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Evening

The archer with time

as his arrow–has he broken

his strings that the rainbow

is so quiet over our village?

Let us stand, then, in the interval

of our wounding, till the silence

turn golden and love is

a moment eternally overflowing.

I'm not sure what Thomas would have made of social media. But I am certain beyond all doubt he would hate and fume and foam at the ubiquitous postings of sunset photographs, often edited by software to exaggerate, highlight, select and effectively recreate and improve what is one of nature's most consistent perfections. Such a private mind and soul as Thomas would be appalled at the promiscuity and shamelessness of the selfie, the illustrated reports of food eaten, the accumulation of trivia over years of our online story. And chief amongst the things that would ignite his ire to a white phosphorescence would be reproduced sunsets, digital images which for all their photographic quality and technical wizardry he would dismiss as no better than painting by numbers while blindfolded.

Sunsets are for watching, waiting, and wanting. The sunset communicates, during those moments and minutes of the daily dying of the sun, deep things to ponder, and awakens long hidden longings that come out of human woundedness and the instinct to worship. This short poem expresses, better than the camera, the spirituality of nature in which Thomas lost himself, and found himself. The rainbow is the sign of the covenant, a promise of mercy, a bow without the string to propel the arrow. But time is the arrow, and it wounds humanity with mortality, so that the dying of the sun each day is a reminder that each day's  passing is a sign of our own daily dying.

"Let us stand then, in the interval of our wounding…" That is both an act of faith and an attitude of worship. Time watching the sunset, and pondering its meaning is not time wasted, but time redeemed, in the golden moment when eternity intersects with these units of time measured by colour, light and silence. The paradox of a moment eternally overflowing is already resolved; not any moment, but this moment. Why? Because it is love that is the overflow, and the superfluity of love the signal and symbol of an eternity in which love is not only the raison d'etre, but the source of Being itself. In this poem, as in several others in this series, Thomas imagines eternity suffusing time; but here sunlight is pouring over the horizon, overarched by the rainbow of mercy, a landscape painted in light and shadow, benevolence and woundedness, a masterpiece of the Creator's originality, every day.

The photo, with apologies to R S Thomas, was taken on Brimmond Hill, at 3.30pm in mid-December.

 Migrants

He is that great void
we must enter, calling
to one another on our way
in the direction from which
he blows. What matter
if we should never arrive
to breed or to winter
in the climate of our conception?

Enough we have been given wings
and a needle in the mind
to respond to his bleak north.
There are times even at the Pole
when he, too, pauses in his withdrawal,
so that it is light there all night long.

The image of migrating geese is one which, for myself, immediately resonates with images, memories and moments of joy. Ornithology becomes ornitheology in these lines which chart the journey of prayer and pilgrimage through life, in a rhythm of movement and return embedded in the instincts by which migrant birds survive. The impetus to go North, the risks and losses and dangers of such a long journey, wings that beat to exhaustion and the uncertainty of feeding on the way, and that unerring sense of direction and directedness – all of these are the experience of this poet who prays, and this pray-er who writes poems about how hard it is to pray.

The characteristic realism all but falling over into pessimism is signalled in the surrendering question, "What matter if we should never arrive….? " Indeed arrival may suggest a completion that robs the search of further meaning, renders the quest both complete and annihilating of that inner drive by which the person praying is compelled towards the bleak north of the One who calls. Was Thomas thinking of the famous confession of Augustine, "Thou has made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee."

But the One who calls, and to whom the praying person is drawn into a long migrant journey, is not to be thought bound by our quest, presumed to be present and there at journey's end. The rewards or blessings of all our praying are not the reason for the journey of prayer; "enough we have wings and a needle in the mind" and the energy and will for the journey. Though "will" may sound too definite, too suggestive that prayer is an impetus born in us rather than an instinct summoned by grace. But once again Thomas is content with ambiguity, and using a frequent metaphor for presence speaks of the mercy of the one who "pauses in his withdrawal, so that it is light there all night long." This image of night illumined by non-withdrawing presence is one of the loveliest and most comforting in all his poems on prayer. This God who awaits the arrival of the migrant heart, guided by the needle in the mind towards that bleak north out of which the wind of the Spirt of God blows.

The photo was taken in January, near Banchory – migrating geese feeding while they can.

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.

The combination of poet and vicar, distilled into the personality of a man who seemed to look angrily as often as tenderly on life, makes for poems that are theologically diverse, speculative and just as often hesitant. If Thomas made no truce with the furies, neither did he ever surrender to the demands of religious certainties. There are many reasons for this.

His lifetime's resistance to the imperial claims of the scientists, and his fear and outright condemnation of technology and the machine as danger and threat to the futures of humanity, made him less than confident that faith and religious ethics would be able to stand up to such metaphysical challenges.

His own temperament as long thinker, and slow ruminator, whose solace in solitude was directly traceable to an introspective dwelling within the constraints of his own mind and emotional existence, all militated against dogma as any kind of answer to the questions that hurt and harry human beings most.

So this little poem on eternity comes as a surprisingly hopeful and modest statement of faith. The threefold use of the word 'little' indicates a lifetime of almost imperceptible gains, incremental progress towards being able to say, with much less certainty than Descartes,  " I think that…" therefore I might, just might, be a little nearer being right, whatever "right" might be. Yet with the cleverness and gentleness that often softens Thomas's God-talk, the word "little" is decisively qualified and extended by the last three words, "more than enough".

Thomas is metaphysical light years away from the Apostle Paul's "I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor pricnipalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

And yet. The ageing poet, retired from his calling as vicar, and contemplating however briefly the relationship between time and eternity, and its implication for human mortality, has conceded a little more understanding is possible – and that is more than enough. A little surer, a little nearer – in eternity that will suffice, for this man of agnostic faith and subdued certainties, who spent his life looking for a foothold on hope. And who found it most often in the shadow of the Cross, cast by the distant light of hope beyond resurrection.

From Bleak Liturgies

'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 not so long ago when we could say at least people didn't starve, there is a welfare safety net, that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. We believed that at its best 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, 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 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, angular, angry Christian man who 25 years ago sensed the trends of a culture more in which obscene rewards are available in the cultures of celebrity, entertainment, sport, financial industries, and with their concommitant 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 is 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 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 diistorted sacraments and physical embodiments of their greed and arrogance. Thomas makes no mention of judgement, 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.

Lent is a time for critical self-reflection, refreshed repentance, changed ways, renovation of our moral furniture, refurbished lifestyles more aligned with the contemporary living Christ. 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.

               Tell Us

We have had names for you:
The Thunderer, the Almighty
Hunter, Lord of the snowflake
and the sabre-toothed tiger.
One name we have held back
unable to reconcile it
with the mosquito, the tidal wave,
the black hole into which
time will fall. You have answered
us with the image of yourself
on a hewn tree, suffering
injustice, pardoning it;
pointing as though in either
direction; horrifying us
with the possibility of dislocation.
Ah, love, with your arms out
wide, tell us how much more
they must still be stretched
to embrace a universe drawing
away from us at the speed of light.

Complaint. Argument. In your face frankness. This is R S Thomnas at prayer when he dares be critical of the One whose mighty power thunders, pursues and rules. This is the old argument forever unanswerable of almighty power, divine benevolence and a contingent universe of sentient suffering and ultimate dissolution into non-being. Interestingly there is no question mark in this poem, only a questioner whose urgent question is stated, not asked.

Questions require answers. But not all answers are logical, reasoned, satisfyingly resolving the tensions. The answer of God in this poem is to reveal the image of himself, and the image is cruciform, present in and present to the suffering of a broken creation and sinful humanity. The answer is to absorb the cruelty and violence of injustice and to pardon it. Yet the Cross itself is ambiguous, no real answer, pointing in two directions, exhibiting both horror and forgiveness, the victim forgiving the punishers, and horrifying onlookers through the centuries unsure what to make of it all. The image of the crucified, and note that Thomas has avoided using the word cross, creates, as does the judicial process of execution, a sense of dislocation, intellectual collapse of the psyche, a conceptual exhaustion parallel to that of arms and legs which give way as joints disintegrate.

Then those closing five lines, when the name we have withheld is used, "Ah, love…" These are amongst the most economic and theologically personal lines in these late poems. God is invited to share his suffering with a humbled and now worshipping mind and heart, and to tell "how much more" before divine love catches up with a universe expnading at the speed of light. As a meditation on suffering and faith, this poem is for me an education in theological honesty in that place where it matters most, prayer. 

Geriatric
by R S Thomas

What god is proud
      of this garden
of dead flowers, this underwater
      grotto of humanity,
where limbs wave in invisible
      currents, faces drooping
on dry stalks, voices clawing
      in a last desperate effort
to retain hold? Despite withered
      petals, I recognise
the species: Charcot, Meniere,
      Alzheimer. There are no gardeners
here, caretakers only
      of reason overgrown
by confusion. This body once,
      when it was in bud,
opened to love's kisses. These eyes,
      cloudy with rheum,
were clear pebbles that love's rivulet
      hurried over. Is this
the best Rabbi Ben Ezra
      promised? I come away
comforting myself, as I can,
      that there is another
garden, all dew and fragrance,
      and that these are the brambles
about it we are caught in,
      a sacrifice prepared
by a torn god to a love fiercer
      than we can understand. 

Lent. A time of reflection, repentance, ascetic self-questioning, self-denial. Reflection as examination of our lives in the light of God; repentance as that motivational impulse towards change in the light of that examination; self-questioning about what matters most, and why what matters most is not always what we attend to most carefully; self-denial, the refusal of the will to go with the moral default settings of self-interest, self-indulgence, self-service.

But sometimes Lent can be something else. Instead of humility and penitence their can be for want of a better word defiance, and defiance articulated in questioning the One who so closely knows, examines and judges us. Giving up our comfortable views of God for Lent! It is that reverent defiance that gives this poem its power to both move us and scare us. Lent is a good time for thinking again of the God we believe in, whose mercy we depend upon, whose love we trust, whose providence and purpose we look for in the contingencies and circumstances of our own living. This poem is about a human being growing old, and the onset of Alzheimer's, the slow relinquishing of the self, and the poet's angry interrogation of any god overseeing with any sense of contentment let alone pride, a garden with flowers wilting, wasting, decomposing into nothingness.

But once again in a single poem Thomas argues for and with a faith that struggles to try and have it both ways. The god of this slowly decomposing garden of human life is questioned and resisted until the poet sees beyond all the withered, dying beauty. But what he sees is not the fantasy that would ever claim that in growing old "the best is yet to be". Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra is a mockery for the reality that is many people's old age. Instead Thomas sees the torn god whose sacrifice makes possible another garden of dew and fragrance, wrested into existence by "a love fiercer than we can understand."

Thomas has no faith or patience in explanations and comforting cliches; he settles for a sterner reality, in which the brambles that catch and tear are real enough, but they are not the final reality and destiny of this body so loved and loveable in its budding promise when young. The tenderness with which Thomas describes the love that enlivens and sparkles each person with humanity, also describes the fiercer love that is torn in order to redeem, renew and make flower again the garden of creation. There is much of Genesis 1-3 in this poem which, while giving full weight to the theology of fallenness and mortality, moves beyond to a hopefulness which is not wistful or hesitant, and which against all apearances to the contrary, trusts this fiercer love which we cannot understand to renew the garden of God's own creation.

This is a remarkable poem about growing old, and the diminishing of the self that attends many whose mind begins to lose its grasp as "reason is overgrown by confusion". The balance of unvarnished realism and reasoned tenderness, create a tension between hope and despair, which if not entirely resolved, nevertheless tilts towards newness, which if not inexorably promised, is neither inexorably withheld.

Geriatric
by R S Thomas

What god is proud
      of this garden
of dead flowers, this underwater
      grotto of humanity,
where limbs wave in invisible
      currents, faces drooping
on dry stalks, voices clawing
      in a last desperate effort
to retain hold? Despite withered
      petals, I recognise
the species: Charcot, Meniere,
      Alzheimer. There are no gardeners
here, caretakers only
      of reason overgrown
by confusion. This body once,
      when it was in bud,
opened to love's kisses. These eyes,
      cloudy with rheum,
were clear pebbles that love's rivulet
      hurried over. Is this
the best Rabbi Ben Ezra
      promised? I come away
comforting myself, as I can,
      that there is another
garden, all dew and fragrance,
      and that these are the brambles
about it we are caught in,
      a sacrifice prepared
by a torn god to a love fiercer
      than we can understand. 

This poem is virtually a mosaic of biblical echoes, whether the vocabulary or the imagery. In two stanzas of 20 words each, Thomas gives a rationale for prayer that is devoid of sentimental spirituality, eschews hard edged pragmatism, is impatient with otherworldly escapism. Because even if eyes are closed to the world, it is this act of sensory asceticism which ignites the bush, signals the presence, commands the removal of shoes from holy ground.  Strength found in acknowledged weakness, the burning that doesn't consume, the uninvited guest who shares the modest table, these are profound biblical allusions to the ways God is encountered. This short poem distils so much into the concentrate of prayer, and acts as both invitation and anticipation of an encounter with one who, knowing our weakness and inadequacy, comes as guest, uninvited, but in the end, welcome.

When we are weak, we are

strong. When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

burns. When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that

uninvited the guest comes.

                Tidal

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

In this poem Thomas uses one of the most evocative images for prayer as both relationship and strategy. The relentless ebb and flow of the tide has its counterpart in the persistent, patient progress of those who simply do not give up in the quest for the One who raises the urgent questions of existence, meaning and purpose. The domestication of transcendence, the reduction of prayer to petition and pragmatic help seeking, the fascination of a culture immured in consumer efficiency and addicted to mechanised production, betray precisely the violence that would take rather than give, that despises reverence, and that far from achieving the true ends of prayer, merely harden the heart of God to rock. 

"My return must be made on my knees…", this phrase recognises the need for reticence in the approach to transcendence, a demonstrable and genuine humility that makes no claims, but hopes for a hearing, and perhaps a word of mercy which might fertilise trust as it struggles to grow. It is one of the immense contributions Thomas has made to Christian spirituality that he so persuasively and poignantly validates hesitation and hopefulness in the all too human instincts for prayer. Repeatedly in his poems, especially the late poems, the disposition of the body on its knees has its complement in a heart and a mind equally submissive; but it is submission edged with determination, and driven by seasonal spring surges when the heart overflows in supplication.

This is for me one of Thomas's finest and most self-revealing meditations on a lifetime's praying, and his discovery of "depositis of mercy where trust may take root and grow." I feel a deep kinship with that image.

R S Thomas could be crabbit, critical, hard to get on with. The poems reveal a man uncomfortably stuck with the limits and frustrations of his own self, and knowing as few Christian poets have known better, the further and fiercer limits and frustrations of trying to bring that self into relation with the great Other, the God we all but analyse out of existence.

So this poem comes as a surprise. The poet's ironic take on the child's observation of the anguished loss of dance and play and make believe and sheer acceptance of the joy of being that is childhood. I wonder if this is Thomas's commentary on Jesus words, " Unless you change and become as a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of God." (Matthew 18.3) The adult view of the world is grown up; which means experienced, more cautious, "knowing" in that way of thinking that is Health and Safety applied as a life principle. Children, happily, know nothing of this; and postmodern adulthood could do worse than change, and rediscover the deeper and different roots of, the deeper and different routes to, a world of recovered wonder and trust. 

Knees are important in Thomas's poetry – not far from knees is prayer, and supplication, and in Thomas's theology prayerful supplication that has no guaranteed outcome in any answer, and perhaps no certainty even of being heard. And just perhaps,, this poem is Thomas's own recognition that the world of the child has more to commend it than all the sophistication and life experience and power games and nameless anxieties of being responsible, accountable, and a seeker of purpose and meaning. 

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R S Thomas

(The image is by Joe Aspell, a statue of Joseph playing with Jesus – or maybe Jesus teaching Joseph to play).

Over the next week in Lent I'll post a poem a day with minimal comment. This is amongst the most important poems by R S Thomas, as far as my own appreciation and judgement goes. I used this at a Maundy Thursday service 30 years ago and still remember the response of a congregation most of whom were hearing it for the first time.

A friend called Alistair, presented me with an inscribed copy. He had taught himself calligraphy while held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war in the same barrack as Laurens Van der Post. That, along with Herbert's Poem Prayer (II), remains a treasured possession.

The Musician

A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.

R S Thomas