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Do you ever find that verses of the Bible that you know so well you can repeat them word for word, sometimes come back to you and you hear them as if for the first time? That’s when the Holy Spirit takes those same words and brings them home to your heart with a new and strange power. Words we have known by heart, are now known in our hearts to be true and real, because they come straight from the heart of God.

Recently I was talking with someone I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. He was having a coffee somewhere I go, sitting alone, and his face lit up as our eyes met above the face masks. I took my coffee over and we talked for a while. His wife had been in hospital, very unwell, passing through an episode of severe mental illness. This had happened before, but this time so much harder for her, and for him.

We talked a while, there were silences which felt a bit uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as glib words or false assurances would have created. My friend and his wife are mature and thoughtful Christians, and they had been walking some very tough miles these past months.

Sometimes love for others is more about shared silence than spoken words. In making time to be with someone there we can create a conversation of heart with heart, and refuse to assume we are problem solvers. Instead, we sense God telling us to be quiet and let the Holy Spirit be the fellowship and communion, and the bringer of comfort and hope. Only after such willing presence in someone else’s suffering, can we dare to hope that words we speak will be helpful, hopeful and, pray God, part of the healing and strengthening of those we care for, and those with whom we sit.

As I came away words I know by heart came home to my heart, straight from the heart of God.

“Come unto me, all you that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” (Matt 11.28-29)

There is huge courage and immense struggle and cost involved, for those going through times of mental ill health, both for them and for their carers. However much we sympathise, and mean well, and want others to begin again to flourish and live more fully, there are limits to what we can do. Which brings me back to those most humane and compassionate words of Jesus.

I’ve read these words, quoted those words, learned them by heart, preached on them often enough. As they came into my head they formed themselves into a prayer for my two friends. It goes something like this:

Lord, my friends are weary and heavy laden, and in their hurt and anxiety they feel they are far away from you, and you from them. So whether they feel able to come or not, I bring them to you and before you, that they may find peace, rest, relief and a healing of mind and body.

Lord Jesus you are gentle and humble of heart. Give them strength to carry the weight of life as it is. Help them to find in you One who bears their burdens, and One in whom they can find rest for their souls.  Compassionate Christ, strong and gentle, through my prayers I bring these your children to be held in the strong embrace of your love, Amen

As we move into the next stages of the pandemic, and its impact on our communities and all those who are our neighbours, there will be many people who find every day a hard mile to walk. As Christian light-bearers, we are called to show the compassion of Jesus to those walking in the shadowlands, to sit with them, to be Jesus’ invitation to those who are weary, weighed down and have lost their way.

One way of doing that is to pray for those we know who are suffering in mind and heart, and to bring before the throne of grace those too weary to come themselves. In this way we become the presence of Christ in other people’s lives, “bearing one another’s burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

              There is no other sound

In the darkness but the sound of a man

Breathing, testing his faith

On emptiness, nailing his questions

One by one to an untenanted cross. 

                          (Page 180, Collected Poems)

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

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

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

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

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

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

………………………

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

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

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

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

Because God is love….we are!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that maybe

I will be a little surer

of being a little nearer.

That's all. Eternity

is in the understanding

that that little is more than enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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