Sunday Poem: The Journey of the Magi

10 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Epiphany, poetry

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“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Things have been too busy to blog this week, but the one plus has been that I have been able to keep this, my favourite poem, from where it would normally have gone, on the feast of the Epiphany, until now.

It’s an odd poem to love because on the surface it is bleak. The epiphany appears to be that death would be welcome because it would bring an end to the torment and unease the unnamed Magus has felt since his encounter with the Nativity. It upturns the usual context in which we see the Magi – which is most commonly as part of our celebrations of the Nativity, in Christmas Nativity Plays and on cards. Eliot cuts to the heart of the matter.

We are told next to nothing about the “Three Kings/ Wise Men / Magi” and so Eliot has a clean canvass on which to paint. He evokes marvellously the “old dispensation” from which the Magi came – the summer palace, the “silken girls bringing sherbet”. The journey requires them to exchange these things for sets of unpleasant and trying experiences, to the point it all seems “folly.”

So far so good, that, you might say, was what is to be expected on a spiritual journey, even if you don’t know it. It’s familiar territory to us from Cavafy and Thomas – it is the journey that matters. But Eliot here takes his text from a sermon given by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes on Christmas Day 1622:

A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solstitio brumali, ‘the very dead of winter.’

But where for Andrewes:

And these difficulties they overcame, of a wearisome, irksome, troublesome, dangerous,
unseasonable journey; and for all this they came. And came it cheerfully and quickly, as appeareth
by the speed they made.

Eliot is more, I want to say so I will say, realistic.

There is a fleeting, almost poignant note of release at the beginning of the second stanza, but the initial optimism is replaced by signs which puzzle the Magus, but not us. The “three trees” evoke for us an image of Golgotha. Then there are the vine leaves and the empty wine-skin, the men gambling with piece of silver. There is even the spectre of the white horse of the apocalypse. These things, hidden from the Magi, foreshadow what is to come.

But you might say, weariness, sore feet, bad hostels, grumpy guides, all these are common to any pilgrimage, suck them up pilgrim and concentrate on what is at the end. And here, for the Magi, it is the new-born Christ child. And yet, and yet, there is no revelation, no overwhelming feeling of “knowing”; indeed what is known, or at least intuited evokes the opposite of good cheer.

“it was (you may say) satisfactory”

Is that it? Was it all for that? But there is more. Back home the Magi cannot feel “at home”. The world they knew feels somehow wrong, alien, full of idols and false gods. The birth felt like a death, and the Magus intuits that what has died in the world he knew – but whilst it dies, the new one is not clear to him. He knows inwardly that a new life comes only with death.

In his sermon, Bishop Andrewes said:

And we, what should we have done? Sure these men of the East will rise in judgment against the men of the West, that is with us, and their faith against ours in this point. . . . Our fashion is to see and see again before we stir a foot, specially if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a journey at such a time? No; but fairly have put it off to the spring of the year, till the days longer, and the ways fairer, and the weather warmer, till better travelling to Christ. Our Epiphany would sure have fallen in Easter week at the soonest.

Yes. We crave comfort. We know the spiritual journey will not contain it, so we put it off, or we tell ourselves it will be okay, and all things will be well in the end, and that if it is not all well then it is not yet the end. But Eliot offers us naught for our comfort. In this broken world there are costs in spiritual rebirth, and if we expect to be at home here afterwards, we shan’t be. The way is hard and only our faith keeps us on it.

Sunday poem: The Island

03 Sunday Jan 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Book Club, poetry

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RS Thomas

As we have reached the end of “Frequencies of God” and the Advent Book Club, I want to see if having a regular Sunday feature on a particular poem might become part of the blog, and so, having spent so long with R.S. Thomas, I thought I’d continue with one of his most challenging poems. As ever, if anyone has thoughts, I’d appreciate them.

The Island

And God said, I will build a church here
And cause this people to worship me,
And afflict them with poverty and sickness
In return for centuries of hard work
And patience.
And its walls shall be hard as
Their hearts, and its windows let in the light
Grudgingly, as their minds do, and the priest’s words be drowned
By the wind’s caterwauling. All this I will do,
Said God, and watch the bitterness in their eyes
Grow, and their lips suppurate with
Their prayers. And their women shall bring forth
On my altar, and I will choose the best
Of them to be thrown back into the sea.

And that was only on one island.

Thomas had a “thing” about islands, living, as he did for many years in sight of one. They have long been places where mankind has gone to find God. My picture is one of the most famous places of pilgrimage in the UK, Lindisfarne, in Northumbria, forever associated with St Cuthbert, one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon saints, whose body was taken from the island after the Viking raids and which, eventually, ended up at Durham Cathedral, where it lies to this day. He is the patron saint of the north-east.

This is one of Thomas’s most challenging poems, and much as I sought to find an easier one to begin this Sunday series, this one kept returning to me, almost like one of those persistent atheists one comes across on the Web who wants to know “how can you believe in a God who lets things like the pandemic happen?” Just because it’s the most frequently asked question does not mean that it is easy to answer, though easy answers are available.

Often, in the Psalms, there is a sense that after suffering, God’s faithful will be rewarded – Zion will be restored, and as with Job, after suffering all things will be restored. Here, Thomas confronts us with a picture as hard and bleak as the island headland. What did St Cuthbert’s successors “get” for their faithfulness? Viking raids which plundered the monastery, death. exile and wandering – “poverty and sickness”.

But there is more here to be uncovered. As so often, it is in the paradox. On the surface the men and women on the island are innocent victims, their belief in God yielding bitter fruit, of any, and yet, we are told that their “hearts” and as “hard” as the stone walls of their churches, and their “minds” let in as little light as the narrow windows characteristic of Anglo-Saxon churches. The fruit of their worship is bitter – and the image of prayers “suppurating” on the lips is one of the harshest he ever uses. There is a sense, throughout, of human sacrifice, with God almost as an egomaniac punishing those who worship him for their failures.

This poem dates from the 1970s and we can see in it evidence of the journey what was to lead him in an apophatic direction. But here, there is indeed “naught for your comfort.”

Advent Book Week 5 Day 7 The first king

02 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club

The first king

The first king was on horseback.
The second a pillion rider.
The third came by plane.

Where was the god-child?
He was in the manger
with the beasts, all looking

the other way where the fourth
was a slow dawning because
wisdom must come on foot.

As we, like the Magi, approach the end of our journeying, there are here, for me, more echoes of Cavafy and Ithaka. The message here is that of Cavafy:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

What makes us “rich” is the journey itself, a message Thomas has communicated to us in so many ways – wisdom does not come in a rush – we are the ones in a rush, like the “kings” in this poem. We are busy, busy doing, busy being helpful, important, busy being busy half the time. We do not stop and go down that narrow path to that hardly used old place of worship; neither do we stop to take in the wonders of God’s world.

Wisdom is, Proverbs tell us “a tree of life”, she calls aloud in the streets, encouraging the “simple” and the “scoffers” to gain deeper understanding, and yet, we are told, most will reject her and

For the turning away of the simple will slay them,
And the complacency of fools will destroy them;
³³But whoever listens to me will dwell safely,
And will be secure, without fear of evil.”
Proverbs 1:32-34

We are told that Wisdom, “Sophia”, was “established from everlasting”, from “the beginning, before there ever was an earth” (Proverbs 23-24) – just like the Word, who in the poem is Incarnate in the Manger. These “kings” seem more concerned with getting to the Manger – but what then?

In Eliot’s Journey of the Magi they are left with a sense of dislocation, no longer at home in their old world, but not yet in a new one. How often is our Christian journey like that?

I write from experience and hope, finally, to heave learned the lesson that Thomas offers us here. Much of the last decade was spent being busy and “helpful”, trying to “do my best” – and never asking “best for whom?” or even “by whose definition of best?” Four years ago it came to a shuddering halt, first with illness, and then with what I can only decscibe as a complete breakdown. But breaking down can be the prelude to building up – but first I had to get “better” – which largely involved learning to stop, how to stop, how to live in silence and to take in the world. If 2020 did one thing for me, it allowed me to take long, solitary walks on which I could pray my Rosary and just “be”.

The journey with Thomas has been a time for reflecting on how we might be receptive to Wisdom, who loves those who love her. It is in those quiet places, those places hallowed by prayer, those wild places, and above all, that place where we cease to be busy trying to construct a God in an image we can understand, and accept him as he allows us to find him.

Thank you, those who have read these reflections, I have profited much from reading what Graham Hart and Ruth Harley have been writing, and hope some of you have followed them too. Most of all I think, I’d like to thank Mthr. Carys Walsh for her selection and commentaries. R.S. Thomas is a fascinating guide, precisely because he refuses to guide us. He offers what he offers, and I hope that between us, we have profited and acquired some wisdom from this walk through Advent and Christmas with him. Maranatha!

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!

Advent Book Week 5 Day 6 That there …

01 Friday Jan 2021

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Christmas, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

That there …

That there is the unfamiliar
too. That there is a landscape
that will through all time
resist our endeavours
at domestication. There is ine
who models his diguises
without a thought, to whom
invisibility is as natural
as it is to be above
or below sound. He hides himself
in a seed so that exploding
silently he pervades the world.
He is the wilderness imprisoned
under our flagstones, yet escaping
from them in a haeommorrhage
of raw flowers. He bares his teeth
in the lightening, delivering
his electric bite, appals us
with his thunder only to unnerve us
further with the blessing of his held breath.

God is known, in part, in his absence, but also as he wishes us to know him; but are we receptive? There is a recurrence here of the theme of God not so much being “absent” as “hiding”, but hiding in plain sight. Thomas has reminded us constantly that for all “our endeavours of domestication”, we cannot see God as we may want, but only as he allows. God is eternal and infinite, we are mortal and finite. What is “natural” for God may seem strange to us and be unfamiliar; but if we are silent and watch, then we can see him in places we would not think of looking. Our limitations limit us, not God.

There are times, in prayer, when, to use a favourite image of Thomas’s, it feels as though you are “tuning in” to a “frequency” which is always there, a consciousness of being part of something much greater and eternal. I think of it as the on-going praise of those whose song is “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.” But even trying to put it into those words diminished it; perhaps some of you have felt it too?

The images Thomas offers to God hiding himself in a seed so that

exploding silently he pervades the world

reminds us that whether on moor, seashore or fields, God is to be found in nature. This is not some simple pantheism, it is a reminder, as Mthr Carys puts it that:

Life pours untidily through the world that we lay on top of God’s world, and even though invisioble, lights our way, with sometimes shocking intensity
p. 162

The poem pulls us away from the world we have put on top of God’s world and challenges our cosy, familiar assumptions, ending with the “heart-stopping” holding of his breath by God. In the silence, after the storm, in the darkness which will never prevail over the Light, there is that still, small voice. Are we on its frequency, or do we expect it to be on ours without making the adjustments?

Advent Book Week 5 Day 5 The God

31 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Christmas, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

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.”

Advent Book Week 5 Day 4 Adjustments

30 Wednesday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Bible, Book Club, Christmas, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

Adjustments

Never known as anything
but an absence, I dare not name him
as God. Yet the adjustments
are made. There is an unseen
power, whose sphere is the cell
and the electron. We never catch
him at work, but can only say,
coming suddenly upon an amendment,
that here he has been. To demolish
a mountain you move it stone by stone
like the Japanese. To make a new coat
of an old, you add to it gradually
thread by thread, so such change
as occurs is more difficult to detect.

Patiently with invisible structures
he builds, and as patiently
we must pray, surrendering the ordering
of the ingredients to a wisdom that
is beyond our own. We must change the mood
to the passive. Let the deaf men
be helped; in the silence that has come
upon them, let some influence
work so that those closed porches
be opened once more. Let the bomb
swerve. Let the raised knife of the murderer
be somehow deflected. There are no
laws there other than the limits of
our understanding. Remembering rock
penetrated by glass-blade, corrected
by water, we must ask rather
for the transformation of the will
to evil, for more loving
mutations, for the better ventilating
of the atmosphere of the closed mind.

An absence of God does not mean that God is not there; it merely means we cannot see him; we live by faith. “Adjustments” can be read as a poem of spiritual growth and challenge. Little by little we grow; we come closer; we acknowledge him as much in what we do not do, the adjustments we make. But if we make the adjustments, are they the corrects ones?

We are familiar by now with the importance of the “passive mood”. Neither through our prayers and invications, nor in our thoughts and writings can we make God appear to us. It is our understanding that is at fault. We are brought back again to Jesus’ words about the faith of little children.

Mthr. Carys points out that the very rhythm of the poem reflects its direction. The first part has a “busyness” about it, as it deals with us. It adjusts to a “gentler soundscape” as we move into accepting and surrendering to God’s will, which we cannot hope to make conform to our understandings; our understandings need to make an adjustment. The following lines challenge us in their ambiguity. Can he really be suggesting that the silence has something to say to deaf man, or that we should not pray for the bomb to swerve or the knife to be deflected? And yet, if we stop a moment and accept the challenge, we see what he might mean by making adjustments. I know some deaf people who do, indeed, embrace their deafness and object to the way our society regards them as “disabled”. That bomb may swerve from those we do not want it to hit, but may hit others who are equally deserving of our prayers, though we do not know and so cannot name them:

It is not for us, Thomas seems to say, to determine God’s adjustments to the flight of the bomb or knife, when it is the condition of the human heart which has already permitted that flight to begin.
152-153

It is with a start that the lines “ask rather for the transformation of the will to evil” hit us – that certainly ventilates my closed mind, but it remains closed to that idea, though I see its challenge. There is here an echo of Thomas’s own pacifism, which does indeed at one level involve a surrender to the evil in this world.

As we “see” in the light of the Incarnation, we see most clearly that however much we blame others, or intangible things for what is wrong in the world, it is the human heart and will, turned to evil, which need transforming – and that adjustment comes in the surrender to God’s will – and it comes little by little.

Advent Book Week 5 Day 3 The Absence

29 Tuesday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Christmas, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

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.

Advent Book. Week 5 Day 2 Tidal

28 Monday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, Christmas, Faith, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

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!

Advent Book Week 5 Day 1 The Kingdom

27 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Book Club, Christmas, poetry

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Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

The Kingdom

One of the joys of this collection of Thomas’s poems has been Mthr. Cary’s commentaries. For the first time, I did not find the opening parts (pp. 137-8), useful as she centres of something called “magic eye pictures” which she assures us “were all the rage” a few years ago. Maybe you will reassure me that I am not alone in being utterly nonplussed by the reference? Or perhaps you will confirm that I really do live in a cave somewhere and am out of touch with everyday realities? Do use the comment box!

Fortunately, unlike the two previous poems, this one is not difficult – at one level. We know from the Gospels what God’s kingdom is like. We have to look only at what Jesus did and to listen to what he says to grasp its dimensions – which is where the difficulty begins. If we look at the Beatitudes, we get a radically different world-view: it is the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those who thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers and those who are persecuted for his sake who are blessed. These are not, in the main, the qualities valued by this world or which lead to worldy success. It is not quite a reversal of the values of this world, because the qualities mentioned are paid lip-service to, but it is a reminder that God’s kingdom, which is always near at hand, is one where lip-service is not enough.

Admission is “free”, and yet, paradoxical as ever, Thomas tells us the price:

if you will purge yourself / Of desire, and present yourself with / Your need only and the simple offering / Of your faith

There is the challenge. How often are we like the rich young man who talks to Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel? You can almost sense the happiness in Jesus as the young man tells him he has obeyed the commandments, and then the sadness as that man cannot to the final thing – sell his possessions and give to the poor. There was something he valued more than the Kingdom of God. So in our own time, we have our own idols, the things we put before God – even if it is only all that busyiness which prevents us stopping for a while and seeking that narrow way and the silence of prayer.

As we enter the final week of our Advent journey, we pass to the final stage. Until now we have been following a Carthusian pattern: waiting; accepting; journeying; and birthing. Now we are at a final stage which Mthr. Carys calls “seeing”. What did we learn from what we saw on our journey?

That takes us back to Week 3, day 1 and the poem “Wrong”, when we saw that, as Cavafy puts it in Ithaka, it is the journey which makes you rich, it is what you gather as you go through and not the destination which really matters. And here, Mthr. Cary’s reflections point us in the right way:

In these days, with the Word freshly among us, we are called to allow our perspective to be disrupted, and to see, with the gaze of faith, into the depths of the Incarnation,
p. 139

Thomas has been telling us that God is everywhere, from nature to the very molecules which make up the world and in the building blocks of langauge itself, and here, if we would but stop to see it, his kingdom is at hand. In the kingdom of God it is Love who rules. That Love who lay in the manger, who preached, who died on the Cross and rose from the dead, he did it because he loved us first. And us? Do we return that love, and if so how? So often he has told us that the expectations we have need to be set aside – and the simple love and faith of the child – are our best guide. As we embark on this last week of reflections, may each of us know the joy of the Christ-child and echo Mary’s obedience at the Annunciation: “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.”

Advent Book Week 4 Day 7. The Gap

26 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by JessicaHoff in Advent, Book Club, poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Advent Book Club, RS Thomas

The Gap

God woke, but the nightmare did not recede. Word by word
the tower of speech grew.
He looked at it from the air
he reclined on. One word more and
it would be on a level
with him; vovabulary
would have triumphed. He
measured the thin gap
with his mind. no, no, no,
wider than that! But the nearness 
persisted. How to live with
the fact, that was the feat
now. How to take his rest
on the edge of a chasm a
word could bridge.
                      He leaned
over and looked in the dictionary
they used. There was a blank still
by his name of the same
order as the territory
between them, the verbal hunger
for the thing itself. And the darkness
that is a god's blood swelled 
in him, and he let it
to make the sign in the space 
on the page, that us in all languages
and none; that is the grammarian's
torment and the mystery
at the cell's core, and the equation
that will not come out, and is
the narrowness that we stare
over into the eternal
silence that is the repose of God.

Mthr. Carys comments that this “might seem a curious choice for reflection during this week looking at ‘birthing’,” as indeed it is. The echoes of the story of the Tower of Babel resonates too with the story of the Fall and God’s words in Genesis 3:22

“And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:”
Genesis 3:22

The result, of course, was exile from Eden.

The reference to Genesis helps us contextualise this poem.

The first part – to the break – is written in the breathlesss, driving language of a passionate quest. As Mthr. Cary’s notes:

words fly around in short lines; some are repeated, and often-stacatto sound phrases are hurled quickly in simple, sibilant, sharp words, sometimes with small plosive sounds, or a note of sharp fear …”
Frequencies, p. 133

The serpent told Eve that:

God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil

Eliot gets to the heart of the matter in Burnt Norton in commenting:

human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

And that is central to understanding this poem.

There is in mankind, and I do, I am afraid think it is mankind, an urge to power and control. In many ways it is an admirable and necessary quality. It has taken humankind from caves and short life-spans to comfortable houses and long life-spans. But there is a dark side which we see in our less desirable characteristics. Science is a good thing – in its place. It is a good servant and a bad master. Because we can build atomic weapons does not mean we should; because we can use them to destroy our enemies, does not mean that we should. That industrialisation which has been one of our proudest boasts as a species, and which has done so much good to so many, turns out to have a dark side to it, and I am simply one of many who fear the effects of climate change which seems driven faster by our actions.

So perhaps we can begin to see God’s point here? Mankind wants God on mankind’s terms. Thinking ourselves to be God, we are, nonethless not God, and however much we wish to define God as we want, he will not be so defined. He evades us. Or, to be more accurate, our finite attempts to define him fail. Even when he sent the Light of the world into the world, the world knew him not and would not receive him:

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name
John 1:12

As C451 noted, God defies our expectations, and the Messiah came not as we thought he would come, but as God wanted. No doubt if God thundered from the heavens thrice daily, even the most sceptical atheist would belive – the evidence might have to be that overwhelming, but so what? That would be to convince our intellects; but what of our hearts? It was love with which God created the world, and love with which he redeemed it. Love does not ask to know, love perceives; love does not demand evidence, it provides it. A God we could define in our own words and image would be us – and we would be like Narcissus.

What the wise men seek to divine through sleepless nights and ceaseless labour is revealed to the small child who trusts and loves. That is not how we might want it to be, it might not fit with our sense of how it should be. But it is in humilty, not pride, that he comes to us. And that gap? In that space we grow and become who he means us to be. We are back to the waiting, the silence and their value to driven human beings who want what we want and want it now.