Living Wittily

"Staring over the edge of the universe...." R S Thomas and Faith Without Sentiment

Still Point, R S Thomas

In the universe one

world beneath cloud

foliage. In that world

a town. In the town

 

a house with a child,

who is blind, staring

over the edge of the universe

into the depths of love.

(R S Thomas, Collected Later Poems, p. 215)

Late in life, No Truce With the Furies reads like a poetics of defiance, in which Thomas seeks and gathers glimpses of a hopefulness that survives the vicissitudes, contingencies, misfortunes and inexplicables sadnesses and joys of human life. The economy of words and mixture of poignancy and prayerful longing saves this brief poem from pessimism. Who is the child in the poem? And where is the town? Is it Bethlehem, or the town where any one of us is born, or lives. "What are human beings that you care for them?" asks Psalm 8, the same reverent realism, but realism stretched to the limits of hope, under a night sky, contemplating our mortality, finitude and desire for significance in an indefferent universe.

Sometimes, and this is what makes him such an important Christian poet, R S Thomas strengthens faith by such qualified affirmations, impatient with mere devotional sentiment, dismissive of any faith that fails to give due weight to the tragic, and the mystery of a redemption which may have no better description than "staring / over the edge of the universe / into the depths of love."

"In the universe one world...", a phrase in which Thomas condenses the inevitable anthropocentrism of the human being in all of us who can never stand outside our own subjectivity, and therefore sees the universe from that centre of consciousness. In the universe there is only one world that ultimately matters, the world as we experience it, and try with such limited capacities to understand it and negotiate its gifts and dangers. In such a universe we cannot see into the vastnesses and intricacies of eternal purposefulness, and at times the chaos and randomness of historic existence flatly contradict such construals of meaning. So perhaps faith is to stare blindly over the edge of the universe, into the depths of love. And that last line in Thomas's poem is replete with a faith both questioning and humble, but also pointing towards a reality no less real because we cannot see it.

Another poet who looked at stars was the astronomer and physicist Rebecca Elson. She died before her fortieth birthday by which time she had an established reputation as a leading interpreter of Hubble images and researcher into globular clusters, the birth of stars and the nature of "dark matter". She was also a fine poet whose poems throb with her sense of wonder, awe and radical amazement at the mystery of existence as evidenced in the universe.

R S Thomas would have sensed a kindred spirit, a mind every bit as sceptical and interrogative about the meaning of existence and the problems of deriving from life and human consciousness a meaning for each individual life. Rebecca Elson remained agnostic, content not to know and too good a scientist to simply dismiss the possibility of God. Here is one of her poem fragments, which is a moving complement to the mixture of wonder and questioning of Thomas's late poems.

Let There Always Be light

(Searching for Dark Matter)

For this we go out dark nights, searching

For the dimmest stars,

For signs of unseen things:

 

To weigh us down.

To stop the universe

From rushing on and on:

Into its own beyond

Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,

Its last star going out.

 

Whatever they turn out to be,

Let there be swarms of them,

Enough for immortality,

Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

 

Let there be enough to bring it back

From its own edges,

To bring us all so close we ignite

The bright spark of resurrection.

                                     (Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe, (Oxford: Carcanet, 2001), p.14 

The photo was taken in late summer 2013, looking out to the North Sea from south of Stonehaven. 

George Mackay Brown and "The Harrowing of Hell."

The Orkney poet, novelist and short story writer George Mackay Brown was one of Scotland's finest writers of that kind of poetry that carries the sound and smell of its geographical context. Apart from his education years he lived a lifetime on Orkney, and learned from its silence, stillness and what others have called the bleak beauty of the islands.

There is a long running discussion, mostly inconclusive, about the terminology to be used of poetry written by "religious poetS", by which I mean a poet writing out of an overt, self-conscious faith commitment, but not always writing about religious themes. Devotional poetry, or religious verse can refer to poetry whose content is religious and which explores spiritual experience, and on occasion, are intended to evoke religious feelings and spiritual responses. But such literary influence and exposition of theology and spirituality do not exhaust poetry which, with more often with no overt religious intent, can equally explore, suggest and point to themes of transcendence and human longing for the divine.  

George Mackay Brown converted to Catholicism in 1961 and was a practising communicant of the Catholic church until his death. Much of Brown's poetry is enlivened with the glimmers and shadows of Christian theological themes and convictions, and even when there is no overt reference, the poetry unfolds in rhythms and resonances of what earliest critics discerned as grace. One of the finest examples of Brown's poetry, "The Harrowing of Hell" presupposes in the reader a high level of biblical literacy and spiritual sensitivity to those longings and fears, hopes and anxieties which both sanctify and terrify the human heart aware of morality, mortality and judgement, yet still hopeful of mercy.

The Harrowing of Hell

by George Mackay Brown

He went down the first step.
His lantern shone like the morning star.
Down and round he went
Clothed in his five wounds.

Solomon whose coat was like daffodils
Came out of the shadows.
He kissed Wisdom there, on the second step.

The boy whose mouth had been filled with harp-songs,
The shepherd king
Gave, on the third step, his purest cry.

At the root of the Tree of Man, an urn
With dust of apple-blossom.

Joseph, harvest-dreamer, counsellor of pharaohs
Stood on the fourth step.
He blessed the lingering Bread of Life.

He who had wrestled with an angel,
The third of the chosen,
Hailed the King of Angels on the fifth step.

Abel with his flutes and fleeces
Who bore the first wound
Came to the sixth step with his pastorals.

On the seventh step down
The tall primal dust
Turned with a cry from digging and delving.

Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in a garden
Through drifts of apple-blossom.

Those last two lines read with the optimism and delicacy of Traherne with his extravagant depictions of nature overflowing with the life-enhancing glory of the Creator. The Old Testament saints are drawn to the wounded Redeemer, and on the seventh step, the primal dust, that from which the Creator formed humanity cries out in hope and joy at a renewed creation, as the seond Adam walks in the garden, and the apple blossom, great contours of white and pink drifts of it, promise a new crop of apples which will come to fruition in the purposes of the Son of Man. This is a playully serious theological meditation on creation, fall and redemption, framed within the medieval fascination with Christ descending to the place of departed spirits, and plundering the kingdom of darkness and lifelessness as the bringer of light and life.

The photo is my personal possession, passed to me by a close friend of GMB, taken some time in the 1960's she thought.

Lent with R S Thomas "...sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit."

The Collected Late Poems opens with The Echoes Return Slow, a collection of autobiographical poems in which the poet's own life is source and resource for some of his most searing questions and searching observations; at times Thomas writes a line, apparently incidental, an explanatory observation, only the reader hears it as an inner interrogation. Always the questioning, spirituality in the interrogative mood, an intellectual grappling with the world that doesn't depend upon, indeed is impatient with, that favoured word of our own times, "closure". Indeed for Thomas the idea of the pilgrimage is defining, the journey is from here to there and from loneliness to companionship, and the important and life-giving disposition is movement towards rather than arrival, longing rather than terminus, opening up to more possibility rather than the lid snap of a complacent closure.

So in these autobiographical prose paragraphs and line poems, the poet looks to his future as an old man, by seeking clues in his past. These are deeply personal, private and guarded poems; suggestive rather than illustrative, oblique in their references but together a series of snapshots which capture more of Thomas and his quest and questions than any 24/7 cctv would ever record. This is I think why I find Thomas's poetry so satisfying and unsettling, so true and so real but not with easy truth or reality reduced to the bearable. 

The poem in which he recalls his own ordination is a study in pastoral frankness; the inadequacy and limits of any human being when faced with grieving parents, bereaved widows, hopeful marriages and faces on a Sunday reflecting the diversity and fragility of human hopes. The prose poem reduces the high calling to be Christ's vicar to local contesxt - "this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river..." A lesson in reality awaits every Christian minister of whatever denominational hue, in this poem of confessed inadequacy. "The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit."

 

I was vicar of large things

in a small parish. Small-minded

I will not say, there were depths

in some of them I shrank back

from, wells that the word “God”

fell into and died away,

and for all I know is still

falling. Who goes for water

to such must prepare for a long

wait. Their eyes looked at me

and were the remains of flowers

on an old grave. I was there,

I felt, to blow on ashes

that were too long cold. Often,

when I thought they were about

to unbar to me, the draught

out of their empty places

came whistling so that I wrapped

myself in the heavier clothing

of my calling, speaking of light and love

in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.

 

Beatitudes as Guides for Intercession

Sunday past I was asked to preach on prayer, using a verse from James Montgomery's still remarkable hymn, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire". The verse I was to consider was

Prayer is the simplest form of speech, which infant lips can try; / Prayer the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on High.

As part of the service I wrote a prayer on intercession based on two of the Beatitudes. The reason for this approach was my feeling that prayers of intercession can be dominated by whatever is most urgent in our own lives, or in the headline news of the day as it saturates our awareness with images and sound bytes about the awfulness of the world. By using the words of Jesus there is some attempt at content control that is more than the loudest daily sound byte and less than a comprehensive listing of all that's wrong in the world. In other words if the Beatitudes articulate the values and goals of the Kingdom of God, then they have the capacity to carry the freight of our prayers as children of that Kingdom.

Did it work? Who knows what in our prayers ever "works"? And who knows what "works" would look like in any case as we engage in conversation and heart work with God? But as a way of praying Scripture, of allowing the words of the Bible to inform and direct our praying, it did gather our attentiveness to the experience of people in other parts of this God-loved world. This God of love and reconciliation, of justice and righteousness, revealed in the redeeming vulnerability of Jesus crucified and in the risen life of the crucified, this God whose eternal purpose is the reconciliation and renewal of all things, is the one to whom we pray. What happens to our prayers, and to those for whom we pray, is best left to the loving wisdom of our God.

The two Beatitudes used were about peacemakers and the persecuted. Here is the prayer that was  in two sections, intersected by singing the Taize 'Kyrie Eleison' as the congregational response.

The Beatitudes and Our Prayers of Intercession

Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

Peacemaking God, in Christ you were reconciling the world to yourself.
We pray for a world unreconciled in itself, the countries and peoples of

Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Pakistan, Israel and Gaza, Nigeria and Libya:

where for generations fear and anger has blinded and divided communities;
where grievances suffered and suffering inflicted leaves legacies of hate and suspicion;
where history overshadows the present, and violence silences voices for peace.

Help us to trust the subversive wisdom of your Spirit,
teach us to speak the language of hope;
as your Spirit brooded upon the waters of chaos,
enshadow the countries and communities in chronic conflict, with mercy and justice, and peace.
Prince of Peace and Living Lord – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake and the Gospel’s:

O Lord of life and peace, who reconciles through the blood of the cross,
We pray for Christians throughout the world who are persecuted for your sake.
In India and Pakistan, where fundamentalist violence breaks out against small churches;
For Christians in Gaza, in Iraq and in Syria, caught up in the violence and hatred of war,                            persecuted because of their faith in you, targeted by militant and violent groups:
In all their suffering strengthen their faith, and give assurance of your presence, your help and your deliverance.

Keep us faithful in our prayers, grateful for every opportunity to witness as ministers of reconciliation in our place and time – at work, in our neighbourhood, in our families.

Restore our saltness, brighten our light, renew our lives in the love and peace and joy of Christ - Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

"The path of life leads upwards..." Proverbs 15.24.

The image of the path is deeply resonant with my understanding of what it means to follow Jesus faithfully. There's something about walking boots, a rucksack, food and water for the journey that turns a mountain hike into something as spiritual as it is physical.

Hillwalking is the image of the hymn I chose for my Ordination. And the following of the path that is Christ informs the entire hymn, weaving obedience and trust, perseverance and grace, into a prayer of dedication to the journey, and the One who goes before.

The photos were taken up Bennachie today, from the Mither Tap (1699 feet). Standing between the massive rocks, looking down onto the hill range below what you see is a visual image of "a long obedience in the same direction". Below is the first verse of the hymn, Christ of the Upward Way; it is followed by a favourite poem by the early 17th C poet Giles Fletcher. The first line of the stanza I quote has virtually been a Christian mantra at those times when my life hasn't been straightforward, the path isn't clear, the hill is rocky and the body is tired. But He has led me in right paths, for His name's sake. I've believed even when the evidence wasn't in, that "to trust in God with all my heart" is to find that he directs my paths. I have deep affinities with Benedictine spirituality and love the Rule of Benedict as a moderate, sensible framework for Christian obedience, and that first chapter which begins with the promise "I will run in the paths of your commandments.

No I'm not always consistent in practice; but Jesus said he was the way, the truth and the life, and his call to follow faithfully after him remains for me the homing call of the heart, the magnetic North of the soul, and the Gospel of reconciliation in Christ, remains the truth around which the mind finds its orbit, with the prayer, that, in the honesty and humility of a grace not mine, "every thought can be captive to Christ."

Christ of the upward way,my Guide divine,

Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;

And move and march wherever Thou hast trod,

Keeping face forward up the hill of God.

Giles Fletcher, from his poem,

The Incarnation

He is a path, if any be misled;

He is a robe, if any naked be;

If any chance to hunger, he is bread;

If any be a bondman, he is free;

If any be but weak, how strong is he!

            To dead men life is he, to sick men health;

            To blind men sight, and to the needy wealth—

A pleasure without loss, a treasure without stealth.

 

 

Wild Geese and Wendell Berry: "all we need is here".

Loch Skene is less than two miles from our door, and year on year it's the roosting and resting place for thousands of geese. A couple of hundred of them honked happily flying over our house just before it was finally dark. Something in the wildness held to nature's rhythm gets to me every time I hear that, and see them, in an informal but efficient formation, driving along their own motorway to the Loch Skene Service Station.

Wendell Berry's poem about Wild Geese is a gentle articulation of that humane common-sense that encourages us to be content, and to enjoy what is here and what is now. The last four lines of this poem always make me aware of what we lose through discontent, what we miss by looking for more, what we might gain if we too followed the ancient trails of community caring, contented kindness and a sense of home. Quietness of heart and clarity of vision are the gifts that reveal the richer deeper giftedness of life.

So tonight, after all is said and done, I'm content to have heard the glad honking of geese pleased to be nearly home. And Wendell Berry's definition of contentment, "...all we need is here".

Photo by Planetstillalive.com

The Wild Geese

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

 

A Prayer of Intercession Following Terror Attacks in France

The following Prayer has been written for the service at Crown Terrace Baptist Church on Sunday January 11. The Kyrie Eleison is the sung Taize version.

Living God, Giver of life to all through Christ,

Creator God, Maker of all things through Christ,

Peace-making God, Reconciler of all things through Christ

Father of Mercies, from whom blessing comes to all through Christ:

We are shocked by the violence of those who claim to act in the name of their God; we share the sadness and fear of the people of France; we have witnessed the power of hate and vengeance to destroy and devastate lives;  we too are sad, afraid, or angry.

We pray for all who gather today in Paris to protest against this brutality and to stand in solidarity with a nation feeling shock, fear, anger and defiance.   We pray for the comfort of victims and the wounded, for strength to the emergency services who had to deal with the carnage and suffering; for the safety of the special forces whose role of protecting others places them in grave danger.   Today we hold in our hearts and in our thoughts, all whose lives are forever changed by these events.

Living God, giver of life to all, restore the hope of life to those affected by terrorism

Creator God, maker of all things, recreate in the places of despair, new hopes.

Kyrie Eleison

Eternal God, we live in the creative opportunities for good and flourishing in our times, but also in the broken order and threatened chaos of a world divided and jagged edged.

We confess the potential for fundamentalist religion to go toxic, for hatred for the other to distil into the nitro-glycerine of hatred, and then to explode into bloody violence, shattering communities into fragments of death, suffering and fear.

We pray that out of this great evil, there will come wisdom and understanding between peoples and faiths. In these early days when it’s easy to blame and hate and retaliate, give voice to those who seek conciliation; help people to grow in understanding, to find a shared commitment to the common good of Christians, Jews, Muslims, those who claim no faith.

With chastened hearts we pray this morning, as a community of Christ’s people, as those entrusted with Christ’s ministry of reconciliation, as patient persistent peace-making children of God, fellow human beings sharing the tears and bewilderment of the people of France.

Peace-making God, reconciler of all things through the blood of the Cross of Christ, bring out of this lethal hatred and hideous hurt, the possibilities of new life and the healing of faiths.

Father of Mercies, from whom all blessings come, and whose faithfulness never turns from this sinful world, we bring our broken words and bewildered thoughts, and without even knowing what blessing could possibly look like in this tragic mess, we ask the only blessing that makes sense,                                          

Kyrie Eleison.

 To Live in the Mercy of God

By Denise Levertov

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

               before ribs of shelter

                                           open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

                      Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

                as salt water

                would hold you,

                                        once you dared.

         

                  .

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

                              to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

                                                   O or Ah

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

                              To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

                              Arcs

of steelwhite foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

                              Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

                      flung on resistance.

..............................

A poem for those times we are taken aback by the givenness of life, and the inner imperative that reminds us of the givingness that is at the heart of what Jesus called life more abundant. I've often thought about a cycle of 31 poems, collected into a booklet, and used one a day for 6 months, call it Psalms of the Poets perhaps.

 

The hunger for awe and the awareness of the vast rock faced mountain that is God's categorical imperative to seek, and climb and risk falling in order to climb; or to live the alternative metaphor, standing in the spray of torrential water hurtling over the cliff, the self-sacrifice and passionate surrender of that

"............................Vast

flood of mercy

                     flung on resistance."

 

Levertov was such a brilliant expositor of human longing and divine elusiveness, human devotion and divine amplitude, our capacity for finitude and God's infinite mercy.

And so, today begins, with a willingness to lie beneath the tree, stand barefoot at the waterfall, know however fleetingly, the drenching spray of mercy.

 

From Inverbervie to Galilee and back again

O Sabbath rest by Galilee

O calm of hills above

Where Jesus knelt to share with thee

the silence of eternity

interpreted by love

Those last two lines, they get me every time. The juxtaposition of eternity and love, not only love as endless, but beginningless; Galilee, a sea which could just as easily become a dangerous cauldron of cross winds and skewing waves; Jesus kneeling before the Father when an eternity of relationship is distilled into the fatigue and emptiness that is the consequence of exposure to the neediness and demands and self-concerned energy of human flesh; that's the reality of the Word became flesh. But it is a reality in which glory kneels in the silent place, and the silent concord of eternal love interprets to Jesus the heart of the Father. Within the tragedy and costliness of human sin and broken love, in that particular place in the created universe, beside the sea of Galilee, once again, through the Word made flesh, God looked on a world, "And God said..."

I love walking by the sea. Partly because the rhythm of the waves eventually persuades the rhythm of my heart, to fall in step.  And of course then my own steps slow down and recover a way of walking that isn't the driven energy of that pelagianism that not only makes me want to save myself, but also the world for good measure! At which point I come as close to praying as perhaps I ever do. "The silence of eternity interpreted by love..." 

 

Elizabeth Jennings, Friendship

 

This is a favourite poem. Jennings often found words for those experiences and gifts in human life that make us feel most fully alive. Was she an easy person to befriend? Did she live what she wrote here? Was she celebrating the reality, or wishing it were so? 

The psychology of friendship is subtle, complex, fluid, a combination of affections ranging from love and commitment to laughter and trust. Friendship means going with the other into the deep places of loss and joyfulness, is given stability by faithfulness and kept durable by the mutual exchange of presence, words and the gift of the other. Few gifts are more wrapped in mystery than two human beings who understand each other enough to appreciate the wonder of such a thing being possible. There is something of grace, of undeserved blessing in the kind of friendship Jennings describes.   

 

 

Friendship, Elizabeth Jennings.

Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it’s gentleness

And understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I’m feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.