Leaving the Reason Torn: Re-thinking cross and
resurrection through R. S. Thomas
Alison Goodlad
Shoving Leopard £12.95
(978-1-905565-18-4)
Church Times Bookshop £11.65 (Use
code CT853 )
WHEN a friend of Matthew Arnold heard that the Victorian poet
had died, he is said to have commented: "Poor old Arnold. He won't
like God." In the same wry spirit, Wynn Thomas, one of the most
perceptive interpreters of R. S. Thomas, noted that it was easy to
understand why the Almighty put off calling Thomas home for as long
as possible: "he knew he would face cross-examination to all
eternity."
Many priest-poets have had audacious relationships with God both
in life and on paper. With George Herbert, you sense that he is
questioning a friend in whose love he is, at the end of the day,
reassuringly secure. Reading John Donne feels more precarious: his
salvation lies partly in his own hands. R. S. Thomas, on the other
hand, looks God in the eye, and, positioned somewhere between
devotion and dereliction, lets the relationship break the silence
from time to time.
Alison Goodlad has written a short study of how God lets the
relationship break the silence, too. Using Thomas's poetry, she
explores the themes of death and resurrection as found in the
poems, and brings them into a creative conversation with the Bible
as well as with theologians, poets, and novelists she finds astute,
such as Brueggemann, Blake, and Brontë. She recognises that the
cross of Christ is pivotal to Thomas's work, but that we shouldn't
go to him for help in neatly understanding it; rather, he takes us
deeper into the disruption and disorientation of it all.
Goodlad also argues the case that Thomas is "a poet of the
resurrection, too". Thomas, she writes, "will suddenly disarm us
with words of tenderness, vision and utter breathtaking beauty that
turn us around to see things quite differently in the newness of
the resurrection morning". Resurrection here, however, is not an
easy resolution to dark days. It is part of the continual dynamic
of disorientation and new orientation which creates an imagination,
and human sensibili-ties, capable of discerning God, not an
idol-substitute.
A Googlesque world of quick information has forgotten that it
should be difficult, even dangerous, to talk about God. R. S.
Thomas is a necessary counterpoint. The mystery of God, finding its
natural expression in the death and resurrection of Jesus, does
indeed leave our reason torn. Goodlad is grateful to the poet for
opening up room for honestly confused but faithful responses to
God's love.
What we long for most eludes us. We wait to be grasped by the
one beyond our reach. "If religion is not about providing answers,"
she says, "but enabling us to live creatively with the questions,
then R. S. Thomas has indeed offered us true religion."
She writes accessibly and with insight. A little more confidence
in her own perceptions and less reliance on the quotations of
others will make her next books, and I hope there will be some,
even more immediate and alive.
The Revd Mark Oakley is Canon Chancellor of St Paul's
Cathedral.