104 years ago today R S Thomas was born. To mark the day here is one of his poems and a few theological reflections on this poet who was impatient with all forms of theological laziness, certainty or reductionism.
Praise, R S Thomas
I praise you because
you are artist and scientist
in one. When I am somewhat
fearful of your power,
your ability to work miracles
with a set-square, I hear
you murmuring to yourself
in a notation Beethoven
dreamed of but never achieved.
You run off your scales of
rain water and sea water, play
the chords of the morning
and evening light, sculpture
with shadow, join together leaf
by leaf, when spring
comes, the stanzas of
an immense poem. You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.
Every poet is likely to develop and change over time, maturing towards a style and range of themes that become characteristic. The great poets write today what has been forming in the mind and imagination over time, each poem building on the successes and failures of their words over the years. As writing and reading enrich the deepening loam of ideas, as thinking and experimenting with words becomes a seeding process as extravagant and risky as that parable of the sower with its twenty five percent chance of success. So the poet's voice evolves and grows and becomes what could not have been anticipated; originality by definition is announced rather than anticipated.
One of the recurring notes, or familiar tones, of R S Thomas's poetry is best described as psalmic. This poem, 'Praise', reads like one of the Psalms, resonant with metaphor, replete with observed and enjoyed experience, exuberant and carefree in imagery ransacked from a created world filled with human creativity, its best and worst. The mixed metaphor of the Creator as artist and scientist deliberately creates a tension between power and beauty, the power to make and unmake, the beauty that may prove transient. This Creator who measures the oceans and calibrates trillions of raindrops, whose geometry is precise and whose music is celestial is likewise the Creator who year by year publishes the long epic poem of Spring and renewed life.
The poet is one of the most conscientious curators of language, skilled expertise dedicated to the conservation of words. The Creator speaks all mundane languages, but also transcends the limits and conceptuality essential for language to function at all. When Thomas talks of answer to complex prayers, he is honestly aware of how our prayers can be brutally simple, desperate and definite as pleading petition whether for deliverance, healing or even the recovery of meaning in a life exhausted. He is also aware of how our prayers are riddled with ambiguities, undermined by hesitations and qualifications, "If it be your will…", compromised by a nagging guilt that might disqualify us from divine favour.
And Thomas is too good a pastor, and too honest in his own spiritual struggles to override all such complexities with strident praise, exaggerated gratitude, or an unquestioning faith deaf to disturbing questions and blind to the reaities of a broken world. The answer from the Creator is the simplicity of a flower, benign beauty, superfluous but for the pleasure it bestows on the recipient, which is the joy of the giver.
But the last lines of the poem are lowering clouds on a no longer blue sky, the warning within the very structures of created reality. Echoing a line from a prayer by George Macleod of Iona, "But in the Garden also; always the thorn." The theology informing Thomas's poetry gives due recognition to the transcendent mystery of a God who need not explain, whose thoughts are not as our thoughts, and whose sovereign purposes may or may not align with what we ever think might be in our own best interests. There is the threat of holiness and otherness in those two words which are pivotal in this poem: 'confronting us'. No running away, no concessions, the same Creator daring us to face up to what we think we are about when "we would domesticate [God] to our uses…" The rioting viruses stand for all that we cannot control, for all our science; that which could destroy us despite our cleverness and will to power. The microscope and the telescope allow us to see far, and deep; but when we do we are confronted by immensities that are as much threat as promise.
The poem is entitled 'Praise'. But in fact it is qualified praise, because the lyrical catena of metaphors eventually reaches a terminus in the recognition that God is never to be taken for granted. The over-familiar spiritualities of God as provider and source of blessing becomes utilitarian, prayer becomes self-referential, petition for our needs replaces intercession for others, and both eclipse adoration and the proper praise of the God who Is rather than the God we insist God has to be. There is a necessary fear of God, the vigilant respect of the keeper for the tiger, a continuing conscious health and safety mindset when approaching that which cannot be tamed. It is that preservation of wild otherness that makes Thomas's poetry such an astringent corrective to any spirituality of over-familiarity. You never, ever, try to shake hands with God!