Thou art indeed just, Lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamenjusta loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain. In Year 12 Literature, I would be the one down the back of the class pouring over the poems no-one else seemed to want to go near, least of all felt any resonance with. The existential terrors and mountain climbing spiritual intensities of Hopkin’s "Terrible Sonnets" felt like they were written for my soul, my mind, ‘frightful, sheer no-man-fathomed.’ At University we learned to objectify, walk carefully around words; poets were put on pedestals or their work drop kicked through post-modern theories. Favourite poets especially were shattered like glass, swept up, binned and then forgotten. Until years later when unexpectedly chosen to be used for a Lenten reflection, or advertised in a Poets in the Faith series, such as the one coming up for us here at St Peter’s, Eastern Hill this year. Dorothy Lee will be speaking on Gerald Manley Hopkins in March and will unwrap his poetry much more eloquently than I ever can. But once more interest is piqued back to explore, renew a bygone acquaintance long forgot. The ‘dappled things’ and ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ can still speak anew. Thou art indeed just Lord s also amongst those poems chosen for reflection in The Heart’s Time: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter by Janet Morley. This Lenten book has been around since 2011 and I still go back to it. It features this sonnet on Friday of Week 2. Morley has that gift for opening up poems, suggesting helpful pathways through; moving inside, then kaleidascoping the themes out into a wider context. Thou art indeed just Lord is set in Petrarchan form, weighing itself between an argument of its first eight lines, and counter response in the last 6. The epigraph, from psalm 119 in the Latin vulgate, sets the poem clearly from the outset in a religious context. Morley links the poem to voices in the Old Testament such as Job and Jeremiah, prophets of suffering who protest vigorously to God. But it's the nature of the relationship between the poet and their God which speaks so powerfully for me today. There is protest, lament, perhaps too a self-indulgent despair: ‘why must / disappointment all I endeavour end?’ and excessive anguish over unfulfilled sexual longing, ‘o the sots and thralls of lust.’ But note, not only does the tight structure of the poem keep the voice in check, but the poem is premised on the knowledge that our Lord is ‘O thou my friend.’ And in this friendship there is a great courtesy extended to ‘thou lord of life.’ Twice the poet calls our Lord, ‘sir’, and although the tone is very earnest, from a human point of view it is also very relatable. It pre-empts, for me, the words of the tragic character Tess in Thomas Hardy's, Tess of the d'Urbervilles: ‘Why does the sun shine on the just and the unjust alike?’ (1891). This is a very reasonable question to ask in the spiritual life. It’s one we all pray at some point. Why, after all, do ‘sinners ways prosper’?  Why, especially for some, is it that ‘disappointment all I endeavour end?’ Once, St Teresa in a more jocular tone asked, ‘if this is the way our Lord treats his friends, how then his enemies?’ The second part of the poem extends this relationship to include the recognition of the beauty and fecundity of nature. And this, I believe, is much deeper than the lament of the poet as simply being ‘time’s eunuch.’ Though there is piercing truth in the words: ‘birds build, but not I build’, the very simple admission that despite this inner state, nature is ‘leavèd how thick’ and ‘fresh wind shakes’ affirms the goodness and connection of God in the world.  These words remind us of other sonnets by Hopkins – Pied Beauty where the poet praises, ‘Glory be to God for dappled things…’ In Thou art indeed just Lord to be in this state where ‘disappointment all I endeavour end,’ yet still ‘see’ the beauty in life, and to have the ability to cry out ‘send my roots rain,’ is the essence of the gift and affirmation of a relationship with our Lord which is held in grace. The ‘justice’ of our Lord may forever remain a mystery in human terms, but God initiates and promises a relationship with Him which has space wide enough and time limitless enough to always bring before Him our private needs, our inner frustrations. God’s love, connecting, comprehensive, non-competing, enables us in times of suffering to ‘see’ the ‘fretty chervil’ whatever they may be for each of us. And thereby is sent the rain that nourishes our souls. The Heart’s Time: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter by Janet Morley is available in St Peter’s Bookroom. $32.95

‘To be able to see, hear, and attend to that within us which is there in the darkness and the silence.’ Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld. The destabilising, yet deeply human, emotions of fear and anxiety take on different forms in the narrative of Matthew’s Gospel. The anxiety experienced by the disciples often has its basis in their lack of faith. The phrase ‘you of little faith’ or simply oligopistos in Greek, occurs five times in relation to them. In this Gospel, ‘fear’ is also born out of the dread of evil and destruction, ‘loss of moral code of the kingdom.’ But there is also the fear which is akin to awe, the revelation of the numinous: the clear, bright presence of Jesus at the transfiguration, and his living presence before the women at the empty tomb. Jesus often reassures, not only by his words: ‘do not be afraid,’ ‘take courage’, but also in his presence. (See The Book of Gospels by Dorothy Lee). The charged events of Holy Week are permeated with people’s attempts to restrain chaos. Here, in Matthew’s Gospel, the chief priests conspire to arrest Jesus but not during Passover lest there be a commotion; Judas Iscariot’s character disintegrates from agreeing to betray Jesus, looking for the right opportunity, then later hanging himself; Pilate, when sensing a riot from the crowd can only wash his hands. A madness is brewing which is born out of group fear and anxiety. It finds its culmination at the crucifixion. Having finally been humiliated and taunted by the soldiers at the cross, when Jesus dies the curtain of the temple is torn in two, the earth shook: ‘They were terrified.’ What is it that can hold us steady? Keep us grounded when we experience deep anxiety, impending chaos and the very earth feels to shake under our own feet? Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, an unfailing courageous worker for world peace during the Cold War, died in a plane crash over the Congo in 1961. In 2021 a previously unpublished document confirmed there was a death warrant out for him accounting for the plane being shot down. Hammarskjöld kept a notebook found by his bedside after his death. This diary he described as ‘a sort of White Book concerning my negotiations with myself – and with God.’ It reads as an ongoing dialogue between a person’s deeply questioning, reflecting soul and their God and Maker. Holy Week is a period where we are invited to look into our own hearts. There’s darkness there, as another famous 20th century writer testified to. But if you really attend, stay close to your own honest negotiations with yourself and God, in the space of prayer, you will come to glimpse something much deeper in the darkness. Beyond fear and anxiety too. Love casts out fear. The narrative in the Gospel of Matthew makes this point clear again and again. The unwavering, steady presence of Christ’s love during Holy Week is astonishing. The Institution of the Lord’s Supper reveals to us a Jesus who is centred, clear eyed about truth, yet tender in surveying the messy emotions and actions of those around him. And honest in recognising more was yet to come. In his humanity he spent time in prayer at Gethsemane negotiating, communing, praying in and with his Father. ‘- Night is drawing nigh-‘ Let me finish what I have been permitted to begin. Let me give all without any assurance of increase. The pride of the cup is in the drink, its humility in the serving. What then do its defects matter? Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld. Photo: St Peter's Anglican Church, East Melbourne, Palm Sunday 2023

Reflection for Sunday 19th March, 2023 I’ve just finished reading the novel Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens. It narrates the slow ruin of a proud, wealthy ship merchant whose life has been focused on financial gain and having a male heir to continue the great House of Dombey. Dombey expresses only coldness and cruelty towards his loving and devoted daughter, Florence. Frustrated when his only son dies at a young age, outraged when his second wife elopes with his friend, Carker the Manager, Dombey withdraws into isolation and financial ruin. It’s only in this state of broken misery that he finally recognises the unchanging goodness of his daughter. But in this wretched state he owns that he is ‘so proud in his ruin…that if he could have heard her voice in an enjoining room, he would not have gone to her. If he could have seen her in the street…..he would have passed on with his cold, unforgiving face and not addressed her, or relaxed it, though his heart should have broken soon afterwards.’ The journey of Lent is like a little journey of life. It is framed by a beginning and end; reminds us that we are time-bound, space-bound and have our being in relationship with one another. Our readings today encourage us to stay open and aware so that our seeing is always fresh: ‘everything exposed by the light becomes visible.’ (Eph 5:13). Everyday has something new to teach us. Being human we create habits. Habits influence our neural pathways, the patterning of our actions and form our nature. They affect those around us and our environment. Barely perceptible, often least recognised by ourselves, habits can make us who we are. It can be near impossible to change some habits. Except that the work of the Holy Spirit makes it possible. Lento in music means to move at a slow tempo. We work in the spirit, the spirit works in us, at a slow pace. It doesn’t operate at record breaking speed. Laetare Sunday is a sign that the human heart doesn’t change at a great pace, but slowly. This day of rejoicing isn’t about how great it is that we may be changing some of our habits. But rather, how great God is in the recognition of our human limits and fallibility. God knows our brokenness. Knows too our blind spots. Paul Dombey is redeemed by the end of the novel. Not so much by his efforts, but by the faithful grace of love. This is God’s endless patient work in our own frail human hearts. In Lent and beyond. Rejoice! Readings for Sunday 19th March: 1 Samuel 16:1-13 Psalm 23 Ephesians 5.8-14 John 9.1-14 Illustration: Let Him Remember It in That Room Years to Come. Illustration from The Charles Dickens Novel Dombey and Son by Phiz (H.K. Browne 1815-1852)

Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears The deceitful face of hope and despair. TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday Stepping out of our current parish office at St Peter’s and turning right ways one is greeted with a steep flight of concrete stairs. It always seems much easier walking up rather than down this flight of well-worn steps, perhaps because as humans we naturally lean forward. Stepping down requires carefulness and holding onto the banister rail, especially if carrying a laptop, mobile, printouts and all the paraphernalia that can still come out of a 21st century office. When I was very young I fell down a flight of stairs at my home in England. I still have a small scar on the back of my head where the panel heater fixed to the wall opposite the bottom stair smacked it. I don’t remember the incident, at least not consciously, but it is a family tale. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday was written soon after his conversion to Anglicanism and published in 1930. The Wasteland had been published 8 years earlier, and Four Quartets came out in stages in the following10 years. Ash Wednesday is a transitional poem in many ways. It’s also a knotty poem, the fluent phrasing, easy flow of metre belies intricately woven and echoing themes. Divided into 6 parts, it is spread throughout with prayer book and biblical allusions, Dante’s Purgatorio features prominently, and the voice in the poem has it feel closer to the writings of St John of the Cross than early 20th century poetry. Though it employs many bold, colourful images, its abstruse, philosophical nature can be a turnoff for the cursory reader. I still find sudden unexpected moments of contemplative joy in revisiting familiar but forgotten lines: ‘teach us to care and not to care / teach us to sit still.’ But I also feel at the beginning of Lent 2023 as if I understand this poem less now than I did 20 or 30 years ago. Who is the poet addressing? He prays to God ‘to have mercy upon us’, echoes the petition in the mass: ‘Lord have mercy on us.’ He imagines the fixed images of Dante’s Beatrice and Our Lady. They, like the ‘veiled sister’ become figures asked on the poet’s behalf to intercede for ‘those who chose and oppose.’ They are much less in the realm of gender debate or politics here than signifiers that in life, in prayer, there is a force, an energy that enables a world seeming out of control, a world where words are lost and bones have no hope of revival, to find hope. The poet walks up stairs and turns to look back. Beatrice walks Virgil up the stairs out of hell and into the realm of heaven. She, like Mary, ‘the silent sister veiled in white and blue’ becomes synonymous in the poem with ‘the spirit of the river, spirit of the sea.’ Residing in liminal spaces, in ‘tension between dying and birth’, ‘between blue rocks’ her presence enables intercession for a suffering world to be redeemed. By her prayer, those in exile have hope that their cry ‘come unto Thee.’ Hope here is not the deceitful face laced by fear glimpsed on the stair. It is the place where bones can sing, where fountains spring up, where the ‘lost word’ may still whirl ‘about the centre of the silent Word.’ But although something or someone seems to be guiding the poet in his ascent, there is also a simultaneous sense in Ash Wednesday of chaotic falling into the abyss of terror, of exile, of the unknown. Ash Wednesday marks a season in the church year when we learn how to tumble down in the hope that even if we are not caught in the way we would like to be, then we learn how to be guided by something deeper than ourselves. It is an interval of 40 days seeking to re-hear and re-see the world around us. We entrust ourselves to the great Holy Spirit. We ask to be re-opened and grow in our relationship with Love. Hope isn’t a constructed idea, but is like the ‘spirit of the river, spirit of the sea’ which urges us to turn around, to remember, to notice, to look honestly. And by this strengthens us, gives us courage to make and build, to heal, restore. I like to imagine that when as a 5-year-old I fell tumbling down those stairs, the ‘devil of the stairs’ was smaller, less effectual than the angel of the air. I could have broken my neck. But perhaps the Holy Spirit calmed, relaxed and guided my somersaulting body. In our letting go this Lent, in the freefall, may there be a Spirit of wisdom that guides our journey so that on Easter Day we too may rise with Christ. Caught up by and in the arms of Love. Carol O'Connor

Mediations by R.S.Thomas And to one God says: Come to me by numbers and figures : see my beauty in the angles between stars, in the equations of my kingdom. Bring your lenses to the worship of my dimensions : far out and far in, there is always more of me in proportion. And to another : I am the bush burning at the centre of your existence : you must put your knowledge off and come to me with your mind bare. And to this one he says : Because of your high stomach, the bleakness of your emotions, I will come to you in the simplest things, in the body of a man hung on a tall tree you have converted to timber and you shall not know me. from: Collected Poems 1945-1990 A Phoenix Giant, 1993 p275 Mediations came out in R.S. Thomas 1975 collection Laboratories of the Spirit. It resonates with several of his later poems. In The Tree, which was written in 1983, he writes: ‘Nightly / we explore the universe / on our wave-lengths….’ (p417). And in his final 1995 collection R.S.Thomas opens his poem, Raptor, with these words: 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. In the last 25 years of his life, R.S. Thomas was preoccupied with understanding by what means, mediations, God chooses to speak to humankind. As in our capacity to tune into sound waves on an am/fm radio what are the best frequencies for human beings to hear God? Alongside this, is the recognition of the sheer variety of wave bands God chooses to reveal God-self in our world. We can put God under the microscope in a laboratory but the warning is, don’t make God small. And also, never think yourself so unworthy as to be outside redemptive love of God. In all of his poetry, although he wrestles with the paradox of God’s absence and presence, struggles to find a language with which to communicate his naturally contemplative yet also often fraught relationship with the Divine, R.S.Thomas never lets go of his need for this very relationship. He scrutinises himself and the world with his priestly poetic eye as truthfully as he can. He finds both badly wanting, yet more than this, he uncovers again and again, the unutterable compassion of God’s love. God is always reaching out for us, long before we stretch out our arms. Mediations was written during his last incumbency in Aberdaron; a town set on a coastline in the furthest western most tip of Wales. R.S.Thomas described that time as the end of his personal pilgrimage. He was now able to focus on what really mattered to him: ‘matters of God and universe.’ Mediations is set as a one solid block of 25 lines on the page. It explores 3 general ways God can choose to speak to a person. For one, it’s via the means of science and mathematics: ‘by numbers and/ figures’, the ‘angles between / stars’ or mathematical equations. Here is the beauty of ongoing proportion and measurement. For another it’s the flash of vision; the laying aside our intellect and entering the mystery and seering realm of prophecy. So we have the intellect alongside the deeply intuitive inner apprehension. The perfection of equations and science, and the inner experience of awe and wonder. But there is a third way. And this most powerful of all mediations is perhaps all the more startling because it’s the means by which God chooses to speak to ‘the one’ who can feel the least worthy. To that one with an ‘high stomach’ and ‘bleak emotions,’ God gives Christ. The reference in the last 6 lines of the poem is the choice that God has made to reveal divine presence via the crucifixion of Jesus. There are many twists and turns of thought in these last lines. These ‘simplest things’ for Christians are the most profound. The ‘tall tree’ that has been ‘converted to timber’ perhaps refers to the devices of our hands to cause immense suffering. It was humankind, after all, who took a tree, made it into a cross and chose to crucify Jesus upon it. God gave us Christ as the great mediator, but we did not know God in him. And yet still, there is a double meaning in the last line, ‘and you shall not know me.’ God was not recognised when Christ came amongst us, and was crucified. But God was still there in Christ, in that act then and in redemption now. By means of Christ’s death God comes to one, to us, in our suffering and pain. We may convert the tree to timber, but God converts the crucifixion to a further sign of God’s love for humanity. In Mediations R.S.Thomas is tuning his own ear into the awesome nature of God’s voice in the world. God may be discovered in the most exquisite mathematical formula or brightest vision. But the voice can be heard too in an even stranger frequencies. Those being our own human inadequacies and failings. However God chooses to mediate divine presence in the world, we are always left with the fact that we can’t control God. Only attune our own ears to listen out. The question we are left with at the end of the poem, and R.S.Thomas spent the rest of life exploring, is: who on earth is this God? Carol O’Connor

At the End by R.S.Thomas Few possessions: a chair, a table, a bed to say my prayers by, and, gathered from the shore, the bone-like, crossed sticks proving that nature acknowledges the Crucifixion. All night I am at a window not too small to be frame to the stars that are no further off than the city lights I have rejected. By day the passers-by, who are not pilgrims, stare through the rain’s bars, seeing me as prisoner of the one view, I who have been made free by the tide’s pendulum truth that the heart that is low now will be at the full tomorrow. from: No Truce with the Furies Bloodaxe Books, 1995 In his biography, The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S.Thomas, Byron Rogers describes how he chivvied Gwydion, R.S.Thomas’ son, for his father’s ‘papers.’ Apparently R.S.Thomas wrote with a waste paper basket beside him and the survival of some poems has been due to Gwydion’s mother who ‘retrieved and ironed them.’ Apart from his puzzling autobiographical work, Neb or No-one, R.S.Thomas left no diary nor private journal. But one day Byron Rogers came to be entrusted with four ‘bulging supermarket bags’ of his possessions. Perhaps he had hoped for new bardic words from the poet but instead, as he lists in a rather lengthy paragraph, the bags contained such items as: the skull of a hare, a cheese box containing a puffin’s beak, advice on the control of moth damage… a list of mills in Merionethshire…..Rogers concludes the inventory with: ‘Envelope containing a single dead prawn.’ At the End appears in R.S.Thomas’ last collection in 1995, No Truce with the Furies. There is here, a paring back to the essentials and recognition that the things we need matter less than how we construct them to frame our vision of the world. The poem centres upon a person’s aloneness; their ‘one view’ is formulated by the Crucifixion, a small window to the stars, a ‘pendulum truth.’ Passers-by see but do not see, for their lives are constructed differently. With its reversals of logic and adept laneways of discursive waywardness, the poem is best apprehended intuitively. Although it’s written as one single 21 line verse, At the End is divided into three distinct parts; each one sentence long. The first lists the few possessions of the poet, including a bed that seems to mean more to pray by than sleep in, and some crossed sticks, offered from the ocean as nature’s acknowledgement of the Crucifixion. The second sentence describes the poet in vigil at night, much like the cross sticks now is his small framed view of the stars which are as close to him as the city lights which he has turned his back on. And the third, set during the daytime: the poet positioned apart from others, seeing life very differently. Passersby view him as a person in prison, but are blind to ‘the tide’s pendulum truth.’ Time for the poet, may swing linear by the clock, but its nature is more real when understood to be cyclic. Indeed, in reality, ‘at the end’ the ‘heart that is low now / will be at the full tomorrow.’ The tone of this poem isn’t angry or bitter about human suffering or estrangement from others. ‘At the end’ our human life needs right understanding about human aloneness, and we need reconciliation with suffering which is shared in God. Experiencing relationship with God transforms us from being simply passersby along the road to pilgrims seeking meaning, entrusted with a deep heart. Those supermarket bags of R.S.Thomas possessions given to Byron Rogers, are redolent with new interpretation when understood in the light of the poet’s relationship with his God. Everything matters to God. At one with himself in prayer, he is set ‘free’ by the very act of prayer itself. The cost of this freedom is patience in vigil, preparedness to sit and know dark periods of the heart’s waning, the ebb tide. To turn aside from city-lights, to claim another identity other than simply being a passer-by, means to stay faithful to this 'one view’ which, in time’s revelation will embrace all views. ’At the end’ there is no end, only human reconciliation in relationship with God Eternal. by Carol O’Connor

Sea-watching by R.S.Thomas Grey waters, vast as an area of prayer that one enters. Daily, over a period of years I have let the eye rest on them. Was I waiting for something? Nothing but that continuous waving that is without meaning occurred. Ah, but a rare bird is rare. It is when one is not looking, at times one is not there that it comes. You must wear your eyes out, as others their knees. I became the hermit of the rocks habited with the wind and the mist. There were days, so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled, its absence was as its presence; not to be told any more, so single my mind after its long fast, my watching from praying. The poetry of 20th Century Anglo-Welsh Anglican priest and writer, R.S. Thomas, has been a travelling companion for me for some months during this year. A man, full of contradictions, enigmatic with a biting sarcasm; there’s certainly no drawing close to a warm and cuddly persona. Always concerned with the singularity of a person’s existence, his later poetry takes this further into the realm of the self’s individual relationship with God. Often this relationship he sets within a church environment or natural surrounding. His language can be prickly and sparse. Angular, but honest. His sharp clarity of perception can deliberately falter before a mature realisation that any life worth living with meaning in God, is going to involve new possibility as well surrendering before paradox and conundrum. In the 1950s during his second incumbency at Eglwys Fach along the west coastline of Wales, bird watching became a method of contemplation for R.S. Thomas. He would leave his family and parish for weeks at a time to watch them in remote islands and areas. Taken by their ancient beauty and independence he began to understand a similarity between bird watching and praying. He wrote: ‘It is exactly the same with the relationship between man and God that is known as prayer. Great patience is called for because no-one knows when God will choose to reveal himself.’ (from No-one: see endnote) The poem Sea-watching was written in the 1970s when R.S. Thomas lived at Aberdaron. Here, at the furthest western most tip of Wales he felt that he had reached the end of his personal pilgrimage. Ministering amongst Welsh speaking people he felt better able to focus on meaning and a person’s relationship with God. He had learned not only to ‘rest the eye’ on ‘grey waters’, but to ‘wear’ them out, as do ‘others their knees.’ One question only is asked in this poem: ‘Was I waiting for for something?’ By this, we are not just as reader invited into the poem, but asked to identify with the poet. As if response to this question the poem goes on to broaden this theme of ‘waiting’. But it also implies more questions for us as reader: What is it in our life that brings us meaning? Have we ever waited longing for a glimpse of ‘that rare bird’? What is it to wear our eyes out in prayer? How do we move and have our being in our relationship with God? The ‘continuous waving / that is without meaning’ is not just the constant movement of the ocean’s waves, but also our own body’s motion through time and place. There are periods, long stretches, when living appears to have no apparent reason. It’s simply a monotony of time passing. But, the poet encourages us, if we we do not stay vigilant in remaining present and aware living in each moment, then we may miss that glimpse of the ‘rare bird’: the one most unexpected moment that makes sense of all moments. Even then, this moment is most likely to come 'when one is not looking, / at times one is not there.’ Entering the landscape of an R.S. Thomas poem can be hard work. It’s not so much the general hills and valleys of his thought or the intuitive and natural imagery he uses that can challenge. But it’s in the minutiae and particular that our mind can get snagged. Like a track through hills which seems to be leading somewhere but then suddenly doubles back on itself, so can the language of R.S. Thomas’ flip over our thinking. The words: I became the hermit of the rocks, habited with the wind and the mist ring out with stark life-force, an existential clarion song. They are immediately followed by the last sentence of this poem. Travelling over 8 broken lines, the broad gaps on the page invite the mind to be set free for a moment beyond thought and language itself: There were days, so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled, its absence was as its presence; not to be told any more, so single my mind after its long fast, my watching from praying. The poet directs our thoughts toward imagining a moment so beautiful that it manages to bring presence and absence together into itself. Here, in this absent presence, the world itself becomes seen through. It’s a moment when paradox is paradoxically held and made sense of. All simply is. Distilled in restful ease the self can now be whom it was made to be. Solitary, at one with nature, with self, with God. The ‘long fast’, has been the time of turning the mind away from distraction and watching the ‘grey waters only.’ But the promise of this moment also teases us by its evasiveness. And we learn that the journey to it has spoken just as truly. There will always be the inevitable days of monotony and ‘continuous waving / without meaning.’ It’s into this very space, whether we are alert to it or not, that the ‘rare bird’ will come. The poem Sea-watching is as much about faith as it is about God’s grace of prayer at work in us. by Carol O’Connor ……………………… Sources: Sea-watching by R.S.Thomas from Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975 Collected Poems: 1945-1990 Phoenix Giants, 1993 p306 No-one by R. S. Thomas In Autobiographies: R.S.Thomas A Phoenix Paperback, 1997 page 99

A Reflection by Carol O'Connor I Go Down to the Shore I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall - what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do. from A Thousand Mornings, 2012 There’s no doubt about it, Mary Oliver has that gift in her poetry for keeping us on our toes. With a sense of ease she can draw us into an intimate setting, position us carefully, then without warning pull the carpet right from under our feet. One moment we can be lamenting our sorrowful lot to Mother Nature anticipating sympathetic response. The next, by means of a gracious but firm rebuff, we’re pushed back onto our own resources. The opening expectation in this poem is completely upended by the last line: ‘Excuse me, I have work to do.’ For a substance so fluid and supple, the sea’s character is yet unyielding and resolute. Whilst not rejecting our troubled, searching self, it courteously reminds us that to be fully human means learning to swim in all seasonal tides. This includes encountering really difficult undercurrents. The sea carries this knowledge in its own ebb and flow; communicates it via ‘its lovely voice.’ I love pondering the epigraphs, those quotes chosen by Mary Oliver to preface each volume of her poetry. They contextualise her work in a wider literary sphere, invite a lens from which to view the poems in each volume. These epigraphs also give us a clue to her own mindset at particular stages in her life. I Go Down to the Shore is from the volume: A Thousand Mornings. This volume has two epigraphs: The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think - C.J, Jung, The Red Book and Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about - Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews One of my favourites is the line prefacing her volume Evidence: We create ourselves by our choices - Kierkegaard Both these volumes of poetry were published in the years soon after the death of Mary Oliver’s partner for over 40 years, Molly Malone Cook in 2005. Increasingly Mary Oliver’s poetry urges the reader to choose to live a life that contains empathy, connection, presence, this ‘only once’ experience of life. It also invites us to turn our attention towards those things which are sustaining, nourishing, offer beauty. Suffering is real, lament is necessary, but so too more life-giving is our capacity for joy and re-awakening. This happens when we intuitively identify with that ‘wild silky part of ourselves.’ Noticing, as in her poem Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night, the ‘expressive sounds’ a dog makes when ‘he turns upside down, his four paws in the air /and his eyes dark and fervent’ (Dog Songs p51), the motion of a swan over water, as in her poem The Swan, and their ‘miraculous muscles’ and ‘clouds’ of wings. (Owls and Other Fantasies p10) - by noticing such in the world we are then able to respond with gestures that are honourable, partake in dialogues that are loving. Why do we go down to the shore? To seek consolation, to hear echoes of our own 'miserable' state? Or to be re-awakened into choosing to live in a way that may not be prescribed, but is signified by kindness, by singing, by empathy and connection? And therefore risk being reimagined, recreated into a more fully alive human being. A Thousand Mornings: Poems by Mary Oliver The Penguin Press, NY, 2012 Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver Beacon Press, Massachusetts,2009 Dog Songs: Poems by Mary Oliver The Penguin Press, NY, 2013 Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays by Mary Oliver Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 2003

A Reflection by Carol O'Connor The Summer Day Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? by Mary Oliver, from: House of Light Beacon Press,1990 During an interview with Mary Oliver in 2015, Krista Tippett in a slip of the tongue, inadvertently changed the article in the title of this poem to ‘A’ rather than ‘The Summer’s Day.’ Oliver was quick to correct her, but subsequently made nothing of it. However, as she talked it became clear why this change is so necessary. This is one of Mary Oliver’s most famous poems. The final couplet, a question, often appears on social media. Oliver is particularly fond of asking questions in her writing and this one is meant to challenge the reader. It’s also an invitation. To describe human life as ‘wild’ and ‘precious’ presses upon the boundaries of our imagination. When I was young, sometimes school reports would include the sentiment: ‘Carol has potential.’ Throughout my life I have pondered these words. Many years ago, I spent a brief time teaching in a secondary school, and I too would write on some hapless students’ reports: she or he has potential. As if, in some undefinable way, something was yet to be achieved. It was an audacious statement, meant to be encouraging, yet bore the mark of my own smouldering. What exactly had my teachers seen in me that had ‘potential’? Does potential ever ripen into fulfilment? After 50 years I still ask: have I yet arrived at their undefined forecaste destination? In other words, am I trapped in living for something only future and illusory? There are six questions asked of the reader in this poem - three at the beginning, and three at the end. They work like bookends. By reference to a ‘Who’ the first three question ask us to name the creator of existence. The poem becomes an invitation to pay attention: in this instance to the physical features of a grasshopper held in the poet’s hand. The poet’s own day spent being ‘idle’ and ‘fall(ing) down / into the grass,’ is her surrender to and joy of life itself. To ‘stroll through fields’ is an act akin to being in prayer. For here is affirmation about what it means to be alive. To be human is to know such placement in natural space. And to know also that we are placed in time. The fields and the grass will die. Life will perish before we are ready to let go. A large section of the poem centres on the fine bodily structure and delicate joint movements of the grasshopper. Our focus shifts from subject to object. No longer ’Who made the world?’ but one small fragile feature in the created world itself, the grasshopper. Description of this minuscule insect takes up seven lines - eight if you include the initial question about who is its maker. This is nearly half the poem. And here’s the nub of the matter. In her 2015 interview with Tippett, Oliver remembers the existence of this very grasshopper: ‘….the sugar he was eating was part of frosting from a Portugese lady’s birthday cake…(that) little creature came to my plate and (said): ‘I’d like a helping of that’…..…Mrs Segura, probably her 90th birthday cake….’ There is relationship here, there is empathy, watchful attentiveness, presence. This grasshopper at this moment pressing on Oliver’s hand really meant something. To be human is hold yourself back in watchfulness. Aware that you are present, yet not wholly participatory. It’s called wonder. Mary Oliver’s famous final couplet asks a question of us and subverts it at the same time. It forecasts a future that is already happening. Potential is always alive and ripening in the now. It’s always acting through subject and object in a particular relationship. For this to be ‘A Summer’s Day’ could mean any day during the season. But it’s ‘The Summer’s Day’ precisely because it is the day this grasshopper flung itself into her hand. It happened. It is still happening in memory. Potential is not who we will be in 20 or 50 years time, not measured by what we have or are known for, but how we carry our being today. How we relate to each being in the created world. Our ‘one’ life, ‘wild’ and ‘precious’ is happening in present and passing time. To experience this is to have the capacity to wonder at what may be sitting on our own hand, who too may be ‘gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.’ Carol O’Connor For Kirista Tippett Interview: https://onbeing.org/programs/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/

A Reflection by Carol O'Connor Invitation Oh do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles for a musical battle, to see who can sing the highest note, or the lowest, or the most expressive of mirth, or the most tender? Their strong, blunt beaks drink the air as they strive melodiously not for your sake and not for mine and not for the sake of winning but for sheer delight and gratitude - believe us, they say, it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world. I beg of you, do not walk by without pausing to attend to this rather ridiculous performance. It could mean something. It could mean everything. It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote: You must change your life. (from Red Bird, 2008) In her poem Invitation, Mary Oliver asks us to ‘linger’ a while and listen to the goldfinches ‘in a musical battle.’ Not a battle to win but one ‘for sheer delight and gratitude,’ directing our attention towards what it means to hear a display of low notes and high notes, notes ‘of expressive mirth’ or ‘the most tender.’ The tone of the poem is light, the words are buoyant, gently moving us along with short elegant lines which seem to float in sea-space over the page. There’s a simplicity and ease in this invitation. Or so it seems, until we are told - though once more in soothing, gentle tones - that ‘just to be alive’ is ‘a serious thing.’ That stops us ‘just’ short of becoming lost in joyful cacophony of musical sound. There’s a message here. We are ‘invited’ to be alive not only to ‘this fresh morning’ but reminded it’s also a morning ‘in this broken world.’ The invitation becomes more urgent as the poet now ‘beg(s)’ us to listen. But still, she softens the plea with gentle ironic humour, it’s after all ‘rather ridiculous performance.’ But the possibility of serious message being given when we ‘linger’ is very real. As weighty as the intensely visionary poet Rilke in his exhortation: ‘you must change your life.’ What we initially thought was an invitation to a musical performance of high and low notes, becomes the possibility for some crucial inner transformation. Mary Oliver has the striking ability in her poetry to gently woo the reader. And shake us inwardly as we are going along. For Mary Oliver, to be human means giving time to the act of lingering. ‘Linger’ is to stay longer in a place because of a reluctance to leave. It’s connected to the German: 'längen', make longer. Comes from the Middle English: to dwell, abide. And so here it means to see the beauty, but also the brokenness. But how could this goldfinch chorus ever resonate with Rilke’s request for us ‘to change our life’? What is this invitation all about? Lingering now doesn’t feel quite so lying down in a bed of melody and gratitude. In an interview with Anita Shriver in 2011, Mary Oliver said: I think when we lose the connection with the natural world, we tend to forget that we're animals, that we need the Earth. And that can be devastating. Wendell Berry is a wonderful poet, and he talks about this coming devastation a great deal. I just happen to think you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. So I try to do more of the "Have you noticed this wonderful thing? Do you remember this?" Wendell Berry and Rainer Maria Rilke are both serious thinkers to draw on: one, an early 20th century Austrian poet, existentially intense and capable of crying out among the Angelic Order, hearing the ‘unbroken message’ from the silence of God’s breath. Reminding us that what we see each day is potentially an expansion of the heart, he adjures, ‘Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising’ (from Duino Elegies, 1). Wendell Berry is a contemporary poet - writer, environmental activist, who advocates sustainable agriculture, understands our interconnectedness with one another as well as to the land itself. His Sabbath poems bare testament to what it means to ‘live thoughtfully’ in one place. Mary Oliver’s poem is rich and generous in its invitation. As ever in her work, also poised and courteous. Hers is a request to hear the wild, untamed beauty of the world, but also nature’s distress. We need the earth, and the earth needs us. If we don’t take time to abide in the chorus of natural life around us, there will be devastation We are in danger of losing the earth as Wendell Berry knows full well. Rilke’s urging for us to change our lives is to recognise that Angelic Orders are already amongst us both in praise and capacity for change. Mary Oliver’s invitation is to dwell a little longer in this world’s beauty and harness that potential for transformation. Red Bird by Mary Oliver Beacon Press, 2009

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 second poem being ‘In Church’. Artwork: Portion of Iso-Mandala 113 by Philip Harvey In Church Often I try To analyse the quality Of its silences. Is this where God hides From my searching? I have stopped to listen, After the few people have gone, To the air recomposing itself For vigil. It has waited like this Since the stones grouped themselves about it. These are the hard ribs Of a body that our prayers have failed To animate. Shadows advance From their corners to take possession Of places the light held For an hour. The bats resume Their business. The uneasiness of the pews Ceases. There is no other sound In the darkness but the sound of a man Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross. R.S. Thomas’ literary executor recalls a conversation with him: ‘the question for me is not whether God exists but what kind of God.’ Appreciators of his poetry have mused: he wouldn’t have written a thing if he had been an atheist. His poetry is full of faith and his struggle with it. (see Barry Morgan, in his ‘Laboratories of the Spirit’). In Church is a poem premised on listening and allowing the questions of faith to break into that space of silence. Although there is only one actual question which is spelt out: in the third and fourth line ‘Is this where God hides / from my searching?’ one senses from the last two lines that there are a whole host of questions. But, that one stated question, “Is this where God hides from my searching?”, implies paradoxically that God is here. Is this a relationship with God one about playing a game of hide and seek? The questions being nailed ‘to an untenanted cross’ have much to do with the nature of this God. English priest, lover and teacher of poetry, Mark Oakley writes: ‘For Thomas shadows point the way. He tries to articulate God only to discover God’s elusiveness, his receding before the poet….it is the eel-like God who slips out of your hand into the dark depths that Thomas attempts to express.’ (Oakley 7) Mark Oakley furthers his thinking: ‘Thomas develops poetry, often around the image of Christ, in which effort gives way to grace, a perception of receiving.’ (Oakley 9) R.S.Thomas may never address Christ, but his thoughts are often never far from the need to understand his reality in God. And by extension, God’s presence or absence in his own life. Dating right back to 1946 there are a number of R.S.Thomas’ poems which are set in country churches. In Church is in a collection of poems, The Bread of Truth, which came out in 1963 when R..S was at Eglwys Fach. Escaping alone to the countryside in the afternoon became a way to ‘forget about the small troubles of the parish.’ (Autobiographies 67) But as he found preoccupations of parish concerns accompanying him on his trips into the country, so too the sense of solitariness never left him when he was involved in parish life. Here it’s not the solitary resonances of silence unfolding into prayer searched for in the darkness of night as in The Other which preoccupy him, but the emptiness of the church after a small congregation has left. The poem has an intimate private feel, made room for already by the recent departure of a handful of parishioners; ‘the few people have gone.’ The poet is listening. The air is recomposing itself; the air is waiting. The air, the space in which the silence hangs, has become its own thing. We’re told that the church was built to hold it in. The air is its own presence and has been since the first ‘stones grouped itself around it.’ This is a time of ‘vigil.’ Vigil is a period of keeping watch or guard. It’s a time to keep awake with some purpose. So, what is the vigil or keeping watch for? The church is described as having the ‘hard ribs’ of a body. We are familiar with looking up at the ceiling in churches to see the wooden beams like an upended boat. In church we are pilgrims in God. There is also play here on church and body. The beams are the ribs of a body. Body in this context reminds us of Christ: being part of the body or community of Christ. The poet's shift from singular first person to plural: ‘our’ connects him back into a representative of his community. The stones of the church, the ribs of its beams, the body of Christ and the poet’s pilgrimage in God all here have ‘failed’ to animate or breathe life. However, the poem moves on with this uneasy sense that for a time before something was animated: the pews now creaking back into their emptiness testify to this. So do the withdrawn bats which now resume their business from before the entrance of parishioners. But more dominant now are the shadows which take possession of the light. There’s an eerie half-light at play here. And this is the place in church where the poet sits. In the last five lines of the poem R.S.Thomas uses that trick again of shifting from first person to third: no longer ‘I’ but ‘man.’ And that trick too of paradox: the silence is animated with the inward sound of breathing. The final three lines form the crux and we realise this is where the poet has been intending to lead us all along: testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross. R.S.Thomas is right: the less said the better about the meaning of his poems. But these last few lines beg some investigation. If the meaning of this poem rests on one man in relationship with a hide-and-seek God, pitting his questions upon ‘an untenanted cross’ - then what is the nature of this cross? And what sort of a relationship is this? There must be a series of questions for them to be nailed one by one, uncomfortably echoing a little like Luther’s 95 articles being nailed to the door of Wittenburg Castle Church. It is easy to think that these questions might pivot around where is God in his searching; the paradox of God’s presence in absence. There is also, however, something so strong here in the sense of God’s absence that it can only mean a knowledge of what presence means - even if only glimpsed in the places ‘light held in possession for an hour.’ Like Luther’s articles, the questions ultimately may move more poignantly around the nature of salvation. The final two words: ‘untenanted cross’ seem to nail down the whole poem. Is the cross untenanted because Christ has deserted his final post? Or because Christ has risen? This paradox, this ambiguity is the place we must begin from if we choose to sit in church and take our seat in a now empty pew. When we analyse and begin to understand the quality of its silence, before, during, or after any congregation has been there - start from, whatever they may be, the questions each of us has to be nailed on this ‘untenanted cross.’ 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 Youtube 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. Autobiographies. Phoenix Giants, 1998 R. S. Thomas. Collected poems 1945-1990. Phoenix Giants, 1993

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. The 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