York Minster

The Soft Self Wounding Pelican

Date: 1st July 2007
Preacher: The Revd Canon Jeremy Fletcher

In early June two years ago I found myself in an unaccustomed position. The Minster Choir was on tour in the Netherlands, and we had just sung Mass in the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Haarlem. It had been a privilege to stand at the altar with the Dean, but that was not what was new. “It is Corpus Christi Sunday”, they said. “We are now going to process outside with the Blessed Sacrament”. And so the Choir and I found ourselves walking the streets of Haarlem led by the Blessed Sacrament in its wonderful monstrance, for, we were told, only the second time since the Reformation.

It was a scene which Richard Crashaw, who crafted the words we have just heard sung, would, I think, have relished. He lived in the turbulent first half of the seventeenth century. His father was a fierce puritan who loathed Catholicism and all its ceremonial ways with a passion. Crashaw shared these views for a while, but finally embraced that kind of Catholicism in such a way that, when Cromwell took over he had to flee the country, and ended his days in Italy in the service of a Cardinal. Crashaw’s poetry in many ways echoes that of his contemporaries John Donne and George Herbert, but he goes beyond them in his devotion to what were classically catholic themes, not least a devotion to the presence of Christ in the Sacrament of bread and wine.

I know from talking with Philip Moore that composers of music for the voice are always on the lookout for good words which can be sung. I do not know what led Gerald Finzi to Crashaw’s work when commissioned by the Reverend Walter Hussey to compose a piece for the 53 rd anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew’s Northampton. I do know that Finzi exercised the composer’s prerogative and changed the words: specifically he took elements of two of Crashaw’s poems and interweaved them. Musicologists would say that Finzi retained the words which were most singable, and it is true that whenever I read them now, it is Finzi’s music which is there instantly: “Jesu, Master”. “Rise royal Sion” “Come away”. So, I ask myself, why did he retain the pelican?

    O soft self-wounding Pelican!
    Whose breast weeps Balm for wounded man.

The words are not Crashaw’s invention: specifically here Crashaw draws from two of the hymns of St Thomas Aquinas about Communion and the adoration of the sacrament. So what is it with the pelican? This set me to some “wilfing” – that phenomenon of the internet whereby you end up so deep in weird websites that you have to ask “what was I looking for?” Did you know then that the brown pelican is the state bird of Louisiana, and that it is the symbol of the Irish Blood Transfusion service, which for many years was to be found at Pelican House, Dublin?

The pelican was thought to care for its young so much that, in times of drought it would wound itself and feed its young with its own blood. This symbol of sacrificial care was used before Christian times, but was seized upon by the church as a way of showing the love of God for his children, and, as the doctrine of Holy Communion was developed, as a way of reflecting on how Christ feeds us with his own blood in Holy Communion. Many people meditated on this, and pelicans were used in medieval church imagery: they are to be found in the Minster still, if you look carefully. So even if Finzi couldn’t attach the word to a memorable musical phrase, it needed to be there for the poetry to make sense.

I began by saying that being in a Corpus Christi procession was unaccustomed for me. The physical adoration of consecrated bread and wine has not been part of my spiritual development. But reflection on the eucharist has been, and continues to be so. What is easy to recognise in Crashaw’s verse, and in the eucharistic devotion of Aquinas and the latin authors from whom he drew, is that the Eucharist, the sacrament, is not the end, not the fulfilment of all things. It points to those things. To receive the sacrament, and to reflect upon it, is not to have arrived. It is to have looked forward to the fulfilment of our journey, to have been given a foretaste.

Crashaw looks forward to the day

    When this dry soul those eyes shall see,
    And drink the unseal’d source of thee.

May we, as we think of Christ and the forgiveness brought by the shedding of his blood, when we see that in the form of the sacrament, and even in the form of a pelican, look to that time

    When Glory’s sun faith’s shades shall chase,

And in that faith live in that light, for the sake of Christ our Lord, who feeds us and sustains us, now and for evermore.

Amen.