With annoying consistency, I have a habit of blaming myself for lots of things, some that are indeed blameworthy (Was I gnarly this afternoon in conversation with my co-worker? Did I listen thoughtfully last Sunday to the fellow church member who holds different political views than my own?) and others that are mostly out of my control. Maybe some of you can relate when I admit that I’m the kind of person who lies awake at night wondering if something I said or did, whether in a meeting or a party or at home at the dinner table, might have been poorly phrased and ended up unnecessarily irritating or even hurting someone.
It’s good, of course, to remain humble in the face of human limitations. But it’s not so good when self-blame risks developing into a self-imposed wall between me and my experience of God’s love. One writer who has long helped me think about–and welcome–the persistent, insistent, patient power of God’s love is the seventeenth-century poet and pastor, George Herbert. The most anthologized poem from his masterwork, The Temple, is “Love (III)” (“III” because Herbert had already included two other poems titled “Love” in the collection), a short piece (18 lines) that dramatizes the human struggle to understand and accept the enormity of God’s love.
The poem dramatizes a conversation between two characters, a reluctant human narrator and “Love.” The narrator has been welcomed to a banquet but self-consciously declares himself too unworthy (unkind, ungrateful) to fully participate in the party at hand. Love, the welcoming host of the banquet, “draws near” and “sweetly questions” the reluctant invitee. (Note to self–this host does not stay distant nor argue, two of my own knee-jerk reactions when someone rejects my approach!) Love explains love’s foundational role in creation (“Who made the eyes but I?”), but the narrator repeats his sense of responsibility in creating his unworthiness: “Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them.” Love reminds the narrator of the story of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice (“know you not . . . who bore the blame?”), yet with one final attempt to wallow in his painful sense of self-agency, the narrator offers to serve at the table rather than to be served. (Think of all the complicated motivations in the story of Peter’s initial refusal to let Christ wash his feet.)
Yet once again, with gentle insistence, Love repeats the welcome: “You must sit down . . . and taste my meat” and finally, finally, the narrator accepts the invitation: “So I did sit and eat.” This short narrative encompasses both the parable of the Great Banquet and the theology of the communion table: we are created, and we have been redeemed by a God whose incomprehensible love becomes concrete in story, liturgy, and community.
An encounter with this God of love, the God portrayed in Herbert’s poetry, serves as the organizing principle for Suzanne McDonald’s devotional, Love Bade Me Welcome: Drawing Nearer to God with the Poems of George Herbert (Cascade Books, 2026). McDonald is a theologian and a scholar of the early modern church, so her approach to Herbert is knowledgeable. Yet she wears her knowledge lightly, seeking to delight a general audience with an encounter with the poet who, she notes in her introduction, has mentored her on her own personal faith journey.
The devotional works its way through fifty-two of Herbert’s poems from The Temple with a liturgical rhythm that shapes it as ideal for personal and group study alike. Each poem is followed by a reflection, a suggested scripture passage, a prompt to “dwell” on the reflection and the scripture, a prayer, and a prompt titled “going forward.” With the rhythm created by this consistent pattern, McDonald provides us with an opportunity to grow in our devotional habits as well as to experience the delights of George Herbert’s poetry.
Poem and Reflection: McDonald offers light notes to the poems’ texts, enough to bridge the centuries for readers, explaining, for example, that a “‘bosom-sin’ means the sin we cling to the most (27). Her reflections likewise share her knowledge of seventeenth-century theology and politics, as when she notes that the Geneva Bible, the most popular Bible in England even as the 1611 King James Bible became available, included a drawing and marginal notes describing the priestly vestments of Aaron, significant to Herbert’s poem, “Aaron” (192). These notes, though, are not the main event for the devotional, which encourages readers to follow Herbert through all manner of encounters with God. As she writes in her reflection on “The Elixir,” “What if everything we see could become a lens to show us something of God, and the ordinary stuff of our lives could become a window to reveal the presence of God to us?” (197).
Herbert doesn’t shy away from images that can be grotesque to our sensibilities, and McDonald helps us make sense of the physicality of the “stretched sinews” (17) and the “Christ-side-piercing spear” (30) of Christ’s body on the cross. However, the main image that McDonald asks us to explore from different angles is that of God’s love. From the beginning of the devotional, the story that McDonald wants us to hear is the one of God’s “redeeming love” (1) and the ways “our stories belong within God’s story” (reflection on “The Altar” 3). This is a God who repeatedly takes us “by the hand” (“Easter” 17, “Love (III)” 216) and whose “loving presence surrounds” Herbert and us alike (reflection on “Mattens” 61). Herbert’s poetry dramatizes plenty of moments of frustration and fear along the pilgrim path (see “The Collar,” 157), and yet McDonald’s Herbert is one who shows us, “even in the midst of his struggles and rebellion,” that “he is held in the unbreakable love of God” (xix).
Scripture: The recommended scripture passage is often one that is alluded to in Herbert’s poem. Thus, we are guided to read Psalm 95, a psalm of praise, together with the poem, “Antiphon (I)” and its repeated chorus, “Let all the world in every corner sing, My God and King” (40). We read a prayer of deliverance, Psalm 13, when “Denial” (90) is the day’s poem. Scriptural references are woven throughout Herbert’s poetry, and so McDonald often notes multiple passages in her reflections in addition to the thoughtful selections recommended for reading and study in this section of the devotional.
Prayer: McDonald alerts us, in her introduction, that “within a decade of [Herbert’s] death, what we know today as Britain was torn apart by wars fueled by major religious and political differences” and yet also that “Herbert’s poetry was beloved by people on all sides” (xix). She explains, “His poetry has been able to unite people across deep divides because most of the time he points us to aspects of faith and discipleship that all of us can share, rather than to issues that drive us apart” (xix). In her choice of prayers, McDonald demonstrates her own ecumenical spirit: she draws from sources as varied as Origen (59), Thomas a Kempis (56) and Lancelot Andrewes (29), from the Book of Common Order from the Church of Scotland (8, 76), and the Book of Common Prayer from the Church of England (25, 43, 63, 68), and she adapts prayers from many other writers to fit the design of each section.
Dwell and Going Forward: Two of the prompts in each “Dwell” section and the entirety of each “Going Forward” section are repeated verbatim. This repetition builds the sense of the devotional experience as a liturgical one. I especially appreciate the way the “Going Forward” section asks us to move from study to action, and to do this through a grateful heart: “Notice–and give thanks for– the work that God has been doing in you through this poem.”
Alongside the devotional itself, since early May, McDonald has written about Herbert in weekly newsletters that can be found archived here. If you’ve ever met Suzanne, you’ll recognize the same endless energy that she exudes in person to be a guiding principle for her newsletters. In these newsletters, she offers a personal account of her own faith journey in “How Herbert Disarmed a Snarky Agnostic (June 20).” Over the summer, she shared photos of her journey in England to locations significant to Herbert’s life (June 6 and 13). For those enticed by the knowledge of Herbert that shows up in the devotional, she adds significant detail in her newsletters regarding the Church of England in the early seventeenth century.
Years ago, I taught a Sunday School class guided by Peter Schakel’s guide to studying C.S. Lewis, Is Your Lord Large Enough?: How C.S. Lewis Expands Our View of God. In my college courses, I’ve taught Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, which holds a similar understanding of God that underpins McDonald’s devotional: that God loves us. Both of these books offer powerful study guides to the pilgrim in faith, the person looking for mentors who can help build a vision of who God is and how we relate to God and to the world God created. Suzanne McDonald’s devotional is equally powerful in its repeated proclamation that we are beloved and that God’s love has been evident through generations to Christians from different walks of life.
