Poetry, Presence and Prayer - Remembering R.S. Thomas

Emerging by R. S. Thomas from Frequencies (Macmillan)
Not as in the old days I pray,
God. My life is not what it was...
Once I would have asked healing.
 I go now to be doctored...
to lend my flesh as manuscript of the great poem
Of the scalpel. I would have knelt
long, wrestling with you, wearing
you down. Hear my prayer Lord, hear my prayer. 
As though you were deaf, myriads of morta
lshave kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your silence by their unfitness.

It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me...I begin to recognize
you anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution 
to, others whose echoes we must expand
to contain. Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to the snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.


Today is the feast of R. S. Thomas.  Well, not officially, although I have no doubt one day it will be, at least on the calendar of the Church in Wales.  But today does mark the thirteenth anniversary of the passing of this great Welsh poet/priest so I thought it fitting to give a nod to R.S. this morning.

I'll admit it took me a while to warm up to him. Thomas isn't exactly a warm and fuzzy kind of poet . . . nor a warm and fuzzy priest from what I've heard from those who knew him.  When I was in Wales a few years ago I attended a lecture about his life in which the presenter (an acquaintance of the poet) had photographs to accompany his talk. A few days later when I had the opportunity to speak to a colleague and close friend of Thomas's, I asked if he ever smiled.  At first his friend was a bit taken aback at the question but as he thought about it he realized he couldn't remember a single instance of him smiling.  He finally said that Thomas's second wife gave him moments of "great delight" and he's sure he must have smiled when with her. I certainly hope so, for both their sake's.  

A photo of Thomas and his wife, obviously the first one.

Despite the gruff demeanor that often came through in his work, the more I read of his poetry, the more I started to warm up to it and to him.  His understanding of the complex political, social and religious climate of Wales and its history struck a deep chord in me.  When it came to his religious verse, though, I found his experience alien and uncomfortable while at the same time beautiful.  In two of his most famous poems, "Via Negativa" and "Absence" he writes about how he experiences the Holy as absence or rather just-missed-presence like when you enter a room that someone has just left.  And while I've definitely had those moments in my spiritual journey, they are fortunately few and far between.  It literally pained me to think of this insightful, talented poet, who's primary vocation was to the priesthood, as never experiencing even a glimpse of the divine presence. 

One morning this past June during the early morning Eucharist at Gladstone's Library, Peter Francis, the warden of Gladstone's,  included several of Thomas's poems in the service. Many of the pieces he read that morning were old favorites of mine and I bobbed along gently on the waves of their words until he got to the above poem.  As he read "Emerging," I was overwhelmed with a tidal wave of emotion and tears. I can't say exactly what brought it on.  Maybe  it was a sense of relief that this poet I so admire had finally had an experience Presence.  Maybe it was guilt for taking for granted my own experience of the same.  Or maybe it was just that I was getting about four hours of sleep a night at that point and was exhausted.  

Whatever it was about this particular poem that touched me so deeply that morning, it continues to do so.
And in addition to (or maybe despite) whatever it was, I have come to realize that in this poem, I think Thomas gives the best definition of prayer, as I understand it, that I've ever come across:

It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,of you in me...
Maybe he finally figured out that instead of chasing the just missed presence, the way to experience God is simply to stand still . . . .

Making space

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop from The Complete Poems:  1927-1979 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.
Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Lent, to me, is a time to make space, space in which I can be more keenly aware of the presence of the holy.  I can create it by letting go of stuff that's taking up space-- extraneous possessions, emotional baggage, not helpful habits.  Or, I can create space by adding to my life-- more silence, more reflection, more poetry.  Either way, it's my intention that makes the space.

Elizabeth Bishop's poem got me thinking about space that is created through no action of my own.  What have I lost?  What do I fear I will lose?  And how can space created through loss be transformed from absence to presence?