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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

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.