Evening

The archer with time
as his arrow--has he broken
his strings that the rainbow
is so quiet over our village?
 
Let us stand, then, in the interval
of our wounding, till the silence
turn golden and love is
a moment eternally overflowing.

As Mthr Carys points out in her reflection on this poem, it is perfectly placed as almost and oasis in this mid-point on our journey. It exemplifies some of the themes which which we should now be familiar: Time, whether in his wingèd chariot, or his speedy arrow, is not our best friend; Quietness, if we can find it, is. Those little epiphanies which have so often been mentioned? This is what they feel like, although we know that Thomas knows that the attempt to put them into words inevitably drains some of the life from them. It’s a tribute to Thomas’s skill as a poet that he is able to convey much of that experience in words. Words are all we have. For all that Thomas is critical of them, in his hands they take us into the heart of silence.

What we find there depends in part on what we bring with us, and also in part on our patience. The “wounding” he mentions will be familiar to us all, and there have been times in my own life when I have wondered where God was and why he did not rescue me. And the “silence” did become “golden” in those precious moments when it did seem as though I was tuning into something that was eternal. The love of the Trinity overflows into creation, as my belovèd St Isaac put it:

In love did He bring the world intro existence; in love is He going to bring it to that wondrous transformed state, and in love will the world be swallowed up in the great mystery of Him Who has performed all these things;

HOMILY II.38.2,22

Only in that stilled silence, when the world is quieted and the heart open could I find that frequency of God and know that he was there; the question was where was I?

There is an #adventbookclub using “Frequencies of God” by Carys Walsh and you can support the publisher by buying it here: https://canterburypress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9781786220882/frequencies-of-god. We’ll be running this club on Twitter and Facebook, and you are welcome to join in with thoughts and comments. Other folk doing this are https://grahart.wordpress.com/ and https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/ so please pop over and read their thoughts too!