R. S. Thomas and Lent as an Easter-Informed Lifestyle.

From Bleak Liturgies ¹

"Alms. Alms. By Christ's

blood I conjure you

a penny." On saints'

days the cross and

shackles were the jewellery

of the rich. As God

aged, kings laundered their feet

in the tears of the poor.

Economics eventually lead back to God. Because justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence there was a time, in the not too distant past, when we could say at least people didn't starve, there is a welfare safety net, that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. The days just before the advent, then the normalisation of food banks.

We believed that, at its best and with all its faults and holes in the safety net, our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above; just, generous, compassionate, sharing – not in order to create dependency, patronise or undermine a person's independence, but to support and enable and empower people to participate as fully as they are able in the wider life and culture of our society.

Much has changed in the past decade or two of this new millennium, and there are multiple explanations for those changes in the ethos of our society. But whatever selected explanations satisfy us, we are still left with an increasing deficit in the social capital, and I would argue the moral vision, of a society more and more fixated on individual self-interest, national economic advantage, and tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth as fewer and fewer have more and more. Our worldview is increasingly monoscopic, its focus on economic growth and prosperity so fiercely specific, that much else which is essential to human flourishing is deemed secondary. More significantly, these other aspects of human welfare and flourishing are often presupposed to depend upon economic prosperity, which is assumed to be morally and politically prior in demand for resources and sacrifices.

The poem above comes as the critical comment of an odd, often angular, sometimes angry Christian man who 30 years ago sensed the trends of a culture becoming more and more one in which obscene rewards are available in the cultures of celebrity, entertainment, sport, financial industries, and with their con-commitant attitudes of self-expression, self-promotion and ultimately self-manufactured individuality. It isn't a large step from such unexamined self-importance to a selfishness which is made socially acceptable and politically validated.

What I read in this poem, Bleak Liturgies is R. S. Thomas as Amos the prophet. Amos condemned those who sold the poor for the price of a pair of slippers; Thomas condemns those 'kings' who launder their feet in the tears of the poor. Both prophets are raging against the inequalities and cruelties of a society in which it is just so hard for the poor to have life chances. And both reserve their sharpest words for the rich whose opulence and extravagance in money and material things, are the distorted sacraments and physical embodiments of their greed and arrogance. Thomas makes no mention of judgement, but of course, presupposes it; while Amos lays about him with graphic threats and sarcastic images of overfed cows, ivory beds, rotting fruit baskets of wasted food. Mind you, Thomas has his own ironic edge – the cross and shackles reduced to trivia, baubles of the rich who long forgot the realities to which the symbols point.

Easter brings an end to Lent. But not the need for critical self-reflection, refreshed repentance, changed ways, renovation of our moral furniture, refurbished lifestyles more aligned with the contemporary living Christ who strode out of the tomb into the resurrection possibilities of peace, justice and hopeful actions let loose by the Resurrection.

Those two images in Thomas's poem take us back to basic realities of human life – the contrasts of those who need alms and those who give them; and the scandal of a secularised power elite, 'laundering their feet in the tears of the poor.' And if we ask where Jesus is in such a society, he is more likely to be in the food bank than the 3 Star Michelin restaurant where a meal costs more than 4 weeks benefits.

The cry of the poor in this poem invokes the most sacred of obligations – 'by Christ's blood'. Till we acknowledge the imperative of that invocation, it's doubtful if we have the slightest clue what Easter is all about, and what its consequences if we commit to living an Easter faith.² 

1. R. S. Thomas. Collected Later Poems. (Bloodaxe, 2004) p. 185.
2. I collect cruciform images. This one was taken in John Lewis's, an old repair to the floor covering, worn and scuffed by countless feet. The trampled cross is a telling image of a culture which values value for money, and confers worth mostly without reference to human value and human worth.