Living Wittily

God who Measures Oceans and Calibrates Trillions of Raindrops

104 years ago today R S Thomas was born. To mark the day here is one of his poems and a few theological reflections on this poet who was impatient with all forms of theological laziness, certainty or reductionism.

Praise, R S Thomas

I praise you because
you are artist and scientist
in one. When I am somewhat
fearful of your power,
your ability to work miracles
with a set-square, I hear
you murmuring to yourself
in a notation Beethoven
dreamed of but never achieved.
You run off your scales of
rain water and sea water, play
the chords of the morning
and evening light, sculpture
with shadow, join together leaf
by leaf, when spring
comes, the stanzas of
an immense poem. You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.

Every poet is likely to develop and change over time, maturing towards a style and range of themes that become characteristic. The great poets write today what has been forming in the mind and imagination over time, each poem building on the successes and failures of their words over the years. As writing and reading enrich the deepening loam of ideas, as thinking and experimenting with words becomes a seeding process as extravagant and risky as that parable of the sower with its twenty five percent chance of success. So the poet's voice evolves and grows and becomes what could not have been anticipated; originality by definition is announced rather than anticipated.

One of the recurring notes, or familiar tones, of R S Thomas's poetry is best described as psalmic. This poem, 'Praise', reads like one of the Psalms, resonant with metaphor, replete with observed and enjoyed experience, exuberant and carefree in imagery ransacked from a created world filled with human creativity, its best and worst. The mixed metaphor of the Creator as artist and scientist deliberately creates a tension between power and beauty, the power to make and unmake, the beauty that may prove transient. This Creator who measures the oceans and calibrates trillions of raindrops, whose geometry is precise and whose music is celestial is likewise the Creator who year by year publishes the long epic poem of Spring and renewed life.

The poet is one of the most conscientious curators of language, skilled expertise dedicated to the conservation of words. The Creator speaks all mundane languages, but also transcends the limits and conceptuality essential for language to function at all. When Thomas talks of answer to complex prayers, he is honestly aware of how our prayers can be brutally simple, desperate and definite as pleading petition whether for deliverance, healing or even the recovery of meaning in a life exhausted. He is also aware of how our prayers are riddled with ambiguities, undermined by hesitations and qualifications, "If it be your will...", compromised by a nagging guilt that might disqualify us from divine favour.

And Thomas is too good a pastor, and too honest in his own spiritual struggles to override all such complexities with strident praise, exaggerated gratitude, or an unquestioning faith deaf to disturbing questions and blind to the reaities of a broken world. The answer from the Creator is the simplicity of a flower, benign beauty, superfluous but for the pleasure it bestows on the recipient, which is the joy of the giver.

But the last lines of the poem are lowering clouds on a no longer blue sky, the warning within the very structures of created reality. Echoing a line from a prayer by George Macleod of Iona, "But in the Garden also; always the thorn." The theology informing Thomas's poetry gives due recognition to the transcendent mystery of a God who need not explain, whose thoughts are not as our thoughts, and whose sovereign purposes may or may not align with what we ever think might be in our own best interests. There is the threat of holiness and otherness in those two words which are pivotal in this poem: 'confronting us'. No running away, no concessions, the same Creator daring us to face up to what we think we are about when "we would domesticate [God] to our uses..." The rioting viruses stand for all that we cannot control, for all our science; that which could destroy us despite our cleverness and will to power. The microscope and the telescope allow us to see far, and deep; but when we do we are confronted by immensities that are as much threat as promise. 

The poem is entitled 'Praise'. But in fact it is qualified praise, because the lyrical catena of metaphors eventually reaches a terminus in the recognition that God is never to be taken for granted. The over-familiar spiritualities of God as provider and source of blessing becomes utilitarian, prayer becomes self-referential, petition for our needs replaces intercession for others, and both eclipse adoration and the proper praise of the God who Is rather than the God we insist God has to be. There is a necessary fear of God, the vigilant respect of the keeper for the tiger, a continuing conscious health and safety mindset when approaching that which cannot be tamed. It is that preservation of wild otherness that makes Thomas's poetry such an astringent corrective to any spirituality of over-familiarity. You never, ever, try to shake hands with God!        

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.

 

Lent with R S Thomas: The Cross on the Altar

"Is God worshipped only in cathedrals, where blood drips from regimental standards as from the crucified body of love? Is there a need for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures? The Cross always is avante-garde."

R S Thomas lamented the modernisation of liturgy, the modern fear of any terminology that is not current, contemporary, accessible, or, God help us, relevant. Against Thomas's apparent liturgical conservationist tendencies it may be that there is nothing to be gained by Christianity sounding like a mystery religion, or the Church adhering to a language no longer spoken, and now seldom understood outside the walls of Christian sanctuary. 

But at the same time, in Thomas's defence, he feared that there may be a great deal to be lost if we surrender the language of faith, the vocabulary of the Spirit, the rhythms and cadences of hymn and liturgy which carry the freight of the Divine promises and presences and which sustain through those times of Divine absence. Thomas was a theologian of God's absence, a pilgrim familiar with the quiet and desolate places, and with an eye and ear observant of emptiness as of fullness. Not for him the easily recited propositions of the over-certain; not for him the substitution of banality and overfamiliarity with the Almighty, often considered by their exponents as informality and demonstrated intimacy, but which are in reality evidence of an absconded reverence and a trivialisation of the Transcendent.

Whatever arguments Thomas had with God, and there were many - fierce, persistent, unrelenting one to one combat, resulting in inner anguish and spiritual wrestling with the One whose name was witheld and whose touch wounded to the quick - whatever the arguments, Thomas knew his place in the presence, or absence of the Divine. Like the great preacher Qoheleth Thomas knew, he just knew, "God is in heaven, and you are on earth, so let your words be few." Quite.

The quotation at the start of this post is from a prose poem which introduces his reflections on entering a church and looking at the altar, the cross and then beyond these to the God revealed in such transiently simple and eternally durable realities. The brilliance of the last line illumines the whole poem.

The church is small.
The walls inside
White. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

(The photo is of the small panel of my tapestry, "Eucharist and Pentecost" currently underway)

 

Learning Latin and Learning Hope from Van Gogh and Levertov

As often, when I am looking for words of substance I turn to poetry from one of those poets who have been my companion for a long time. Denise Levertov is one whose work I have read and pondered, for a long time. Some of it is worth pondering, some was so immediate, so woven with context that its fabric quickly fades with time. One reason Levertov is to be cherished is that, at her best, her poetry has a long view, she understands the importance of time and patience in the formation and growth of hope. This was a woman who wore her heart on her sleeve, and who wrote her heart in her poems. And the longer life went on the more she became a poet whose political and ethical vision burned with moral passion and compassion. From her opposition to the Vietnam war, the atrocities in Cambodia, El Salvador, Iraq, and global threats of nuclear armaments, ecological crises and economic injustices, she wrote with anger, pity, love, and with hope. For Levertov, hope is inherently patient, involves waiting, summons us to take the long view, literally, longing for hope.

I remember my first year of learning Latin at school I came across the little word "diu", meaning "for a long time". I never forgot it, I liked it from the first day I learned it. Perhaps the sense of permanence, the longevity and spaciousness of time implied by those three letters, "diu", for a long time, appealed to a boy with his own hopes and forward looking into a future yet to come. Levertov's poem For the New Year 1981 is a poem about hope, the patient multiplication of gestures that take the long view and make space in human hearts and relatedness for hope. The Van Gogh painting becomes self explanatory after reading the poem

For the New year 1981 

I have a small grain of hope—
one small crystal that gleams
clear colors out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

–Denise Levertov

"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.

 

 

"The best laid plans of mice and men, gang aft agley...."

 

 

 

 Not sure how much I want to say about this photo.

I wish I'd seen this live.

I wish I had taken this photo.

I wish our greed for cheap food and our macro-agriculture treatment of the countryside didn't push animals like this to the edge of survival.

I wish, like Rabbie Burns, we saw small animals as gifts of providence to be cherished, rather than as the mere collateral damage of "man's dominion."

I wish our theology had a place for animals, as co-habitants in God's creation.

I wish as human beings we would look humanely forth on those creatures that help us define what it means to be human - attentive wisdom, compassionate care, companionable co-existence.

I wish I'd taken this photo.

I wish I'd seen this live.

 

From Facebook to Youtube to a Theologian, Poet and Philosopher.

The Australian poet, theologian and philosopher Kevin J Hart gives an intriguing interview here What is so helpful in this extract from a fuller conversation is Hart's indebtedness to an algebra lesson for his conversion. The Damascus road experience came to him while looking at a blackboard with a simple equation, and his realisation as he looked around the class that he was now seeing the world differently. At this stage there was no theological content, more a sense of the mystery and longing and beauty of life distilled into the elegant rightness of an equation. Later his discovery of a Southern Baptist congregatrion (in Australia), opened him to new and deeper longings for a God both transcendent and immediate, whose love beyond words was nevertheless sung out with passionate intensity in hymns utterly inadequate to their theme, and in their lack of metaphysical reach, all the more poignant and valid.

When later at age 21 he converted to Catholicism, he became interested in the mystical streams of Catholic theology, and in the tension between kataphatic and apophatic theology,the classic distinction between positive theology as a revelation and way of knowing, and negative theology as a more reticent admission of unknowing. Hart is an important voice because what he says is refracted through a mind at ease with mathematical abstraction, careful in theological humility, precise in philosophical reflection, imaginative in poetic discourse, and each of these articulated within his Catholic faith in which the sacraments function as reminder and confirmation of the God in whose mysterious conjoining love Creation, human being, and life itself subsists.

Hearing Hart's testimony is a reminder of the need for some apophatic reticence in  all of us if we are ever tempted to make our own experience the paradigm, our own theology the norm, our own take on the world a claim we know 'the way it is'. Truth is not univocal, as if 'it means one thing and that's what I think it means'. Nor is truth equivocal, as if 'it means what each person thinks it means'. Mathematics, poetry, evangelical hymnody, mystical theology, Continental philosophy are any one of them slightly off the beaten path of the ordinary; as an intersection of disciplines, intellectual, theological and ethical, they provide for Hart a multi-vocal exploration of this vast mystery, this terrifyingly beautiful conundrum that is our human existence in relation to the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

I came across this interview clip by entire accident, follwing several links from facebook to youtube. By such random purposefulness life is enriched. 

Wild Geese and the Homing Instinct for God

This poem is posted because I like it.

It may be Mary Oliver's most anthologised poem. That's another reason for posting it. If so many editors choose it, it must say something important.

Living in Westhill, geese fly over and around us every year, long skeins of them. It's the season after Pentecost, and the wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the wild freedom of the Holy Spirit, the creative, urgent movement of life and the homing instinct for God. Another reason to post it.

Whatever else Paul meant by his insistence that Christian existence is to live in the Spirit, he meant to the wild freedom and the homing instinct that makes us long for God.

It wasn't written as a Pentecost poem - but I read it and wish I had wings.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in  the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.                             

Faith: Trusting we are held, even in our falling

I like it when I'm ambushed by a poem. Reading an article on the way the Bible is interpreted in English poetry, this celebrated poem by John Milton was referenced. The lines recount the anguished questioning of a poet whose sightless eyes now frustrate his main talent, writing poetry. The resolution achieved by patience is an ideal and obedient spiritual response. And I'm left wondering whether for Milton such reluctant surrender was unattainable aspiration or complaint uttered as obedience to unchangeable circumstance?

 

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

 

The mind that conceived Paradise Lost, was imaginative, interrogative, dealt in complexity of motive and soul, was familiar with the inner terrain of temptation, guilt, remorse and the longing for forgiveness and heaven. Perhaps that last line is indeed a resolution - "They also serve who stand and wait"; then again, when it comes to making sense, understanding, coming to terms with life-changing personal loss, there will always be the question mark after a phrase such as 'light denied'.

Sometimes faith is knowing you don't know, living with ambiguity, trusting we are held even in our falling, letting go of the love that even then will not let us go.That's when faith becomes more than 'sweet trust', and feels the stern demand of another great literary artist who shared Milton's "superb imagining": Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11.1)

Blakes etching of the Trinity is a beautiful image of the love that will not let us go, especially when we no longer find the strength to hang on.