Living Wittily

R S Thomas and unintended theological apologetics

I have waited for him
               under the tree of science,
and he has not come;
              and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
              there is no guile.

I have put my hand in my pocket
              for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
              it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
              on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.
                  And where do I go
              from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
              laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
              there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
              prove to them that they were wrong.
R S Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 89



Very few poets manage to write theological apologetics. R. S. Thomas of course never set out to do that, his aesthetic and spiritual integrity make it literally unthinkable. Nevertheless in this poem there is a knowing skepticism about scientific certitude and the imperialistic tendencies rational modernity.

And as often with Thomas, the use of a trojan term, an oblique reference to a Christian symbol, almost camouflaged by ambiguity and easily missed by the secular mindset, by which he pushes the reader towards the place of revelation:

                "...and have put a cross

                     there at the bottom

of the working out of their problems to

prove to them that they were wrong."

Alice Meynell: "the heart shattering secret of His way with us".

One of my favourite poems from the gloriously eclectic Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, D H S Nicholson and A H E Lee (Eds.), (Oxford 1917), 463-4. This anthology has never been revised or updated so has little in it of the 20th Century. But there are a lot of poems like this one, by minor or near forgotten poets.

This kind of poem pushes the boundaries of thought and theology, and whatever else prevents that devotional reductionism by which we try to eliminate mystery and ‘the heart-shattering secret of His way with us.’ There are lines in this poem that are worth a while of anyone's time to contemplate - maybe alongside the great Christocentric hymns of the New Testament in Colossians, Ephesians and John chapter 1.

 

Christ in the Universe, Alice Meynell.

 

With this ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us. These abide:

The signal to a maid, the human birth,

The lesson, and the young Man crucified.       

 

But not a star of all        5

The innumerable host of stars has heard

How He administered this terrestrial ball.

Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.       

 

Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,       10

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.     

 

No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,       15

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.       

 

Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or His bestowals there be manifest.       20       

 

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.       

 

O, be prepared, my soul!       25

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

Robert Browning's "A Death in the Desert".

"Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought."

Robert Browning's line comes from one of the very best introductions to John's Gospel - his long poem, "A Death in the Desert".

Does anyone still read Browning?

Rublev's enthroned Christ I've always thought conveys the majesty of the glory of Christ - and thus the miracle of what it meant to say, "we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth".

Some time when you want to come at John's gospel from a different route, try Browning's poem. You know how on the motorway or A road you sometimes see the sign that offers the tourist route, or the scenic route? Think about leaving the critical historical motorway for a while to meander with Browning into the mind and heart of John the ageing evangelist, reflecting on the Gospel he is composing in his head, and every now and then "stung by the splendour of a sudden thought".

Fearfully and wonderfully made: from poetry to biography to theology

Along with biography as theology, and poetry in relation to theology, I've long made a habit of reading biographical studies of poets! The latest one recently arrived, Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life. I've read two earlier and major biographies of Hopkins, both published a decade and more ago. The argument and thesis of Robert Bernard Martin I found unconvincing in its psychological analysis of Hopkins as a man of anguished spirit and troubled sexuality. Its sub-title A Very Private Life suggests more can be established as fact than is the case. Martin's speculative reconstructions, however well informed and meticulously documented, remain one person's reading of widely acknowledged and major gaps in the data of Hopkins' inner life. The other biography by Norman White is what it says it is, a literary biography laden with literary analysis, just the kind of biography you expect and enjoy from Oxford University Press - long, detailed, erudite. But the danger, not avoided here, is that the scholarship is so overdone, the essential mystery of the person is obscured by a too conscientious thoroughness.

But I learned a lot from these two writers, especially about what happens when poems are read from different perspectives informed by largely unexamined assumptions. Presuppositionless exegesis, according to Bultmann is impossible - that's as true of poems as biblical texts. Neither biography got to the heart of the man, perhaps because neither took with sufficient seriousness one of the most obvious and definitive facts about Hopkins - he was a man of profound religious devotion, whose poetry gave high expression to some of his hardest questions and most moving confessions. With that as an acknowledged presupposition Paul Mariani has written a quite different biography - resulting in a quite different interpretation of the poems.

Mariani has read and written about Hopkins throughout a long career as a scholar of English Literature in general, poetry in particular, and Hopkins' poetry as a special focus of long attentive study. Hopkins is understood (both empathetically and intellectually), as a religiously intense man, and as a poet whose gift is applied to the mystery of God, the world, the human soul and the woven ambiguities of human existence, and these great truths glimpsed in their frighteningly complex inter-relationships, whether as developing or unravelling pattern. Here is one example - simple, and I think reminiscent of George Herbert in interrogative mood, conscience haunted by assumed failure, longing for assurance yet the longing unresolved - not even by a closed parenthesis and full stop at the end of the poem.

Poem 94
Trees by their yield
Are known: but I -
My sap is sealed,
My root is dry.
If life within
I none can shew
(Except for sin),
Nor fruit above-
It must be so -
I do not love.

Will no one show
I argued ill?
Because, although
Self-sentenced, still
I keep my trust.
If He would prove
And search me through
Would he not find
(What yet there must
be hid behind

.     .     .     .
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W H Gardiner (Ed.), Oxford: OUP, 1938, p. 144.

Jesus... "a thousand times more frightening......"

Maybe
Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
      stood up in the boat
         and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
   different crosses
      the threshold--the uncles
         mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water--
      sometimes, for days,
         you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
      one or two of them felt
         the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
   as they are now, forgetting
      how the wind tore at the sails
         before he rose and talked to it--

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was--
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer sea.

(Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Volume One, pages 97-98).

And here is one of my favourite pieces of non-western art that shows Jesus "tender and luminous and demanding as he always was".

 

Resurrection Fibonacci (I) and "Easter Wings".

Resurrection Fibonacci (I)

Christ?
Yes!
Risen?
Disbelieve!
Disbelieve for joy!
Incredulity learns to laugh,
unembarrassed by the scandal of resurrection.
"And on the third day." His promise no exaggeration. Empty graveclothes, empty tomb.
Galilee. Peter. Upper Room. Thomas. Garden. Magdalene. Emmaus. Cleopas. Places transfigured, people transformed. Risen indeed! 

Luke 24.41 should always be read in the RSV or AV. "The disciples disbelieved for joy". When that which is singular, unprecedented, inconceivable, incredible, unimaginable, occurs, the normal response is disbelief. When that occurence forces the realisation, even the minute possibility, that our worst fears and worst nightmare can no longer happen, then that disbelief is energised by joy. To disbelieve for joy isn't scepticism, it is wonder giving birth to possibility, because the impossible has just been contradicted.

To disbelieve for joy is to struggle with mixed emotions, at one and the same time to dare to hope and hope to God we are not wrong, deluded, mistaken, duped by our own desire that it be so. Joseph Fitzmyer is my first resort on Lukan exegesis; his translation of the key phrase in 24.41 is 'because they were still incredulous, overjoyed yet wondering...". Resurrection does that . It doesn't take much imagination, (though maybe even the little it takes is too much for some of us) to think our way into the minds and hearts of disoriented disciples, traumatised, grieving and scared. Yes incredulous. And yes overjoyed, overcome with that hilarity that is somewhere between joy and hysteria. Later they would begin to understand, incredulity would give way to faith, joy would become something akin to assurance, worship would become urgent in a world now changed forever, and their witness to that world an affirmation of Christ crucified and risen. And the news so good that countless others who encounter Jesus will disbelieve for joy, that God is like this Jesus, reaching out in love and mercy, meeting them where they, and we, are.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

The statue is by Frederick Hart, and is called "Christ Rising". The image expresses the anguish of Christ's sacrifice and the power of resurrection. One of Hart's descriptions of his own art shows why this statue is such a powerful statement: "Art must touch our lives, our fears and cares – evoke our dreams and give hope to the darkness."

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

.....................................

And because I can't print it the way George Herbert intended, here is a scanned image of Easter Wings, a poem I think is hauntingly beautiful - the words and the form. I've included the words below for easier reading - but the typesetting on the scan was Herbert's original intention.

 

Easter-wings

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine
And feel this day thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Poetry of the Passion 6 : Holy Saturday and the aching hiatus of not knowing.

Holy Saturday is about emptiness. Empty hope and an apparently empty future. An empty cross and that looming emptiness we know as bereavement. Words like disillusion, aftermath, undone, waste, hiatus, paralysis, unreality, each lacks precision for that confusion that faces a future certain only of not knowing, of not knowing how, and not knowing why.

Chris has captured something of the bewildering ambiguity of the great heart cry of Christ, "It is finished", in her Good Friday reflection posted yesterday. Particularly the unreality of that which was finally and irrevocably real in the death of Jesus, and the brute fact not only of crucifixion, but of a cross now empty. Today's passion poetry can be read there, and thanks Chris for a powerful evocation of that liminal time between Good Friday, Holy Saturday and what comes after, and what it might have felt like to not know, and to disbelieve for grief.

Poetry of the Passion 5: "Incarnation's heaviest weight..."

Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seem in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a soul-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
and wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don't show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill under the weight of the Cross,
He went through with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
nor the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not even, in agony's grip)
was Incarnation's heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.
(Denise Levertov, New selected Poems, Bloodaxe, 2002, page 182)

One of the most important contributions to Western theology made by Jurgen Moltmann's seminal The Crucified God, was to recover confidence in the theology of the cross as a way of understanding the inner relations of love in the life of the Triune God, and to explore the nature of divine self-surrender through the experience of Jesus as God revealed in human flesh. The incarnation as an historic event, and as occasion for the outgoing redemptive love of God to a creation fallen, finite yet the object of eternal purpose and infinite love, opened for Moltmann and subsequent theological explorations, a rich seam of reflection on the nature of divine and human suffering. And in various occasions of reflection in his work, Moltmann takes with reverent seriousness and theological courage, the far reaches of meaning in the great cry of dereliction. The God-forsakenness of Jesus has its deepest echo in the heart of the Father, amplified by the Spirit, and borne as unutterable anguish constrained to the human words, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

In his autobiography, A Broad Place, Moltmann tells of his experiences as a young soldier, the God forsakenness of young men cowering under air attack, and witnessing comrades shattered into oblivion before their eyes as bombs rained from the darkness. Such personal anguish can never be irrelevant to the developments of later theological reflection. In a border village in Austria is a beautiful modern church we visited some years ago while on a walking holiday. At the entrance is placed a War Memorial Plaque, in black marble, with a young soldier cradling his dying comrade. And in German the same words that are on countless similar plaques in British churches, "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

Good Friday is a complex intersection of emotion, memory, past pain, heightened awareness of loss, and for people of faith the puzzle we dare not try to solve, the holy enigma of God's broken heart, the tear of separation that signals ultimate bereavement, the grief of God. What makes it Good Friday is the love that is revealed yet mysterious, infinite yet personal, pushed to the utter limits of endurance, yet not giving in to

this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.

Levertov displays profound theological insight into the psychological anguish created by uncertainty, as inner resolve seems shattered by physical agony, and yet from somewhere deep in the truth of who God is, final purpose perseveres, "enduring the cross, despising the shame". Few poems idenytify with such precision, exactly what John meant when he said, "For God so loved the world....".

 

Poetry of the Passion 4: Saying no, and yes, to peace

Brian Wren is a provocative, imaginative and at times controversial hymn writer. Several of his hymns have a secure place within my personal canon, and one of them (Lord God your love has called us here) is amongst the very best communion hymns extant. His book, What Language Shall I Borrow manages to argue for gender inclusive language, and for non hierarchical images of God, with cogency, passion, informed theological reflection and at times a noticeable impatience, even resentment at resistance to experimentation with metaphor, image and vocabulary. In Wren's hymns God is the Holy Weaver, deftly intertwining; the Dancer, the Sending One, the Wild One, the Storm of Love, the God who changes place.

He is also unafraid of hymns that have political and ethical edge rooted in the Gospel story, and fuelled by the abrasive protests and angry compassion of the prophets. Interestingly Wren's D PHil is on the Hebrew prophets and he has degrees in Modern Language and in Theology - a fair tool kit of disciplines, ideas and sources which he exploits again and again in hymns that enable worshippers to sing about such scandals as child labour, racist violence, economic tyranny, life shattering loss, aching grief and most of the bad stuff in the news. But it is always juxtaposed with Gospel, with what God is about in a creation so in need of redemption that God takes matters into his own hands to heal, to make new, to begin again....and again.

Holy week, and the events that led inexorably but purposefully to the cross, are frequent themes on which he writes with a fresh understanding of our understandable human recoil from such incomprehensible suffering for love's sake. The first two stanzas of his poem 'Hope against hope', is a condensed theology of the cross, replete with pastoral intent. It's a good example of Wren's approach

Here hangs a man discarded,

A scarecrow hoisted high,

A nonsense pointing nowhere

To all who hurry by

 

Can such a clown of sorrows

Still bring a useful word

Where faith and love seem phantoms

And every hope absurd.

The following hymn is more political, contemporary, but no less insistent on radical Christian protest, and the importance of saying "No!".

The hymn is a frank recognition that peace at any price can never be an option for those who understand the meaning of incarnation, atonement and resurrection - for God, and for the world. In other words the Gospel Story is indeed about peace at any price - the cross even redeems our search for peace, saving us from those short cuts that merely prolong injustice by ignoring the actual cost. Holy Week sets out the timetable of Jesus last days, when again and again, he said no to peace, in order to say yes, and so bring peace.

Say No to Peace!

Say "No" to peace
if what they mean by peace
is the quiet misery of hunger,
the frozen stillness of fear,
the silence of broken spirits,
the unborn hopes of the oppressed.

Tell them that peace
is the shouting of children at play,
the babble of tongues set free,
the thunder of dancing feet,
and a father's voice singing.

Say "No" to peace,
if what they mean by peace
is a rampart of gleaming missiles,
the arming of distant wars,
money at ease in its castle,
and grateful poor at the gate.

Tell them that peace
is the hauling down of flags,
the forging of guns into ploughs,
the giving of fields to the landless,
and hunger a fading dream.

Brian Wren.

Easter, then, isn’t about eggs, bunnies, pastel coloured cards and half full churches. It’s about peace rooted in reconciliation, hope that grows out of justice, and faith that radiates new possibility in a world where Jesus is Risen. The resurrection of Jesus wasn’t just God’s last minute equaliser in the ultimate power contest. The resurrection of Jesus is God saying no today to any peace built on injustice and the suffering of others. Easter is God’s promise of life contradicting death, love overcoming hate, and peace won through costly reconciliation. Easter is God's yes to peace.

Poetry of the Passion 3: Lead Me to Calvary

I was standing in the rain on a Saturday afternoon in Law Village, Lanarkshire. I was 17 years of age. I had just for the first time told the story of how I had met Jesus a couple of weeks earlier - I gave my testimony, told how my story and the Gospel story coincided. And how those two stories intersected in an encounter between a confused and uncertain teenager and One who offered gift and demand, and all the risks attendant on making life meaningful. I had written it all out carefully with a Woolworth's cheap fountain pen, in royal blue ink - and it was raining. The paper was sodden, the ink had run, my words illegible, and I was left with a battery powered megaphone to tell anyone who was listening that Jesus had changed my life, that he had died for me and I had now given my life to Him. I gave testimony - in the rain - without notes, and with a heart thumping from either terror or joy, and probably both.

I was with several other Christians, including two Faith Mission pilgrims. In the 1960's Faith Mission Pilgrims provided a first-hand opportunity to encounter experiential Evangelicalism in which evangelism was primary and the approach utterly anti-cultural in its oddity. Those wonderful people lived for evangelism, and tried to live by the Gospel, and at the time I met them I regarded them with awe and a puzzled admiration. They asked me to tell others what the Lord had done for me. So I did.

That afternoon I handed the megaphone back to Margaret (whose large wide-margin RSV Bible I still have, cherish and use, as the gift she later passed on when I started training for ministry), and Margaret decided it was time to sing. Now in those days Law Village wasn't a place where many people sang in the streets on a Saturday afternoon - late Saturday night, yes, but not a wet and windy weekend 2.o'clock ad hoc Gospel sing song, with accordion and solo female voice. The song and its singing acted like a spiritual seal on what I'd tried to say, and what I so deeply felt but hadn't discovered the words and ideas to fully grasp.

The words weren't the best poetry in the world - and Margaret wasn't the best singer in the world, and didn't claim to be. But this Holy Week, in honour of Faith Mission Pilgrims like Margaret, whose courage and resilience remains for me an inspiration, I wanted to recall those words. And to recall too that first act of public testimony from a converted teenager. That the song also happens to have been one of my mother's favourites, simply makes it more poignant, and gives it even deeper inner resonances. I've long reserved space for sentimental verse and song as an essential element in a balanced diet of spiritual health foods! Not all hymns need to be good poetry - sometimes it's enough that they are genuine prayers. And this was prayer, pure, simple and to the point, when Margaret sang it that dreich Saturday afternoon.

 

Lead Me to Calvary

King of my life, I crown Thee now,
Thine shalt the glory be;
Lest I forget Thy thorn crowned brow,
Lead me to Calvary.

Refrain

Lest I forget Gethsemane,
Lest I forget Thine agony;
Lest I forget Thy love for me,
Lead me to Calvary.

Show me the tomb where Thou wast laid,
Tenderly mourned and wept;
Angels in robes of light arrayed
Guarded Thee whilst Thou slept.

Refrain

Let me like Mary, through the gloom,
Come with a gift to Thee;
Show to me now the empty tomb,
Lead me to Calvary.

Refrain

May I be willing, Lord, to bear
Daily my cross for Thee;
Even Thy cup of grief to share,
Thou hast borne all for me.