Lent with R. S. Thomas: When Our Prayers Keep God Awake, Now and Forever, Amen.

Minerva's bird, Athene noctua: too small for wisdom, yet unlike it's tawnier cousin active by day, too, its cat's eyes bitterer than the gorse petals. But at night it was lyrical, its double note sounded under the stars in counterpoint to the fall of the waves.

 

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There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity.

(R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe 2004. p. 51)

 

What happens when we pray? What happens to us when we pray? But Thomas explores a more unsettling question: What happens to God when we pray? If prayer is indeed relationship, what kind of relationship can it be? Who is this "Other" that we dare to trouble with our words and thoughts and desires and fears?

 

In the stillness of the night there are the noises of the natural world, and hearing has the heightened sensitivity of solitude and the otherwise silent nightscape. Silent except for the two tone cry of the little owl,¹ the bird of prey hunting in the darkness, seeing but unseen, dangerously silent; and the bark of the fox, its yelp having the right frequency to carry from distance.

 

And that other sound so resonant for Thomas, the swell of the waves which originates in oceanic depths beyond imagining, but which then rise and fall and finally break "on the long shore / by the village that is without light  / and companionless." To be "without light and companionless" is a self-description of the priest awake in the small hours; it glints with lucid honesty, distilling into ordinary images and experiences a theologia negativa. But companionless is not the final word, nor is it's time-bound duration assumed to have ultimate permanence. Because there is an other Being, who like the long shore allows our prayers to break on him, and not for the limited duration of a tide in ebb and flow, but forever.

 

Thomas is probing a theological axiom of the impassibility and immutability of God. He is imagining what it must mean that human prayers come from a swell in the deep oceans of humanity in extremis, and they rise and fall, rise and fall, wave on wave, on the long shore of God, not for a few hours but for eternity. Written like that, in prosaic clauses Thomas's speculative theology is startling enough.

 

But written in the cadences of this poem, those closing lines evoke that strangest of responses, our sympathy for God, who is awake in the night hours, receiving into the reality of who God is, endless waves of human longing, rising and falling, originating in those Atlantic depths of existence beyond human telling, where hope and despair, love and loss, comfort and terror become waves which break on the shoreline of God's eternity.

 

"There are nights that are so still...". Psalm 121 is a night Psalm, and has a similar image: "He who guards Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." But Thomas has taken that affirmative confident confession of faith to a different level of meaning. This "Other" is, like Thomas himself, unable to sleep; or perhaps unwilling, because letting "our prayers break on him", allowing human longing, desire and need to matter.

 

Then there are these words, written by P. T. Forsyth,² another pastor theologian impatient with lazy thought and easy answers : "God has old prayers of yours maturing by him...we shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's great refusals were sometimes the truest answers to our truest prayer. Our soul is fulfilled if our petition is not."³ I think Thomas might have raised an eyebrow at such spiritual confidence, perhaps because Forsyth had pushed too far in imagination into the mind of God, and beyond the mystery of prayers apparently unanswered.

 

That in turn may be because as well as having a reputation as one of the best read British theologians in contemporary German theology and philosophy, Forsyth was also a deep reader of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin. In one of his treatises, Goodwin has a passage in which he likens God's faithfulness in answering prayer to the conscientious correspondent  who keeps his friend's letters in a conspicuous place until they are answered. Forsyth interpreted the silence of God as neither absence nor indifference to those waves of prayer, but as the wise intentions of love, requiring patience and trust while acknowledging the frustrations of delayed response . 

 

Thomas refuses such comforting analogies. The two note call of the little owl, the bark of the fox from miles away, imitate the heart hunger of the human lying awake in restless longing. And as counterpoint, the poem finishes with a cyclic climax.God's willing enduring of wave upon wave of prayers is not for hours, or days, but for eternity. Love is eternally vigilant, eternally enduring, eternally willing to bear the prayers of a broken creation. The rhythms of prayer and the waves of grace coincide, and break on the shores of eternity and upon the heart of "that other being, too..."

 

1. The photo of the little owl in flight is from the website Bird Spot. https://www.birdspot.co.uk/bird-identification/little-owl  The photo of the sea was taken at Aberdeen beach beside the breakwaters on a winter morning!

2. P. T. Forsyth was a polymath, fully immersed in contemporary intellectual and artistic culture. Born in Aberdeen in 1848. he became Principal of the Congregational College in London. His writings form a remarkable corpus of passionate theology written with urgency to the church of his day always circling round his core conviction that God is holy love.

3. P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer. Independent Press, 1949, p.67, 14.