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? 

Adjective or verb. . .what is my comfort zone?

There are lots of words in the English language-- 616,500 according to the second edition of the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary published back in 1989, which means it likely leaves out many newly minted words such as blogging and Brangelina.   If you were to say one word every second, it would take you just over a week to go through the entire inventory of the English language.  However, linguist David Crystal estimates the vocabulary of the average native English speaker consists of some 60,000 - 75,00 words including both active (those we use) and passive (those we understand) words, so a day would suffice for most people to exhaust their storehouse of vocabulary.

The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists provides a ranking of the most commonly used words in English.  Numbers 1-25 make up about 1/3 of all the printed material and the first 100 make up about half the written words in English. 

The First Hundred
the of and a to in is you that it he was for on are as with his they I	at be this have from or one had by word but not what all were we when your can said	there use an each which she do how their if will up other about out many then them these so	some her would make like him into time has look two more write go see number no way could people	my than first water been call who oil its now find long down day did get come made may part

Given those statistics, it's surprising that Sunday was the first time I noticed an odd synchronicity.  As I was spending a somewhat lazy morning lying in bed listening to NPR's Morning Edition and catching up on blog reading, at exactly the same moment I was reading the words "comfort zone" on the screen, the words were being said on the radio.  Granted, neither the word comfort nor zone appear in the top 1000 much less 100 commonly used words, which is probably one reason I noticed the occurrence-- because it isn't an everyday phrase.  But more than just the coincidence of reading and hearing the exact same phrase at the exact same moment, what made me really sit up and take notice was the juxtaposition of the contexts. 

The phrase I heard was in a story about the response of members and clergy in historically African-American churches to the upcoming vote in North Carolina surrounding gay marriage. A pastor used the parable of the Good Samaritan as a lesson in inclusion, saying, "Jesus is always calling us away from our comfort zones." 

The phrase I read was on a Danish fashion and lifestyle blog I follow. It described a look book full of romantic, embellished clothes that the author said inspired her but, as a Scandinavian women used to "edgy" and "minimalist" fashion, moved her out of her comfort zone. 

Radical acceptance, respect and compassion for "an other" on the one hand; wearing lacy skirts and pink fuzzy sweaters on the other:  Two  very different ways of moving beyond a comfort zone.  I don't want to imply that one of these examples is more noble than the other.  I've watched enough episodes of "What Not to Wear" to realize that for many women, fashion comfort zones are tied to deeper issues than just a personal preference for style-- body image, gender issues, power, sexuality.  And as for Jesus, well as one of my professors in seminary said, "What Jesus asks us to do is not usually difficult but it is frequently inconvenient."

Comfort by Edvard Munch

But this did make me think about my own comfort zones-- those I am willing to break out of or perhaps just stretch a bit, and those I want to stay hunkered down in for the long haul.  There have been situations in my life lately where I've had to move out of my comfort zone, not by choice but in order to be present with and for others.  And maybe that's the key to knowing when I should move beyond my comfort zone . . . when it involves the transition from comfortable to comfort, from adjective to verb.

Two Mountain Poems

WITNESS

by Denise Levertov from Selected Poems (New Directions)

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.


THE BIRDS HAVE VANISHED by Li Po from Endless Rivers trans. by Sam Hamill

The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.


I like these two poems together.  They're like salt and pepper shakers-- each containing their own flavor of what it means to be present. 


How may you be present this day?

 

What We Need is Here

WHAT WE NEED IS HERE
by Wendell Berry from Selected Poems (Counterpoint)

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 a new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear.  What we need is here.  

Next year I need to see if I can do a week or two on geese poems.  There's something about the image of these birds in particular that makes poets take note.  Maybe it's the way a flock of geese often resembles a big check mark scrawled across the sky, as if their presence affirms something about our life on earth that's been written in the heavens-- something we have to pause and ponder to be able to read. 

What message is being made clear to you today?

What do you need, that is here?