An old friend of Herbert McCabe rang Blackfriars, Oxford the other day. He accidentally rang Herbert's number and was thrown to hear the familiar voice saying, ‘This is Herbert's non‐answering machine’. Herbert died in 2001. Those who knew Herbert McCabe may have a similar feeling reading this collection of sermons. One can hear the voice of this ‘remarkable, exhausting and loveable man’, as Rowan Williams describes him in the foreword. Herbert wrote every word of his sermons and so what we read in this book is exactly what the congregation would have heard. He wrote so freshly and directly that one had the impression that he was speaking spontaneously. He wrote every word because he wished to be as clear as possible. Clarity and hard thought are necessary if one is to get a glimpse of the mystery which is beyond all words. These sermons constantly invite us to think. ‘Let's think about sin.’(p. 63). He invites us to think about what it means to rejoice, or to worship money, or to be forgiven. This can be testing but not because the sermons are abstract or use technical language. On the contrary, these sermons are written as simply as possible, with humour and wit. Herbert had a profound sense of responsibility for his words, and the apparent simplicity is the fruit of the repeated reworking of these texts.
Herbert loved to start from a detail of the gospel, but we are always led back to the central themes of his theology: that God is not a powerful person but is beyond all our concepts; faith and the destruction of idols; that we are made for happiness and friendship with God; the Trinity as our home, etc. The whole of Herbert's life was dedicated to the exploration of these themes. As Thoreau said, ‘Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still’. A constant theme is the utter priority of God's action. In prayer we do not seek to change God's mind, any more than in repentance do we try to gain his forgiveness. We are loved and forgiven from all eternity. In both cases we are changing our minds about God and not the other way around.
Even though I have read most of what Herbert wrote, and many times, I was still often astonished by fresh new insights. His sermon ‘Motorways and God’ is pure delight. He compares God's love for us with the M40, on which Herbert so often sped on his ancient motorbike, slicing through the Chilterns and soaring over High Wycombe. Or there is the wonderful sermon on ‘Poverty and God’. God is poor because ‘in God, being alive or being wise or being good are just simply being God and nothing more, nothing extra that he has’(p. 55). Or there is the delightful sermon in which he compares our relationship to the Trinity with that of a child who sits listening to a group of adults engaged in the play of conversation, ‘the crack’ as the Irish say, sensing that something wonderful is happening though beyond her understanding.
There is some repetition. The sermons on ‘Prayer’ and ‘Life after Death’ both largely repeat material that is found at the second chapter, on hope. But this hardly matters. Herbert is struggling to liberate us from preconceptions about God and ourselves that are so deep rooted and hard to shake, such as that religion is about being ‘spiritual’, that one is happy to submit once again to his efforts to free us from being led astray by images. Of course, he insists that we need images of God, lots of them, but we must learn not to take them in the wrong way.
Reading through this collection of sermons, I was surprised by the centrality of certain concerns: the mystery of God's love for us, sin and the cross. Traditionally these are fundamental themes of theology, but theologians are often rather nervous of addressing them too explicitly today. Of course God's love for us is the heart of Christianity, but it is hard to talk about without sounding trite or saccharine. I recently heard a gifted young preacher confess that he was almost embarrassed at telling the congregation that God loved them, and I understood exactly what he meant. Herbert succeeds in doing so without sentimentality, refreshing one's sense of the utter mystery of a love that embraces all that we are and gives us existence in every moment. As he says, God is besotted with us.
We may also shy away from talking too much about sin. Catholics often claim to have been crippled by neurotic guilt from having listened to sermons about hell fire and damnation. Time and again Herbert returns to the theme of sin, but in ways that have nothing to do with inducing a harmful guilt. Sin is ‘always to construct an illusory self that we can admire, instead of the real self we can only love’(p. 18). It springs from ‘the fear not just that one is playing a false part, wearing a disguise, but that one is nothing but the disguise’(p. 70). Facing one's sin is, for Herbert, part of the entry into true self‐love, the knowledge that one is loved utterly, and therefore have no need of pompous self‐images. Indeed, as his brethren well knew, and sometimes to our discomfort, he was quick to spot and demolish any hint of pretension or superiority. And finally he repeatedly writes of the cross, refusing to reduce it to a passing step on the way to glory. It is the moment of Jesus’ complete failure, in which we glimpse the mystery of God.
Brian Davies OP has done the Church a profound service in editing these sermons. I hope that there are some more volumes to come.
