No one exposes the illusions and pretensions of the new and fashionable academic discipline of practical theology more effectively than those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, the service of the life in the service of those communities we call the church. Thus R S Thomas who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encoutners as qualitiative research using the hermeneutic phenomenology a la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and his disappoinments with his own fittingness to be a priest, R S Thomas sometimes nailed it.
Nailed it! Now that's a contemporary term I dislike on semantic and aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image - perhaps because for a Christian to use the verb to nail we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross. And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologians of glory.
His prose-poem account of how he spent his days as a priest in a remote and hard to find corner of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.
"A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet..."
I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts.
"And yet..." Those two words are hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value, and the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened, but limping towards the dawn.
"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer; it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of frutifulness and harvest, a time for ideas to take root and grow.
And it is a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet...", there is too, in study and field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.
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