A beautiful prayer

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Lindsay54

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Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ: I am an Anglican, but would love you too to enjoy this lovely poem, or better, prayer, by George Herbert (1593-1633), for it is not as well known as it ought to be:

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”

“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
“My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.”
So I did sit and eat.
 
Beautiful! 🙂

I have always had a special fondness for the English metaphysical poets.

His poetry is sublime and he was a wonderful mystic.

Thanks!
 
That was a nice prayer. I wonder if George Herbert was Roman Catholic.
 
No, ready, he was most certainly not RC, far from it. He was a pietist Anglican, who, were he alive today, would be fairly far out on the evangelical wing of the Anglican spectrum.
Lindsay54
 
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