There were other churches from which the
populations had withdrawn, Celtic foundations
down lanes that one entered with a lifting of the
spirit, because there were no posts, no telegraph
wires. Is God worshipped only in cathedrals
where blood drips from regimental standards as
from the crucified body of love. Is there a need for
a revised liturgy for bathetic renderings of the
scriptures? The Cross always is avant-garde.
—<>—
The church is small.The walls insidewhite. On the altara cross, with behind itits shadow, and behindthat the shadows of the shadow.
The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of those recessions
are brought up short by
the contemporaneity of the Cross.
(R.S. Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 82-3.
In this slim volume Thomas juxtaposes prose and verse, and both must be read as twin perspectives, perhaps as two light-casting candles. In the prose poem, my copy has no question mark after "crucified body of love". Was that Thomas's intent or a miss-print? Is the absence of the question mark a hint that such a rhetorical question is no question, but a statement from one who had thought long on the human capacity to shed blood and think it justified in heaven, and had shaken his head in defiant negation? The cross is not the validation of war but its nemesis. And for Thomas, God is known not in the theology of glory but in the theologia crucis. So that the crucified God, symboled in shadow-casting light and crucified love, remains the most powerful critique of a theology of glory dressed up in religion too closely aligned with the centres of secular power.
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