Few writers have managed to capture both the weight and wonder of prayer. The most beautiful attempt I know of comes in a sonnet written by George Herbert (1593–1633). Before we plunge into this poem together, I’d love for you to let Herbert’s masterpiece wash over you whole:

Prayer (I)

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 tow’r,
     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.

Double-Edged Wonder

I memorized this sonnet five years ago. For half a decade now, these 27 images have been part of my mental furniture, in my soul’s blood. My awareness of prayer will always bear Herbert’s 97-word fingerprint. Still, whenever I return to this poem, I am pulled in two directions.

First, I am moved to wonder whether I’ve ever really prayed before. Have I ever tasted the crumbs from the banquet Herbert lays out? Have I ever been within a mile of this throne room? If this is prayer, have I ever prayed?

Second, I am moved to wonder — full stop. Herbert brings me up short, drops my jaw, makes me marvel. Whatever this something is that he understood, I want in! With his wealth of images and endlessly suggestive phrases, Herbert calls my imagination to wake up to prayer as life with God.

Then, this double-edged wonder moves me to do one thing: pray. If, perhaps, I’ve never really prayed before, and if this thing called prayer is so massive and so mystical and so (dare I say) magical, what sane person could do anything other than dive in headfirst with “Our Father” on his lips? Herbert cracks open the wardrobe door and bids me enter reality — to abandon the fantasy world where prayer is some small private duty I owe to God and step into the real world, the world where prayer is, well, “Prayer (I).”

Recovering Prayer

Friend, do you feel that tension between despairing at your own feeble prayers and staring wide-eyed at Herbert’s portrait? If so, I encourage you to sit there. Soak it in. I imagine Herbert himself felt that tension as he wrote and read his poem. After all, he was no spiritual romantic. He knew despair and delight; he knew how to wrestle with God and how to wait on him. He knew the feeling of praying in an empty room. But he also knew what the Bible says about prayer. He knew feelings do not determine reality. And he knew that the effort to say beautifully is a means of seeing beauty.

So “Prayer (I)” — for both Herbert and us — is a means of recovering, reenchanting, remembering what prayer is; and then, properly astonished, we will pray. If we lay hold of even the outskirts of Herbert’s vision, prayerlessness becomes almost unimaginable.

In the remainder of this article, I want to help kindle your wonder by meditating on a handful of Herbert’s images. The aim here is more playful meditation than definitive exposition. Like admirers in an art gallery, let’s stand before a few images, invite them to lead us, and surrender our own prayer lives to their scrutiny.

‘Angels’ age’

Let’s begin with perhaps Herbert’s oddest phrase: “Angels’ age.” In this poem, Herbert plunders the inarticulate by way of deep imagination, and the limits of language are pressed in this very first line.

So what is Herbert getting at with “Angels’ age”? To begin, prayer is as ancient as angels. Traditionally, the heavenly hosts were considered the first created, rational beings that could communicate with God and, thus, the first to pray (Job 38:4–7). Herbert sounds the unfathomably ancient depths of prayer. Its roots reach back to the dawn of time — to the age of the angels. When we pray, we participate in an activity nigh on as old as creation itself.

But that leads to what is probably Herbert’s main point: personal prayer always participates in something cosmic. Prayer is never an isolated event. The relentless adoration of the celestial ones resonates at the very foundations of the cosmos (Isaiah 6:3–4). The world has hummed with their song-laden praise since God set the doors of the sea (Job 38:4–7). Centuries of chubby cherubs and kitsch art have blighted our imagination when it comes to the heavenly host. Herbert is not so impoverished. For him, prayer is a cosmic affair.

When we pray, we enter into a polyphonic chorus millennia in the making. And we also stride onto a spiritual battlefield. In Revelation 8, John sees an angel mediating the prayers of the saints to God and then hurling them to earth. The result is what one writer calls apocalyptic pyrotechnics — “peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake” (Revelation 8:5). Here is Herbert’s “reversed thunder”! It’s no wonder Paul closes his manifesto on spiritual warfare with prayer (Ephesians 6:18).

Yet more wonderful, prayer participates in cosmic celebration. It is not lost on Herbert that we “have come [now, in this moment] to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22). This angelic party anticipates the wedding feast to come. Prayer joins in that. It is a foretaste, a forefeast, if you will. It is the “Church’s banquet.”

‘Engine against th’ Almighty’

As his lines march on, Herbert does not temper the arresting strangeness of his images but sharpens them until we are left reeling before “Engine against th’ Almighty.” Now Herbert presents prayer as an engine of warfare, a siege weapon, lofting amens against God himself. At best, this is an audacious image; at worst — well, I’m tempted to ask, “Herbert, how dare you?”

We know prayer is a weapon against the foes of God, but a weapon against God himself? That we cringe away from. But not Herbert; his blood ran too bibline for that. He listened to Abraham barter with his Maker (Genesis 18:22–33). He watched Moses issue an ultimatum to the Lord and live (Exodus 33:12–16). He heard Jacob’s bones crack as he wrestled with God and prevailed. The battle cry of engine-prayer is, “I will not let you go until you bless me!” (Genesis 32:22–32), and the artillery launched on high are the promises of the Most High.

If your snap reaction to this line is like mine, perhaps it says more about our small view of prayer than Herbert’s boldness. Surely, he is right who said, “It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in his presence.” And Herbert would add, “And shies to besiege him.” Yet those found in Christ approach the throne as boldly as the Son himself (Hebrews 4:14–16). And the Son’s boldness, at times, took the form of struggle, of blood and tears, of — might we say — holy violence. Not violence as in physical force or assault, but violence as “vehemence or intensity of emotion, behavior, or language; extreme fervor; passion” (per the Oxford English Dictionary). Nothing less captures Gethsemane.

Herbert, at least, saw prayer thus, and he was not alone. Subdued as always, Charles Spurgeon says, “Blessed be God if this holy violence is in your spirit: you shall take heaven by force yet; you shall take it by storm, and carry the gates of heaven by the battery of your prayers.” And Herbert’s mentor, John Donne, preached, “Prayer has the nature of violence; in the public prayers of the congregation, we besiege God . . . and we take God prisoner, and bring God to our conditions, and God is glad to be straitened by us in that siege.”

Donne’s final line introduces an all-important clarification. No “engine against th’ Almighty” has the slightest chance of success unless the Almighty wills it so. Frodo might as well besiege the Black Gates. No one blackmails God. You cannot strong-arm the One whose arm is omnipotent. No “sinner’s tow’r” can scale heaven unless God allows it. But God wills to be won, and prayer is the engine of that enterprise.

‘The land of spices’

We’ve seen images of cosmic scale and holy war, but what on earth might Herbert mean by “the land of spices”? At the end of this journey, where does Herbert lead us? “The land of spices” conjures the enchanted realm of Eden. Lest we forget, Eden was a garden, a garden that delighted the soul with God and the senses with arboreal pleasures (Genesis 2:9). After all, spice can mean “a spicy fragrance” (OED), the signature scent of gardens (Song of Solomon 4:16). As the garden, Eden would have been awash with lovely aromas.

Prayer is redolent of the high country where God walks with man in the cool of the day. It recalls God near man once — the greatest pleasure of the garden — by relishing God in man now and anticipating God with man forever (Revelation 21:3). Lovely aromas indeed!

Yet Herbert, as always, packs more into this line. In his day, “the land of spices” referred to the Far East, the almost mythic origin of spices. In the fifteenth century, staggering amounts of wealth came to Europe from the Indo-Asian spice trade. Cinnamon, pepper, ginger, aloe, cloves, tamarind, amber, mace, and coconut far exceeded their weight in gold. “Land of spices” smells of exotic wealth and mysterious treasure. As Dennis Lennon writes, it is an image of “trafficking in the inexhaustible resources of Christ” (Turning the Diamond, 110).

Here again, by the very richness of Herbert’s imagery, we are confronted with the poverty of our own prayer. What wonders do we surrender, what riches abandon, what joys jettison when we walk not in the garden of prayer? Why settle for mud pies? Why trade paradise for a wasteland? Why do I insist on being a spiritual pauper, threadbare and penniless, when unsearchable “riches in glory” are freely on offer (Philippians 4:19) — and not just the riches that God gives but the riches that are God? Herbert would not have it so. He is too hedonistic for that.

Holy Intoxication

It should be obvious by now that, for Herbert, prayer is a strange and wonderful thing that leaves no inch of reality unaltered. For Herbert, “Prayer is the total response of the whole person to God within the full range of lived experience” (Turning the Diamond, 20). In other words, prayer is shorthand for enjoying God.

Thus, we should not miss the hedonistic impulse that pulses at the center of this poem. Prayer opens access to “joy, and love, and bliss.” Along this path, we pursue “gladness of the best” — happiness that cannot be extended or improved (Psalm 16:11). Even when Herbert employs violent or aggressive images, the tone is pervasively jovial. And how could it be otherwise? Prayer is the doorway to Trinitarian fullness. Herbert would have loved how Tim Keller summarizes prayer:

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are adoring one another, giving glorifying love to one another, and delighting in one another. . . . God is, therefore, infinitely, profoundly happy, filled with perfect joy — not some abstract tranquility but the fierce happiness of dynamic loving relationships. . . . Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself. (Prayer, 67–68)

Herbert felt this. He had feasted at this table, tasted this “exalted manna.” He dressed himself in this gladness, perfumed with this aroma. And offering us this potent brew of images, Herbert invites us into this same holy intoxication.

Saint, how shall we then not pray?