A lot of time and money is spent on books on prayer which are of the Teach Yourself, Idiot's Guide, Prayer for Dummies genre. Sometimes it's a help if someone gives you the instructions for the IKEA pack. There are also books of prayer or prayers that prime the pump, kick-start the engine, flick the switch, reboot the hard drive – these metaphors are all a bit reductionist, mechanical and utilitarian, but unless we are super-saints, we all need that kind of encouragement and stimulus, at least sometimes.
Then there are those times when with open Bible, or some other text worthy of Lectio Divina, we allow our minds to ponder, weigh, consider; or imagine, wander and play; or give way to those inner feelings of the heart such as gratitude, joy, and trust or on the down side, anxiety, grief and doubt. But the text holds us as we hold it; there is nourishment in those long-ago written words; the words and the Word sometimes coalesce in blessing as we receive them and embrace them.
Such reflections on the practice of prayer as life habit and spiritual discipline are blown out of the water by R S Thomas. The reader of R. S. Thomas's poems must learn to be patient with his doubts, caring and understanding about his complaints, and respectful of a man who with utter and compelling seriousness, followed his quest for God with hard questions and mostly no answers. At least none that he found persuasive enough to convince, or come near to the kind of closure that ends this most demanding of quests to know God. God is not the object of our knowing, but the subject whose presence and absence, lures us into waters deep enough to overwhelm all our concepts, words and attempts to frame within the confines and limits of human knowledge.
"The sea at his window was a shallow sea; a thin counterpane over a buried cantrel. There were deeper fathoms to plumb, 'les délires des grandes profundeurs', in which he was under compulsion to give away whatever assurances he possessed. He was too insignificant for it to be a kind of dark night of the soul."
Words like deep, profound, and vast are mere intensifiers – deep thought, profound feeling, vast oceans. But they are all he has as he looks at the shallow sea outside his window, and becomes aware there are "deeper fathoms to plumb," so deep and so impenetrable that "he was under compulsion to give away whatever assurances he possessed."
The prose poem acknowledges that in the human hunger for truth, reality, and personal encounter with the Mystery beyond the reach and grasp of human intellect, there are no guarantees, no assurances given; not even the cold comfort that the absence of such assurance is the genuine spiritual experience of the dark night of the soul. Out of such uncertainties comes this poem:
Hear me. The hands
pointed, the eyes
closed, the lips move
as though manipulating
soul’s spittle. At bedsides,
in churches the ego
renews its claim
to attention. The air
sighs. This is
the long siege, the deafness
of space. Distant stars
are no more, but their light
nags us. At times
in the silence, between
prayers, after the Amens
fade, at the world’s
centre, it is as though
love stands, renouncing itself.1
"Hear me", the classic cry of the Psalmist, which Thomas with uncomfortable realism describes as "the ego's claim to attention", and in so doing puts all our praying in its place. But the cry to be heard encounters the deafness of space. So are our prayers heard? Or is is possible that after the words are spoken and the silence falls, what is left in the heart and the mind is the real prayer, coming after the speech, when the Amens have stopped their echo?
As so often in his poems on prayer and the absence or presence of God, the final line or two move towards a resolution, not certainty, not recovered assurance, and certainly not closure, but resolution as pray-er and prayed-to experience each other like the mystery of light seen now that was extinguished aeons ago. Our prayers, like the light from dead stars, still nag the pray-er and signal the presence of the prayed-to.
The image of the dying star, whose light reaches us though the source is now gone, may be an oblique reference to this God whose nature is self-renouncing love. The Cross stands at the world's centre, and "it is as though love stands, renouncing itself." There are few poets I know who probe so deeply into the psychology of prayer, who examine so precisely, at times fiercely, the theology of the God prayed to.
Late in life Thomas, who had edited a selection of George Herbert's poems, confessed he couldn't read Herbert any more, "I cannot get on matey terms with the Deity as Herbert can." This is the God of deeper fathoms and distant stars; to be wrestled with if his name is to be discovered; to be known as love, but love renouncing itself.
I think Thomas would have burned all prayer manuals that presume to reduce prayer to practicalities; he believed too much in the life or death struggle that prayer is to put up with such trivialising pragmatism. As he said in an earlier poem, he would "flee for protection from the triviality of my thought to the thought of its triviality…" 2
- R. S. Thomas. Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe, 2004, page 70
- Ibid., 67.
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