Living Wittily

Lent with R S Thomas: The Kings who launder their feet in the tears of the poor

From Bleak Liturgies

'Alms. Alms. By Christ's

blood I conjure you

a penny.' On saints'

days the cross and

shackles were the jewellery

of the rich. As God

aged, kings laundered their feet

in the tears of the poor.

Economics eventually lead back to God. Because justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence there was a time not so long ago when we could say at least people didn't starve, there is a welfare safety net, that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. We believed that at its best our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above; just, generous, compassionate, sharing - not in order to create dependency, patronise or undermine a person's independence, but to support and enable and empower people to participate as fully as they are able in the wider life and culture of our society.

Much has changed in the past decade or two, and there are multiple explanations for those changes in the ethos of our society. But whatever selected explanations satisfy us, we are still left with an increasing deficit in the social capital, and I would argue the moral vision, of a society more and more fixated on individual self-interest, national economic advantage, and tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth as fewer and fewer have more and more. Our worldview is monoscopic, its focus on economic growth and prosperity so fiercely specific, that much else which is essential to human flourishing is deemed secondary. More significantly, these other aspects of human welfare and flourishing are often presupposed to depend upon economic prosperity, which is assumed to be morally and politically prior in demand for resources and sacrifices.

The poem above comes as the critical comment of an odd, angular, angry Christian man who 25 years ago sensed the trends of a culture more in which obscene rewards are available in the cultures of celebrity, entertainment, sport, financial industries, and with their concommitant attitudes of self-expression, self-promotion and ultimately self-manufactured individuality. It isn't a large step from such unexamined self-importance to a selfishness which is made socially acceptable and politically validated.

What I read in this poem is Thomas as Amos the prophet. Amos condemned those who sold the poor for the price of a pair of slippers; Thomas condemns those 'kings' who launder their feet in the tears of the poor. Both are raging against the inequalities and cruelties of a society in which it is just so hard for the poor to have life chances. And both reserve their sharpest words for the rich whose opulence and extravagance in money and material things, are the diistorted sacraments and physical embodiments of their greed and arrogance. Thomas makes no mention of judgement, while Amos lays about him with graphic threats and sarcastic images of overfed cows, ivory beds, rotting fruit baskets of wasted food.Mind you, Thomas has his own ironic edge - the cross and shackles reduced to trivia, baubles of the rich who long forgot the realities to which the symbols point.

Lent is a time for critical self-reflection, refreshed repentance, changed ways, renovation of our moral furniture, refurbished lifestyles more aligned with the contemporary living Christ. Those two images in Thomas's poem take us back to basic realities of human life - the contrasts of those who need alms and those who give them; and the scandal of a secularised power elite, laundering their feet in the tears of the poor.' And if we ask where Jesus is in such a society, he is more likely to be in the food bank than the 3 Star Michelin restaurant where a meal costs more than 4 weeks benefits.

Lent with R S Thomas. Favourite Poems 6 "Ah, love, with your arms out wide..."

               Tell Us

We have had names for you:
The Thunderer, the Almighty
Hunter, Lord of the snowflake
and the sabre-toothed tiger.
One name we have held back
unable to reconcile it
with the mosquito, the tidal wave,
the black hole into which
time will fall. You have answered
us with the image of yourself
on a hewn tree, suffering
injustice, pardoning it;
pointing as though in either
direction; horrifying us
with the possibility of dislocation.
Ah, love, with your arms out
wide, tell us how much more
they must still be stretched
to embrace a universe drawing
away from us at the speed of light.

Complaint. Argument. In your face frankness. This is R S Thomnas at prayer when he dares be critical of the One whose mighty power thunders, pursues and rules. This is the old argument forever unanswerable of almighty power, divine benevolence and a contingent universe of sentient suffering and ultimate dissolution into non-being. Interestingly there is no question mark in this poem, only a questioner whose urgent question is stated, not asked.

Questions require answers. But not all answers are logical, reasoned, satisfyingly resolving the tensions. The answer of God in this poem is to reveal the image of himself, and the image is cruciform, present in and present to the suffering of a broken creation and sinful humanity. The answer is to absorb the cruelty and violence of injustice and to pardon it. Yet the Cross itself is ambiguous, no real answer, pointing in two directions, exhibiting both horror and forgiveness, the victim forgiving the punishers, and horrifying onlookers through the centuries unsure what to make of it all. The image of the crucified, and note that Thomas has avoided using the word cross, creates, as does the judicial process of execution, a sense of dislocation, intellectual collapse of the psyche, a conceptual exhaustion parallel to that of arms and legs which give way as joints disintegrate.

Then those closing five lines, when the name we have withheld is used, "Ah, love..." These are amongst the most economic and theologically personal lines in these late poems. God is invited to share his suffering with a humbled and now worshipping mind and heart, and to tell "how much more" before divine love catches up with a universe expnading at the speed of light. As a meditation on suffering and faith, this poem is for me an education in theological honesty in that place where it matters most, prayer. 

Lent with R S Thomas. Favourite Poems 5. Growing old, the balance of unvarnished realism and reasoned tenderness

Geriatric
by R S Thomas

What god is proud
      of this garden
of dead flowers, this underwater
      grotto of humanity,
where limbs wave in invisible
      currents, faces drooping
on dry stalks, voices clawing
      in a last desperate effort
to retain hold? Despite withered
      petals, I recognise
the species: Charcot, Meniere,
      Alzheimer. There are no gardeners
here, caretakers only
      of reason overgrown
by confusion. This body once,
      when it was in bud,
opened to love's kisses. These eyes,
      cloudy with rheum,
were clear pebbles that love's rivulet
      hurried over. Is this
the best Rabbi Ben Ezra
      promised? I come away
comforting myself, as I can,
      that there is another
garden, all dew and fragrance,
      and that these are the brambles
about it we are caught in,
      a sacrifice prepared
by a torn god to a love fiercer
      than we can understand. 

Lent. A time of reflection, repentance, ascetic self-questioning, self-denial. Reflection as examination of our lives in the light of God; repentance as that motivational impulse towards change in the light of that examination; self-questioning about what matters most, and why what matters most is not always what we attend to most carefully; self-denial, the refusal of the will to go with the moral default settings of self-interest, self-indulgence, self-service.

But sometimes Lent can be something else. Instead of humility and penitence their can be for want of a better word defiance, and defiance articulated in questioning the One who so closely knows, examines and judges us. Giving up our comfortable views of God for Lent! It is that reverent defiance that gives this poem its power to both move us and scare us. Lent is a good time for thinking again of the God we believe in, whose mercy we depend upon, whose love we trust, whose providence and purpose we look for in the contingencies and circumstances of our own living. This poem is about a human being growing old, and the onset of Alzheimer's, the slow relinquishing of the self, and the poet's angry interrogation of any god overseeing with any sense of contentment let alone pride, a garden with flowers wilting, wasting, decomposing into nothingness.

But once again in a single poem Thomas argues for and with a faith that struggles to try and have it both ways. The god of this slowly decomposing garden of human life is questioned and resisted until the poet sees beyond all the withered, dying beauty. But what he sees is not the fantasy that would ever claim that in growing old "the best is yet to be". Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra is a mockery for the reality that is many people's old age. Instead Thomas sees the torn god whose sacrifice makes possible another garden of dew and fragrance, wrested into existence by "a love fiercer than we can understand."

Thomas has no faith or patience in explanations and comforting cliches; he settles for a sterner reality, in which the brambles that catch and tear are real enough, but they are not the final reality and destiny of this body so loved and loveable in its budding promise when young. The tenderness with which Thomas describes the love that enlivens and sparkles each person with humanity, also describes the fiercer love that is torn in order to redeem, renew and make flower again the garden of creation. There is much of Genesis 1-3 in this poem which, while giving full weight to the theology of fallenness and mortality, moves beyond to a hopefulness which is not wistful or hesitant, and which against all apearances to the contrary, trusts this fiercer love which we cannot understand to renew the garden of God's own creation.

This is a remarkable poem about growing old, and the diminishing of the self that attends many whose mind begins to lose its grasp as "reason is overgrown by confusion". The balance of unvarnished realism and reasoned tenderness, create a tension between hope and despair, which if not entirely resolved, nevertheless tilts towards newness, which if not inexorably promised, is neither inexorably withheld.

Geriatric
by R S Thomas

What god is proud
      of this garden
of dead flowers, this underwater
      grotto of humanity,
where limbs wave in invisible
      currents, faces drooping
on dry stalks, voices clawing
      in a last desperate effort
to retain hold? Despite withered
      petals, I recognise
the species: Charcot, Meniere,
      Alzheimer. There are no gardeners
here, caretakers only
      of reason overgrown
by confusion. This body once,
      when it was in bud,
opened to love's kisses. These eyes,
      cloudy with rheum,
were clear pebbles that love's rivulet
      hurried over. Is this
the best Rabbi Ben Ezra
      promised? I come away
comforting myself, as I can,
      that there is another
garden, all dew and fragrance,
      and that these are the brambles
about it we are caught in,
      a sacrifice prepared
by a torn god to a love fiercer
      than we can understand. 

Lent with R S Thomas: Favourite Poems 4. The Uninvited Guest to an Inadequate Table.

This poem is virtually a mosaic of biblical echoes, whether the vocabulary or the imagery. In two stanzas of 20 words each, Thomas gives a rationale for prayer that is devoid of sentimental spirituality, eschews hard edged pragmatism, is impatient with otherworldly escapism. Because even if eyes are closed to the world, it is this act of sensory asceticism which ignites the bush, signals the presence, commands the removal of shoes from holy ground.  Strength found in acknowledged weakness, the burning that doesn't consume, the uninvited guest who shares the modest table, these are profound biblical allusions to the ways God is encountered. This short poem distils so much into the concentrate of prayer, and acts as both invitation and anticipation of an encounter with one who, knowing our weakness and inadequacy, comes as guest, uninvited, but in the end, welcome.

When we are weak, we are

strong. When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

 

burns. When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that

uninvited the guest comes.

Lent with R S Thomas. Favourite Poems 3: "Fissures of Mercy..."

                Tidal

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

In this poem Thomas uses one of the most evocative images for prayer as both relationship and strategy. The relentless ebb and flow of the tide has its counterpart in the persistent, patient progress of those who simply do not give up in the quest for the One who raises the urgent questions of existence, meaning and purpose. The domestication of transcendence, the reduction of prayer to petition and pragmatic help seeking, the fascination of a culture immured in consumer efficiency and addicted to mechanised production, betray precisely the violence that would take rather than give, that despises reverence, and that far from achieving the true ends of prayer, merely harden the heart of God to rock. 

"My return must be made on my knees...", this phrase recognises the need for reticence in the approach to transcendence, a demonstrable and genuine humility that makes no claims, but hopes for a hearing, and perhaps a word of mercy which might fertilise trust as it struggles to grow. It is one of the immense contributions Thomas has made to Christian spirituality that he so persuasively and poignantly validates hesitation and hopefulness in the all too human instincts for prayer. Repeatedly in his poems, especially the late poems, the disposition of the body on its knees has its complement in a heart and a mind equally submissive; but it is submission edged with determination, and driven by seasonal spring surges when the heart overflows in supplication.

This is for me one of Thomas's finest and most self-revealing meditations on a lifetime's praying, and his discovery of "depositis of mercy where trust may take root and grow." I feel a deep kinship with that image.

 

Lent with R S Thomas: Favourite Poems 2. Children

R S Thomas could be crabbit, critical, hard to get on with. The poems reveal a man uncomfortably stuck with the limits and frustrations of his own self, and knowing as few Christian poets have known better, the further and fiercer limits and frustrations of trying to bring that self into relation with the great Other, the God we all but analyse out of existence.

So this poem comes as a surprise. The poet's ironic take on the child's observation of the anguished loss of dance and play and make believe and sheer acceptance of the joy of being that is childhood. I wonder if this is Thomas's commentary on Jesus words, " Unless you change and become as a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of God." (Matthew 18.3) The adult view of the world is grown up; which means experienced, more cautious, "knowing" in that way of thinking that is Health and Safety applied as a life principle. Children, happily, know nothing of this; and postmodern adulthood could do worse than change, and rediscover the deeper and different roots of, the deeper and different routes to, a world of recovered wonder and trust. 

Knees are important in Thomas's poetry - not far from knees is prayer, and supplication, and in Thomas's theology prayerful supplication that has no guaranteed outcome in any answer, and perhaps no certainty even of being heard. And just perhaps,, this poem is Thomas's own recognition that the world of the child has more to commend it than all the sophistication and life experience and power games and nameless anxieties of being responsible, accountable, and a seeker of purpose and meaning. 

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R S Thomas

(The image is by Joe Aspell, a statue of Joseph playing with Jesus - or maybe Jesus teaching Joseph to play).

Lent with R S Thomas: Favourite Poems 1. The Musician.

Over the next week in Lent I'll post a poem a day with minimal comment. This is amongst the most important poems by R S Thomas, as far as my own appreciation and judgement goes. I used this at a Maundy Thursday service 30 years ago and still remember the response of a congregation most of whom were hearing it for the first time.

A friend called Alistair, presented me with an inscribed copy. He had taught himself calligraphy while held by the Japanese as a prisoner of war in the same barrack as Laurens Van der Post. That, along with Herbert's Poem Prayer (II), remains a treasured possession.

The Musician

A memory of Kreisler once:
At some recital in this same city,
The seats all taken, I found myself pushed
On to the stage with a few others,
So near that I could see the toil
Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth
Fluttering under the fine skin,
And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,
As we sat there or warmly applauded
This player who so beautifully suffered
For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary
In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:
The men standing by and that one figure,
The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,
Making such music as lives still.
And no one daring to interrupt
Because it was himself that he played
And closer than all of them the God listened.

R S Thomas

Lent with R S Thomas: The God of Deeper Fathoms and Distant Stars

A lot of time and money is spent on books on prayer which are of the Teach Yourself, Idiot's Guide, Prayer for Dummies genre. Sometimes it's a help if someone gives you the instructions for the IKEA pack. There are also books of prayer or prayers that prime the pump, kick-start the engine, flick the switch, reboot the hard drive - these metaphors are all a bit reductionist, mechanical and utilitarian, but unless we are super-saints we all need that kind of encouragement and stimulus, at least sometimes.

Then there are those times when with open Bible, or some other text worthy of Lectio Divina, we allow our minds to ponder, weigh, consider; or imagine, wander and play; or give way to those inner feelings of the heart such as gratitude, joy, and trust or on the down side, anxiety, grief and doubt. But the text holds us as we hold it; there is nourishment in those long ago written words; the words and the Word sometimes coalesce in blessing as we receive them and embrace them.

Such reflections on the practice of prayer as life habit and spiritual discipline are blown out of the water by R S Thomas. I am learning to be patient with his doubts, caring and understanding about his complaints, and respectful of a man who with utter and compelling seriousness, followed his quest for God with hard questions and mostly no answers; at least none that he found persuasive enough to convince. Words like deep, profound, and vast are mere intensifiers - deep thought, profound feeling, vast oceans. But they are all he has as he looks at the shallow sea outside his window, and becomes aware there are "deeper fathoms to plumb," so deep and so impenetrable that "he was under compulsion to give away whatever assurances he possessed."

Following the prose poem, further down the page are these lines:

Hear me. The hands
pointed, the eyes
closed, the lips move
as though manipulating
soul’s spittle. At bedsides,
in churches the ego
renews its claim
to attention.. The air
sighs. This is
the long siege, the deafness
of space. Distant stars
are no more, but their light
nags us. At times
in the silence, between
prayers, after the Amens
fade, at the world’s
centre, it is as though
love stands, renouncing itself.

"Hear me", the classic cry of the Psalmist, which Thomas with uncomfortable realism describes as "the ego's claim to attention", and in so doing puts all our praying in its place. But the cry to be heard encounters the deafness of space. So are our prayers heard? Or is is possible that after the words are spoken and the silence falls, what is left in the heart and the mind is the real prayer, coming after the speechand the Amens have stopped their echo? As so often in his poems on prayer and the absence or presence of God, the final line or two move towards a resolution, not certainty, not recovered assurance, and certainly not closure, but resolution as pray-er and prayed-to experience each other like the mystery of light seen now that was extinguished aeons ago. Our prayers, like the light from dead stars, still nag the pray-er and the prayed-to.

The image of the dying star, whose light reaches us though the source is now gone, may be an oblique reference to this God whose nature is self-renouncing love. The Cross stands at the world's centre, and "it is as though love stands, renouncing itself." There are few poets I know who probe so deeply into the psychology of prayer, who examine so precisely, at times fiercely, the theology of the God prayed to.

Late in life Thomas, who had edited a selection of George Herbert's poems, confessed he couldn't read Herbert any more, "I cannot get on matey terms with the Deity as Herbert can." This is the God of deeper fathoms and distant stars; to be wrestled with if his name is to be discovered; to be known as love, but love renouncing itself. I think Thomas would have burned all prayer manuals that presume to reduce prayer to practicalities; he believed too much in the life or death struggle that prayer is to put up with such trivialising pragmatism. As he said in an earlier poem, he would "flee for protection from the triviality of my thought to the thought of its triviality..."

Lent with R S Thomas: "The opposite of poetry is not prose but science."

You could be forgiven for thinking that R S THomas was a Luddite, a hater of technology and the mechanisation of life. The machine is manufactured, and Thomas was deeply fearful of what "man" "makes" in factories, what machines do to the land and to the human soul. Many of his poems are negative about science, ambivalent about technology, fearful and mistrusting of human knowledge applied for the purposes of mastering nature by machinery and mechanisation rather than serving creation by care and stewardship. He had lived through the years of war, of the tractor replacing the horse, the combine harvester devouring fields in half a day that would have taken men a week with scythes, twine, forks and sheaves, and further days of toil at the threshing mill.

His deeper fears focused on human applications of physics, the creation of the atomic bomb, the deploying as threat of nuclear weapons capable of destroying human life and earth as a viable home. Picking mushrooms reminded him of the mushroom cloud, and the white domes of early warning systems. The laboratory was a place where power and domination were exercised over matter, so that the same power could be exercised over other people, peoples and nations. Like George MacLeod, Thomas had no hesitation in seeing the splitting of the atom, and nuclear fission, harnessed to military ends, as blasphemy, the turning of the fundaments of life to the ends of mass death.

The opposite of poetry is not prose, says Thomas quoting Coleridge, it's science. Jesus was a poet, he argued, implying much that we are left to ponder. "Jesus was a poet, and would have teased the scientists, as he teased Nathanael". Nathanael was the disciple sitting under the fig tree, whether thinking, praying, waiting. But the allusion to Nathanael and his waiting under the tree is Thomas's entry point for one of his ironic and apologetic critiques of the scientific enterprise, the technological mentality, the mechanistic worldview. His quarrel wasn't with science, but with science as dominance, technology as efficiency, lust for knowledge unrestrained by humility. His late poem on the theme of science as both wrong question and wrong answer shows he is not an obscurantist opposed to science, discovery and learning. The poem considers the futility of science as an explanation of ultimate concerns (he was a well read fan of Tillich). Science and technology are not of themselves a sufficient basis for human flourishing, or even as guarantors of a human future.

I have waited for him
              under the tree of science
and he has not come:

            and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
            there is no guile

I have put my hand in my pocket
                for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
                it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
                on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.

                     And where do I go
                 from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
                 laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
                 there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
                 prove to them that they were wrong.

"I have put a cross..." At the centre of Christian faith is a truth beyond the powers of science to explain or even explore. The cross is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world; how can the answers be right if all the working and working out are based from the start on false premises, incomplete data, and skewed purposes. The cross is also a symbol of all that is right, at least insofar as the Cross is God's way of confronting the self destructive impulses that go back to the beginning when under another tree, the knowledge of good and evil was filched from God.

This is a poem that absolutely requires biblical literacy to be able to hear the potent theological and biblical sub-texts. As a Lenten poem it could be a call for us to adopt a far less sanguine view of human technological ingenuity, as in its rapid advances it outstrips our moral maturity and wisdom. And in place of intellectual hubris, a Cross, that symbol of the marker that something is so wrong in the conclusion, that the questions and answers require deeper and better thought.

 

Lent with R S Thomas: When Our Prayers Keep God Awake Forevermore.

The Other.

 

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

 

What happens when we pray? What happens to us when we pray? But Thomas explores a more unsettling question: What happens to God when we pray? If prayer is indeed relationship, what kind of relationship can it be? Who is this "Other" that we dare to trouble with our words and thoughts and desires and fears? In the stillness of the night there are the noises of the natural world, and hearing has the heightened sensitivity of solitude and the otherwise silent nightscape. Silent except for the two tone cry of the owl, the bird of prey hunting in the darkness, seeing but unseen, dangerously silent; and the bark of the fox, its yelp having the right frequency to carry from distance.

 

And that other sound so resonant for Thomas, the swell of the waves which originates in oceanic depths beyond imagining, but which then rise and fall and finally break "on the long shore / by the village that is without light  / and companionless." To be "without light and companionless" is a self-description of the priest awake in the small hours; it glints with lucid honesty, distilling into ordinary images and experiences a theologia negativa. But companionless is not the final word, nor is it's time-bound duration assumed to have ultimate permanence. Because there is an other Being, who like the long shore allows our prayers to break on him, and not for the limited duration of a tide in ebb and flow, but forever.

 

Thomas is probing a theological axiom of the impassibility and immutability of God. He is imagining what it must mean that human prayers come from a swell in the deep oceans of humanity in extremis, and they rise and fall, rise and fall, wave on wave, on the long shore of God, not for a few hours but for eternity. Written like that, in prosaic clauses Thomas's speculative theology is startling enough. But written in the cadences of this poem, those closing lines evoke that strangest of responses, our sympathy for God, who is awake in the night hours, receiving into the reality of who God is, endless waves of human longing, rising and falling, originating in those Atlantic depths of existence beyond human telling, where hope and despair, love and loss, comfort and terror become waves which break on the shoreline of God's eternity.

 

"There are nights that are so still...". Psalm 121 is a night Psalm, and has a similar image: "He who guards Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." But Thomas has taken that affirmative confident confession of faith to a different level of meaning. This "Other" is, like Thomas himself, unable to sleep; or perhaps unwilling, because letting "our prayers break on him". The poem finishes with a cyclic climax. God's willing enduring of wave upon wave of prayers is not for hours, or days, but for eternity. Love is eternally vigilant, eternally enduring, eternally willing to bear the prayers of a broken creation.