A reading of the poem by Carol O'Connor On Wednesday the 16 th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the fourth poem being ‘The Bright Field’. This image is a pencil colour drawing by Philip Harvey. The Bright Field I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price, the one field that had treasure in it. I realize now that I must give all that I have to possess it. Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you. As far as I am aware we have no copies of any sermon which R.S.Thomas delivered. We know, from parishioners, that his sermons spoke to congregation members where they were at and met their needs. He himself maintained that the job of a priest was to represent the church in its teaching. However, in 1972 a film was made of R.S.Thomas by John Ormond. In it, R.S. Thomas created some controversy by statements such as - ‘Poetry is religion and religion is poetry…Christ was a poet….The New Testament is metaphor. Resurrection is metaphor….When one is discussing Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects…..The resurrection is a metaphorical use of language as in the Incarnation. My work as a poet has to deal with presentation of imaginative truth. Christianity ems to me is also the presentation of imaginative truth. So there is no necessary conflict between these two things at all. And as a priest I am committed to the ministry of Word and the ministry of the sacrament. Sacrament is language. The combination is perfectly simple.’ (See Morgan & Williams) The New Testament is metaphor. Resurrection is metaphor. When asked to comment on these words Rowan Williams, ever helpful, offers a pathway through for us: when we hear such statements people can tend to slip the word ‘just’ in there - the New Testament is just a metaphor. However, such a statement from R.S.Thomas is tougher than this. He is not saying that these are simply ways of talking about religion. But here he is making a serious claim. Poetry and metaphor are ways of knowing. And the word truth in the phrase ‘imaginative truth’ is not redundant. So the expression of religion for R.S.Thomas means the necessary employment of the imagination. Spirituality can never be captured or pinned down (to use a recurring metaphor this morning) in language. It is not literal but more than this: mystery, living, ever unfolding. Perhaps these words of R.S.Thomas are close to Jesus’ own use of parables, in which to teach and help open the spiritual mind of those he met. Perhaps too, metaphor became a way for R.S.Thomas to open his own mind into understanding the nature of our relationship with God. The Bright Field came out in the volume ‘Laboratories of the Spirit’ during RS Thomas’ last year at Aberdaron. The poem begins by referencing two parables from St Matthew’s Gospel chapter 13: 44-46: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” R.S.Thomas brings immediacy and particularity to the parables. Also, again his sense of time in this poem shifts. ’The kingdom of heaven’ has been found when the world lit up in a field. It was only for a moment and half-overlooked in that moment, even forgotten after. But at some point later it is remembered and with that the realisation that this is in fact, ‘the pearl of great price.’ The emotions of the poet swivel now from past indifference to a strong need to ‘give everything I have to possess it.’ What was overlooked is realised subsequently to be extraordinary and the poet would give his life for it. The illumination has been seen. It can be again. This is the kingdom of God. The poem plays in the reader’s mind on the paradox of linear time, chronos, the nature of its transitoriness, and kairos, eternal time. Memory can call you back to remember, even your youth, but it can never re-recreate what was. The kingdom is not about pining after a past that has now gone. Nor, is it fixating our mind on with future dreams and desires: Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. Looking forward or backwards is not seeing nor living in the kingdom of God. The voice in this poem again moves from a subjective experience, through a learning gained, then becoming opened out as object lesson to all: ’I have seen the sun…’ finally becomes ‘…the eternity that awaits you.’ There is something humanly instinctive in the nature of seeking this pearl, ‘the field that had treasure in it.’ Once glimpsed, it has the capacity to awaken in any person, whether they notice it or not, the seed of desire to seek eternity. But, another paradox, in order to possess it, something inside the human self must be let go of. In fact, everything must be given: ‘I must give all that I have to possess it.’ Possession of the pearl involves complete dispossession of self. For the poet, the realisation has come that life is found by truly making a home in the present. It’s found by making room for, providing space in the currents of time to open our eye to the light of what’s before us. To ‘turn aside’ like Moses, in this time present, and see the miracle of the burning bush vision that so filled the Old Testament character, Moses. The pearl is analogous to light. The sun illuminates the bright field as the blaze of the lit bush illuminated the mind of Moses. We can at first think this poem is about finding the pearl yet the real pearl, like light itself, can be felt and experienced but never fully owned. It is transitory, but also calls us on as we turn to gaze back. Here is the very Celtic understanding that God’s kingdom is not that area above and unreachable, but intensely close alongside us. It is the understanding that the eternal is already genetically encoded into the present time we are living in. As human beings we have an extraordinarily unique capacity to consciously reflect back over even experiences overlooked, or project our thinking into an imagined future. This poem has had me reflect on the last 12 months which due to Covid opened up a very difficult terrain to navigate for so many of us in the whole world. It has been a time for many, of longing to go back to what we had before and recognising the entry into a new normal. Those privileged with wifi and computer access could go via youtube and zoom, in one day say prayers with others in countries all over the world. I have found that the very best of those prayer times weren’t the ones where we longed for things to return and be fixed up, nor hankered to be in another country as if that would take us away from our own problems, but those which called us back to our present circumstances and place, and look alongside our own locked down selves and surroundings, to find the bush of Moses burning right beside us, no matter where. The Bright Field is a poem about a way of seeing the world. And it means the loveliness and joy cannot be held and caught, nor pinned down or preserved in a book. How we choose to act in the world after we have seen, is another story. But the first step is to see it. Mark Oakley understands this well when he says: ‘What we long for eludes us. If we ever think we possess God we will stop desiring Him…We know information can be got at the press of a key, but we know too truth is hard won, flinty and sharply digested in a lifetime’s search. God is always revising our understanding of God as well as who we are: his gift to us is being, our gift to him is becoming …. [R.S.Thomas] knew the inadequacies of words but uses them as it were, like setting a trap for clarity and for his God. He levels the ground of faith with honesty.’ (Oakley 9) Sources Barry Morgan & Rowan Williams. Laboratories of the Spirit : R.S. Thomas’ religious poetry. Public conversation conducted by the Learned Society of Wales Cymdeithas Ddysgedig Cymru. On Y outube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtgpHmEASj0 Mark Oakley. R.S. Thomas and the hiddenness of God. University of Gloucestershire, Park Campus, 2017 R. S. Thomas. Collected poems 1945-1990. Phoenix Giants, 1993

A Reading by Carol O'Connor On Wednesday the 16 th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the third poem being ‘Raptor’. Artwork: Portion of Iso-Mandala 313 by Philip Harvey Raptor by R.S.Thomas You have made God small setting him astride a pipette or a retort studying the bubbles absorbed in an experiment that will come to nothing. I think of him rather as an enormous owl abroad in the shadows brushing me sometimes with his wing so the blood in my veins freezes, able to find his way from one soul to another because he can see in the dark. I have heard him crooning to himself, so that almost I could believe in angels, those feathered overtones in love's rafters, I have heard him scream, too, fastening his talons in his great adversary, or in some lesser denizen, maybe, like you or me. Rowan Williams has been quoted as saying that R.S.Thomas is a ‘great articulator of an uneasy faith.’ An increasing influence on the poet’s writing and thinking is the work of Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. God may be glimpsed by a person occasionally in a country church, but is essentially baffling and unknowable. God is wholly other to our human categories of understanding. Raptor is a later poem, published in No Truce with the Furies in 1995. There’s something of this experience of the wholly otherness of God touched on here. This poem makes us feel uncomfortable. It asks us to include aspects of life that we would prefer not to in our conversation about God. The opening six lines form themselves as a ‘retort’ to the reader: to you - who treat God as something or someone we know and feel very familiar with. The reader assumes something about God that is not possible: an entity to break down scientifically, known in a laboratory, able to be tested and measured. The poet plays on the word ‘retort’: being a return argument, a retaliating defensive holding of a position; or, a ‘retort stand’ , equipment or glassware to support scientific equipment. Both meanings imply the reader assumes science experiments and quantifiable measurements will open up to us the nature of God. Articulate this even in measured stanzas. But if we remain true to this task in our absorption, the task becomes really one of ‘bubbles’, effervescent, evaporating, interesting to our attention but ultimately futile. God cannot be measured and is not quantifiable. This is a call to the reader to wake up from this illusion. The poet’s own ‘retort’ or refutation to ‘you’ becomes the premise of the poem. In the first stanza this, he says, is what ‘you’ think of God. But the next three stanzas will turn to what the poet thinks. Turning away from the laboratory he draws on nature as his chosen place to think on God. A place which is never quantifiable in bubbles nor readymade to order. He chooses a metaphor: considering God to be a large bird who can move in the half light, live in the shadows and operate stealthily in the dark. This ‘enormous owl’ has no inclination to lie astride instruments in a laboratory, but flies ‘abroad’ in the night. It is a living creature whose enormity defies the smallness of being grounded inside a pipette. It can’t be objectified, but neither one whose presence can be denied: sometimes it physically touches the poet with its wing. And then the poet’s ‘blood freezes.’ The brush of feathers may be ever so gentle, but the physical response is immediate and dramatic. The Owl has the capacity to visit ‘one soul to another’ amongst all of us. It is never still for long. Its presence can cause our very self to stop and feel aghast. Rather than retracting this sense of unease and discomfort the poet pushes the point further in stanza 3. This is a God whose very language is a weird inaccessible ‘crooning.’ It sings in a soft low voice to itself - its own strange tunes are unintelligible to humans; a God whose words are secret, keeping its own counsel. A capricious God too, who without warning, can turn violent, flinging itself down with a ‘scream’ to ‘fasten its talons’ into its opponent. Is this a mighty act on the part of the Owl against some great enemy? Are we the ‘denizen’ whereby our own spiritual territory unaccountably and suddenly invaded and violated? Are these talons for rescue or consumption? There is a fascination with violence and cruelty which runs through this poem and is projected onto God. If we can’t examine God under a microscope is this the sort of God we end up inviting in? If we can’t control God, are we then vulnerable to sudden predatory attack? If we can’t pin down God with our mind under a microscope then we risk being pinned down by God in our emotional response of terror? But R.S.Thomas is being honest in his perception that for him God can be complicit and involved in cruelty in the world. We live in a world where natural disasters, violence and suffering happen for no apparent reason. How do we begin to reconcile ourselves with this phenomenon? We each have to come to terms with violence in the world in our own way. So on one level we can read this poem as a wrestling with the notion of a God who chooses not only to be complicit in but an active agent of violence in nature and human disaster. There is good precedent for this wrestling state of soul in our Christian scriptures: the prophets, the psalmist, Jesus’ ‘haunting cry’ on the cross. There is permission in our Christian history of language about God to explore these darker instincts. But there’s more. The poet shows us that if we choose to engage with the process of understanding God as a metaphor rather than investigation under a microscope then we are changing the very premise in our discourse about the nature of God. Something else is understood to be at work here and we have to invite it in to our language. For a start we surrender control. No longer the scientist in control of the experiment, we enter a territory in which mystery and unknown pathways are acknowledged. We have to learn to see differently. And to speak what we see differently. The territory involves owning our emotions, imagination and intuition. There is quite a range being expressed: feelings of wonder and awe at an ‘enormous owl abroad in the shadows’, at ‘angels in love’s rafters.’ The poem is full of soft sibilant sounds which at times give the effect of tenderness. But there is also the terror, ‘the blood in the vein freezes,’ the owl’s scream in fastening his talons. Feelings and intuitions may not be at all comfortable nor welcome, but that doesn’t make them less credible. In fact, underlying the poem is the understanding that in reckoning with pain, suffering and violence we have to bring these responses into play. In doing this the reckoning now has its own language and expression. And we, as free agents not studying scientists, now are able to recognise and credit not only the sinister ‘croon’ but also legitimise the presence of angels and hear their overtones, for their voices in ‘love’s rafters’ though unknowable are still valid. What we are receiving in these three stanzas is not a cut and hang out to dry God, but something much bigger, deeper, richer. By employing our whole range of perceptions, thoughts and feelings about God we are loosened into a new understanding not only about the nature of God, but of ourselves. There are fears being expressed here that need to be brought out, seen for what they are. They too may have their own bubbles of illusion. This poem is expression a pathway towards forming a much richer, more mature relationship with God. In this sense, Raptor is a call to be free to wrestle with dark emotions, frightening thoughts and observation of evil. We can never know God fully. But if we open ourselves emotionally and imaginatively, we can grow into discovering a relationship with God which can, despite all, hold our terrors, inspire our wonder and help us see, as He does, into the dark. Sources R. S. Thomas. No truce with the furies. Bloodaxe Books, 1995

A Reading by Carol O'Connor On Wednesday the 16th of June, Carol O’Connor led a Spiritual Reading Group session via Zoom on the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. Four poems were discussed, the first poem being ‘'The Other. Artwork: Portion of Iso-Mandala 324 by Philip Harvey The Other There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl calling far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity. from Destinations , 1985 In the late 1990s, 20 years after R.S.Thomas left Aberdaron, Evelyn Davies came as vicar there. Apart from mentioning: ‘I think RS would turn in his grave if he knew a woman priest was here,’ she also says of her time there: ‘…..You('d) hear such stories. Someone would have come for miles to knock on his door. This would open a crack. “What do you want?” “I should like to talk to you about your poetry. There’s something I don’t understand.” “Well, if you don’t understand it, there’s very little I can add.” Bang. But I think he used to blame that on the wind.’ (Rogers 233) R.S.Thomas mostly resisted ever giving an interpretation of his poetry. Insisting that the words can only ever say what they mean by their actual saying it. No matter where we take these poems, R.S.Thomas is right in that we can only ever go back to the words in the poem. This poem is written out on a large slate slab in the church at Aberdaron commemorating his memory there. It was originally published in 1985 and probably would have been written later during his retirement at Sarn. There at night, in the white stone cottage high above the ocean, such ponderings seem a good setting. T he tone in this poem is a gentle one and the theme touches on a recognition of a kind of existential consciousness of self in relation to other, that particularly runs through the latter poems. The poem reads simply, smoothly. But like so many of his poems, this belies its ambiguity and complexity. The language and imagery are pared back. As the hours are described as being lean so too is there something without embroidery or productive in the experience of lying awake alone in the night. Lean has a double meaning in English. Spare, skin and bones. But also slope, bend, recline into. These hours seem to lean into the swell born from some deeper ocean of experience. The single syllables of the first two lines are uttered as if night time quiet tentative footsteps: There are nights that are so still that I can hear the small owl. After this come a series of present participles: calling barking, listening….These words ending with -ing give the sensation of rocking. The rhythm begins to sync with the gentle motion rising and falling of the ocean waves. The reader is softly swayed, coaxed and attuned into the rhythm of the poet’s line of thought. The voice is self-consciously solitary: the poet is alone with his thoughts at night, perhaps lying awake in bed. It’s a period those of us prone to nocturnal meditations can identify with. The imagery is natural: the fox, the owl. Night creatures, accustomed to this period of time, are awake with him. To be solitary in this way feels natural in the poem. Yet bereft. And it is not only confined to the sense of being a single individual. The village itself with its own lights turned off is companionless. But alone and apart from what? Many of R.S.Thomas' poems directly ask spiritual questions: ‘What are a god’s dreams?’ he asks in Incarnations or ‘What are the emotions / of God’ in Silence . If not directly, they rest upon or are in tussle with some existential interrogation. There is an absence of celebratory poems for occasions such as birthdays or Christmas. Even when featured, the mood in poems such as Blind Noel is not celebratory in observing: Love knocks with such frosted fingers. His poems are never directly addressed to Christ, or to God, they are often internal soliloquies on absence or presence. The question this poem The Other seems premised on has something to do with how far apart can we bear to be or feel from another soul or from God? How far out is too far out? How dark does a village have to be before it is too dark? There are two spiritually pivotal moments in the poem: “listening / to the swell born in lines 5-6 and “the thought comes / of that other being ” in lines 10-11. They are both broken across two lines and I think of them as spiritual because they are moments when the poet connects with something bigger than himself. The swell of the ocean expands the movement of his own reflections. Through this sea the listening poet is being rocked and linked slowly into some greater recognition about the nature of existence. His listening stretches beyond the St Georges Channel of Wales and the Celtic sea, right out much further into the large expanse of Atlantic Ocean. Once more it takes only 3 single syllable words: 'the thought comes' which seems to move into the verse with the quiet stealth of a night owl or fox, to create a powerful effect. This thought is a fastening and enough to spark connection. It's as if by the very act of thinking of another person, known or unknown, is itself enough in prayer to bring us together. And it’s the imagery of the sea that allows this joining of one spirit to another to happen. The last 5 lines all run in together. Once the swell of the ocean has opened his imagining of another, his own pondering further expands in person and place. The first person ‘I’ becomes third person ‘our’ and time and these few hours becomes eternity. This is the life of prayer. This is what links us all not just in empathy, or place and one time, but in all time itself. It is never too far out to be apart from God. It is never too dark for a village to be companionless. In the life of prayer broken relationships are linked into an unending unity with others, known or unknown. The poem becomes our prayer, as our perceptions, alongside the poet, are expanded out in time, place and personhood: from the particular to the all. In all this is a deep abiding: rest and peace, solitary yet connected with one another and in swelling presence of God. Sources Byron Rogers. The man who went into the west : the life of R.S. Thomas. Aurum, 2006 R. S. Thomas. Collected poems 1945-1990. Phoenix Giants, 1993

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