A R.S. Thomas Advent
Week 2: The Peace of Crumbled Manna
It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.
*
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions—that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.1
As I write this, snow blankets my little corner of the world, muffling external sounds and inviting interior stillness. Bare trees delicately silhouette against a pearl-gray sky, the spaces between their branches promising a cleansing emptiness. A lone crow flies overhead, watchfully herding the whitened landscape. The air is crisp, cold, and thin. It takes my breath away.
In moments like this, I sense God’s Presence more than at any other time. I enter into the place of Shanti. This is what the angelic host proclaimed in Bethlehem centuries ago: on earth, Peace!
Sleeve-Catcher
For poet R.S. Thomas, the natural world is the place where he, too, most keenly experiences the Divine. Walking in deserted moorland, he feels more genuinely at church than when he officiates behind the altar of his stone Welsh chapel. As he says in his poem “The Presence,” it’s when he’s surrounded by heather and gorse, embraced by their quiet, that
I feel the power
that, invisible, catches me
by the sleeve.2
Caught by the sleeve: an apposite turn of phrase. On the moor, Thomas doesn’t cogitate about God: “the mind’s cession / Of its kingdom.” Theological speculation and philosophical abstractions—words, “prayers”—have no place there. Instead, the experience of Presence is chthonic, enfolding, sensuous. In that holy and lonely place, a sanctuary into which Thomas enters reverently with “breath held like a cap in the hand,” he feels God in the “movement of the wind over grass.” Wind: pneuma, ruach: spirit.
The wild place through which Thomas roams doesn’t spawn the temptations that bedeviled Jesus, John the Baptizer, or their fellow desert ascetics. Quite the contrary. Here, all his demons are silenced; here, he finds the peace that eludes him in ordinary life. He discovers a “stillness / Of the heart’s passions,” a peace that passeth understanding, one that leaves him “simple and poor” in the best senses of the words.
In his simplicity, he opens to the Mystery. In his poverty, he desires nothing. He is at peace.
Golden Seams
Many of us are conflicted creatures who live fragmented existences, torn between opposing desires and warring passions. Like St. Paul, we know the better but desire and often do the worse. Chronically dissatisfied, perpetually restless, we rip ourselves apart frantically grabbing in all directions at whatever we fancy will scratch our multitude of itches.
The peaceful stilling of passions that is the moor’s gift to Thomas heals his fragmentation. Peace—shalom—is wholeness, integration, fulfillment, a genuine putting-together of that which is broken.
Think of the Japanese art of kintsugi, the restoration of broken ceramics and porcelain by joining the shards together with cementing veins of gold. The kintsugist’s careful and skilled hands gently de-fragment a bowl or dish which has lost its shalom, and the upshot is that the new wholeness is even more beautiful and sturdy than before the breakage.
The kintsugi-shalom experienced by Thomas isn’t a fake peace, a fearful denial of the ever-present threat of fragmentation posed by our passions. Thomas is neither a romantic nor a fool. He’s well aware that Leviathan lurks in the deep waters of his soul, just as he knows that the same natural landscape that brings him a Godded sense of peace and simplicity can also be cruel.
Take the sea, for example, another kind of wilderness. It’s both, says Thomas, a mirror and a window, a bringer of peace as well as an engine of fragmentation.
“In the mirror is to be seen all the beauty and glory of the creation: the colours and the images of the clouds, with the birds going past on their eternal journey. But on using it as a window, an endless war is to be seen, one creature mercilessly and continuously devouring another. Under the deceptively innocent surface there are thousands of horrors…”3
Each of us is a microcosm of the vast sea from which we emerged. We possess the potential to reflect the beauty and glory of the creation. But we also have buried within us a Leviathan rapacity, a trace tohu-wa-bohu longing for chaos. Shalom isn’t glorifying the one and denying the other; repression is never a genuine stilling of the passions. The peace that comes to Thomas is a reconciliation of the two tendencies: acknowledging and wedding them, kentsugi-style, so that they complement and enhance one another. This is the creative integration of genuine shalom.
Holiness
In this moment of peace, Thomas “walked on / while the air crumbled / And broke on me generously as bread”: a striking image, evoking both manna and the Eucharist, that underscores the holiness of the moor-church. Something precious is graced to Thomas here, something as palpable as the bread eaten by the Israelites in the desert or the faithful at the communion rail. He chews, swallows, and internalizes the Presence and the Peace. No burning bush frenzy, no host of dramatically whooping angels. Instead, ultimately fulfilling serenity. Words can’t hope to capture its plenitude, but that’s perfectly okay. The thing is to feel, not to think or speak. Thinking and speaking, halting stabs at conveying the experience, can come later.
Holy, holy, holy.
Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.
Shalom.
Next Week. Advent 3: Turning Aside Toward Joy. Poem: “Bright Field”
R.S. Thomas, “The Moor,” in Collected Poems, 1945-1990 (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 166.
Ibid., p. 391.
R.S. Thomas, Autobiographies, trans. (from the Welsh), Jason Walford Davies (London: Phoenix Press, 1997), p. 78.