, we recognize ourselves aboard the ark. When we hear of an evil regime trying to crush the ones who are “not like us,” the deliverance of the oppressed at the Red Sea encourages our own struggle to break free of the dark. When we hear of dry bones resurrected by divine breath, our own dead hopes begin to breathe again.  

In the darkest days of the Second World War, W. H. Auden wrote a “Christmas Oratorio” [iv] which had no illusions about the world into which God was made flesh:

The evil and the armed draw near;
The weather smells of their hate
And the houses smell of our fear …

Such days are upon us again, and we truly need our sacred stories—the ones that remember divine intention and a habitable future—more than ever. At our Episcopal parish of St. Barnabas on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where my wife is the rector, I’ve been developing fresh versions of the stories, listening carefully for whatever they want to say to us in the year of our Lord 2025.

We will begin with a pair of texts projected on a screen after the ancient Exultet is chanted. The first says, For God so loved our stories. This is of course a blend of Elie Wiesel’s “God made man because he loves stories” and John 3:16’s “For God so loved the world …” The theology of Incarnation says that God’s own self entered fully into the human story. And the theology of salvation says that we in turn are meant to participate in the divine story. Both meanings are implied in the preface to our Vigil story time, grounding the performed narratives in the conviction that we can meet God in them.

The second text is a verse from Jeremiah (29:11): For surely I know the purpose I have for you, says the Holy One: plans for peace and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. At a time when our future is in question and hope is stretched thin, God invites us to sit around the Paschal fire and let the stories of promise speak to our hearts once more.

Here is how the telling will go at this year’s Paschal fire:

The Creation: After the voice of e.e. cummings says, “When God decided to invent everything, he took one breath bigger than a circus tent, and everything began,” a big screen lights up with spectacular footage of the natural world, taking us through the first seven days in seven minutes. In response, the congregation is urged “to pray fervently for all the people of the earth, and for ourselves, that we may repent of our careless and arrogant abuse of creation, and find our proper and constructive place within its fragile and balanced harmonies.”

The Flood: Four people at a table engage in Bible study. Some of them resist the story (“Why do we even tell this story? No one wants to believe in an angry God” … “In the beginning, God says everything’s so great. Then suddenly he wants to call the whole thing off?”). Others see a kind of learning going on—God learning to live with an imperfect creation. Then somebody argues that the story is not really about God’s choices or God’s emotional life. It’s about the ark.

“The people who first told this story were just like us. They were adrift in a sea of chaos. Everything they had hoped and believed was underwater, washed away in the blink of an eye, and they wanted to know if they still had a future.”

As the discussion winds down, someone says, “Well, I’d better go feed the animals.” Wild waves appear on the screen behind them. It turns out that they have been on their own ark the whole time. The story they were discussing was happening to them. That’s often true of Bible stories.

The exhortations to prayer that follow each story reiterate the themes of the narrative. After The Flood, the Presider reminds the assembly that “God remains deeply committed to our story … God will not forget us, though we be sinking in a sea of chaos.” And the Deacon bids us pray for victims of natural disasters, all whose lives are beset by chaos, those drowning in the dark waters of doubt and fear, and those who cling to the precious ark of faith.

The Red Sea:

Noirish images of anonymous figures (from a bleak Hungarian film) shuffle through an imprisoning corridor on the screen, while three dancers on the stage express the experience of oppression with their bodies. A narrator explains:

Three thousand years ago, in the land of Egypt,
there were people who had no name.
They were the faceless many,
exploited by the powerful,
forgotten by the privileged: slaves, immigrants, the poor,
the homeless, the vulnerable, the invisible, the outcast.

Then dismissive terms for the oppressed appear on the screen in stark animated graphics: Not like us … worthless … horrible people … trash … less than human. More images of “the faceless many” are shown as the dancers writhe in despair and an offstage choir sings a verse of “Go down, Moses.”

Suddenly, the divine breaks into this dark world: the screen flashes red, and we see the words from Psalm 68 that are always used in Orthodox Paschal liturgies:

Let God arise!
Let the foes of Love be scattered!
Let the friends of justice be joyful!

Then we hear a verse of a Civil Rights song: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle … Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long, we must be free.” The dancers’ bodies shift from oppression to liberation, while the screen shows powerful footage of crowds on the march for justice. As we hear a repeating loop of Martin Luther King saying “We cannot walk alone,” the dancers begin their own march across the stage to the “Red Sea,” where they halt while the narrator declares:

This too is a creation story:
On this day, God brought a new people into existence.
On this day, God became known as the One who delivers the oppressed,
the One who remembers the forgotten and saves the lost ,
the One who opens the Way through the Sea of Impossibility,
leading us beyond the chaos and the darkness into the Light.
When the world says No, the power of God is YES!

As the dancers begin to cross the Sea, the choir sings, “We are not alone, God is with us …”
After the song, the bidding to prayer begins:

Pray now for the conscience and courage
to renounce our own complicity
in the workings of violence, privilege and oppression.
Pray in solidarity with all who are despised, rejected,
exploited, abused, and oppressed.
Pray for the day of liberation and salvation.

The Fiery Furnace: This story from the Book of Daniel is borrowed from the Orthodox lectionary for the Paschal Vigil, and its humor (yes, the Bible can be funny) provides some comic relief after the Red Sea. The story’s mischievous mockery of a vain and cruel king, outwitted in the end by divine intention, feels quite timely. The idol shown on the screen is a golden iPhone, which will be destroyed by a cartoon explosion from Looney Tunes. The humorously tedious repetition of the instruments signaling everyone to bow is performed with the following (admittedly unbiblical) instruments: bodhran, bicycle horn, slide whistle, chimes, train whistle, and Chinese wind gong. The Song of the three “young men” in the furnace is recited by three women in an abbreviated rap version. At the end, the cast of twelve exit happily, singing the old Shape Note chorus, “Babylon is fallen, to rise no more!”

The Fall of Babylon, Tapestry of the Apocalypse, Angers, France (1377-1382).

Then we give thanks “for the saints who refuse to bow down to the illusions and idolatries of this world” and pray for “the grace and courage to follow their example, resisting every evil, and entrusting our lives wholeheartedly to the Love who loves us.”

Valley of Dry Bones: Unlike the embellished retellings of the other stories, this one sticks closely to the biblical text, but is delivered in a storytelling mode by a single teller (me) in a spooky atmosphere of dim blue light. The voice of God is a college student on a high ladder. The sound of the bones joining together is made by an Indonesian unklung (8 bamboo rattles tuned to different pitches). When the story describes the breath coming into the lifeless figures sprawled across the valley, I get everyone in the assembly to inhale and exhale audibly a few times so that we can hear the spirit-breath entering our own bodies. Then I move among them, bidding one after another to rise until everyone is standing, completing the story with their own bodies: the risen assembly itself becomes a visible sign of hope reborn.

Then the Presider says,

Dear People of God: There are those who tell our story as a history of defeats and diminishments, a narrative of dashed hopes and inconsolable griefs. But tonight we tell a different story, a story that inhales God’s own breath and sings alleluia even at the grave. By your baptism, you have been entrusted with this story, to live out its great YES against every cry of defeat.

And then, with our sacred stories of faith and hope freshly written on our hearts, we will process from the Story Space to the church for the Renewal of Baptismal vows, followed by the festive first eucharist of Easter, replete with Alleluias. And God willing, by the time it’s all done, none of us will be the same.

May all of you who make the Paschal journey this weekend come to “see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by the One through whom all things were made, our Savior Jesus Christ.” [v]

Resurrection of Christ, Brittany (c. 1425-1430).


All liturgical texts, unless otherwise cited, are by the author.
The Easter Vigil at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church (Bainbridge Island, WA) is on April 19, 2025.

[i] The Exultet (“rejoice”) is a chanted praise sung before the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. Dating back to the 7th or 8th century, it is one of the most beautiful chants in the western rite, and its text is packed with striking images and metaphors of Christ’s passage through death to resurrection, and its implications for our own salvation. Singing it at the Vigil has been one of my greatest priestly joys over the years.

[ii] The line is taken from Mary Oliver’s poem, “At Blackwater Pond.”

[iii] The Vigil lectionary is not all stories. Beautiful texts from Isaiah, Baruch, Ezekiel, and Zephaniah are options as well. During the “Story Time” of the Vigil, we stick to the narratives. The non-narrative texts are then recited by readers along the way between the Story Space and the church, so that the people process through a corridor of continuous audible texts on their way to the font of rebirth.  

[iv] W. H. Auden began writing For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio in the autumn of 1941. It was published in September, 1944). Dark times indeed.

[v] Quoted from the collect (prayer) that concludes the Old Testament readings in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

“Though the whole world turn to coal”—George Herbert’s “Virtue”

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“Only a sweet and virtuous soul, / Like season’d timber, never gives …”

Today is the feast day of George Herbert (1593-1633), one of my favorite poets. It is fitting that we remember him at the beginning of Lent, for his poems are imbued with the season’s themes of repentance and renewal. He was a student of what the Book of Common Prayer calls our “unruly wills and affections,” and could be brutally honest about his own need for divine grace. 

I have posted reflections on his life and work before. In Heart Work and Heaven Work (2016), I wrote: 

The Herbert whom we meet in his poems is a person very much in process: unfinished, imperfect, always aspiring to something higher. He cared deeply about formation and growth – his own as well as that of his congregation. As poet and priest he used all possible art to move those with ears to hear.

And in “Flie with angels, fall with dust”—Appreciating George Herbert (2019), I celebrated the way he perceived the spiritual richness of the world:

Herbert’s spiritual environment seems so alive with correspondences between visible things and deeper, invisible realities. The Mystery of the world is met in the humblest of circumstances. The burning bush flashes through the surface of the ordinary. Everyday phenomena are saturated with significance.

This year let us honor “the holy Mr. Herbert” (as his parishioners called him) by examining a single poem. Perhaps we will make this an annual tradition on February 27. For today, the poem is “Virtue.”

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, 
The bridal of the earth and sky; 
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, 
For thou must die. 

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave 
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; 
Thy root is ever in its grave, 
And thou must die. 

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, 
A box where sweets compacted lie; 
My music shows ye have your closes, 
And all must die. 

Only a sweet and virtuous soul, 
Like season’d timber, never gives; 
But though the whole world turn to coal, 
Then chiefly lives. 

“Sweet rose … thy root is ever in its grave.”

The poem has been called “one of the purest lyrics in the language.” [i] The predominance of one-syllable words exemplifies its “fine poetic thrift.” [ii]  The sixteen short lines, divided into four quatrains, overflow—almost miraculously—with diverse images, references and meanings. For example, “The bridal [wedding] of the earth and sky“ invokes the Easter Vigil’s Exultet: How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined. “Thy root is ever in its grave” describes the paradox of mortal life with stunning brevity: even at our liveliest, we are dying creatures. Or as we say on Ash Wednesday: Remember that you are dust. 

The poem’s opening line establishes rhythmic beat of successive iambs (short-long): “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright.” This pattern is more or less followed in the first three lines of the first three quatrains, but each fourth line slams on the brakes with its sober message of mortality, delivered in a series of strong beats like the striking of a drum or the tolling of a bell: For thou must die … And thou must die … And all must die.

Although an apocalyptic wisdom throughout the poem reminds us that days end, flowers wither, seasons pass and worlds burn (“turn to [char]coal”), the first three quatrains seem more celebratory than melancholy. The word “sweet” occurs six times. The inevitable terminations of temporal existence need not diminish whatever pleasures and joys we experience in the moment. However, as the poem’s conclusion insists, the “soul”—our innermost self or enduring identity—can partake of something deeper and more lasting, an essential and enduring stability at its core.  

The governing images of the final quatrain, “season’d timber” and “turned to coal,” each call up a constellation of meanings. Timber suggests both the cedars of Lebanon and the cross. And the seasoning of wood represents the testing of the soul, which, by God’s grace, “never gives”—never gives in, never gives up. As Herbert scholar John Drury explains, “Timber is seasoned by being left to dehydrate out of doors undercover for several years, enduring, like the soul, the extremes of weather and the seasons. After that it is stable and strong.” [iii]

But wood is flammable, and the doomsday image of a world-ending fire takes us to the brink of ancient fears of annihilation. But Herbert deftly steers us instead into a place of hope and promise. Wood tested by fire can become a glowing ember, an image of liveliness. Likewise can the tested soul become “a quick [living] coal / of mortall fire,” as Herbert says in another poem, “Employment (II).” And even should the world’s last embers cool and turn to dust, the soul which belongs to God will “chiefly” live. “Chiefly” means particularly, or mostly, but it may also reference Christ, the Chief of history, in whom all are made alive.

Unlike the last line of the first three quatrains, with their percussive stresses hammering out our doom, the stresses of the very last line, reduced from four to three, seem gentler and, aided by the use of a two-syllable word, more lilting: “Then chief-ly lives.” Try reading just the fourth line of each quatrain in succession, and notice the difference in tone at the last.

As it always is with God, life has the last word.

[i] Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Johns Hopkins, 1968), cited in Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81. I am indebebted to Professor Wilcox for her richly annotated collection of Herbert’s English poems, each of which also includes summaries of the best Herbert criticism over the years. Since his poetry can be difficult and many of his terms archaic, her book is indispensable.

[ii] John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 59. A must-read if you want to go deeper.

[iii] Ibid., 59.