In Church
Often I try
To analyse the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.
R S Thomas
Faith is no easy trust for this poet. R S Thomas was no pietist, nor was he one for whom dogma provided emotional ballast or intellectual comfort. Yet for all his complaints and hesitations, his metaphysical doubts and theological impatience with tidiness and certainty, there is the glint of steel in his words. He neither claims easy faith nor surrenders easily to the felt absence of ground for faith. "Is this where God hides from my searching?, he asks, reversing the expectations of those who come to church to seek God that haply they might find him.
The vocabulary is laden with previous disappointments; silence, waiting, failed animation, shadows, uneasiness, darkness, emptiness, and that final theological clanger, 'untenanted cross'. This is faith so often disillusioned it comes close to resignation, and regret if not resentment. Thomas walks the via negativa, from church porch to altar, as he has done before, often, time after time.That's why the poem reads as a long pondered questioning, frequently undergone, of what the priest is about, serving an unresponsive God, in a building "prayers have failed to animate".
"Often I try to analyse the quality of its silence...I have stopped to listen". Silence varies in quality, and purpose, and explanation. There is the silence of absence, no one there to communicate with; the silence of mystery when the question asked has no yes or no answer; the silence of the vigil, waiting with expectation and no guarantee of fulfilment. Then late in the poem the silence is disturbed:
There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.
"The sound of a man breathing" has a primordial referent, going all the way back to Genesis, the Creation, and a garden when God breathed into the first human and he became a living soul. Breath and prayer mingle in the cold church, like an exhalation in the frosty air. "Prayer is the Christian's vital breath" as well as the "soul's sincere desire", in Montgomery's hymn. And prayer is "God's breath in man returning to his birth" according to George Herbert's sonnet, which Thomas would know by heart. And Thomas was too steeped in Scripture and liturgy for the sound of a man breathing to mean less than 'the burden of a sigh'.
The interrogative mood of so much of R S Thomas's poetry can become irksome to those whose sense of God is more obviously felt, more easily experienced, and even more easily explained. But for those whose disposition is less sure and sanguine, and whose questions are more persistent and unsettling, Thomas describes a spirituality of intellectual struggle and chronic discontent with questions too easily settled. Which brings us to those last words, "an untenanted cross". Jesus is depositioned, and deposited in the grave. One by one the poet nails his questions to a cross on which the work is done, but the fruit has not appeared. In the liminal time of Easter Saturday, the priest struggles to understand the meaning of atonement without resurrection. One by one he nails his questions, but there is nobody there, he is testing his faith on emptiness.
In Church is a poem for our 21st Century. All over European and North American society, the church is losing its grip, Christian faith is in recession, and the faithful struggle to arrest decline, and to maintain credibility, and resist the undertow of a growing disillusionment. This too is a body our prayers have failed to animate, as the Church and the churches are pushed to the margins of a culture no longer all that interested in, because no longer in need of, the Christian God with the human face of Jesus. And we have questions of our own, if we have the courage to ask them and the integrity to refuse that false optimism which is denial. It seems that the cross is untenanted and faith is being tested on emptiness. But every instinct tells us to nail our questions, one by one, on the untenanted cross. Because there will soon be an untenanted grave. "It's Good Friday but Sunday is coming", as Tony Campolo once quipped.
And Thomas knew this. In another poem, 'Suddenly', he looks at the cross once more. Still untenanted, the cross is the place where life suddenly erupts.The poem ends:
The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.
It occurred to me reading these two poems, that 'In Church' is a description of an interior where air recomposes itself into vigil, there is the silence of the grave, and shadows cast by receding light, and then there is the sound of a man breathing. The cross is untenanted because the one who died there breathes "in this risen existence." And that's the thing with Thomas. He nails his questions to the cross, but eventually finds himself heading towards a garden, with a tomb, where he will test his faith with its emptiness.
The Station of the Cross is one of a triptych, personal gifts from a personal friend, the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart.
I find R S Thomas's poems difficult to get into, so I appreciated your thoughtful unpacking of this one. A few other observations:-
"The air recomposing itself for vigil" - I like the sense of worshipful waiting in this.
"It has waited like this since the stones grouped themselves around it" - interesting that he gives animation to the stones, the most solidly inanimate elements of the poem, reversing expectations again.
The overall sense of the poem is that the service - the church occupied - has disturbed the search for God, which now resumes. But does he also feel something more positive from the service, in the place "the light held for an hour"?
Posted by: Dave Summers | October 28, 2018 at 07:37 PM