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.
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