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Morning has broken
Like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird.
Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
Praise for them, springing
Fresh from the Word!

Sweet the rain’s new fall
Sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall
On the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness
Of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness
Where his feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight,
Mine is the morning,
Born of the one light
Eden saw play.
Praise with elation,
Praise every morning,
God’s re-creation
Of the new day!

I'm old enough to remember Cat Stevens singing 'Morning has broken' on TOTP. The lyrics were written by the children's author and poet Eleanor Farjeon, commissioned specifically for children and to match the tune 'Bunessan'. The subsequent history of the hymn is now inextricably linked to the name Cat Stevens (now Yusuf), but the authorship of the words is less well known and is often conflated with the name of the singer.

I thought of this hymn the other day while walking in the Bin Forest up at Huntly. It had been raining heavily, and the trees were dripping with run off water. The smells were pungent, amongst them wet wood, grass in full flower, the aroma of pine branches and new cones, and that leafy green smell that's hard to describe but seems to depend on rain and its aftermath of sunlight. 

I think back to the countless times I've heard this song, in church worship, at weddings and funerals, on radio as song and in orchestrated versions where on hearing the tune 'Bunessan' the mind defaults to Farjeon's lyrics, and for me, to Cat Stevens, singing accompanied by his acoustic guitar and Rick Wakeman's brilliant piano accompaniment and instrumental interludes.

And so a classic is born from the coincidence of a traditional Gaelic tune named after a village on Mull, a hymn written by a children's poet in the 1920's, a singer with an evocative and remarkably clear voice, and an emerging rock instrumentalist whose keyboard accompaniment make the hymn instantly recognisable in its first couple of bars.  

What is less obvious is the rounded theology of creation that is woven into the simple words. There are echoes of the Psalms in every verse. It is a hymn of praise inviting the singer to praise, and providing the words and images to do so. The rain, dewfall, bird song, sunrise, and grass are images straight from the great Psalms of creation praise, but transposed  to words simple enough for children, and profound in the imaginative stretch required to transport the mind to the Genesis creation narratives.

Words so familiar can become divorced from their literary precursors: 'Where his feet pass', God's recreation of the new day', and especially the last lines of the first stanza, "Praise for them springing, fresh from the Word."; these provide the essential biblical substructure of a hymn that is joyfully exuberant at the sheer extravagance of God's creative artistry, as everything is "sprung in completeness, where his feet pass." And God saw that it was good, very good. 

Something of that was felt and smelt in a wet forest, walking with Sheila and Andrew, and remembering Aileen, who loved this song, which we sang at her funeral thanksgiving service. The playfulness of Eden, God's work of creative completion, and God's recreation of each new day – these are hopeful, though at times poignant convictions which I hold to, and pray that each day they will spring fresh from the Word. 

I had an email from someone yesterday. It was one of those affirming, appreciative, encouraging surprises in the inbox, intended to make you feel better, more hopeful, and know you are valued. In this case the person assured me of their prayers, and they sent a biblical text they thought was 'just meant' for me. 

The text was "Behold I make all things new…", and is from Revelation 21.5. It comes at the end of the most spectacular imaginative writing in the entire New Testament. Like much in that book, this text is freighted with meanings from the Old Testament, especially Isaiah 43.18-19:

“Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
   See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland."

Throughout my life as a Christian, over 50 years now, I have turned to the later chapters of Isaiah at times when hope was hard to come by and life seemed to be asking more than can be given. Isaiah couldn't be further removed from pop psychology, life and self-management, and the always look on the bright side way of coping.

So when Isaiah says God says, "Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing", this is neither command nor permission to relinquish our sorrows, erase sad memories, or try to disguise the wounds. God promises to make a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. The new thing doesn't obliterate the past, it redeems it, transforms it, turns aridity to fruitfulness, irrigates the places where nothing has grown for years. Wilderness is land, waste places have potential, all they need is water, and that's what God promises.

In that sense Isaiah was sending to the exiles a surprise in the inbox. A promise that all that seems wasted can be gathered up again into a future fruitfulness. The tears will remain shed, and more will come; the wounds will take a long time healing, and will leave scars. But out of all the suffering God brings new possibilities, there can be streams in the wasteland, and a way through what seems like endless and life-denying desert. 

That email yesterday came at the end of a long day. It included an early morning cycle run, a walk to the local farmer's market just re-opened after 4 months, and later a 3 hour forest walk enjoying the peace and invitation of a forest still dripping after earlier rain. Like everyone else I have found these past months difficult, tricky to navigate, at times seemingly unending in the slow blurring of days and timelines, and at times lonely when missing all those in whose lives we are invested, and whose friendship is an investment in us. So a walk in a forest gives time to think, to pray, to look and see, to listen to outer sounds and inner thoughts. 

Walking behind the other two for a while, looking at leaves dripping water, listening to ditches gurgling, examining flowers closely, there was a complete sense of Cat Stevens! "Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden, sprung in completeness, where his feet passed."

We came back, had a replenishing meal, watched an old film, and I came up to the study, to find a text sent earlier that day, "Behold I make all things new.", and the inexplicable hunch, that such a text "was meant". 

I started this series "Photos in a Time of Pandemic", as a way of reflecting on photos I had taken in the first two months of lock down. Now I've caught up with myself, and where events now are. Whatever these next months bring, it is impossible for us to forget the impact of a pandemic on our world, our country and our own small world of family, friends, church, work and all that we used to call normal. I have no idea what a text that says, "Behold I make all things new" will mean for all of us. But like so much in the life of faith, I don't need to know what will be what. More important to know that God will be there as well as here, then as well as now. And whatever blessing God brings, it will come as streams in the wasteland – that is, our past experience is not erased, it becomes a source of fruitfulness; and it will come as a way in the wilderness – that is, our future experience will be a way forward, following the one who is going before, and who makes all things new. 

At least that is my attempt at trying to make some sense, and some faithful response to a promise that comes out of the blue, "Behold I make all things new." Now and again, there is a surprise in the inbox, a reminder from God knows where, that we are part of something vaster than we know, and pulled into purposes that spring, as we will eventually see, from the eternal Yes of God to his whole creation. "Behold I make all things new."    

This is a much more prophetically edged poem than many in the Sabbath collection. The poet is compelled to interrogate his own values and motives as a poet, as a citizen, and as a human being capable of moral discernment and ethical protest. 

One of the reasons I admire and return to Wendell Berry's writing is precisely that unerring instinct for naming what is going wrong in a culture, and pointing to legitimate response. This poem was written the year the Allied coalition invaded Iraq in the so called "War on Terror". The justifications offered for those long years of conflict,with countless civilian casualties and the destabilisation of several nation states in a volatile region, have proven to be less than valid; the conflict itself still unsettled, and a road map to peace still uncharted.  

Berry went to the heart of the matter; the eclipse of truth by political, economic and military powers that hijack words and monopolise media. And his response was to envision a world where however rich, powerful and entitled those powers might feel themselves to be, protest was then, and is now, a moral and spiritual imperative. 

So Wendell Berry, one of our finest poets and novelists wrote a Sabbath poem about the power of silence. Not passive silence, but a deliberate self-imposed absence of words as a symbol of freedom. Against those who would restrict the freedom of speech of writers and musicians and painters, Berry claims on behalf of a true patriotism the freedom of silence; by which he means the refusal of the poet to allow his words, the refusal of the musician to allow their songs and music, the refusal of artists to allow their painting, to be enjoyed and co-opted by those who have hijacked the deepest freedoms of the human spirit. 

Berry is aware that the high arts have profound formative power for the nation, the land and the people. So they must never be prostituted in the interests of political manipulation and propaganda. Patriotic duty sometimes requires persons and a people to resist, protest, say no to what we are being told is our patriotic duty. The core values of that duty can never be dictated by a party, a political leader, or a movement.

The poet's point has wider application than the time and place this poem was written. Only a few days ago, The Rolling Stones went to Court to prevent their music being used at Trump Rallies. A rock group is refusing to allow their music to be co-opted for other ends, because they know the deep resonances, motivational and associational power of music, lyrics and concerted focus.   

The freedom of silence is a revolutionary act of non-alignment and non-compliance with the powers that be. The refusal of the poet to validate the practice of word devaluation; the refusal of musicians to have their music exploited in the interests of the powerful; the refusal of artists to allow image to be used as a way of distorting meaning and manipulating reason, emotion and conscience. These are revolutionary acts that are statements of freedom.

            Sabbath Poem VII 2003

When they cannot speak freely in defiance

of wealth self-elected to righteousness,

let the arts of pleasure and beauty cease.

Let every poet and singer of joy be dumb.

When those in power by owning all the words

have made them mean nothing, let silence

speak for us. When freedom’s light goes out, let colour

drain from all paintings into gray puddles

One the museum floor. When every ear awaits only

The knock on the door in the dark midnight,

Let all the orchestras sound just one long note of woe

……..

All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,

is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt

the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve

undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct

forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty

to say so and oppose. What else have we to live for?

It was raining, I remember that.

It was in Edinburgh, in 1976, and I was standing beside Greyfriars Bobby getting soaked by persistent drizzle.

I was waiting to cross the road to the small Christian book shop on Forrest Road.

It was one of my early solo book shop crawl expeditions to Edinburgh, and I knew what I was after.

I had been to James Thin's but they didn't have the blessed book.

Maybe the recently opened Christian Book Shop on Forrest Road would have it, they said.

Walked past the National Museum of Scotland heading for Forrest Road. 

Inside the shop I spoke to the proprietor and asked for the newly published book.

Ah well, he wisnae sure about the book, whether it was "sound" or not.

Read it with discretion he warned!

"Aye right", I said, inwardly.   

I bought it, and over the next week read it from cover to cover.

Forty odd years later I still have that book, and recall the pleasure of its weight in my brief case. 

It was Leslie Allen's commentary on several minor prophets, amongst them Jonah.

To this day Allen's volume remains on my shelves as a favoured option on those prophets.

In these days of easy access online to your door delivery somethings has been lost; the chase, the handling and perusing and the smell and the heft of a book you know you're going to buy – and the bookseller, someone who has opinions on what you buy, and is not backward about coming forward with them! 

I don't remember the first time I saw lichen. I know it grew on old drystane dykes I used to climb over, on the first farm where I was old enough to go stravaigin across the fields. That was in deepest Ayrshire in the 1950's.

Over the years since, I've interrupted countless walks to stop and admire and wonder at lichen's and mosses. The intricacy and durability of these botanical miracles, the range of colours, mostly pastel, the way they soften and transform the shape of stone, wood, bark and other surfaces barely hospitable to organic life and growth.

Yesterday walking in the Bin Forest just north of Huntly, I was again fascinated and in my element, enjoying again these miniature masterpieces of organic architecture. It's an old forest, still managed and harvested, but a lot of the fallen trees, broken branches and older wood has lain for years, and have become lichen plantations.

One old tree stump, hollowed out over the years, has now filled with moss and lichen, and it is a marvel of artistic innovation and natural beauty. A photograph doesn't do justice to the textured diversity in such a microcosm of delicate invasion, but it is one way of remembering the several minutes of contemplative joy at such wondrously casual achievement over years.

The Victorian John Ruskin wrote some of the most polished prose in the English language; some of his descriptive writing reads like a literary version of a Monet garden. The overall impression is of beauty, delicate tones and shades and softened shapes somehow coalesce, forming an image that has accuracy of emotional impression, rather than descriptive precision. Yet to gaze at a Monet lily pond is to have the deepest and most durable inner impression of precisely that moment of physical encounter. Ruskin's prose can be like that. His description of mosses and lichens in Modern Painters has that same quality when emotional impressionism becomes a vehicle of visionary description. 

Here is Ruskin in gorgeous full flow: 

No words that I know of will say what mosses and lichens are. None are delicate enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass – the traceries  of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, aborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace…

 Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most honoured of the earth children. Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow fingered, constant hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of the cowslip god – far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

               Sabbath Poems

                     2002 

                       X

Teach me work that honours thy work,

the true economies of goods and words,

to make my arts compatible

with the songs of the local birds.

Teach me patience beyond work –

and, beyond patience, the blest

Sabbath of thy unresting love

which lights all things and gives rest.

For decades Wendell Berry has written and spoken, argued and protested, enacted and demonstrated  what true economies are. The economy of agrarian stewardship; the economy and ecology of words; the economics of community; the economy of friendship, love and neighbourliness – each of these he has described, explained, and most of them he has incorporated into the way he lives his own life.

Behind his lifelong persistence and patience with alternatives to frantic, grasping human wastefulness is a fully confessed love for the natural order as a divine gift. Berry is a critical friend of Christianity, acknowledging and at times exposing its distortions, failures and responsibility for much that has gone wrong with the way the world is exploited and pushed to the edge of ruin. 

But when he listens to the songs of birds, watches a river carve a landscape, lies on a forest floor and sees a green cathedral illumined by light refracted through a million leaves, he knows he is celebrating someone else's work. And he wants emulate its creativity, beauty and exuberant hopefulness. It is deeply human to create, and to take such care and imaginative skill so that work becomes an art form.

The prayer for patience giving way to Sabbath blessing is a further acknowledgement that all around us is gift. The One addressed in this poem is ceaselessly active, a sustaining and recreating love that is the light of life, illuminating, vitalising and energising and enabling to be. These moments of address to the divine by giving thanks and surrendering to the beauty and miracle of this place and this moment, are clues to Berry's overall vision.

Panentheism is the conviction that God is active, present and invested in all that God has made, the belief that 'thy unresting love lights all things, and gives rest.' Running through this poem are two dispositions familiar to readers of Berry; contentment to receive the gift of life and shared existence with the earth; responsibility to receive that gift gratefully and to add to its value, not diminish its richness. The economies of goods and words are constructive, conserving, and creative all at once. 

I read this poem and sense in my own responses a deep emotional, almost physiological agreement, a recognisable longing to make my arts compatible with a world serenaded by the songs of birds, local birds. The arts of words and goods, economies of community, sharing and compassion, receiving gratefully the gift of life and our world, and responding with arts that enrich and do not diminish the gift it is. 

That word local. Berry uses it often. He is an apologist for the local; people, fields, woods, towns, roads, rivers, the known locales that give a person place, identity and relationships.

When it comes to local birds, these past months of lock down, I have been out on the back roads on my bike, past fields and farms, woods and the occasional burn. Every time I have seen and heard goldfinches, yellowhammers, wood pigeons, skylarks, sparrows, blackbirds, coal tits, chaffinches, blackcaps, and others that flitted past or sang their pieces in the distance.     

And so this brief Sabbath poem becomes a prayer to be taught a way of being, a way of seeing the unresting love that lights all things, and gives rest. It is a gentle rebuke to living for things, pursuing the limited goals of acquisition and functional possessiveness. Berry is right. "Teach me work…and patience beyond work…"

Matthew 5.7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Mercy is a soft word that makes tough demands. Mercy is more than empathy and compassion; it is a standard of behaviour, a habit of the heart,  a call to action for those who seek first the Kingdom of God. Generous giving, compassionate care, practical help, honest to goodness kindness, costly forgiveness, – these make up the barcode that when scanned, identifies true followers of Jesus.

The above is one of the brief Thought for the Day reflections I've been writing every day for our church community in Montrose. It is one of seven for next week, each based around one of the Beatitudes. As I tried to condense into around sixty words the meaning and demand of that word 'mercy', I was very aware it isn't a word we use much these days. Which made me wonder if it was an idea we hadn't much time for, in a culture fixated on value for money, addicted to buy one get one free, more in favour of quid pro quo than uncomplicated generosity looking for nothing back.

Could we ever envisage a society like ours able to act on a presumption of compassion, an inner moral instinct towards humane consideration of the needs of the other? Well, whether or not – what would it mean for me to be merciful, one individual, in a world of militarised interventions, displaced millions seeking home, consumer lifestyles built on exploitation, an asset stripped planet, racial hatreds and divisions, globalisation and the inequalities on which it is built?   

That kind of questioning thinking set me off looking with more care at the concept of mercy as an essential human quality and disposition. What becomes obvious as soon as you dig into the biblical texts is the that the originating source of mercy is God. Right at the beginning of his Gospel, Luke records the song of Zechariah praising God for becoming entangled in the eternally costly love affair with Israel and through his people, with his world.

And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
⁷⁷ to give his people the knowledge of salvation
    through the forgiveness of their sins,
⁷⁸ because of the tender mercy of our God,
    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
⁷⁹ to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.” 

Look at that line in verse 78 – "because of the tender mercy of our God." It all comes from and flows back to the tender mercy of God, a cycle of mercy. The motivation is mercy; the originating cause of the entire Christian story is mercy. The rising sun and the daylight rays of life shine in the dark places, and guide those 'in the shadow of death' back to God. Mercy is active, purposeful, determined and irrevocably committed to guide people from the shadow of death to the paths of peace. "You are the light of the world" said Jesus with more faith in the disciples than they had in him. 

Now. What happens if we use the Song of Zechariah as our definition of mercy as we go about the business of being merciful? This individual me in a globalised world, choking on its own overgrown web of connectivity, consumption, and competition – how do I become one of the blessed merciful? 

Old Zechariah gives this advice, don't only look for the light, be the light. Find ways to shine on those living in darkness and the shadow of death; ask yourself what we need to do to guide people into the path of peace. Mercy is the sunshine breaking through the shadows of death and germinating new seeds of hope that life can change direction into paths of peace. 

Blessed are the merciful, the light shiners, those who appear in other people's lives like the rising sun.

Blessed are the merciful, those willing to come alongside those whose lives are overshadowed and be the light of hope and new possibility

Blessed are the merciful, those whose patient kindness slowly opens doors closed by fear and anxiety

Blessed are the merciful, those whose faithful compassion can be depended upon when life is overshadowed by too many rejections

Blessed are the merciful, those unafraid of speaking the truth in love, and speaking love truthfully to lighten the darkness of those whose hollowed out by guilt, regret and self-condemnation

Blessed are the merciful, those who shine the light of hope and affirmation on people undermined by low self-esteem and diminished self-worth

Blessed are the merciful, those whose daylight openness and love befriend the soul haunted and made suspicious by old hurts that make new trust and new friendships seem impossible

Blessed are the merciful, those who see unjust and power based systems which humiliate people, diminish hope, oppress and exclude, and in the seeing bring to bear a moral light which can guide our feet into the paths of peace.

Mercy is not an option. Not if we want to be shown mercy. Jesus is not making a suggestion we might wish to consider. He is making a promise that has two possible outcomes. If you show mercy you will be shown mercy. If I live carelessly, without caring, complicit in a world of unmercy, I can have no complaints when I am the one who needs mercy and nobody cares, or listens, or comes.

Blessed are the merciful -perhaps at the start of each day, to repeat to myself as a daily imperative, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."

                                    – perhaps at the end of the day, indeed at the end of each day, that is a rigorous criterion by which to judge my performance as a human being, a follower of Jesus, one to whom great mercy has been shown. 

                     Sabbath Poems

                       1999     VI

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

I don't know another poem that speaks so audibly into that experience we all have of looking backwards in order to understand where we are now, how we came to be here, and the mystery of seeing blessing at times and in places we never thought them to be. The wearyingly repetitive cliche of 'the journey' has lost for many of us the freshness of that metaphor before it became banal. It is now overused, and a lazy way of talking about change, development, and even an excuse for making decisions and taking turnings that turn out to be wrong choices and missteps. 

But Berry is too allergic to cliche to reiterate the obvious. Instead, he takes us into his confidence from the start, with the inclusively knowing words, 'We travelers'. He has taken time to consider the meaning of travelling from 'here' when we are not sure where 'there' is. We 'can't see ahead', and in that phrase Berry touches a raw nerve. Often enough I've said, and heard said, "Just as well we don't know what's ahead of us.' There is an ancient wisdom in that recognition that life is lived in the now, and if we knew in detail what is coming it would inevitably skew our decisions, distort our choices, tempt us into hedging our bets and thus failing to live the life we have because we are so anxious to anticipate and even control, the life that is ahead. 

So we can't see ahead; but if we take time to stop and look backwards, we can see the road we have come, "Along which blessings now appear." It's that word now. Only when we stop and look back, and survey the scenery, and trace backwards from where we are to where we were, only then do we see what was there to be seen all the time. "Risen" always has a double entendre for people of Christian faith, whether or not Berry intended it. I think he did. The triple use of the word blessing, and the common trope of light / darkness as attributes of God, suggest Berry's own inner standpoint is trustful of the often unseen presence of God

"From sightlessness to sight", from shadow to light, blessings that went unnoticed 'now appear / risen.'

"and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark."

To stand at the edge of a forest, or pause on a mountain path, is the action of someone for whom travelling is more than movement from here to there. It is considered movement, the stopping is a required interlude in a reflective journey, and turns mere journey into attentive travelling on the alert for epiphany. The purposeful patience required in keeping going is sustained because we are "by blessing brightly lit', by a light that dazzles.

Every time I read this short poem it reminds me of much better known lines from Henry Vaughan which I assume Berry knows

“There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness.” 

And whether or not the allusion is intentional, Berry's poem is a developed paraphrase of Vaughan's speculative theology, acknowledging the cataphatic and apophatic tensions in Christian theological talk of God. Those tensions create a force field within which theology is wrought, seeking to articulate that which is revealed and that which is hidden, the gift of revelation and the divine reticence in mystery, the via positiva (light) and the via negativa (darkness).   

So we travel…by blessing brightly lit, looking back the way we came, along which blessings now appear, risen. 

For six decades Wendell Berry has been writing about citizenship. But citizenship with it widest most inclusive meanings: global citizenship, human citizenship, socially responsible citizenship, community building citizenship, agricultural and environmentally friendly citizenship; not those narrower forms of nationalism and consumerism, built on models of competitive economics which encourages upward spirals of production, consumption, waste production and the ultimate exhaustion of our planet. 

 

Wendell Berry is the original friend of the earth, because the friend of the creatures that live on earth, and especially the friend of humanity, people like ourselves who have the capacity to nurture or ruin the planet on which we all depend. If you haven't read Wendell Berry then you are missing one of the most distinctive, patient, informed and passionate voices of the past half century, speaking on behalf of your future, your welfare, and your responsibility to care about how the way you live your life impinges on everyone else's future and welfare.

 

This post is the first of several in which I reflect on Berry's work, and how in ways I don't always realise, his words have been like the best compost, taking time to break down into ideas that nourish the intellectual topsoil and make it more hospitable to imagination, vision and hope. Essays and novels, poems and short stories, have become for his readers like blades of the plough Berry so admires and advocates, turning over the soil, preparing the ground for newness, growth and organic developments of human minds, technology as servant not master, the natural world as gift to be enjoyed and stewarded rather than exploited and laid waste by runaway greed.

 

The collection of Sabbath poems that Berry has written over the years is one of those books that you can read repeatedly, or browse in occasionally. What makes the contents of This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems so special is that the poems were written on the Sabbath day, in the disposition of rest, when the poet purposely and purposefully takes pencil and paper and writes what he sees, feel, and prays. They range across the subjects and causes to which he has devoted his time and energy, in a vocation of priestly care for creation. Few writers, practitioners and advocates have spoke with more eloquence and humane learning on behalf of a natural world besieged by forces unheeding of its ruin. His Sabbath poems are forms of contemplative prayer, or brief soliloquy, or thought experiments in environmental renewal, each of them a hopefully imagined turning point in the health of both the earth with its creatures and the human community entrusted with a world.

 

The poems are gathered in chronological order. In 1998 three poems enable us to overhear Berry, or to look over the shoulder of the poet, and learn what it is he fears, (IX) what gives him hope (V), and how he looks on the ordinary and find there extraordinary grace (I). There is a poignant yearning for it not to be so, when he speaks of his fear of despair; there is an indomitable trust in love as eternal in consequence when he writes of what matters whatever happens; and there is visionary hopefulness in his conviction that when the river overflows it mirrors the overflowing love and sorrow of God.

 

                                            IX

         What I fear most is despair

         for the world and us; forever less

                                          V

Whatever happens
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
into the lasting world
and will not leave
whatever happens.

                                        I

Last year I found a first edition of Pietà, by R S Thomas, his seventh published volume, issued in 1966. It's a serious looking slim volume, wrapped in now slightly faded mauve, and black. The austere appearance and stark title image, anticipate rather exactly the mood and gravity of much of the book's contents. The font used in the upper case title, the tau cross T, and the segnaccento above the A, are hauntingly evocative of Roman crucifixion nails. The dust jacket was designed by M.E. Eldridge, whom Thomas married in 1937.

The lamentation of the Christ (Pietà) is one of the most strongly evocative images in Christian art. The Pieta is a visual representation of a son's love-compelled suffering and death, and a mother's love inconsolable in grief. The the two human forms, mother and son, are entangled in the anguish of loss, death and bereavement, draped together in a love both serene and defiant of the world doing its worst.

Two poems can helpfully be read together from this collection; the title poem 'Pietà', and 'In Church'. Both poems express the anguish and ambiguity of the poet's faith at a time of crisis in his life and vocation as poet, priest and theologian on the trail of the elusive presence and compelling attraction of his God. Both poems also intimate a shift in Thomas to a more theological form of reflection on the presence and absence of God in the context of both the Passion pf Christ and Thomas's personal inner crucifixion of soul. Out of his experience of God's nearness and distance, presence and absence, occasional intimation of divine acknowledgement and frequent disappointment of unexplained silence Thomas, torn between faith and doubt, wrote some of his most faith-interrogating poems. In both 'Pietà', and 'In Church' he explores the concept, and the theological and spiritual implicates, of "an untenanted cross." 

Pietà

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.

And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.

Pietà, the title poem locates the incarnate and crucified Christ beneath a dominant cross and lying helpless in his mother's arms, the cradle that first held him. The scene is as still as death. There are no explanatory glosses, but a foregrounding of the Cross which is personified and invested with feelings. The wood-worked cross, sharing that same sense of cosmic loss, aches for the body of the carpenter, the whole creation groaning and awaiting redemption. It is an astonishing juxtaposition of ideas. 

The Michelangelo Pieta most naturally comes to mind as the defining image of a mother's lamentation overflowing in tears for the world. I don't know if Thomas ever went to Rome to see it, but behind that masterpiece is a huge square, sharp-edged 'untenanted cross', in stark contrast to the softly flowing drapery, human formfulness, and intricate detailed intimacy of the mother cradling her dead child. (See image below)

The entire mystery of the Incarnation as the story of God in Christ, from cradle to cross, resides in this short second stanza. The suffering of the Christ is mirrored in the face of his mother, her arms a cradle, the lifeless body suspended in that time between the times, post crucifixion and pre-resurrection. The untenanted cross aches to hold the crucified, and the arms of the mother though full again as she cradles her son, ache with the weight of his body, and are themselves cruciform. The poignancy of the poet's softer words are made more acute by the way he hints backwards to the nativity, and a maid holding her first child, and in those same arms, the destiny of humanity.

At the end of the Pietà collection comes 'In Church.' I wrote about that poem a year or two ago and the post can be found using the link below. I simply want to draw attention here to its connection to the poem Pietà. Waiting in the empty church is Thomas, the priest. When everyone else has gone, he is listening, searching, hoping for some glimpse or whisper of presence, some inner assurance that the crucified God he serves, though hidden is present, and though silent speaks even in that silence. 

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.

'Pieta' and 'In Church' are clear poetic intimations that the faith of the priest R S Thomas was in critical dialogue with a theology increasingly apophatic, expressed in negative terms because language breaks under the strain of expressing the inexpressible. Yet a theology rooted still in the central Christian narrative of the Incarnation and the Cross of the Redeemer, celebrated in Eucharist, and despite all evidence to the contrary, embodied incarnationally and ecclesially, though often obscured, in the lives of Christian communities such as those amongst whom he toiled and struggled. 

Thomas understood human suffering. He knew that it was more than physical pain, that the ache of grief was another kind of heart attack, no less life-changing and debilitating. He understood with a tenderness not often attributed to him, human frailty, and arms that, however aching, will cradle the child, and the dead Jesus, and in their desperate holding will express the indefinable limits of human joy and human sorrow and human love.

All this in two poems. But in their turn towards a more overt and persistent interrogation of what kind of God is to be discerned, discovered, and divined from that 'untenanted cross', they signal the poet's future quest and questions about the Divine in the poems to be written beyond that pivotal collection of 1966, Pietà.    

  https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/10/in-church-often-i-tryto-analyse-the-qualityof-its-silences-is-this-where-god-hidesfrom-my-searching-i-have-stopped-to-list.html