Author: admin

I remember exactly where it was. On the top shelf of the new book section in the recently opened Waterstones, on Union Street Aberdeen. I had to use one of those round Dalek shaped stepping stools to reach it. I bought it there and then. How could I not?

It had been anticipated in The Listener a year or two before in an article about religious poetry if I remember right. Remember The Listener, that weekly cornucopia of media (TV and Radio) reviews, articles on culture, science and politics, essays on literature and music? I miss it and nothing has come close to replacing it.

Anyway, in 1993 I bought a first edition of the first printing of this handsomely produced volume, prepared and arranged by RST himself. The dustjacket features a landscape by his wife, M E Eldridge, and its austere and sparse landscape, in washed tones and more suggestive than descriptive, reflects the inner landscape of so much of Thomas's poetry. The book is a lovely example of the book publisher's aesthetics, and one of three poetry books I handle with an excess of care, bordering on reverence.

I have to confess that before the Collected Poems, I had read Thomas only occasionally, and mostly in the anthologised poems in interrogative mood. But that's why I was drawn to his poetry. There was something attractive in a man of faith for whom faith could never be propositional certainty or overly God-confident assurance. I had one or two of his earlier volumes, including Pieta. As a preacher I had found some of Thomas's apophatic theology a helpful contrast to and constraint on the preacher's temptation to say more than the text, and to claim more for the faith of the believer than is justified by elusive truth only partially known. 

What I mean by that is not my preference for doubt over faith, but an acceptance that faith is not about all questions answered, it is more about all questions asked, however unsettling their asking. For example, the penultimate poem in Pieta, published in 1966, is titled, 'The Church'. It is one of his best known inner soliloquies, in the form of a threefold conversation:: with the reader, with the absent God, the Deus absconditus, and with himself as he sits in contemplative impatience waiting for any sign of the elusive presence. There is only one question mark in the poem. As the pastor and preacher lingers once the few congregants have gone home, he asks, "Is this where God hides from my searching?" 

That poem has haunted my imagination all the years since I first read it. The reason is in its resolution at the close of the poem. There are few poets who have articulated with fiercer passion the unbearable tensions of faith in the crucified God. And the last lines of 'The Church' are amongst his most searing and searching explorations of Gethsemane as experienced by Christ, and as borne in the souls of all those likewise crucified between faith and doubt:

              There is no other sound

In the darkness but the sound of a man

Breathing, testing his faith

On emptiness, nailing his questions

One by one to an untenanted cross. 

                          (Page 180, Collected Poems)

  The publication of The Collected Poems was for me a personal literary event with ongoing repercussions. I became a student of R S Thomas, but a student whose primary disciplines were theology and philosophy. I began to argue with Thomas, to question his questions, at times agreeing to disagree, at least for now. The blurb on the back cover is for once helpfully astute. It was written by Brian Cox, poetry editor of The Critical Quarterly:

"R S Thomas's poetry is not without metaphoric brilliance, but he prefers a plain style, spare, unflinching, robust…His poetry uncompromisingly records the shifting moods of the believer, the moments of spiritual sterility as well as of epiphany… He is the poet not of Resurrection, but of the Cross."

And as a poet of the Cross he goes deeper than many a theologian trying to articulate the mystery of the crucified God. A few years after Collected Poems was published I led an ecumenical Good Friday service. We used 'The Musician',¹ a poem uncompromising in its portrayal of sacrifice and personal kenosis as the cost of musical genius and virtuoso performance. Kreisler engaged in a form of self-crucifixion in the utter self-giving, indeed self-emptying, that a complete performance demands. If that sound like too many self compounds, that is because kenosis is precisely, the self willingly poured out, sacrificed for love of the other, whether Kreisler's audience, Thomas's erstwhile congregants, or a broken God-loved world witnessing the crucifixion of the Son of God.

Thomas is profoundly aware of the mystery of suffering, and is too good a theologian to ignore Resurrection as Cox seems to suggest. But while the Cross sits front and centre of some of Thomas's most powerful poetry, Thomas himself occasionally relieves the darkness with hints and clues that, if followed, bring the reader to a surprising moment of hope. For one example, the poem quoted above – he kneels quietly, if interrogatively, before an empty cross, untenanted because the dead body of Christ has been removed. It is no accident that one of the finest monographs on the theological poetics of Thomas is about Holy Saturday,² the liminal time of silent waiting, the anguish and tension of the unknown, straining for the first sight and sound of the not yet happened resurrection. 

There is so much more in the poetry of Thomas beyond such specific focus on the cross, and on the cruciform experience of the suffering God. But it is through the writing of these poems Thomas himself suffers an inner crucifixion of intellect and heart. In his best poems we are allowed to overhear the cry "Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief, and as we read him we accompany a modern reluctant Apostle, struggling to articulate an adequate account of the One to whom another Thomas eventually surrendered in the cry, "My Lord and my God!"

In the Collected Poems 1945-90 I found a book that gave me new ways of seeing, thinking, praying, preaching and fulfilling those crucial if costly acts of pastoral accompaniment. I have a long shelf of books on atonement, the Cross, and the mystery revealed and veiled in the crucified God. But my theological and pastoral education would have been much the poorer, and my own writing and speaking far less careful of the mystery that is human suffering, without regular seminars in the 'laboratories of the spirit', and 'experimenting with an Amen' in the company of this argumentative priest who nailed his questions one by one to an untenanted cross.

………………………

¹ This beautiful piece of calligraphy was created and presented to me by Mr Alistair Beattie following that Good Friday service. Alistair began writing calligraphy in a Japanese POW camp, in the same location as the writer Lauren Van der Post, with whom he corresponded for a time after WWII.   

² Saturday's Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchlan, (University of Wales Press, 2016.) 

This post was written 13 years ago! Have I really been blogging that long! I reproduce it today in Jungel's memory, following the news of his death. May he rest in peace, rise in glory, and go on wondering.

This morning I was re-reading some passages in Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World. (page 223)  Jungel's volume is widely recognised as difficult to read, brilliantly argued, and a serious challenge to all attempts in modernity to reduce transcendence to philosophical irrelevance. Below I've copied it out exactly as in the book, but put it into verse form, with only a couple of parentheses omitted – the italics are in the original. Rearranged like this does it read as theology or poetry, or a prose poem? The question is an open one – I'm genuinely intrigued by how it looks and reads when the paragraph is broken down into rhythm and different form. I also wish I could read German to hear how it sounds as Jungel wrote it. Just a wee thought experiment – what do you think – could it pass as a poem?

Because God is love….we are!

God is creator out of love
and thus creator out of nothing.
This creative act of God is, however,
nothing else than God's being,
which as such is creative being.
In that God relates himself creatively to nothingness,
he is the one who distinguishes himself from nothingness,
he is the opponent of nothingness.

God's being, as overflowing and creative being,
is the eternal reduction of nothingness…
Creation from nothingness
is a struggle against nothingness
which carries out this reduction positively.
As such it is the realization of the divine being.

In the work of creation,
God's being not only acts as love
but confirms itself to be love.
Therefore that God is love
is the reason that anything exists at all,
rather than nothingness.
Because God is love,
we are.

One of those strange moments when the internet's algorithms get it spectacularly wrong, and in doing so accidentally make a very different point.
Chine McDonald writes movingly of the moment she sang the African praise song 'Imela' in St Paul's Cathedral, in the Igbo language of her Nigerian ancestors. I'll post about that later

But I went looking for that event on Youtube and couldn't find it. So I Googled it, and found several of Chine McDonald's interviews, but no clip of her singing this piece.

But two or three entries down Professor Google suggested 'McDonalds in China', a seven minute clip in praise of brand saturation, globalisation, and the erosion of diversity by cultural hegemony. Chine McDonald writes about narratives that marginalise, absorb, and eventually dissolve cultural identities; McDonalds in China is a pervasive agent in that process.

Chine McDonald is not wrong about the power of dominant cultural narrative, and the need to tell the other stories. More on all this when I write a couple of review posts.  

The poet W H Auden tried over the years of his life to recite the Lord’s Prayer once a day, usually at night getting ready for bed. He reckoned that it was one of the hardest things to say the whole prayer, petition by petition, paying attention to each, and not letting the mind wander. Try it. It’s harder than you might think!

Yet in times when so much is happening, much of it going wrong, it’s good to have an anchor point for our anxieties, a framework within which to be hopeful. The Lord’s Prayer gives us words that take us out of our worrying and into the presence of God, whom Jesus taught us to call our Heavenly Father.

Much of the Sermon on the Mount is about how we learn to trust God, and teaches us about the God we are invited to trust. If God feeds the birds and clothes the flowers, why be anxious about food and clothing? God knows what we need before the thought enters our heads and the words leave our lips. Solomon had everything anyone could ever want or use, yet in all his glory and despite being overloaded with stuff, the field anemone had a beauty he could never emulate, a glory he couldn’t copy.

So when Jesus gave to his disciples, and to the church, a model for prayer, he gave us words and phrases that touch all the important sides of our lives. What is to be the focus and purpose of human life? According to Jesus being part of God’s will and purpose for his creation. What is the will of God in heaven that we pray should be done on earth? Paul found various words for that – peace, justice, joy, love, grace, all of these the gift of God and achievable by the power and purpose of God who has come to us in his Son Jesus Christ: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”

More than that. The old fashioned word providence hovers over the whole prayer like a sheltering promise. “Give us this day our daily bread”, is a prayer for the basics of life. But I keep coming back to the grammar of that prayer for bread. Us, not me. Plural, not singular. Us isn’t just me and mine, it’s you and yours, it’s them and theirs, it’s myself and every other person for whom bread is necessary for life.

It’s quite a thought, that a prayer that starts with hallowing God’s name, and finishes with kingdom, power and glory has a loaf stuck right in the middle, and that plural pronoun. I often wonder, with great sadness, about food banks and what they do to folk who are hungry, and have to go ask for food. More than once I’ve gone with someone, as support, and to help ease what is a difficult thing to do. The folk who serve our communities in these ways are wonderfully kind, careful and courteous not to patronise or make people feel all the emotions it’s so easy to feel – guilt, shame, embarrassment.

With all that in mind I have no doubt at all, that the Lord’s Prayer has profound political implications. “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer for a world where far too many go hungry, and where wealth, food and the basics of life are all out of balance. The great theologian Karl Barth was absolutely right:  “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” 

At a time when in our own country people will be anxious about the winter, the Lord’s Prayer tells us as Christians what we pray for. Bread and with it the basics of life, for others. Heating and eating, shelter and clothing, friendship and support, all the things that enable a human life to flourish and be free. That’s what we pray for ourselves, but not without also praying for the same provision (providence) for others. “Give us…” Me and my neighbour, us and them, God’s created children in Afghanistan and all those other places that we peer into on the news.

At our harvest service in Montrose on October 3^rd we will have the opportunity to share in an offering for the people of Afghanistan, which is both a thanksgiving to God for his goodness to us, and is also one small way in which every prayer that we pray has practical consequences. Give us, and our neighbours in Afghanistan, their daily bread, and shelter, and medicine, and whatever else money buys that makes life sustainable.

During this week as we pray the Lord’s Prayer each day, let’s include Afghanistan in our prayers. May God’s will of justice, peace and joy be done in that part of our earth; and may the people there have daily bread, shelter, warm clothes and medicine in all the disruption and loss they have suffered. And may our own contributions help towards all this through the work and presence of Baptist World Mission and all the other aid agencies in that country.

In the early 1980's I was responsible for a daily 2 minute telephone sermon. It was an innovative approach to ministry and mission which had been going for several years before I arrived. That telephone ministry taught me to count words, and to think and speak with clarity and focus. The recording time was 1 minute 54 seconds. To say something meaningful in such a short time that might help folk through their day, required a strict economy of words, an idea that shouldn't be muddled by superfluous words, and a deliberate inner discipline of slowness in delivery.

Reading some of R S Thomas's short poems on the anniversary of his death, I become aware again of the power of words rationed to concentrate thought and distil meaning, chosen and positioned to convey something that, by verbal multiplication, would be costly in clarity and power. This is especially true of poems that explore our inner climate, a form of introspective spiritual questioning at which this poet excels.

Thomas is attentive, and makes us pay attention, to those hopes that push like green shoots through the cracks in our everyday concrete existence; to the recurring anxieties that by friction wear away the ropes of longing we hang on to for dear life; and to the constant stream of emotional weather fronts that blow across our days bringing alternations of sun or cloud, blue or grey, surprising newness or predictable sadness. Call it the poetics of humanity brought to deeper self-awareness by the easily missed summons of a Significant Other. 

Here is a photo of one of those poems. Rather than just print it out, it helps make my point if we pay attention to an entire page that contains 28 words, and the white emptiness of blank paper, except for those precisely placed and carefully chosen words, which read:        

I think that maybe

I will be a little surer

of being a little nearer.

That's all. Eternity

is in the understanding

that that little is more than enough.

Collected Later Poems, R S Thomas, (Bloodaxe, 2004, page 131)

I find this brief testimony of the soul's pondering deeply moving, and theologically provocative. Is it intended as an overheard soliloquy, or the preacher's humble homiletic wondering out loud in the face of his own uncertainties, or an oblique prayer uttered in defiance of his ever-present because instinctive scepticism?   

That hesitant 'maybe' is characteristic of one who was never so sure of God that he took liberties in the ways he spoke of God, and God's ways. The repeated 'little' qualifying the two comparatives 'surer' and 'clearer' gives those first three lines the balanced precision of hesitancy and certainty, not cancelling each other out, but including each other in. 

'That's all.' The ambiguities that emanate from that unambiguous hinge phrase, screwed firmly in place to open the poem into a vaster reality in the word that follows! 'That's all', says Thomas, knowing full well that there's more. The modest hesitancy of 'maybe' is confronted with 'Eternity', that compelling reality before which every seriously thoughtful mind is hesitant, falters, and hopes. The human mind can neither understand, nor escape from the lure of Eternity.

Yet Eternity is promise before it is threat. We encounter the Eternal in the finite but precious human capacity for self-transcendence in thought, vision and hope: "Eternity is in the understanding…". The inner pressures of Eternity are experienced in our human awareness of time and mortality, and felt in that terrifying yet exhilaratingly deep instinct for meaning, purpose and the ultimate fulfilment of our lifelong longing for life, – and understanding.

To be "a little surer" of the faith we believe, to be "a little nearer" to the One we are called to trust with radical faith, to be conscious of the tension between our limited time and the vast infinity of the space-time continuum; that is to be suspended between the ambiguity of the first line with its "maybe", and the resolved hopefulness of the last, ending with "enough", more than eneough.

I read this poem as a brief sketch of RST at peace with himself, as much as he ever was. Not because all the questions are answered, but because he knows he doesn't have to find all the answers. Trust is living with the questions, being unafraid of maybe, and thankful of all that makes us a little surer of being a little nearer. That's all, and that's more than enough, as indeed is the grace and love of God. 

Halfway through two books that could hardly be more different. Except both are about how we think of God, both challenge our personal (and limited) images of Jesus, and both argue with persuasive passion why all of this matters.

Chine writes as a journalist, a black woman, and as a Christian critical of a church too reluctant to move quickly on racism, and too attached to a white Jesus as the dominant image in the theological and devotional imagination of white Christians. 

McCormack writes as one of the premier theologians of our generation, at the end of a long intellectual pilgrimage through the Christian dogmatic tradition. On his way he critiques the Chalcedonian definition and the early exponents of Kenotic Christology before revisiting the New Testament construal of the God Man, Jesus Christ, with special reference to Philippians 2.5-11.

More on both books anon – for now there is a rich and enriching oscillation of disciplines, experience and examined concepts. Thank God for books.  

 

Maybe we all have our go to texts when we are searching the scriptures for wisdom, guidance, a word from the Lord, a nudge in the right direction. I often turn to Paul’s prayers. The reason is simple, I think! Paul’s prayers are always for the churches as they face all the ups and downs, tensions and ructions, blessings and demands, of small community life.

Many of us have begun to think about how we now move forward as a church, as a small community of Jesus’ disciples in a world very different from the one we had gotten used to. I too, have been thinking, and praying, and listening for that word, trying to be alert to that nudge, waiting for that guidance that helps make sense of where we are and where God might be calling us into the future. 

So I turned to Colossians 1.9-11, what some scholars call one of Paul’s wish prayers. No, not wishful thinking, but Paul’s wish list of blessings for the Christian house groups in Colossae. It’s worth taking time to read the gist of it:

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.

Follow Paul’s line of thought. Paul asks for knowledge of God’s will, all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives so that…. two things – so that they might live a life worthy of the Lord AND so that they may have great endurance and patience. Now there’s a surprise. Yes we would expect to ask God for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when we are seeking to know God’s will. But patience? A willingness to wait often requires more faith than the rush to action or the exciting risks of new ideas and rapid change.

Paul prays that these small communities under pressure will receive from God wisdom, understanding, and patience. Imagine praying for the power of God to be patient! But there is a lot of wisdom, and a lot of faith in Paul’s praying for the communities of Christ to have patience. Read his words again: “being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience.”

Here’s why I think Paul’s prayer for patience helps us where we are right now. The long, slow, and stuttering emergence from Covid-19 lockdown and restrictions will require of us courage, risk-taking, and a huge amount of goodwill and understanding. To think and pray, to share ideas but listen to each other’s fears, to begin to rebuild differently but also to discern what should change and what we should keep and enhance, – that’s a process that works best when we have been empowered with patience.

So perhaps the prayer, “God give us patience” is the prayer for a time like this. I sense and fully understand the urgency, intensity and yes, even impatience, to get started, to get doing, to get the show back on the road. Except the church is not a show, it is a community of the Spirit, a fellowship of believers, and a local expression of the Body of Christ. Together we are the real presence of Jesus, his risen life flowing through and amongst us as together we seek to serve Him in the power of the Spirit, whose fruit is patience.

Paul’s prayer comes from one who knows the wisdom of the gardener who waits for growth, the builder who gets the foundations right, the doctor who doesn’t rush to a diagnosis, and the shepherd who guides but does not chase the sheep. Patience and endurance are very similar words in Paul’s vocabulary. Together they describe the ability to work things out and work things through.

And note this, it’s important. Patience isn’t the product of our own strength, holding ourselves in check with gritted teeth. Patience is God’s empowering presence, the resilience of the risen Christ strengthening his people. So as we begin to think and plan, pray and seek God’s will together, it will put all our decisions and plans on a much surer footing if first we ask for patience.

A closing thought from Isaiah, another of God’s prophets:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40.31)

Early in the 1980's I read The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. It's a book that defies description and category. It's a travel book about a journey into Himalayan Nepal in search of the snow leopard. Then again the book reads like a novel with a gripping plot, kept taut by the tension of whether or not he will eventually see the near mythical snow leopard, and with memorable characters. It is undoubtedly autobiographic, and Matthiessen is a wise and self-aware observer of his own inner climate, his hopes and failures, and his way of looking at the world. Throughout the book Matthiessen comments on Zen Buddhism, by then a philosophy that held a deep appeal to someone in quest not only of experience, but of the meaning of Being itself.

At the time I first read The Snow Leopard, there were relatively few films or photographs of the animal available. The snow leopard is elusive, shy, lives in remote and inaccessible locations high in the mountains, and in order to see them in the 1970's the traveller had to endure terrain, weather and deprivations only the most hardened and resourceful could achieve. There are near things with avalanches and crevasses, changes in sherpa personnel, conflict and co-operation amongst the team, fascinating descriptions of the food in the remote villages and the customs of people strange and hard to interpret to western eyes. 

On that first reading I came to the end of the book with a profound sense of gratitude that in our world, rapidly being absorbed by human consumption, development of domination, there was still space for such a magnificent, graceful and mysterious animal. That has all changed. The snow leopard faces the very real threat of extinction in the wild. Even in the 1970's Matthiessen had anticipated the increasing dangers of decreasing habitat, the invasion of sightseers and tourists, the massive profits for poachers and the insatiable greed and arrogance of those who glory in trophies and accessories made at the cost of not just one snow leopard; those who kill a male snow leaopard weaken the entire population, and if they kill a female they destroy the possibility of future families in an environment where natural survival is already precarious.

So it was with excitement and a thin sliver of anxiety that I found myself at the Scottish Highland Wildlife Park. The car tour was slow, interesting and simply acted as a warm up act for me. Then we climbed the modest brae to the snow leopard enclosure, and the anxiety that the animals may not co-operate with yet more gawping tourists and decide to hide in the long grass. 

There are moments in all our lives when we know we are seeing something that changes our way of viewing the world, that shifts around and rearranges the inner furniture of past experiences real and imagined. My first view was more a sigh of recognition, the fulfilment of a longing to see, just to see, and be grateful for the existence of these animals. I have a modest and ageing camera, and hadn't come to photograph and capture, but to wonder, and enjoy. No photographic image can substitute for those moments of grace and power when Animesh moved out of the grass and across her cliff top, and I exhaled something between a sigh, a smile and a prayer of gratitude.

All those years ago I had read about Matthiessen's quest, and had been drawn into the story of these magnificent cats. In the intervening time David Attenborough made a full documentary aided by the advent of digital technology and the full resources of the BBC. But this was different. Here was a snow leopard, kept safe in Scotland, the wire fences an ambiguous barrier that contains an animal made to roam for endless miles, but which protects her, allows her to breed, and so ensure some kind of future for her species. And here I was, with a ten year old camera, privileged to see her, and to take in the marvel of wildness and a creature often called the ghost of the mountains.

As a theologian I read a lot of theology. But theology has to find a firm footing in the realities of our world, its politics, economics, ethics and our human impact on God's creation. Theology has to be brought into conversation with what is happening to our environment and climate, and as counter-voice to our insatiable lust for economic power and dominance. Theology is not concerned about concepts and metaphysics, ideas and arguments as ends in themselves. Theology is a means to an end, a way of understanding God, the world and ourselves in ways that enable us to see what we are doing, and learn what we need to do, to be stewards of God's creation, harbingers of God's kingdom, responsible and responsive human beings whose privileged place in the world is a gift not a right, and is for the good purposes of God not the proud self-assertion of human dominance. 

Matthiessen's book, The Snow Leopard, is a masterpiece of literature. For all the reasons previously mentioned, and for one more. For over 40 years I have carried inside me the image of the snow leopard, imagined from the pages of this book. It takes remarkable writing to create the longing and fascination this book embedded in my imagination. No photos or film clips since, have erased my long held desire to see this creature, and to gaze with inner wonder at such a gift to our world. No wonder this animal became a symbol of the World Wildlife Fund. One of the most treasured birthday gifts our daughter Aileen gave me, was a year's sponsorship of a snow leopard. Our visit to the Scottish Highland Wildlife Park was part of that same nexus of love, memory and gift.