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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. I am learning 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. 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."

Following the prose poem, further down the page are these lines:

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.

"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 speechand 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 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…"

You could be forgiven for thinking that R S THomas was a Luddite, a hater of technology and the mechanisation of life. The machine is manufactured, and Thomas was deeply fearful of what "man" "makes" in factories, what machines do to the land and to the human soul. Many of his poems are negative about science, ambivalent about technology, fearful and mistrusting of human knowledge applied for the purposes of mastering nature by machinery and mechanisation rather than serving creation by care and stewardship. He had lived through the years of war, of the tractor replacing the horse, the combine harvester devouring fields in half a day that would have taken men a week with scythes, twine, forks and sheaves, and further days of toil at the threshing mill.

His deeper fears focused on human applications of physics, the creation of the atomic bomb, the deploying as threat of nuclear weapons capable of destroying human life and earth as a viable home. Picking mushrooms reminded him of the mushroom cloud, and the white domes of early warning systems. The laboratory was a place where power and domination were exercised over matter, so that the same power could be exercised over other people, peoples and nations. Like George MacLeod, Thomas had no hesitation in seeing the splitting of the atom, and nuclear fission, harnessed to military ends, as blasphemy, the turning of the fundaments of life to the ends of mass death.

The opposite of poetry is not prose, says Thomas quoting Coleridge, it's science. Jesus was a poet, he argued, implying much that we are left to ponder. "Jesus was a poet, and would have teased the scientists, as he teased Nathanael". Nathanael was the disciple sitting under the fig tree, whether thinking, praying, waiting. But the allusion to Nathanael and his waiting under the tree is Thomas's entry point for one of his ironic and apologetic critiques of the scientific enterprise, the technological mentality, the mechanistic worldview. His quarrel wasn't with science, but with science as dominance, technology as efficiency, lust for knowledge unrestrained by humility. His late poem on the theme of science as both wrong question and wrong answer shows he is not an obscurantist opposed to science, discovery and learning. The poem considers the futility of science as an explanation of ultimate concerns (he was a well read fan of Tillich). Science and technology are not of themselves a sufficient basis for human flourishing, or even as guarantors of a human future.

I have waited for him
              under the tree of science
and he has not come:

            and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
            there is no guile

I have put my hand in my pocket
                for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
                it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
                on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.

                     And where do I go
                 from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
                 laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
                 there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
                 prove to them that they were wrong.

"I have put a cross…" At the centre of Christian faith is a truth beyond the powers of science to explain or even explore. The cross is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world; how can the answers be right if all the working and working out are based from the start on false premises, incomplete data, and skewed purposes. The cross is also a symbol of all that is right, at least insofar as the Cross is God's way of confronting the self destructive impulses that go back to the beginning when under another tree, the knowledge of good and evil was filched from God.

This is a poem that absolutely requires biblical literacy to be able to hear the potent theological and biblical sub-texts. As a Lenten poem it could be a call for us to adopt a far less sanguine view of human technological ingenuity, as in its rapid advances it outstrips our moral maturity and wisdom. And in place of intellectual hubris, a Cross, that symbol of the marker that something is so wrong in the conclusion, that the questions and answers require deeper and better thought.

There is no surprise that the eucharist is an important theme in the poetry of R S Thomas. Well of course it is, he is a priest, and when all else fails him there is substance and reality in the bread and the chalice, and again and again he alludes to the broken bread and body, the blood of Christ, the Cross and the chalice.  Likewise the sea and in particular its movement and noise, the waves and the wind, the tides ebbing and flowing, the unseen depths of an ocean filled with mystery and dark with secrets.

The two images of restless sea and celebrated eucharist are brought together in a brief poem

The breaking of the wave
outside echoed the breaking
of the bread in his hands.

The crying of the seagulls
was the cry from the Cross;
Lama Sabachthani. He lifted

the chalice, that crystal in
which love questioning is love
blinded with excess of light.

Here in an ascetic economy of words Thomas tells the double drama – breaking waves and breaking bread; seagull's cry and Jesus cry of dereliction; sun reflecting on the sea and light radiating from the silver chalice, and the vast ocean and the fruit of the earth and of human hands are each and all enfolded in love. This is Thomas at his most devotional, when love is allowed to be perfected as the radiated blessing of the Redeemer Creator. The chalice is "that crystal in which love questioning is love blinded by excess of light." So few words, such theological intelligence, an apophatic theology of illumination, an experience of love asking for proof of truth, and being blinded by what it cannot truly or fully ever see or comprehend.

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not comprehended it", said John in a Prologue whose depth theology caused Thomas's heart to vibrate with sympathy, and with questions. And of the hardest question of all, about whether God's love is believeable, the answer is broken bread, a seagull's cry and a crystal clear chalice radiating the light of Creation and Redemption. The beatific vision may well be described in such terms, when "love questioning is love blinded with excess of light." Or in the words of another Apostle, when seeing through a glass darkly gives way to seeing face to face, because "faith hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love."

(The photo was taken on the Aberdeen beach, the seagull obligingly posing on the horizon)

So our Health Secretary intends to impose new contracts on Junior Doctors in the National Health Service. A democratically elected Government is seriously planning to impose contracts having failed to get its way at the negotiating table. The imposition of changed working conditions, pay, and contracted hours on the nation's front line medical care staff is stated in Parliament with attempted ministerial gravitas as if it were a decision to uphold the law against those who are wilfully and destructively breaking it. Junior doctors are demonised; the British Medical Association, one of the most highly respected professional unions in the country is labelled "totally irresponsible"; patients lives are being put at risk by unjustified and selfish resistance to necessary change to improve Health Service provision, or so it is claimed; and of course the Government has no responsibility whatsoever for the impasse, the misinformation, and the hardening of ideological positions.

Jeremy Hunt has presided over the most confrontational episode involving front line medical staff in my lifetime. He is simply blaming others, asseting both his rightness and his authority, and yet is so uninformed of the actual experience of Junior Docotors' working conditions he resorts to misinformation and insinuation. Indeed he has been described by several eloquent and passionate doctors as a man who is lying to the public and pursuing a privatisation agenda that will endanger the fundamental principle of universal care at the point of need.

There are many political points to be made here; how imposition of state contracts fits with our democratic institutions; ideological pursuit of privatisation; non-availability of additional funding to enable the proposed expanded cover to weekends; electoral promises which are selectively implemented and were selectively explained in the manifesto. But as a Christian I come at all this with additional questions, about ministerial integrity and honesty in speech; about Government responsibility for sustaining the capacity of our society to provide medical care for all, from the poorest to the richest; about vocation and calling and the protection of those whose passion is to serve and care, from exploitation of that life-transforming motivation to drive through policies that undermine those same ideals; about trust, the trust of patient to doctor and of doctor to the Government institutions which resource our nations medical provision. That's a long list, and each issue has profoundly ethical implications that overlap into theological considerations.

The NHS is an institutional safeguard of our nation's humanity. The dignity, worth and place of each person is recognised and affirmed by the way our society treats each person in need of medical care. A theological anthropology underlies, or at least underwrites that view of each human being.

The role of a Government minister is to govern, and in a democracy that means seeking consensus, negotiating around differences, building and sustaining trust within the structures and between the persons, and ensuring the interests of the Department are upheld within the wider concerns of Government such as budget, development and future human resourcing. The Christian ideal of conciliation and compassion seem to me to be primary absences in the current situation.

Junior doctors claim they are vocation driven and that their commitment to the NHS is the real source of their opposition to the proposed changes to their role and conditions. Yet some have said their concern for the NHS might lead them to emigrate or go into private medicine. It is a hard ask to align such statements with the publicly declared commitment to the NHS as the underlying driver for BMA opposition to these changes. Thus on both sides a need for honesty about motive, and guarding against a fatal sclerosis of the conduits of dialogue to avoid our NHS provision and structures breaking down completely. An imposition of will by one side in a dialogue, is an act of unilateral deafness, and individual hubris.

As to what can be done? Well I guess the Christian cop out is to say, we can only pray for a resolution to this quite dangerous precedent. And I agree. So long as praying is neither seen as cop out, or reduced in significance as mere last resort. The work of the Holy Spirit is to be looked for outside the church, abroad in our society, haunting the corridors of power, moving in closed minds and across emotional barriers. Peace-making, conciliation, understanding, changes of mind, new perspectives, forgiveness, confession of failures, mistakes and wrong turnings, resources of patience and goodwill – these are the fruit of the Spirit invading the market mentality, unhinging the closed door ideologies, rebuilding the fractured relationships where trust lies in pieces on the floor, recalling and re-calling people to the work for which God made them, and turning heads away from the intensity of confrontation to possible new horizons to which it is possible walk together. Yes. That kind of praying to that kind of Holy Spirit, set loose in our kind of world.

No one exposes the illusions and pretensions of the new and fashionable academic discipline of practical theology more effectively than those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, the service of the life in the service of those communities we call the church. Thus R S Thomas who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encoutners as qualitiative research using the hermeneutic phenomenology a la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and his disappoinments with his own fittingness to be a priest, R S Thomas sometimes nailed it.

Nailed it! Now that's a contemporary term I dislike on semantic and aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image – perhaps because for a Christian to use the verb to nail we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross. And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologians of glory. 

His prose-poem account of how he spent his days as a priest in a remote and hard to find corner of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

"A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet…"

I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts.

"And yet…" Those two words are hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value, and the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened, but limping towards the dawn.

"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer; it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of frutifulness and harvest, a time for ideas to take root and grow.

And it is a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet…", there is too, in study and field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

Poetry is a gift with words that take us to places beyond words. When poetry is written as letters from a far country, they can become life-saving  missives for those of us who must eventually travel there. When it comes to faith, God, sin, love, loss, suffering, hope, grief and much else that confirms our transience, poetry often brings clarification and consolation, providing description of what seemed to us indescribable.

The relations of poetry to theology, and of both to philosophy and science, have seldom been better configured than in the poems of R S Thomas. In a note on his poetry on my Faceboo page I wrote:

They are so sharp, combining theological precision with theological hesitation – for Thomas, faith is not certainty, and God is not to be encapsulated in our words nor reducible to our cleverly constructed concepts. But at the centre of these poems is the Cross, the question mark, worship offered through open lips and gritted teeth, and a man whose cantankerous complexity was the vehicle for some of the loveliest lines I know about love, and that great Love that "moves the sun and other stars."

During Lent I am reading through this volume of his later poems. The poems were likened by Denis Healey to Beethoven's later Quartets in their "fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death." For years now I have listened to Thomas give  voice to profound uncertainty, hesitant faith, pessimism which stops this side of despair, the elusive miracle of human love which transcends the best of the human intellect to define, delimit or explain away. His exploration of the outer landscape gives him clues to the changing inner climates, the varied landscapes of the mind and the heart and the spirit – I'm not sure Thomas would bother much about the anomalies and theological perplexities of such a tripartite view of the inner life of any one of us. He could be acid and ascerbic about theologians.

So if Lent is a time for deep thinking; for stripping away illusion to better see what is, or is not, real; for re-aligning the loves of our life so that they nourish rather than devour each other; for facing the failures of faith, confronting bad faith, recovering good faith in God, and in ourselves and our sisters and brothers; then I know few guides more qualified to lead the mind, the heart and the Spirit through Lent and towards Calvary and beyond to resurrection.

Throughout Lent I'll post some meditations on these late poems, these late Quartets of the the Welsh composer who, like Beethoven, understood the De Profundis, and the Alleluia of those for whom faith comes hard, and is all the more cherished for thattruth.

For regular readers of Living Wittily apologies for the absence over the past week or two. There have been other fish to fry, other books to read, other places to be, people to meet, and things to get done with some urgency and determination. Of the things to be done the most 'need to get this done' obligation is all about pensions! It isn't so much difficult as serious when you are making decisions about the rest of your life, when a big chunk of it is already behind you! And the pensions adviser is asking the necessary hypotheticals about what happens if…..!

This February I will reach retiring age, which for me living in 21stC Scotland, is 65, while for many younger than me that dateline age is a receding horizon; my children may have to work till they are 70 before state pension age. Inevitably, and quite properly, such a life event as a retirement date prompts some serious reflection on what has been and what still might be, what has been done and what can still be achieved.

So here are some ordinary conclusions which have grown out of some thinking and praying, swithering and deciding about this quite remarkable gift which we are right to take for granted, life. To take something for granted is not to undervalue its reality, it is to receive it as a gift without spending life and energy feeling guilty about it. The proper response is gratitude, and the best gratitude is our joy in the gift and in the generous love of the Giver. 

Retirement is both an artificial label and a fiscal reality. I have no intention of stopping doing what I have done all my working life, though I may do less of it, and have more choice how long and how much. I preach, spend time with people in pastoral friendship, read and write sermons, teach and explore theology. Those choices of how much and hor often and how long I work are made possible by an income now unrelated to work done and hours contracted out.

Retirement from paid work is not retirement from vocation. Not everyone in our cultural climate would call what they do a vocation, a calling. But many do. And they are not just ministers of religion. Nurses, doctors, social workers, artists, teachers, IT specialists, pilots, fire service, police, naturalists, environmental officers – these are only some of the jobs that some of my friends would be just as passionate about as I am of being a minister. That's because they have a sense that what they do for money they don;t do just for the money. Unsurprisingly, that's also true of my own take on post 65 birthday.

Retirement is an opportunity to make different choices and enjoy new opportunities. By the time you're 65 the bumper wisdom that says "Life is short, eat your pudding first" takes on a poignant urgency. So these next years it makes sense to do what you really want to do; to spend time with those whose presence and gift of themselves is fundamental to who we are; to gather the goodness of each past year into an external drive for safekeeping, there to ponder the grace that gave each day, grateful and glad for just being there to live it; to kick the bucket that holds the list and just do the blessed list! Well, within limits. Because there are limits. I've little patience with the can do mentality that seems to ignore all the reasons, good and real reasons of life obligations and resources, that stop us living every dream. But there are liveable, realisable, affordable dreams that still demand risk, energy, effort and the courage to reach out and embrace them in all their possibility.

Retirement is not about me; it is about me in relation to others. I am also tired of the me, me, me, litany of life that pervades the social media like an unexamined credo of the self. My own happiness is not always the most important thing. What I think of myself is not always the best criterion for self-knowing, self-awareness and self-transformation. What I want is not a Christian categorical imperative if what I want is achievable only at the cost and loss it causes others. It is still the case that of all the ways of living our lives, young or old, "the greatest of these is love." If life till 65 means I am now a graduate in the skills and knowledge of living, then post retirement is post-graduate study, researching wider and deeper on the mystery and miracle of human beings and human being.

So now that the forms are filled, the advice is taken, the process of pension calculation hums away in the background, very little has changed or will change radically on my birthday. But if as Kirekegaard urged, life can only be understood backwards and lived forwards, then I am also persuaded of the wisdom of Dag Hammarskjold: For all that has been – Thank you. For all that is to come – Yes.

(The photo is a small central panel from the current tapestry I am working, "Eucharist and Pentecost". Tapestry is for me a contemplative form of art, or an artistic form of spirituality.

This got me thinking again about austerity. Even if austerity was justified as an economic policy, that still leaves questions about priorities, and the criteria for choosing and implementing these priorities, and the even more contentious issue of who gets a say in the decision making.

What gets me about this image circulating on Facebook is the astounding question behind that word if! As if there could be any doubt – music and art are the grammar of our emotions, the wings of the mind, the nutrients of the imagination, the tutors of the conscience and the proof and celebration of our humanity.

We need music and art education like we need a heart, a brain, emotion and thought; we need music and art education because we are human beings and these are two of the most developed gifts of and to our humanity; we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing, the rhythms and cadences and melodies that make life dance, and weep, and love and leap; we need music and art education because there are pictures we dream and create out of the richly textured kaleidoscope of imagination, vision, longing and desiring that is the human hunger for meaning. 

The removal of music and art education from the classroom is not austerity, it is the removal of opportunity and resources for children and young people to discover the joy and discipline of beauty and harmony. Budget cuts may be necessary to balance the books, but the targeting of music and art education will condemn those same young lives to an austerity of the spirit, an impoverishment of imagination, a limitation of worldview and a constriction of the understanding that through music and art grows into wisdom, wonder, purpose and vocation.

A child learning to play the piano or guitar, a group of young people discovering the disciplined joy of choir and orchestra, guided by the conductor; a teenager with oil paint, brushes and canvas, or with clay and sculpting tool, mentored by a teacher who helps them to see, to really see; these are gifts we can provide for our children which make for a richer, expansive life in which the words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' and 'if only', are freed of their limiting power over the self that is each of these young lives.

Utilitarianism is, paradoxically a useful philosophy, a rule of thumb that fits many if not most substantial decisions we make. The greatest good of the greatest number. But the word also has that undertow of negativity when things are valued for their practical usefulness. Allied to economics it is fatal to those dimensions of human experience which have little market value, which are not crucial to our employability, and which we can live well enough without – until the inner ache of hunger reminds us of their absence. Music and art education are crucial strands of our cultural fabric. To reduce them to market barcodes, budget mathematics, and austerity targets is to apply the utilitarian criterion in its most negative and least valid form. 

If our school budgets cannot support adequate provision in music and art education that is an issue that ought to be placed way beyond the control and competence of budget number crunchers. Decisions made here affect the capacity of our culture to sustain and maintain a supply of creativity, discipline, confidence and ability sufficient to produce, enjoy and celebrate the intellectual, aesthetic, moral and cultural activities that are amongst our most human attributes.

Creator God, whose love and purpose for all your creation is blessing. We thank you for the gift of this wonderful, beautiful, place we call earth.

When we pray give us this day our daily bread, we are confessing our dependence on your mercy and the limits of our own strength and abilities. So our heavenly Father, we give thanks for all that has made our lives good – for food, shelter, home and the people we love and who love us.

Keep us grateful for what we have; generous in what we give; compassionate in our care for others; responsible in how we treat our world; careful not to waste the resources of our planet; and gentle with all those creatures who share our place on this earth.

This past week we have been reminded we can’t always control what happens. We pray especially today for those whose lives are in turmoil after the floods. Those whose homes are ruined; whose businesses are devastated; those now trying to salvage what they can, and find hope for these next weeks and months. In their despair bring hope; in their bewilderment give reassurance; in their fear and anxiety for tomorrow and coming days, comfort and strengthen them.

We thank you that no lives were lost despite the disaster; we thank you for all those who worked night and day to help those overwhelmed and in danger – our emergency services, council workers, volunteers, working together within the community for the sake of each other.

In coming days, when generosity and good planning will be needed, and when the real costs become known, give wisdom and courage to the local council, to our Government, and to those who provide the services to our communities. Help us as churches wherever and however we can, to be engaged in the work of supporting and helping, giving and caring; and if we don’t know how, give us the gumption to find out and to be responsive with whatever we can give and do.

Lord so much rain – yet remind us that you once taught us to notice that the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, and that our Heavenly Father’s love falls upon our world with life giving gifts of refreshing grace, forgiving mercy and righteous peace. Make us then showers of blessing, streams of your mercy, conduits of your grace, and reservoirs of your love in Jesus Christ your son, in whose name we pray, Amen