LENT

 HOLY SONNETS - XIV

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

~ John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God …

The image is one of a battering ram and the language is that of war. Why does Donne address the Almighty in terms of martial conflict? He might just as easily have written: ‘capture my heart,’ or ‘open my heart.’ (Neither would have disrupted the metrical flow of the Sonnet’s loose iambic.) However, the poet’s employment of siege imagery is in keeping with his conviction that his life has been hijacked by a usurper, and that refusing to relinquish control, this tyrant must be overthrown.

Donne makes his appeal regarding his ‘heart’ because the heart is the seat of loving-knowledge. As a metaphor ‘the heart’ represents who we are at our center - our fundamental identity. When we know something ‘deep-down in our heart’ it means we have more than merely an emotional appreciation or a purely theoretical understanding. It means we get it. It means the distance between subject and object has been bridged, the veil torn in two.  The heart as the center of loving knowledge represents who we are as those created in God’s “own image and likeness.” The address to the ‘three person’d God’ is at once an appeal to the Holy Trinity and a cry from the heart to the One in whose image all hearts are made. The supplicant is pleading for nothing less than to be conquered by his own eternal reality.

I suppose most of us don’t focus much on our eternal reality or even believe in it for that matter. Instead each of us identifies singularly as an isolated psychophysical entity convinced that we are somehow separate from the rest of the world, out there, and God. Perhaps this is why Origen maintained that Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs should be studied together. Proverbs concerns our turn to wisdom; Ecclesiastes, in maintaining  the futility of seeking fulfillment in the passing vanities of the world, points to our growth in wisdom, and the Song of Songs celebrates the soul’s homecoming in loving union with God. Most of us get stuck somewhere in Ecclesiastes, yet to be convinced of the vanity of it all.

The poet declares that God knocks, breathes, shines, and seeks to mend. God invites, inspires, enlightens, and welcomes us to wholeness and fullness of life but we are captivated by our selfishness and find that we cannot stand upright unless we are overthrown. We are constantly betrayed by our nagging fear, our need to control, our victim identity, and our sense of never being enough. As our own worst enemy we must be broken and refashioned by a master craftsman. “Break, blow, burn, and make me new,” cries the author. He knows that he cannot overcome himself and that all ‘labor’ to do so solidifies the false identity. He pleads to be enthralled and ravished, terms expressive of the radical, fierce, reality of grace. He yearns to rest in the love which never forsakes us and never lets us go; a love which feeds us, and sustains us, and gathers up all our broken pieces so that not one fragment remains.