Lent with R. S. Thomas: "The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle."

Perhaps no other experience exposes more effectively the limitations and occasional pretensions of the relatively new academic discipline of practical theology, than the vocational routines of those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, and the self-giving of daily life in the service of those all too human communities we call the church.

Thus, I think, R. S. Thomas, who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encounters as qualitative research using an hermeneutic phenomenology à la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and recurring disappointments with his own fittingness to be a priest, Thomas the priest-poet sometimes nailed it.

Nailed it! I dislike that contemporary cliché if only on aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image - perhaps because when a Christian uses the verb 'to nail', we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross.¹ And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologies of glory. 

His prose-poem account of how he spent his earlier days as a priest in remote and hard to find corners of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray, that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

"A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet..." ²

I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts, or held captive by semantic precision.

"And yet..." Those last two words represent hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value. And the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened; "And yet...", we go limping towards the dawn.

"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer. Rather it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of fruitfulness and harvest, a time for ideas to germinate, take root and grow.

"The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle." Irony? Apologia? I think neither. More an acknowledgement that though working different fields, priest and farmer labour towards a shared goal of sustained human life in the daily round.

And there is in this prose poem a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet..."; yes, there is too, in study as in field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

1.The image is a detail from one of my own tapestries, "Bright Wings". It is based around the Hebrew script of Tikkun Olam, "to repair the world', and on the poem 'God's Grandeur' by Hopkins. 

2. The Echoes Return Slow, MacMillan, 1988, page 32; and in Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe, page 27. The Echoes Return Slow is one of my favourite volumes, and the first one I read and re-read 35 years ago now. This was the collection that drew me in.

Comments

[Olivia]

I stumbled across your blog and am so glad I did - wonderful words to ponder.

[Jim Gordon]

Thank you Olivia. Glad you happened by and found something good!