"Is God worshipped only in cathedrals, where blood drips from regimental standards as from the crucified body of love? Is there a need for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures? The Cross always is avante-garde."
R S Thomas lamented the modernisation of liturgy, the modern fear of any terminology that is not current, contemporary, accessible, or, God help us, relevant. Against Thomas's apparent liturgical conservationist tendencies it may be that there is nothing to be gained by Christianity sounding like a mystery religion, or the Church adhering to a language no longer spoken, and now seldom understood outside the walls of Christian sanctuary.
But at the same time, in Thomas's defence, he feared that there may be a great deal to be lost if we surrender the language of faith, the vocabulary of the Spirit, the rhythms and cadences of hymn and liturgy which carry the freight of the Divine promises and presences and which sustain through those times of Divine absence. Thomas was a theologian of God's absence, a pilgrim familiar with the quiet and desolate places, and with an eye and ear observant of emptiness as of fullness. Not for him the easily recited propositions of the over-certain; not for him the substitution of banality and overfamiliarity with the Almighty, often considered by their exponents as informality and demonstrated intimacy, but which are in reality evidence of an absconded reverence and a trivialisation of the Transcendent.
Whatever arguments Thomas had with God, and there were many - fierce, persistent, unrelenting one to one combat, resulting in inner anguish and spiritual wrestling with the One whose name was witheld and whose touch wounded to the quick - whatever the arguments, Thomas knew his place in the presence, or absence of the Divine. Like the great preacher Qoheleth Thomas knew, he just knew, "God is in heaven, and you are on earth, so let your words be few." Quite.
The quotation at the start of this post is from a prose poem which introduces his reflections on entering a church and looking at the altar, the cross and then beyond these to the God revealed in such transiently simple and eternally durable realities. The brilliance of the last line illumines the whole poem.
The church is small.
The walls inside
White. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.
The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.
(The photo is of the small panel of my tapestry, "Eucharist and Pentecost" currently underway)
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