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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

Several times in the past week or two I have found myself crossing a bridge. Nothing spectacular, mostly built for utility and convenience over a river, a burn, a stream, the usual geographical features that prevent you taking the shortest distance from one side to the other, from here to there. The one not in the photo spans the River Deveron. It is a photo of both sides, taken from the middle, above the water, with my feet dry. The bridge is a means to an end; it is a makes-all-the-difference means to a makes-all-the difference end, of passing over an obstacle.   

I like bridges. They take you places. They are also viewpoints where you can stand and see both sides. One of my all time favourite songs is about those special people who are like a bridge over troubled water.

One of the most significant texts in the entire New Testament is from 2 Corinthians 5.18-21. It is all about bridge building: "God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation…and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors…"

Really? Is that what the church, each community of Christian faith, is?

Forget the developed strategies for a wee while, scrap the strap lines, rethink the re-brand.

Think bridges. Think churches as bridges. Think Christ as reconciling bridge, the church as a community of bridge-building reconciled reconcilers. Then imagine the good news as the lived reality through the renewed structures of a church whose defining passion is reconciliation.

Then think again Paul's text, too easily overlooked by those who want to use God as a name of division, over-againstness and hostility, "All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation." Bridge building is God-like work, and will sometimes cost what it cost God.

The Cross of Christ is the bridge that spans the troubled waters or a broken and divided world. A paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 5 could well be, "Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down." That is cruciform language, the language of the bridge as a place of meeting, holding two sides together.

Those who know me know my love for the writing of one of Scotland's finest theologians, Principal James Denney. His last book is called The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. It is a profound, and at times anguished examination of the cross of Christ as the reconciling centre of the universe. I still remember the afternoon I found a previously unknown letter of Denney's in which he lamented to his friend William Robertson Nicoll, the latest casualty figures from the Somme. He had been notified earlier of the deaths in action of several of his students from the United Free Church College in Glasgow.

Those events compelled Denney to think ever more deeply about the meaning of the cross, until he came to what he believed the deepest layer of mystery, the cross as the place of reconciliation, where judgement and mercy meet on a bridge that spans from eternity. 

Near the end of his book, and probably one of the last things he wrote before his unexpected death in 2017, he wrote this paragraph on what he called "the life of reconciliation":

"The life of reconciliation is a life which itself exercises a reconciling power. It is the ultimate witness to that in God which overcomes all that separates man from Himself and men from each other. Hence it is indispensable to all who work for peace and good will among men. Not only the alienation of men from God, but their alienation from one another — the estrangement of classes within the same society, the estrangement of nations and races within the great family of humanity — yield in the last resort to love alone. Impartial justice, arbitrating from without, can do little for them. But a spirit delivered from pride and made truly humble by repentance, a spirit purged from selfishness and able in the power of Christ's love to see its neighbour's interest as its own, will prove victorious alike in the class rivalries of capital and labour, and in the international rivalries that are now devastating the world. It is in its all-reconciling power that Paul sees most clearly the absoluteness and finality of the Christian religion."  (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, James Denney, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917, pages 329-30) 

The life of reconciliation is bridge shaped. Bringing together two sides, joining what is divided, refusing to function as a wall, overcoming estrangement in the power of Christ's love, seeing our neighbour's interest as our own, spanning and supporting the road to friendship and the two way travel of mutually acknowledged dignity, rights and obligations.

The life of reconciliation is lived under the shadow of the cross. The cruciform life is a bridge capable of bearing the weight of a world's sin, overcoming cycles of hostility, wearing down intractable indifference, deconstructing competitive rivalry, curing habits of suspicion, and expelling long nourished hatreds – all of this, in the power of Christ's love.

I like bridges. They take you places. They introduce you to the other side. They are meeting places, a two way conversational encounter of people travelling in opposite directions. The life of reconciliation is such a bridge.     

Every month at our Deacons' Meeting we finish by singing this two verse hymn. 

1 How good is the God we adore,
Our faithful unchangeable Friend:
His love is as great as His power,
And knows neither measure nor end!

2 'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last,
Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home;
We'll praise Him for all that is past,
And trust Him for all that's to come.

No it's not the greatest poetry, and its sunny piety might occasionally jar with the realities of life's steep braes and sharp turnings. But it expresses the rich variations of faith and devotion of our folk, happily using superlatives that cannot be exaggerations when predicated of God.

It is also Trinitarian, the faithful God who is Father of every family named on earth, Jesus who is the beginning and end of all that matters most in life, and the Spirit, "who guides us safe home."

These past few months, I've missed singing that. And when by God's mercy we are through all this, I'll look forward to singing it, and those last two lines:

We'll praise Him for all that is past,
And trust Him for all that's to come.

Last evening I was restless. Lock down does that. For all our attempts to look for the positives, and all the well meaning urgings from others to find ways of using well the time and freedom from routine responsibilities, some days during lock down are just mince. 

Now, in Scottish vernacular the descriptor 'mince' has important negative vibes. Indeed, the Scottish slang use of 'mince' found its way into Hansard, the record of Parliamentary proceedings at Westminster in 2016.

Kirsty Blackman, MP for Aberdeen North described some of the standing orders as 'mince'. On being asked subsequently for a translation, she Tweeted,  "The word I used was *mince*." Mince is Scottish slang used to describe something which is below par or rubbish." That is now a footnote in the official record. 

So I use the word advisedly, and in its Hansard definition. Some days are mince. But not many days, and seldom a whole day. When such times come walking helps, and so does the spiritual practice of taking photographs.

My camera has become a way of re-framing the world. Walking with eyes attentive to what is there, and mind deliberately turned outward to the world, you begin to see what otherwise would simply not exist to the preoccupied mind. So much time and energy is needed to sustain the inner life of the introspective temperament; so in recent times I've come to recognise when the time has come to quieten the inner conversation, still the swirling movements of thought, and turn to the world outside of this ever present inner me. It's the thing to do when the day just doesn't seem to be working.

I walked down to Arnhall Moss, a mile from our door, and stood on the path, the sun slanting behind me, and noticed what looked like a sunlight footstep pointing the way. Of course it was mere coincidence, an accident of light requiring a far fetched hermeneutic to think that it could have been, well, meant. But in fact it was well meant. On yet another day of sameness and constraint, a Hansard day, that was beginning to feel like mince, "below par or rubbish", I stepped into a wood touched by late sunlight. And that light falling across my path  for all the world shaped to reassure, a beckoning forward, an invitation to walk in the sunlight and shadow. 

Only when I came home and looked at the photograph did I make all these connections, and sense the heart-lightening message of that sunlit footprint. And then a further nudge from Who knows where, the familiar rhythm of a favourite song we will sing again in our church as soon as we meet again in the freedom of friendship, fellowship, worship and praise: 

The Spirit lives to set us free, 

Walk, walk in the light;

He binds us all in unity,

Walk, walk in the light! 

And then from a very different source, another hymn, written by someone for whom many days were mince. The poet William Cowper suffered throughout his life with prolonged periods of depressive illness, a chronic sadness that could escalate from low grade self-doubt to desperate self-despair. Out of such inner anguish he wrote several hymns about how to survive days that are mince:

Sometimes a light surprises
the Christian while he sings;
it is the Lord, who rises
with healing in his wings:
when comforts are declining,
he grants the soul again
a season of clear shining,
to cheer it after rain.

Last evening in Arnhall Moss, I proved Cowper right: "Sometimes a light surprises….. 

This Scottish Paraphrase goes back to 1745. The Scottish landscape of mountain and glen is in the background; so are the Jacobite rebellions and the desire for peace and harmony between nations. 

"The biblical phrases are incorporated into the verses with a dignified rhetoric that is in the best tradition of metrical Psalmody." This Scripture paraphrase of the eschatological vision of Isaiah, combined with the tune Glasgow, is one of the most powerful peace hymns I know.

Long before the more recent Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, the Scottish hymn and liturgical tradition produced a deeply contextual theology of peace between nations and longed for reconciliations.  

(The hymn was sung at the close of the funeral service for Scotland's first First Minister, Donald Dewar.)

1 Behold! the mountain of the Lord
in latter days shall rise
on mountain tops above the hills,
and draw the wondering eyes.

2 To this the joyful nations round,
all tribes and tongues, shall flow;
up to the hill of God, they'll say,
and to his house we'll go.

3 The beam that shines from Zion hill
shall lighten every land;
the King who reigns in Salem's towers
shall all the world command.

4 Among the nations he shall judge;
his judgements truth shall guide;
his sceptre shall protect the just,
and quell the sinner’s pride.

5 No strife shall rage, nor hostile feuds
disturb those peaceful years;
to ploughshares men shall beat their swords,
to pruning-hooks their spears.

6 No longer hosts, encountering hosts,
shall crowds of slain deplore:
they hang the trumpet in the hall,
and study war no more.

7 Come then, O house of Jacob! come
to worship at his shrine;
and, walking in the light of God,
with holy beauties shine. 

This hymn draws its power from the cruciform image of Christ's outstretched arms. Athanasius used that image to powerful effect in his De Incarnatione.

It's a good introduction to a hymn we could do with singing these days, a lot:

"How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched? Here, again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself."

When Christ was lifted from the earth,
his arms stretched out above
through every culture, every birth,
to draw an answering love.
Still east and west his love extends,
and always, near or far,
he calls and claims us as his friends
and loves us as we are.
Where generation, class or race
divide us to our shame,
he sees not labels but a face,
a person and a name.
Thus freely loved, though fully known,
may I in Christ be free
to welcome and accept his own
as Christ accepted me.
(Brian Wren, 1980)

This hymn is a rich exposition of what it means to believe "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" and "He has given to us the ministry of reconciliation".

Honesty about our own sinfulness and propensity to excuse ourselves; honesty too about structural as well as personal sin; then to hear our true name called in the welcome of Christ who serves us before we ever get to serving Him.

The last two verses weave around themes of love, justice, hope-building, peace-making, in the multiform practices of those called to embody and enact God's love for God's word. 

Lord God, Your love has called us here,
As we, by love, for love were made.
Your living likeness still we bear
Tho’ marred, dishonoured, disobeyed.
We come, with all our heart and mind
Your call to hear, Your love to find.

We come with self inflicted pains
Of broken trust and chosen wrong,
Half free, half bound by inner chains,
By social forces swept along,
By powers and systems close confined,
Yet seeking hope for human kind.

Lord God, in Christ You call our name,
And then receive us as Your own,
Not thro’ some merit, right, or claim,
But by Your gracious love alone.
We strain to glimpse Your mercy seat,
And find You kneeling at our feet.

Then take the towel, and break the bread,
And humble us, and call us friends.
Suffer and serve till all are fed
And show how grandly love intends
To work till all creation sings,
To fill all worlds, to crown all things.

Lord God, in Christ You set us free
Your life to live, Your joy to share.
Give us Your Spirit’s liberty
To turn from guilt and dull despair
And offer all that faith can do,
While love is making all things new.

(Brian Wren is a prolific hymn writer, some of whose hymns are amongst the best in the modern tradition. He has a particular concern and interest in seeking language and metaphors for God that are inclusive and less freighted with ideas of power, dominance and the legitimation of oppressive ideologies. His book What Language Shall I Borrow remains a powerful challenge to the use and imposition of language more suited to Constantinian power politics than a Gospel of love, justice and reconciliation.)  

We've all had to find ways of getting through days and weeks of lock down, and staying at home more than we ever have before. Once the garden is tidier than tidy, the grass is cut almost to manicured standard, the car is washed to an unfamiliar gleam, the study spring cleaned and each book affectionately dusted, the entire house hoovered – serially, the daily walk completed (recently walks, plural), the essential shopping procured through stealthy raids when most folk are doing other things, – once all that's done, what's to do?

That's where books have been my lifeline – mental, emotional, intellectual, imaginative lifelines to that necessary balance between escapism and realism. When I review what I've read in three months I'm intrigued that I've largely stayed away from novels; for some reason fiction hasn't worked. That surprises me because I've read novels throughout my life, and often as a way of dealing with stress by either escapism (think Lee Child, John Grisham), self-reflection through narrative (think Salley Vickers,Gail Godwin, Marilynne Robinson), or whodunnit detectives, (Val McDermid, Jacqueline Winspear – these two are very different in levels of dark).

I've read poetry, these past weeks, mostly by those I already know; George Herbert, R S Thomas, Mary Oliver, Denise Levertov and browsing in a serendipitous way in a few anthologies. I've read biography, the real life experience of people seeming more rooted in a world where, for a while now, so much seems unreal. The word surreal has become an overused descriptor for anything slightly unusual – our experience of the pandemic has been more than slightly unusual; not even surreal describes the vortex of confusion, fear, anxiety and the recent loss of confidence in the way the world is experienced as low grade dread. Biography has a way of carrying us inwardly into a life other than our own, a time different from now, and a place where pandemic is a word for another time and place. 

The photo shows four of the books I've spent time reading, other than poetry and biography. I decided to catch up on reading a number of recent books in New Testament Studies. The State of New Testament Studies is a refresher course on recent development over the past 20 or so years, in the many and various strands of New Testament scholarship. There isn't an essay in this book, and there are 23 of them, that doesn't repay the reader's time; taken together they provide a map of the current landscape with enough detail to show the important routes ahead and how we got to where we are. 

Constructing Paul vol 1 by Luke Timothy Johnson is readable scholarship, authoritative and persuasive, independent in its conclusions, and is a constructive account of Paul's life, social context, cultural environment, and relations with the churches with which he corresponded. Johnson does two things that make this book an important contribution. First, he uses all the canonical letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament. His defence of this approach is based on his deconstruction of the critical consensus that there are only seven "undisputed letters". Johnson insists that using the thirteen letters provides a much more rounded picture of what he calls the canonical Paul. I have always been hesitant about the confidence with which Pauline authorship of certain letters has been dismissed; I found Johnson's reasoned rebuttal persuasive in itself, and more so when the results are then set out in a way that allows for the complexities and ambiguities of Paul's personality and compound identities as Jew, Greco Roman, apostle and controversialist.

In addition to using the entire canonical corpus of Paul's letters, Johnson gives decisive weight and substance to the New Testament accounts of Paul's personal experience of Christ. Johnson is known for considering religious experience an essential body of evidence in constructing a credible account of Paul's life, the lives of the earliest Christian communities, and indeed for understanding the faith and practices of contemporary Christians. Paul's encounter with Christ, his experience of life in the Spirit, and the reconfiguration of his worldview, created for Paul a radically new understanding of God's purpose for Israel, the Gentiles and the new mission of the communities formed by faith in Christ. But that radical newness was not seen by him  as a final discontinuity, but a fulfilling of God's purposes through Messiah Jesus. While Johnson has long insisted that the religious experience of believers is relevant data in trying to understand the historical, social, cultural and ecclesial context of those early Christian communities, it is in this book that he pursues that line of investigation in constructing Paul. The result is a tour de force, readable, persuasive, and for me, convincing in its portrait of Paul.

The biography of Rendel Harris is a huge book just short of 700 pages. I'm still immersed in it. A full review of it will appear in a Quaker Journal later this year. But this Quaker biblical scholar is a deeply fascinating subject. His travels in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, on the hunt for ancient manuscripts read like the best travel books, often illuminated by his wife's journals. He and his wife were outspoken in their protests and political representation on behalf of the Armenian people many of whom were massacred and their communities destroyed under the order of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Harris worked as a scholar in America, Cambridge, and especially in Birmingham as the first Principal of Woodbrooke, establishing the primary Quaker Research Institution in the world. His textual studies, contributions to ecumenical co-operation, curatoriship of important manuscript collections and so much more, make this late Victorian Quaker one of the most attractive and at times eccentric figures in English nonconformity. 

George Hunsinger is a leading Princeton theologian, a world class authority on Karl Barth, and the founder of The National Religious Campaign Against Torture. His commentary on Philippians published only last month reflects much of that depth and range of theological understanding, his continuing passion for social justice, and careful unfolding of Paul's letter from prison to the Philippian believers. I'm almost finished this one.

Hunsinger is a refreshing and generous commentator, at ease with exegeting the text and then exploring how such ancient guidance to an upset house church in Philippi, can become contemporary and urgent in our own faith struggles of the 21st Century. There are some verses where Hunsinger decides to dig down deeply to discover the theological foundations on which Paul is building. His take on what Paul means in Philippians 3.9 "not having a righteousness of my own…" is simply superb. Those few pages are an education in how to balance historical critical exegesis with what Hunsinger calls an ecclesial hermeneutic.

There is similar stimulus in his treatment of the Christ Hymn Phil. 2.5-11. So much has been written on this passage; it would be easy to either repeat what others have said, but more briefly; or try to find something novel to say. Hunsinger does neither. The exegesis is woven through his theological reflection on Christology, the Trinitarian relations of the Godhead, and how Phil 2 relates to the Nicea-Chalcedonian definitions. This has been a deeply satisfying study of one of Paul's letters, one I already knew well – I now feel I know it better.

There's something reassuring about intellectual engagement with familiar subjects and disciplines. A good therapist might deconstruct what is actually going on here, and that's OK. It has worked for me, and there are the additional longer lasting benefits; the uncomplicated joy of reading, the contentment of a mind supplementing its store, delight in new discovery and some hard to hide smugness when you are able to say, "Oh, I knew that."   

The View from the Window, R. S. Thomas

Like a painting it is set before one,
But less brittle, ageless; these colours
Are renewed daily with variations
Of light and distance that no painter
Achieves or suggests.  Then there is movement,
Change, as slowly the cloud bruises
Are healed by sunlight, or snow caps
A black mood; but gold at evening
To cheer the heart.  All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried; yet what eye,
Looking coolly, or, as we now,
through the tears' lenses, ever saw
This work and it was not finished?

R S Thomas, Collected Poems, 1945-1990, (London: Dent, 1993, page 81)

God the artist is ceaselessly at work, and the poet is reflecting on his worldview through the limited standpoint of a familiar window. Every time the poet looks the scene has changed, the colours renewed, and the work displaying a subtlety and technique beyond the reach of any human artist. There is, in this poem, a deeply reverential acknowledgement of the cost and unending discipline of the artist persevering in continued work on the same canvas. This tireless artist  is painting not only the fluid, elusive landscape visible as topography under the sky, but with the same deft knowing of the subject, he is painting the changing movements of the inner landscape of the viewer / reader. "Cloud bruises/are healed by sunlight", "white snow" contrasts with a "black mood", and "sunset gold" brings cheer to a heart at times more aware of the bruise than the sunlight.

Creation as continuous, the world as an unfinished masterpiece, the constant expenditure of the Creator's energy and emotional investment, enables Thomas to convey the soul of this artist poured out on his work: "All through history / The great brush has not rested, / Nor the paint dried…". It isn't often that Thomas's readers are given such a clear and genuine articulation of the poet's sympathy for the work and works of God. But in this poem the juxtaposition of a constantly moving landscape and a continuously working painter evokes in the reader a sense of a work in progress, and the artist's commitment to bringing it to completion.   

What I find intriguing in all this is the theological reticence of Thomas in dealing with creation and Creator. There is no creation by fiat, none of the "God spoke and it was so". The refrain of Genesis that God spoke, it was so, and it was good, is absent. Instead there is the presumed presence of the painter, working away every day, renewing colours, adjusting light and shadow.

And as the painter works, the viewer looking through the window, watches, and then there is a moment of vision, a fusion of outward scenery and inner feeling, as the painter's deft touches, over the years of watching, build up the colours of light and shadow, on landscape and soul. 

"All through history
The great brush has not rested,
Nor the paint dried…

The Creator Artist is at work, and the view through the window is of a work in process, with as yet no deadline for completion. The artist is fully engaged, continuously working away at it, "all through history", bringing towards completion a vision that is dynamic not static, a work of artistic self expenditure that is, quite literally, his life's work.

This poem has made me wonder, along with other aspects of Thomas's theological poetics, whether he read the Process philosophical theologians of the 1960's and 70's (e.g. Whitehead and Hartshorne). Their emphases on God's involvement in the fate of the world, God as one who interpenetrates and animates all that exists (panentheism), the world as held within God creative purposes, and God as the lure of Divine Love, preferring persuasion to coercion, acting in the vulnerability of love rather than inscrutable sovereign power, shaping all that is towards future consummation and fulfilment.

Such a God risks the act of creating creatures with freedom, placing them in a world that is contingent and made for such creaturely freedom, creativity and potential, a world and universe where things can and do go badly wrong. Much of the central concerns of Process theism is hinted at in the image of the artist persisting towards perfection with no guaranteed outcome, such as is woven through 'The View from the Window.' 

Thomas finishes with a question that opens up the entire range of human emotion, from cool detachment to tearful wonder. To human eyes the work is finished; yet look again and the artist is still at work, building up the texture, adjusting tone and colour, recalling the words of Jesus about the unrelenting demands of God's work: "As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me." (John 9.4)

So the artist works ceaselessly and patiently. God works, and waits, with all eternity to work in. "The activity of creating includes the passivity of waiting….of waiting upon one's workmanship to see what emerges from it." (W H Vanstone, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, (London, DLT,1977, p.33.) The God portrayed here is solicitous, patient, persistent, invested in the outcome, restlessly intentional in actualising potential by giving fullest expression to his vision. 

It is a hallmark of Thomas's spirituality that the pressing questions of human existence, our varied and oscillating experiences of faith, and our incessant longing for beauty, truth and goodness, set up a force field of tensions that an earlier, simpler age might have called hunger for God.

"The tears' lenses" is a phrase of studied ambiguity – like the changing landscape of sunlight and shadow, now bright then dark, Looking at the view from the window, through our tears they refract as a rainbow spectrum, tears of sorrow or joy, wonder or regret, or ultimately trustful surrender. This is R S Thomas the priest poet at his most poignant.

"These colours are renewed daily". In writing those words, I wonder if Thomas was alluding to the one sunlit verse in the bruised clouds that brood over the Book of Lamentations 3.22-23:

"Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
 They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness." 

Sometimes our hunger for innovation, over-concern with relevance, insistence that hymns reflect personal experience rather than objective affirmation of faith in God, all combine to dull our awareness of that world out there, and the realities that have to be encountered and navigated every day.

Fosdick’s hymn is an unflinching confession of the mess of things, its recurring prayer to be granted wisdom and courage for living this hour, these days, at this time.

Praying this hymn brings before the God of grace, the state of our world, our country, and confesses the troubled heart and mind of contemporary culture.

1 God of grace and God of glory,
on thy people pour thy power;
crown thine ancient church's story,
bring its bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the facing of this hour.

2 Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn thy Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage
for the living of these days.

3 Cure thy children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

4 Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of thy salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore.