In the early 1980's I was responsible for a daily 2 minute telephone sermon. It was an innovative approach to ministry and mission which had been going for several years before I arrived. That telephone ministry taught me to count words, and to think and speak with clarity and focus. The recording time was 1 minute 54 seconds. To say something meaningful in such a short time that might help folk through their day, required a strict economy of words, an idea that shouldn't be muddled by superfluous words, and a deliberate inner discipline of slowness in delivery.
Reading some of R S Thomas's short poems on the anniversary of his death, I become aware again of the power of words rationed to concentrate thought and distil meaning, chosen and positioned to convey something that, by verbal multiplication, would be costly in clarity and power. This is especially true of poems that explore our inner climate, a form of introspective spiritual questioning at which this poet excels.
Thomas is attentive, and makes us pay attention, to those hopes that push like green shoots through the cracks in our everyday concrete existence; to the recurring anxieties that by friction wear away the ropes of longing we hang on to for dear life; and to the constant stream of emotional weather fronts that blow across our days bringing alternations of sun or cloud, blue or grey, surprising newness or predictable sadness. Call it the poetics of humanity brought to deeper self-awareness by the easily missed summons of a Significant Other.
Here is a photo of one of those poems. Rather than just print it out, it helps make my point if we pay attention to an entire page that contains 28 words, and the white emptiness of blank paper, except for those precisely placed and carefully chosen words, which read:
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.
Collected Later Poems, R S Thomas, (Bloodaxe, 2004, page 131)
I find this brief testimony of the soul's pondering deeply moving, and theologically provocative. Is it intended as an overheard soliloquy, or the preacher's humble homiletic wondering out loud in the face of his own uncertainties, or an oblique prayer uttered in defiance of his ever-present because instinctive scepticism?
That hesitant 'maybe' is characteristic of one who was never so sure of God that he took liberties in the ways he spoke of God, and God's ways. The repeated 'little' qualifying the two comparatives 'surer' and 'clearer' gives those first three lines the balanced precision of hesitancy and certainty, not cancelling each other out, but including each other in.
'That's all.' The ambiguities that emanate from that unambiguous hinge phrase, screwed firmly in place to open the poem into a vaster reality in the word that follows! 'That's all', says Thomas, knowing full well that there's more. The modest hesitancy of 'maybe' is confronted with 'Eternity', that compelling reality before which every seriously thoughtful mind is hesitant, falters, and hopes. The human mind can neither understand, nor escape from the lure of Eternity.
Yet Eternity is promise before it is threat. We encounter the Eternal in the finite but precious human capacity for self-transcendence in thought, vision and hope: "Eternity is in the understanding...". The inner pressures of Eternity are experienced in our human awareness of time and mortality, and felt in that terrifying yet exhilaratingly deep instinct for meaning, purpose and the ultimate fulfilment of our lifelong longing for life, - and understanding.
To be "a little surer" of the faith we believe, to be "a little nearer" to the One we are called to trust with radical faith, to be conscious of the tension between our limited time and the vast infinity of the space-time continuum; that is to be suspended between the ambiguity of the first line with its "maybe", and the resolved hopefulness of the last, ending with "enough", more than eneough.
I read this poem as a brief sketch of RST at peace with himself, as much as he ever was. Not because all the questions are answered, but because he knows he doesn't have to find all the answers. Trust is living with the questions, being unafraid of maybe, and thankful of all that makes us a little surer of being a little nearer. That's all, and that's more than enough, as indeed is the grace and love of God.
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