Most people of faith struggle with faith. It's like snakes and snake skins--to grow, something dies and has to be sloughed off. It's usually unnerving.
But the more we tend our relationship with both God and the world, the more we let Wisdom speak to us regarding both, the more we'll grow and will need the sloughing.
The Welsh priest and poet R. S. Thomas writes like he was unnerved much of the time. He's a hard read much of the time. But worth it (though I don't read his poems without remembering to be prayerful, mindful).
He often describes faith in need of sloughing. Faith dried out and peely. Yet in the integrity of his bare honesty, there's something roomy, and in the skilled and beautiful ways he writes, there's something that inspires. Thomas writes so faithfully about his experience of Absence that I often find myself experiencing God as Presence, through the 'Rare Bird' named below, for instance.
More on this in future posts. In the meantime, see for yourselves. But pray first. Pray during. Pray after reading, remembering that emptiness precedes fullness.
Sea-Watching
Grey waters, vast
as an area of prayer
that one enters. Daily
over a period of years
I have let my 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.
- R.S. Thomas
in Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975
