I think that maybe
I will be a little surer
of being a little nearer.
That's all. Eternity
is in the understanding
that that little is more than enough.
The combination of poet and vicar, distilled into the personality of a man who seemed to look angrily as often as tenderly on life, makes for poems that are theologically diverse, speculative and just as often hesitant. If Thomas made no truce with the furies, neither did he ever surrender to the demands of religious certainties. There are many reasons for this.
His lifetime's resistance to the imperial claims of the scientists, and his fear and outright condemnation of technology and the machine as danger and threat to the futures of humanity, made him less than confident that faith and religious ethics would be able to stand up to such metaphysical challenges.
His own temperament as long thinker, and slow ruminator, whose solace in solitude was directly traceable to an introspective dwelling within the constraints of his own mind and emotional existence, all militated against dogma as any kind of answer to the questions that hurt and harry human beings most.
So this little poem on eternity comes as a surprisingly hopeful and modest statement of faith. The threefold use of the word 'little' indicates a lifetime of almost imperceptible gains, incremental progress towards being able to say, with much less certainty than Descartes, " I think that..." therefore I might, just might, be a little nearer being right, whatever "right" might be. Yet with the cleverness and gentleness that often softens Thomas's God-talk, the word "little" is decisively qualified and extended by the last three words, "more than enough".
Thomas is metaphysical light years away from the Apostle Paul's "I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor pricnipalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
And yet. The ageing poet, retired from his calling as vicar, and contemplating however briefly the relationship between time and eternity, and its implication for human mortality, has conceded a little more understanding is possible - and that is more than enough. A little surer, a little nearer - in eternity that will suffice, for this man of agnostic faith and subdued certainties, who spent his life looking for a foothold on hope. And who found it most often in the shadow of the Cross, cast by the distant light of hope beyond resurrection.
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