The God

Of poets

Made of rhyme and metre,
the ability to scan
disorderedlines; an imposed
syntax; the word like a sword
turning both ways
to keep the gates of vocabulary.

Of Musicians

The first sound
in the silence; the frequency
of the struck chord; the electrical,
ultimate rhythm of the full
orchestra, himself the
conductor of it and the composer.

Of Artists

Who disguises
himself in wood and stone;
who has to be unmasked
with such patience; who escapes
in the end, leaving them standing,
tool in hand, in front of a supposition

Of Scientists

The agitation at the centre
of non-being; the agreed myth
of their equations; the experiment
that provded them wrong; the
answer they have overrun
that waits for them to turn around.

Of Theologians

The word as an idea,
drimbled by their dry
minds in the long sentences
of their chapters, gathering dust
in their libraries; a sacrmanet that,
if not soon swallowed, sticks in the throat.

Who IS

Whose conversation
is the aside; whose mind
is its own fountain, who
overflows. Who takes the Cross
from between his teeth
to fly humanity upon it.

One thing we have in common with our Creator is the urge to create – and it is there we are most like him. God’s love overflows into the creation of all things that are and ever shall be. As my beloved St Isaac the Syrian put it so perfectly:

“In love did He bring the world into existence; in love does He guide it during this its temporal 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; in love will the whole course of the governance of creation be finally comprised

St Isaac, II.38.1-2

All we create is a product of that love, as we are ourselves:

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

1 John 4:10

In his litany of creators, Thomas once more uses paradox to remind us that for all our attempts, we can know of God in this mortal life only what he wants us to know. As creators we tap into and echo the “primary imagination” of God (Frequencies, p. 156). Thomas thought that “poetry and religion” were the two unifying themes which harnessed the imagination to God, and here we see echoes of that.

But as always with Thomas, it is a matter of echoes, resonances, allusions, but also of elusiveness. Our quest to pin God down has failed and will always fail. The tree on which the Son was nailed becomes a source of inspiration, of flying, for us – the paradox is complete. The twisting of the words in the imagination of the poet; the elusive chord sequences trailing away, captured only in our notation which is but an echo of what the spirit captured; the angel hidden in the marble; in all these God is and creates through us.

Those who seek to find order, whether the scientist or the theologian, risk missing the elusiveness in the need, their man-made need, to find labels and to order things. “Dry minds” and “long sentence” reminds my of my attempts to read Barth. Goodness me did I try. I am not stupid or unintellectual, but the more of him I tried to read, the more I got lost in a word-maze – the the further away from God I felt. I returned, as I always do, to my beloved St Isaac who captures the immensity of God’s creative love for us:

Among all God’s actions there is none which is not entirely a matter of mercy, love and compassion: this constitutes the beginning and the end of His dealings with us. 

In that is all we need to know.

The theme of this final week is “Seeing” and the words of St John ring out loud in terms of seeing God as he wishes us to see him”

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.

john 1:14

Grace and Truth lie at the heart of great art, great music, great poetry, and they are permanent ephiphanies of that love with which God created all things. He beckons us on, in the words to the hymn, “to the place that he is gone.”

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!

The Absence

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

So many times we have seen Thomas refer, sometimes obliquely, to the absence, or the sense of the absence of God. This trait is so pronounced that some have called him a poet of the absence of God. Here there is nothing oblique about the treatment of the “absence” – it is the gaping hole that is the centre of the poem. But that is the point.

It is in our fallen nature to want to be like God and to want to see God when we want to see him – and that is usually NOW. Yet throughout this series of poems one message runs – that is not given to us in this mortal world: restraining our desires; calming our busy minds; stopping and taking the by-ways; knowing that God is everywhere. Thomas is an apophatic poet, we know God by what he is not, by paradox, by intution, by ephiphanies. We see, as Paul said we would in this world, God as “through a glass darkly”. There is no easy resolution of the paradox of our wanting God and God loving us; it is in the nature of this mortal life. That is why God does not “abhor” the “vacuum” – it is necessary.

If, as we are promised, eternal felicity means seeing God as he is, then the distance he keeps in this life is part of this life, and however much we want to know him better and see him better, he has told us, through the Incarnation, how we should try to live this life. As and when, and if, we do that, we come closer to him. And in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine at the Eucharistic feast, we are one.

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!

Tidal

The waves run up the shore
and fall back. I run
up the approaches of God
and fall back. The breakers return
reaching a little further,
gnawing away at the main land.
They have done this thousands
of years, exposing little by little
the rock under the soil’s face.
I must imitate them only
in my return to the assault,
not in their violence. Dashing
my prayers at him will achieve
little other than the exposure
of the rock under his surface.
My returns must be made
on my knees. Let despair be known
as my ebb-tide; but let prayer
have its springs, too, brimming,
disarming him; discovering somewhere
among his fissures deposits of mercy
where trust may take root and grow.

When I was a girl and lived very near the sea, I used to stand on the cliff and watch the tide come in and go out. I was fascinated by it and its regularity. As I grew up, I often thought of the tide as a way of thinking about my relationship with God, and the first time I read this poem, it spoke powerfully to me; it still does.

Sometimes I am asked by sceptical friends (moving in academic circles I have many friends who view my Christian faith with curiousity) whether I think my prayers “work”? That brings this poem to mind. Sometimes I get emails from groups to which I subscribe asking me to “storm Heaven with your prayers” for cause x or y. At such moments, though I have not a drop of English blood in me, I feel very English; I slightly cringe and say a prayer, but feel a bit uneasy about the language. I am really unsure whether “storming Heaven” is a thing one should do – it is all a bit reminiscent of our wanting God to do things our way. This poem is a reminder that there are other ways.

If we do simply batter Heaven like the tides batter the shores, it may, as Thomas implies, achieve little. Our Father knows what we want and need before we know it, and he knows it better. Better that we are persistent, like the tides. That may be why I find the habit of praying the lectionary Morning, Evening and Night prayers so comforting. The Morning is like the tide beginning to come in. I used the well-worn phrases, and some days find little there, and on others, there is an illumination; the Collects and intercessory prayers can, and do, add something. But there is a rhythm. The evening prayer marks the ebb of the tide, and I light more candles to mark the Light that the dark cannot defeat. Then the unvarying Compline, which lulls me to sleep.

I do this everyday, and it helps me understand what Thomas means when he writes about:

discovering somewhere

among his fissures deposits of mercy

where trust may take root and grow

There are, unbidden (and, I might add, unbiddable) moments when small epiphanies come, when words I had thought familiar, and even worn with that familiarity, mean something more. I do not seek to pursue them, I let them settle, like those little rock pools one sees on the beach as the tide ebbs. It is in the surrendering of my will, in the suspension of my questing desire to know and see more, that the epiphanies come. Words, as Thomas so often says, will not quite do to catch them.

Mthr. Carys refers to a well-loved poe here, Dover Beach, which was the first poem I ever discussed on this blog back in 2012. There, Arnold adjures his lovers to be “true” to one another as the sea of faith ebbs away. But I prefer the image of the tides – what goes out, comes in, but what matters for those who live by the sea is the coming out and the the coming in. We often use “tides” as an image of fickleness – but they are the opposite. They are regular – as our prayers to God should be.

And now, having not quite stormed heaven, I am off to bake some scones!

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!